Food for Thought

Tonight as I was eating a slice of homemade pound cake, layered with fresh-cut strawberries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, I was told to enjoy the food I eat. Ok, easy enough. The message went a little deeper, though. When we first sat down in a cozy meeting room of the Covenant Presbyterian Church to start our interfaith dinner, one of the Christian hosts for the evening described the menu: vegetarian lasagna, salad, garlic bread, ice cream, and finally the cake. This last course was a family recipe of hers, a vivid memory from childhood passed down by her grandmother. With the anecdote she encouraged our own dinner discussion of personal "food memories" and introduced the theme for this evening.

So for the next hour the seven women at my table ate, talked, and laughed food. We didn't have any grand theological or political discussions, but by the end of the meal I knew that a Jewish woman makes Challah-french toast for her family on Sundays, and a Muslim woman delights in the scent of baking cookies during Ramadan.

Now these religious stories I could relate to. In my family (and this probably reveals too much about my family) religion has always been synonymous with food. In fact, when my mom found out this year that I was planning to go out of town for Easter she paused for a moment, considered the implications, and responded accordingly:

"Well I guess I have already made ham for dinner recently, we won't be missing much." I couldn't help but laugh, because she was right. As I searched my own bank of religious events, holidays, and ceremonies, I realized their menus were the easiest memories to grasp. Chrstmas... cookies. Shabbat... challah. Easter... honey-baked ham. Passover... haroset. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs... those yummy little peanut butter/chocolate treats... what were those called? Anyway, I know this association is ridiculous, but it's gnawing at something deeper.

The main course of the evening was a sort of after-dinner sermon on the importance of food in the three faiths and in life. The woman who baked the delicious pound cake, though, had put more into it than a half-pound of butter, so I intended to get more out of it than a pleasant belly ache. She said that food, in all three religions, was something not just to be deprived from, it was something to delight in, to spend time preparing, and to enjoy eating. She understood this later in life, after her husband left and her kids grew up and she stood in the kitchen alone asking only herself, "What do I want to eat tonight?" She said it was an awakening.

Perhaps like the "scraps" we throw away after dinner, the meat we farm and grind and ship, and the snacks we can never have enough of in the cupboard, we take our religious sustenance for granted as well. After all, we had all come together on this night with empty stomachs, we had joined over a meal, and we had learned about each other through stories of food. The dinner was not only substance, it was a symbol.

"You know some people have trouble understanding the practice of communion," a minister said later, "but it is really just based on the acts of Jesus, getting together with friends, enjoying food, asking them to remember him by it."