I always wondered why monks put fasting so high on the list of things to do, and St. Benedict, who saved civilization from returning to complete debauchery, had specific rules for his monastery about food. It was known that the monk who could not be disciplined on food would fall to pieces on virtue.
I can confirm this.
Having grown up on Kool-Aid and Little Debbie (and loving every Nutty Buddy minute of it), the era of cheap food has created a constant feast. The elderly people who grew up in the Depression understood food far better than their baby boomer children and grandchildren. They certainly understood it better than those of us who, in our post-Kool-Aid college era, could pound cheap cases of Natty Light beer and wash it down with a Nacho Bell Grande at 4 AM. (Lest anyone feel I lean too far right, let me remind you I live caught somewhere between hippy and redneck, and the hippies and tree-huggers were right about fast food and fertilizer. But, they missed the second part. While pointing a finger at food and greed, they accepted sin and the overall moral decay as “progressive.”)
Here’s my theory on Genesis as a mirror of the Green Revolution and the Sexual Revolution:
No-fault divorce was caused by refrigeration. Nitrogen fertilizer led to mass-scale abortion. The combine harvester led to the current transgender fad. In short: just as food led to The Fall in the Garden, so did the food security of the last seventy years lead to the rejection of God all over again.
In Iowa, a man named Norman Borlaug is praised for feeding a billion people with his scientific agricultural management principles, but in producing massive yields and cheap food, we ate from the tree of knowledge once again and made the same mistake. There is a reason that The Fall starts with food. Taking food for granted leads to sin, lots of it. Food and sex are intertwined. Notice, please, if you will, that the story in Genesis 3 of eating is followed by an obvious sexual fall where they know their nakedness.
…the serpent said to the woman, “…when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…” (Gen 3:4-7)
Stop. Do you hear how the food was eaten in this secure food paradise? It was eaten without God. Adam and Eve rejected God. Neither of them paused to say “Grace” before eating the fig (or the apple, if you prefer). No, they ate just like we do today, like we do at Culver’s or Applebee’s, we just dive right in because the food is taken for granted. Occasionally you see some weird family praying in public, but it’s rare. And right after Adam and Eve pig out on the fruit, they are naked, porning up the whole world. They are George Costanza.
How we think about food matters immensely in the moral life, and it’s no wonder that the mass rejection of God parallels the obvious fact that few people pause to say a prayer before eating today. As I fell away, I fell into free beer and fast food and the Age of Costanza swallowed me like the sea beast did Jonah, except I was in the belly for far more than three days. I was barfed out about fifteen years later.
Notice, if you would, that the Lord’s Prayer hinges in the center on the phrase: “Give us this day our daily bread,” signaling that food is important. In fact, food is so important in centering our lives around God, that the whole Lord’s Prayer links this line about food between the beginning heavenly things to the latter earthly things. Food is a gift from God and we should be acknowledging that simple fact as a blessing. But we think the food came from our own ingenuity and cleverness.
We assume that the Chipotle and the mutant-sized fruits at Costco all came from us, forgetting that the soil and water itself came from God. This is like someone entering a beautiful home, hanging their own 3x5 picture on a wall, and declaring, “I built this house.” The fact that we have mucked with some genes, figured out refrigeration, and spread NPK fertilizer around the earth in no way diminishes the reality that this created world is the foundation, the gift from God, from which every calorie we eat springs forth. In other words, we are foodless without God. The Great Hunger in 1800s Ireland was not that long ago, and for goodness sakes, Band-Aid and “We are the World” was a mere forty years ago when Ethiopia suffered from famine. The illusion of food security is strong because anyone alive in America today who remembers the Great Depression is now very likely in a nursing home, and those people tend to say a prayer before they eat.
A culture flush with food and wealth quickly falls into sin. I don’t know how, but the short and seemingly simple book of Genesis always has another layer to it. But then so does Exodus. In the prelude to the Golden Calf, what happens? A giant Texas barbecue, that’s what.
“…the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” (Ex 32:6)
Food and booze are followed shortly thereafter by the most famous orgy in history, the scandal known as the Golden Calf incident. It makes Watergate or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal look like a game of Go Fish. Furthermore, in Exodus, whenever the Israelites start complaining, they want to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt where they were slaves, but you can see how strong food is, such that it goes hand in hand with the rejection of God. What they pine for is when they were slaves and “sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full.” Surely there were some hieroglyphic nudes involved as well, the ancient Egyptian version of Playboy or Penthouse. We’ve all seen the art - they had their porn on stone and papyrus instead of screens.
The more I read the Bible, the more I see how much food and sex come up, and why the seemingly odd acts of sacrifice in the Pentateuch make increasing sense, because it was aligning the people’s food toward God, and this is exactly what the Eucharist does in our lives at the Catholic Holy Mass. (Once again, two excellent books to help understand sacrifice and food in the Bible are Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life and Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)
Somehow, a kind of knowledge lies within our food, and it goes specifically with taking food for granted. There is something about being full, and having plenty of food, that leads to pride and the rejection of God. I think this is why Jesus says that it will be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. Why? Because the rich man has plenty of food. He feels fully secure and therefore thinks he can live without God. He assumes he has no weakness because his belly is full and he cannot imagine missing a meal because his bank account is also full.
All of this illuminates to me why so many of the saints fasted, and why the beatitudes elevate the poor, and why Jesus calls so many of his sheep from places where food security is unlike the American buffet. Those who appreciate food tend to appreciate God, because they know that God is the giver of food. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a demand; it’s a supplication to God and a request made with gratitude.
Even today, wealth means food security, but we have so much food that even those in poverty are overweight, and statistics bear this out. Thus we have reached an odd point, where poverty does not mean hunger in many places. That’s great that we have food, except when it leads to the rejection of God.
So knowledge of good and evil, and the idea that we can be like God, comes after food abundance. It should come as no surprise that the modern “all-you-can-eat-buffet” started in Vegas in the 1940s in order to keep gamblers at the tables, as food and vice were married in true Vegas style.
When we feel full, we assume a strength and power that we don’t truly possess, and when feeling strong, our pride blooms. When pride blooms, humility is trampled. Fertilizer brought the modern fruit in the garden but the fruit was Fast Food and cheap food, and we have eaten, and eaten, and eaten, like the Hungry Little Caterpillar. The only problem is, we’re not caterpillars, so we don’t turn into butterflies, we just become full and look for other things to do, like sinning. Sex is the most obvious one. Without food abundance, there would have been no Woodstock, because there would not have been a large population of idle college students of prime working age who could while away their youthful years on drugs and alcohol. Without food abundance and a sense of security in wealth, the Prodigal Son never leaves home and squanders his money on vice. I speak from experience, despite coming of age long after Woodstock, and millennia after the Prodigal Son.
Once we are full, knowledge is the great, tantalizing dessert that we desire, always calling to us. It is like the pie in the old diners that sat in the revolving glass case, spinning around, on display like some kind of jewelry near the cash register. The pie sat behind glass like forbidden fruit, and we only order after being already full. But the appetite continues, wanting the pie.
I remember looking at the pie and cake in those well-lit spinning cases and wondering, “What might the pie taste like? Will it fulfill me and finish off my meal? What if I could just have a bite?” I don’t recall a serpent being there at all, but if serpent actually means “Shiny one” as I have read, then I know what the sacred writer of Genesis was referring to.
St. Benedict knew something important. He knew that we cannot reach the wisdom through the mouth and stomach. The kind of knowledge that will satisfy our souls does not come through food, which is why Jesus tells the devil, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” It’s not through pie or Kool-Aid or the constipation that accompanies 200 grams of protein a day that we will find the peace and rest we seek..
In a bizarre twist, we must pursue a different kind of knowing, sometimes called the Cloud of Unknowing, and it comes not through food, but through self-denial and prayer.
The cloud of ecstasy, we’re told by the culture today, must come by a different kind of relationship, usually sexual or experiential, and we completely forget about food. If we haven’t fallen for the marketing of the sugar mafia, particularly Coca Cola, then we may fall for the fitness syndicate’s promises. If we are not overeating, we then go to the other side of food insanity, where we must know the caloric content and nutrients of every morsel that passes over our teeth. But in both cases, gross abundance of food is present. The foodies and the gluttons have one thing in common: a food obsession coupled with the abandonment of God.
Hence, our current world of sexual immorality is a symptom of a prior fall, just as we really don’t see the sexual fall in Genesis until chapter 6, with the infamous Nephilim, which come after the eating in the Garden.
But one thing is certain. Wealth and abundance lead to the other sins of the body, the “warm sins” as they are sometimes called. And in my own lifetime, you could watch and observe this mood change about what is and what is not a sin, which almost coincided with the increased portions of food. The organic phenomenon is trying to correct the problem seeing food as the God, when food is in fact the gift from God, and so every crossfit and intermittent faster who is not measuring out their food-prep with God at the forefront has missed the point. Both the obese and the buff miss the purpose. It’s no wonder we don’t understand Leviticus, because it’s almost entirely about food and getting into the right relationship to God via food.
But we have moved on, thinking that the food abundance will last forever, and thus we’ve moved on to ever greater sins, knocking down walls and fences of morality and calling them old-fashioned. Why? Because we think this Garden was of our doing, and not God’s.
