“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” John Green
I have been engulfed in a flood of food information. And just like uncle George after Thanksgiving dinner, I am stuffed, so stuffed I could explode in an eruption of facts and anecdotes that would shock the average eater. But rather, I will present the key points of my reading and entice you to read more so that the shattered world can be put back together.
I read The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, by Joel Salatin, my favorite Christian, Libertarian, tree hugging, farming author. Joel typically writes books about farming, pointing out the problems in our farming system today. But this book is different. It is his coming out of the closet and preaching to the choir book. And the choir needs to hear. Joel lays out, what I will describe as, a Christian Theology of Food.
Important points that he makes are:
- For the most part, the church is out of touch with the spirituality of food, and never asks what Jesus thinks about what we eat.
- We don’t vote our food dollars to encourage farming in ways that honor God and His creation.
- The factory farms that we support during church potlucks and fast food meals desecrate the nature of God in the animals He created.
- We should respect the nature that God put into farm animals, and rather than overcome that nature, work with it to enhance the animal’s life so it enhances ours more.
- Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do something.
Next came In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. I guess I got so spun up with Joel, that I had to know more. Michael has one simple thesis.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
The human body is an amazingly evolved (designed) machine that has proven to work well in various times and geographies with a WIDE array of diets. But there is one diet that, whenever it is introduced to a culture, leads to hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes (aka The Western Diseases). That diet is the so called Western Diet with all its processed foods full of salt, sugar, and fat.
Michael all speaks repeatedly of the science of Nutritionism. He is aghast at the sophomoric nature of nutritionism. While we have been able to identify many components of food, we are wholly unable to truly understand it. We believe that, in our wisdom we are able to neatly divide whole foods into neat piles of things to eat and things not to eat in order to facilitate our consumptive, time scarce lifestyles. But what we see is that whole foods are more complex that we understand, and we can not, in our wisdom, improve upon what was created eons ago.
Not only am I stuffed, I am rather frustrated. We have together gotten ourselves into quite a predicament. We have encouraged a food industry to feed us fake food that is profitable for them and detrimental to our health. And we are so caught up in our fake reality that we can’t see that the emperor has no clothes.
And the loud declaration that the emperor is butt naked was precisely what I appreciated about these two books. I strongly recommend Christians read The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, and everyone should read In Defense of Food.
