How do we eat well?
Aubrey Buster, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Old Testament
This was the question that I was left with after a three-day seminar in which I and my fellow faculty worked together, sweated together, talked together, and yes, ate together around a mutual consideration of Norman Wirzba’s forthcoming book Agrarian Spirit.
In this work, Wirzba exhorts the reader to consider themselves as enmeshed with creation in light of its status as the “material means and embodied expression of divine love.”[1] Because creation is such an expression of God’s love, participation in and with creation is not the opposite of a spiritual practice, but is itself a spiritual practice. To recognize and live in light of our relationship with creation is to work with God’s spirit. The result of this is to promote the mutual flourishing of land, and people and creatures altogether.
A recurring theme of Wirzba’s book, and of our seminar together, was food. We enjoyed good food together, often food that was gifted to us by the hands of Dr. Tiffany Kriner, who had both made the food and cultivated the ingredients from the soil and the life of her own land. As Wirzba writes, eating is “conducive of creating opportunities for fellowship and companionship.” It serves to “intimately join” people to the land and to each other.[2] We enjoyed that delightful power of food-sharing together many times over the course of our time together. In contrast to this experience, the “anonymous economy,” in which most of us live, is one in which we are separated from the sources of our food and therefore unable to care for the land in which it was cultivated or for those who cultivated it.[3] A separation from the source of food is also a separation from community.
The connection between food and community is also a central focus of the book of Daniel. The book of Daniel opens with a scene in which the eponymous protagonist reflects on the source of his food and the statement of solidarity made by eating together. In Daniel 1:8–14, Daniel refuses to defile himself with the food and wine of the Babylonian king, and instead eats a diet of “seeds and water.” Several explanations have been proffered to explain this strange refusal and its equally enigmatic substitution. Some have suggested that the king’s food would have included food sacrificed to idols; others suggest that Daniel refused to eat rich food in preference for a more austere diet; others suggest that Daniel is trying to follow Jewish food laws, and that the royal diet transgressed those food laws in some (albeit unidentifiable) way. More recent commentators have suggested that the issue was not necessarily with the content of the food, but with its source. To eat the food of the king was to accept food from the figure who had defeated Jerusalem and razed its temple to the ground. It was to eat food that had been collected as tribute and plunder from the far-reaching conquests of the Babylonian empire. The food is defiled not because Babylonian rations or wine are inherently defiled. It is defiled because it comes from the king who is tainted because of the atrocities that he has committed.
This suggestion is amplified by what anthropologists have recognized (and which Wirzba re-iterates) about the social significance of food. To eat is not merely to fill one’s stomach. When one eats, one always eats with, and eating with others is a powerful statement of solidarity and community. To refuse food is to refuse a relationship with the one who offers it.
By refusing to eat the king’s food, Daniel rejects an association with this evil and his empire. Who then does Daniel eat with? The “seeds and water” (Daniel 1:12) that Daniel eats have produced just as much exegetical speculation as the king’s rations and wine. It is likely, however, that there is some connotation of unprocessed grain, and water instead of wine marks a drink of much lower socio-economic value. It is the diet that the Lord commands Ezekiel to eat as Ezekiel dramatically enacts the coming judgment against Jerusalem (Ezekiel 4:6–13). Simply put, it is a siege diet that would be eaten by a beleaguered community under attack. If this connection is correct, then Daniel is very deliberately choosing who he will (and will not) eat with. He declares solidarity with the Judean exiles and denies this intimate association with the king.
The book of Daniel suggests that the question “how do we eat well?” might be better formulated “who should we eat with?” Are we eating in communion with the land and all the living creatures who live upon it? Are we eating in and with our local communities? Or are we eating in support of an “anonymous economy” that harms the land, the creatures who live upon it, and our communities? Daniel also challenges us to consider that eating well might also entail, on occasion, a refusal to eat with. How does one use one’s eating patterns to protest an economy that renders food and the lives that it comes from as an “abstraction…shorn of any trace of its history with soil, disease, sweat, blood, sunshine, and death.”[4]
The question of who one should eat with is not only a concern of the Jewish exiles in Babylon. It is also a question of central concern to early Christian communities. The startling breakdown of the distinction between Jew and Gentile required the formation of a new community, in which both Gentile and Jewish groups were brought together in the common worship of Jesus. Eating together becomes a significant practice for that community. In Acts 10, Peter sees a vision abrogating the Jewish dietary laws for Christians in order to facilitate a common table between Jew and Gentile. Communion in the Christian church is itself a symbolic act of commensality, designed to remind those who share a Christian identity of their common identity and their common allegiance to Christ.[5] In 1 Corinthians 11:17–26, Paul admonishes those who eat separately from other Christians when they come together in communion. The question of “who one eats with” is therefore a question that has been of concern to Christians since the founding of the early church. Instead of questioning “what then should we eat” as the people of God, Daniel 1 and the witness of the early church invites us to ask both “with whom we should identify,” and perhaps “from what should we separate,” as we seek to demonstrate allegiance to God and reconciliation with creation through our eating practices.
[1] Norman Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 5.
[2] Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, 165.
[3] Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, 166.
[4] Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, 190.
[5] See the particularly insightful analysis in Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).