Lest we feast unto our own judgment

I sometimes joke that I want to start a cooking blog where, instead of telling the same formulaic stories about “my grandmother used to make this cake,” or “my family discovered this stew on vacation,” I situate my recipes in dramatic fantasies and thrillers. Who wouldn’t want to try the cake I made for my Elven friends, after we fought off the Nazgul? Or the stew a famous poet served me, when I took refuge in his garret, fleeing fascists? Sure, the stories wouldn’t be true, but they’d be fun. 

Food bloggers have to include stories if they want their recipes to be findable by search engines, so I can’t blame them for the paragraphs of text. Plenty of people enjoy the little slices of life, and those of us who prefer to cut to the chase can use the “jump to recipe” button. 

It’s not just that I find the stories boring, though. It’s that the writers are missing out on exciting stories that are already there, since any encounter with food automatically connects us with a bigger picture. I’d love to read more food writing in the vein of the late Anthony Bourdain, who understood that food comes with epic tales attached. “The history of the world is on your plate. All food is the expression of a long struggle and a long story,” Bourdain said. 

The moment of enjoyment when you eat a slice of cheese is never just a moment. It invokes a saga going back generations, connecting you with the people who tended their herds, the animals the milk came from, even the molds that made the cheese. And if you eat meat, the literal flesh of an animal that died for you becomes part of your flesh. 

Food tells stories of migration, as families moved from place to place, bringing seeds and traditions with them. I write this just having harvested the last of my heirloom tomatoes and peppers. They sit on my counter, a glossy, gorgeous array of colors, thanks to immigrants from Mexico, Russia, Italy, Lebanon, Hungary. And when I experiment with new dishes from different cultural traditions, I get to do this because of the resilience of various ethnic groups who held onto their food traditions as they traveled, settled, expanded, and interacted. 

My own cultural heritage, from the Jewish side of the family, comes with various feasts in which we eat particular foods and celebrate surviving. In springtime we celebrate Passover with the Seder meal and matzoh ball soup, and Purim with hamantaschen. We tell the story of how they tried to kill us and God preserved us to arrive at this day. 

But the food tells the story, too. Like many others of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, I grew up eating latkes, or potato pancakes, every Hannukah. The oil we use to fry the potatoes reminds us of the oil that miraculously burned for eight days after the Maccabees liberated the Temple from the Seleucid Empire. It was years before I learned that other Jewish groups celebrate Hanukkah with different fried foods: Sephardic and Israeli Jews eat fritters or jelly doughnuts. Romanian Jews eat latkes made of pasta. Jews in India eat gulab jamun (fried dough made of milk solids). 

In the Catholic tradition, food has a special significance because of the tradition of the Eucharist, which, the church teaches, is not just a symbol of Jesus but Jesus’ actual physical body and blood. The bread Catholics eat in communion comes with the story of how that bread was made (which these days usually involves nuns in commercial kitchens) as well as the story of how wheat became domesticated, a tale that takes us back thousands of years. But Catholics also understand the bread of communion through a theological story, and that story, like the story of ordinary human food, is also about boundary-crossing and blurred lines. As Daniel Groody reminds us in A Theology of Migration (Orbis Books), the incarnation was itself a story of migration, God passing into humanity. 

A delicious food can tell a story of suffering. The interactions and migrations that brought about new food traditions were often the result of oppression. Jewish people eat different foods because we were forced into diaspora, subjected to pogroms for centuries before the actual genocide that murdered six million of us. We settled where we could, practicing our faith in secret, making food with whatever ingredients we could find. 

Or consider how African people who were kidnapped, trafficked, and enslaved in the Americas found ways to keep their culinary traditions alive despite not even being permitted to own property. We sometimes call sweet potatoes “yams” because African people who were forcibly trafficked to a new continent encountered tubers that looked a bit like “nyami,” or true yams—a staple in many African food cultures. 

Or take the Vietnamese soup ph?, which exists in part due to the influence of French colonizers. The name of the dish may even be derived from the French one-pot stew called pot-au-feu (literally, “pot on the fire”). It’s a delectable meal, but the story it tells is not one of cheerful collaboration but of oppression, exploitation, and disenfranchisement. 

No matter the pleasure we get from food, it always connects us with pain, and not just the pain of past cultures. We live because an animal died. We eat because of the labor of underpaid migrants or factory workers. Taken one way, this is sinister or tragic, but it can also help understand Eucharist, because taking communion also connects us with a story of dire suffering. Yet that also connects us with all Creation. 

No wonder the Eucharist comes with warnings: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

In the United States right now many Catholics seem determined to pretend we are not answerable to the body and blood of Jesus. An idea has taken hold, that we can somehow follow Jesus while ignoring or even reviling those outside our select circle. Our materialistic, individualistic culture validates this. Go ahead and enjoy things, it says, and don’t feel obliged to do anything uncomfortable. 

We don’t need to bring in Nazgul or poets in garrets to make our food stories interesting, but maybe we’re choosing to keep things narrow and bland, because knowledge of the bigger world confers obligations. We owe a just wage to workers, and a welcome to immigrants. We owe environmental protections to oceans, forests, and fields that make our food possible. Maybe, for a little while, we can enjoy our individual pleasures while ignoring our connections with creation, but reality will catch up to us. It might be climate catastrophe, or economic collapse. We might find ourselves the target of fascist oppression, simply because of our religion or ethnicity. No one, as John Donne reminded us, is an island. 

When we eat an heirloom tomato, a Ghanaian stew, a Mexican taco, or even a candy bar, are we ignoring our obligations to the people who made that food possible? If we’re Christians approaching communion, are we pretending we aren’t answerable to the whole Body of Christ?  Either way, we do so at our peril. 

Read more by this author and more about the Eucharist at our web site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a writer and academic residing in rural Ohio. She is the digital editor for U.S. Catholic magazine and can be found at rebeccabrattenweiss.com.