[Reimagining the Dietary Laws]
In the Hebrew Bible there is a book titled Leviticus. It one of those books that a lot of people begin reading and, slowly, the reading tapers off and few ever really finish it.
The book gets its name from one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel, the tribe of Levi, which happens to be the tribe full of priests that helped lead the community and the nation to live together with God. So as you can imagine, if they decided to get together to write a book, it would definitely be interesting.
However, there are a lot of people that simply hear the word 'Leviticus' and cringe. They open the book and just see lists and lists and rules and commands and descriptions of things that seem to have no relevance in a world that no longer sacrifices animals (for the most part) or lives in a primal civilization (again...definitely up for debate). But, from what I've seen, what seems to happen is people get caught up in what appears to be some sort of legal document and forget that they are reading a story.
In its raw essence, Leviticus is a story. It is a story of God showing us what it looks like to live in his world. When we fail to realize this, it typically leads to never actually reading the book; which is a shame because it is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing that you will ever come across. It doesn't deserve to be so neglected.
Now, there is one part of Leviticus that, despite the books negative image in most circles, is still very widely known and referenced. It is what we call the dietary laws.
The dietary laws have an interesting image in today's world. For much of Christianity, these are things that help prove that the Hebrew Bible is no longer necessary. God got rid of the whole clean and unclean food thing...so the Old Testament apparently doesn't actually matter. These 'laws' have become this outdated and strange mark of the Jewish faith and not only do they have nothing to say to us today, even mentioning the dietary laws can get raised eyebrows followed by the question, "Wait...are you Jewish?".
But what if God meant what he said?
What if this list of what can and what can't be eaten isn't just some unnecessary, outdated commandment about clean and unclean that Jesus and Paul got rid of in what we call the New Testament, but is something that has real implications for how we live today? Because if you read Leviticus 11 [which if you haven't, please do. It will take approximately two minutes. I'll even help you out: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/search=lev%2011&version=TNIV]
Once you read it, it probably just raises a lot of questions like which animals chew the cud? When did kites become animals? And why are people touching carcasses in the first place?
The whole thing really just seems quite a bit irrelevant.
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I currently live in Southern California. In most of the country, there is a season I formally knew as Fall. Here, it was over 100 degrees in October and consistently in the 80's and 90's in November. At some point in the midst of that, you become ready for anything that sparks even the smallest sense of autumn's beautiful season. So back during the October warmth, we finally had a day where it was down in the 70's, which after months of intense heat, feels really nice and so to really hammer home my attempt to make it feel like Fall, I decided to make some hot chocolate.
I came into work that morning and the air still had a bit of a chill to it, so my first move before I even sat down was to head over to the the little kitchenette we have in the middle of the office building to begin the Fall experience. Naturally, I bypass the coffee as it has zero appeal to me and probably should just be banned altogether, but off to the side on top of one of the shelves in the corner there sits the pile of hot chocolate packets. They are the packets that you have to vigorously shake to get the powder in the bottom corner so it all doesn't fly out at you when you tear it open. So I grab the packet and begin the ritualistic shaking. I then get a cup to pour hot water into it from the water cooler that ironically also has a heater [and maybe should have a name change as well] and at this point all is ready. I take the packet , shake again just to ensure the powder has all made its way down to the bottom corner and I then tear the corner off so that the pouring can begin. However, just as the packet is at eye level in mid tear, I was forced to pause, because I saw something that was slightly unexpected.
Right as I was tearing, I noticed the list of ingredients printed on the back side and it just seemed strange to me that the list for the powdered chocolate was long enough to take up almost half of the packet's back side. And I would list them for you, but I don't even know how to say some of them let alone tell you what most of them are.
I thought it was chocolate. Like cocoa. A natural growing thing from the earth. But probably a good half of the ingredient list was made in a lab somewhere. Maybe it is me, but I see that and my first thought is that this is just strange and unnecessary and it kind of bothers me because hot chocolate doesn't have to be made like that.
Unfortunately, though, this isn't just an issue with hot chocolate is it?
Where did we go so wrong with food?
Because you look around at our world today and food has become a product to be consumed. You buy it like you buy school supplies. It is mass produced in a factory, often thousands of miles away, stuffed with chemicals to make it last longer or ripen after it has been picked from its source, and packaged in fancy plastic to ensure that you will buy it.
If you explained this series of events to someone from the ancient Far East or a farmer from a rural village in India or a serf in the Middle Ages of Europe or even someone from colonial America, they would probably look at you, tilt their head, and be highly confused.
Because the way food works in our society has changed more
in the last 50 years than it had in the last 10,000.
So even 50 years ago when you sat down for a meal you knew exactly where that thing you were about to eat came from. In many cases, you probably even raised it yourself. For thousands and thousands of years food was simply the central part of your livelihood and what took up the majority of your day. It was how you stayed alive so, consequently, your life revolved around however you got your food; your garden or taking care of animals or learning how to take care of and store different types of foods to make them edible. It wasn't just something you popped in a microwave so that you could get to your next meeting. It was the means of your livelihood and it took long hours of work everyday to pull it off.
Not exactly how it works today.
Simply think of the words used to describe our food. "Fast food" should be an oxymoron. "I'm gonna eat and go" as a phrase should be banned for taking away from what should be a sacred human experience. We've created an entire culture that completely contradicts the world of food and meals and sustenance that humanity has known since the beginning of the world. We live in this culture where animals and plants are products to buy and sell and have a profit margin on. Food is business made in factories as opposed to real living creatures also created by God.
This just can't be what God had in mind.
Which if you read Leviticus 11,
you begin to realize that this it isn't what God had in mind.
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There is this creation poem in the book of Genesis where we are shown that there is a way God creates the world to be. It is this natural flow of things that stands starkly opposed to the current state of our world and, in the Jewish tradition, there is a particular word to describe it.
It is the word shalom.
We typically translate shalom as peace, but the word shalom has much more depth to it than our word 'peace' gives credit to. Shalom is wholeness and harmony, where everything is in its right place exactly the way God intends. Shalom is the universal flourishment of all things aligned with God's dream for the world. That is the picture God wants us to see with how the world begins.
Which is why God keeps pointing out that, "It was good."
One way to understand this goodness and shalom that God is up to is the idea that everything is connected. The wholeness and goodness, the harmony of the world, it comes from the fact that all things are in right relationship with all other things. This is why words like wholeness and harmony are used.
Because it is this picture that we are all connected.
So as humans, we can read the story of how the world began and see that we are meant to be connected to and in shalom with everything; with God, with each other, with ourselves, and even with creation.
Apparently, this would make food kind of a big deal. Because there seems to be a particular way God created us to interact with nature. There is supposed to be a particular shalom like relationship present there. For example, over and over again God keeps making the point that creation is moving, it is going somewhere and we are then told that God has given us, the humans, a divine responsibility to take this moving creation and guide it in the right direction. Like a parent helping their child to move through the universe, that is what we are supposed to be doing with creation and that is what brings the shalom like connection that God intended for us to have.
Which means creation is not something to be violated and abused, it is something to be cared for and nurtured.
At one point in the poem God even says this, "And to all the animals of the earth and all of the birds of the sky and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has the breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food."
Which has two pretty big implications. One, that these creatures have the breath of life; this thing that allows them to breathe and move and live.
You know who else is sustained by this 'breath of life'?
Humans.
The same thing that makes us alive, the keeps us breathing, that gives us the ability to walk and think and enjoy is the same thing moving through each and every creature and animal in this world.
Which leads us to point number two: that God says that these animals and creatures, these things with the life breath, they eat plants...meaning they don't eat each other [a friend of mine pointed out to me that it isn't called the Farm of Eden on purpose]. For some reason, the way God sets everything up is that nothing with the breath of life will be killed. No humans killing other humans, no animals killing other animals, and, evidently, no humans killing animals, either. Because it doesn't make sense for one thing that is kept alive by this breath to take away that breath from something else.
Just as that breath is a gift to you, it is a gift to them and it is the same exact breath. How can you, in the midst of using and being kept alive by this gift from God, take it away from something else?
You don't take away the life breath.
And very specific language is used by God in the poem to ensure that humans understood their responsibility to partner with God in taking care of the world. The picture of the relationship that humans are supposed to be having with creation is shown very vividly as this caring, guiding, directing, respectful participation that allows the world to live in connection and wholeness and harmony with each other.
Not exactly how things have always gone.
Because as the first humans continue in the world...the shalom gets broken. They don't take the world the way God intended them to. They don't continue in this beautiful picture the Genesis poem gives. They don't live in the flourishment that God dreamed for them. Instead, they separate and tear apart all of the ways they are supposed to be connected. It all gets shattered.
Their connection with God.
Their connection with each other.
Their connection with themselves.
And even their connection with creation.
It is a story of a people who are participating in disconnection.
Which is what we began calling sin. Sin is just all of the ways we disconnect what was meant to be connected. We participate in a way of living in the world that isn't what God had in mind and it takes the world further and further away from the shalom it was supposed to be.
In everything we do and think and are a part of and that comes from us, we have to ask, is it connecting the world to the shalom it was meant to be or is it shattering our connection to a million different pieces?
Because the common theme in humanity is to do our own thing, to stop guiding the world and ourselves with God's dream for the world and to follow our own dream for it.
We have a tendency to participate in disconnection.
Which is something the story of Genesis is very clear on pointing out.
From here, we see humanity continually move away from the garden of connection and immediately the disconnection begins to exponentially increase. At one point God basically says, "I've had enough." God calls humanity corrupt and evil and sets out to start the whole thing over.
That's how bad the disconnection had become.
This is the part of the story popularly known as the flood. The flood is basically a picture of how God sets on this journey to re-create the world [a picture which will have to be discussed in a whole other writing]. But there is something interesting that happens after the flood is finished and the new creation has started.
God tells the people that they can eat meat.
A major adjustment from the last creation story where the life breath wasn't supposed to be taken from anything. Which raises the question:
Why?
Why does God all the sudden allow people to take the life breath away?
Well earlier in the story, before God brings on the flood there is a small detail that is important to note. When God deems humanity as corrupt, the thing that kickstarted the entire series of events, the reason they are so corrupt and disconnected that he had to start the world over, is because they were violent.
Their violence disconnected the world so bad that God had to flood it.
So it is almost like God re-creates the world and says, "You have to stop killing each other,"
This change with the animals and the whole eating meat thing begins to make a little more sense.
God allows humans to eat meat as a way to curve the violent aggression towards each other. Instead of killing humans who have this unique divine image thing going on, they begin killing their fellow creation; which immediately poses an issue - because how can you be connected to something when you are killing it?
So God throws in the command that when you eat meat...you don't eat the blood.
Because blood is where the life breath existed.
"Eat the meat, but still respect the life."
But even in the midst of this you can feel God's heart breaking. You can sense the struggle in God's heart allowing his creation to be maimed...
...all because of the excessive violence that human beings
can't quite seem to control.
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It is into this world, where eating meat developed as a regular part of the diet, that the dietary laws take place. But we still have to remember that eating meat is not natural...it was a later development for people who couldn't control their violent tendencies otherwise.
It is into this that God enters in and essentially says,
"Alright, alright...we've gotten way off track, let's try to fix this thing."
Reading the story of the Bible, you realize that the dietary laws are not just some random thing God decided to bring up, rather, it is God trying to do something about the disconnection of the world. This part of Leviticus isn't just a bunch of arbitrary rules to control people, it is God attempting to heal what has been shattered.
Maybe what God has to say about food in Leviticus is God simply trying to get people back to the shalom of Genesis.
The dietary laws are God saying,
"How you eat should reflect my dream for the world."
Behind all the details and seemingly obscure descriptions and commands, God is presenting humanity with a path to journey back to the garden and to begin reconnecting what we've disconnected. And I realize that on first reading of Leviticus 11, this is not exactly something that stands out, but this reconnecting the world is the driving force behind it all.
And it has a lot to say about how we ought to be navigating the same issues in our world and culture today.
Now, sown into all the details of the dietary laws are three central ideas God is trying to confront that emerge when you place this writing within God's narrative of the world. It is clear that there are some things God is trying to confront in hopes of bringing the world back to the garden.
It begins by God presenting an overarching idea that gives substance to what has gone wrong in the first place. Developed into the dietary laws is a standard for what has happened to humanity and it confronts the violent world that humanity became.
What we find is that within these laws, God is attempting to curve the violence.
The dietary laws are a push for non-violence.
Within this ancient Hebrew culture, a slaughtering process developed as a direct result of what God gave humanity in Leviticus 11. It was basically an effort to ensure that no animal was disrespected or abused. So only certain members of the community who had been fully trained using a particular technique of slaughtering were able to actually kill the animal. This dealt with the significance of blood and not messing with the life breath, but also with not causing pain to the animal that was being used for food.
A direct counter to the violence that had been taken out on animals since after the flood.
Because the only reason you should be killing an animal is for food right? So what this did was it kept people from just randomly killing animals...something that seems cruelly common in human aggressiveness.
So if only these particular members can kill animals, and kill them in a way that acts completely counter to violent maliciousness, then you will have a lot less animals dying and a lot less animals dying painfully and pointlessly.
But there is something else God is doing here.
There would have been a ton of animals roaming around the known world. So beyond only certain trained people being able to kill animals to create food, only certain animals were even aloud to be killed in the first place. So the available animals to use for food in the world became incredibly limited as a way to protect the majority of creation from what humans were failing to do. It is almost like God saying, "You can't just kill whatever you want," and so sets up a sort of regulation to keep the whole process in check. God is attempting to tame the violent and agressive nature that developed and to keep a large section of the animal world safe from it.
If you are going to eat meat...fine,
but don't just go around killing things.
This first idea is all about how food and meat was simply becoming an excuse to feed that violent impulse that had developed over time and how humans had developed a sort of contempt for their fellow creatures. The allowance for meat had occurred, but it had gotten out of control and now God is doing something about.
Something had to be done about the situation inside of humans and their connection with the world around them.
This was God's answer.
However, this is a perspective that is not very widely discussed.
Most discussion on the dietary laws is that God was creating a healthy diet for his people.
But this wasn't the reason.
And this needs to be acknowledged. The purpose of this whole thing wasn't so the Hebrew people would have been a healthy people. We have to be careful that this doesn't become the nice and neat answer to make sense of Leviticus 11.
But I also think there is something here that people are onto.
Because there has been a lot of modern emphasis on proving that the Levitical dietary laws promoted health, avoided disease, and improved sanitation. And it definitely has been proven; these things all, for the most part, seem to be true.
The issue is that there is almost zero chance that the culture during this time would have understood this or even been concerned about the health issue.
So the question becomes, "Was God up to something bigger here?"
Was God doing something in the background behind these other more prominent issues?
Because God could have just said, "Hey guys, the sea creatures with the shell, they are more capable of carrying this disease that will just mess things up for you so don't eat that." But God doesn't. It just wouldn't have been very effective because it wasn't a big deal for that culture in that time.
Maybe in the foreground God was directly taking care of these other more prominent and relevant issues that were incredibly pertinent to that world and in between the lines, God threw in a way of relating to food that also was positive for their health.
It is kind of like God snuck this part in on them.
Because I think it is safe to say that God wants people to be healthy. But we have to also be aware that health isn't the point of this whole thing and there are other elements that God felt were more important. The health part is just an accompaniment. Which raises the question, "How do we still accomplish these other things that God is directly pointing at while still moving in the direction of health that God seems to be up to behind the scenes?"
Because, evidently, God wants us to be healthy, too.
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Now, beyond both of these, there is a third element that seems to be at the core of what is going on in the dietary laws. The non-violence element deals with why God takes action with this whole thing in the first place; God is trying to do something about the direction of the world, but then we get the question of why does God say what God goes on to say? God could have just explained the first element and left it at that, so what are we supposed to do with the details? Why does God chose these sets of things instead of the infinite number of other things that could have been discussed?
On the surface, this whole text is one giant list; and to us it seems to be pretty random, but what can be brought to light is that this list has a very clear agenda for the Hebrews:
It is meant to directly contrast the world around them.
For example, most people, when they think of clean and unclean creatures, pigs are the first animal to come to their head. But God didn't just draw strings or say, "Well, the pig is kind of ugly, I pick them." There is a reason God considered pigs unclean; because pigs were used in sacrifices by pagan cultures throughout the Middle East. Which meant that the other cultures and tribes surrounding the Hebrews believed that pigs were a source of food for their various gods. God doesn't want his people to take part in that...so he describes it as unclean.
Even if you look at other parts of the list you find that various animals or insects listed were used as symbols for these pagan cultures or they were part of their mythologies or they had some sort of ritualistic significance.
So God wants his people to boycott that.
It is God being very clear that he desires his people not to be like the world around them. Those things aren't good and beautiful and true. What those cultures are doing are contradicting my dream for the world, they are adding to this disconnection mess...
...so don't do it...
...don't be like that.
In fact, the majority of the book of Leviticus is God telling this group of people that he doesn't want them to set up a community like the world around them...that God wants them to look different.
Because the urge is to just follow the trend.
For example, if you are going to set up a sacrificial system you would probably have a pretty strong tendency to use the sacrificial systems you saw in the people around you as a reference. Or if you are establishing a priestly cult or designing an economic system, there is a good chance you will use what you know from your neighbors and then go from there.
So God is challenging this group of people not to do that.
God wants them to imagine a different world, one more like the one God created.
This whole thing about food happens to fit right into that.
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All of the sudden, Leviticus 11 begins to feel like it was written exactly for a time and a culture like ours. Because it isn't just some old ancient document with no relevance for our advanced culture...it has just as much to say to us here and now as it did to this ancient tribal group thousands of years ago; we just have to do a little transposing. We are going through the same issues, asking the same questions, and facing the same problems that humanity has known since the beginning of the world.
Which means if we take what God is saying seriously in this particular part of the story, it has crucial implications for us today.
First, it brings up the issue of how detached we are from our food.
The concept of raising your own animals and having to slaughter them in order to eat meat seems like a myth to many Americans. Which is unfortunate, because it does something to you when you put the work into sustaining and nourishing your food and then the long, difficult, and messy process of getting that food onto a table.
Instead, what happens for much of the modern world is exponentially more disturbing. I've seen images of the long, thin walled shelters where our food is kept. Where opening a door provides the only channel for light to touch the skin of those kept inside. Where you step into the giant one room building, sometimes with stalls keeping several animals, whether it be pigs or chicken or cattle, smashed together. Other shelters are just dirt floored and filled to a capacity that keeps any living thing from moving any distance without being smashed into a fellow captive. As an animal with a future only in being slaughtered, your food is chemical induced corn or some foreign substance that has been so modified that no proper name would do it justice; nothing like the grass their stomachs were made for. Dead and rotting carcasses lay scattered, typically covered in feces, unable to survive the scientific experiment their lives have become.
Pretty messed up.
The way our food is carried out today has a very strong non-shalomness to it and we are all participants in this continuous disconnection with our fellow creatures.
Or you could just say that we are violent from a distance.
We live in a culture that not only lets this happen to creatures with the breath, but supports it. Which means you are still taking part in it even if you aren't the owner of one of the many slaughterhouse factories that keeps our grocery stores stocked.
So much for guiding creation.
Whatever was going on to spur God to confront a culture steeped in violence towards the world, probably is going on just as much today.
But this is the industry of food. It is profit minded businessmen trying to be as efficient as possible to sell their product. And in return, we are left with a violent, unconcerned, unaware, take advantage for profit, disrespectful, and detached perspective on something that should be respected, intimate, and grateful.
Even the amount of meat is ridiculous. Part of what God was doing was limiting the amount of meat used by humanity. We have gone from a world where meat wasn't even comprehended as something for food back in Genesis 1 [because you had to take its life from it and why would you do that?], to cultures where meat was a luxury, to a world where meat exists in an abundant expectancy practically with every meal.
Every meal doesn't need a 'protein'.
This is a new and relatively rare experience compared to the rest of history.
And sometimes I simply wonder if any of this would change if we had to raise and kill our own meat; something America, at least, needs to start thinking a little harder about.
So if God were to enter into this same discussion today and give us new dietary laws, what would they look like? What kind of things would God be bringing up? What things would need confronted? What would need changed?
I really don't think it would look too much different than Leviticus 11.
Because the problems haven't really changed too much...we have just disguised them differently.
What is happening in Leviticus 11 is absolutely transcendental no matter what culture or time period of history you live in. We just have to transpose what is going on.
Maybe God would begin by raising some questions around the same non-violent 'you've got to get ahold of your aggressiveness and detachment from my creation' problem.
In light of how our culture handles food, can we have respect and gratefulness for what we eat? What if we stopped taking an abusive and dominant approach to our fellow creatures and, instead, own the perspective that this life is given to me so I can continue having life? Where it is no longer just something to eat, but something that we are connected to?
We have to begin asking ourselves some pretty intense questions.
Do we have a view of food that would reveal a violent contempt and disrespect swelling inside of us or do we understand and see animals and life the way God does?
When you see your food do you mourn for the life breath that was taken away from it or do you just not care?
Do you support an industry that completely counters what God desires for the world or do you search for ways to reconnect with creation?
God's dietary laws today would have a lot to do with this. Because we have lost our connection with creation and that just simply isn't how God desires the world to be.
So in your eating, are you participating in the disconnection of the world that has been going on since Genesis or are you healing the shalom that has been so shattered? We need to reclaim and restore the initial connection we had with the earth and its creatures.
Maybe we could just ask it this way:
Are we allowing nature to live in the garden?
How you eat would give us a lot of answers to whether you are or not.
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But that is only the first element that this text brings up.
Food and how you eat has a lot to do with our connection with the earth, but it also has implications for the connection we have with ourselves. This was another one of the things that was disconnected as the Genesis story continued. So not only is it possible for our eating to disrespect the creatures of creation, it also has the potential to disrespect ourselves.
Through what you eat, you may be participating in some violent things towards nature and the world, but you may also be participating in violent things towards you.
I think this was something God was getting at whether or not that culture understood it.
Because what you put in your body matters.
How you treat yourself matters.
Destroying your life from the inside out matters.
If you are making it difficult for you body to survive and function and flow the way it was created to, evidently that is important to God and God wants to do something about it. If you are putting things in your body that your body wasn't meant to process...God cares about that. God created you to have shalom with yourself just as much as with all these other parts of the world and if you are neglecting you then it is causing just as much disconnection as anything else.
We have got to be more aware of what we are eating.
Chemicals and plastic and things built in a laboratory weren't meant to go into you.
Massive amounts of butter and salt and sugar and protein weren't meant to go into you.
Eating more things produced in a factory than things actually grown out of the ground...you just weren't meant for that.
And our bodies have a way of telling us that we live in a society
that has really screwed this up...
...it's called obesity
and strokes
and heart attacks
and cancer.
What we eat shows that we are very disconnected with ourselves...and God wants to restore that, too.
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Yet there is still one more piece that I think God has a lot to say about:
That our navigation with food should be counter cultural...which unfortunately isn't as clear to pick up on as it was back in the days of Leviticus' writing.
Though it may be difficult to piece together what a counter cultural approach to food looks like today, it isn't very difficult to see that things are pretty messed up in our culture. I'd even say that our culture's food paradigm is more disconnected than ever seen in history.
So just as God boycotted the cultures participating in disconnection back then, God is pushing for our world to do the same thing today. But it isn't as easy as just reading the varied lists in Leviticus 11 and following them. It is even possible that you could follow those lists precisely and still go against the very thing God is trying to do in the world.
If we are trying to reconnect this thing then that means not approaching food the way the rest of the world seems to. Because, at least in America, we are very much participating in disconnection with the earth and with each other and it needs to stop.
For example, the whole idea of the commonality and convenience of food is an issue. Our food travels an average of 1500 miles to get to our table; a relatively new idea in the world. Think of all the gas that goes into shipping this food, the chemicals that go into it to preserve it and to get it to ripen while not being connected to its plant, or the manipulation of seasons that occurs to make all of this unfold. It just isn't meant to work like that.
And what about the people on the other side of our food. Do we ever consider the possible slavery or poor conditions or violence done to the people who make our food so convenient? Do we give the workers and laborers the same assumptions of respect and comfort that we give ourselves? Or does our apathy towards the situation expose how incredibly disconnected we are with our fellow neighbors?
Or just look at the speed of food that happens in our culture. We want food fast, we want it now, and we don't care what you have to do to make that happen. But back in Genesis, God creates the world and tells the humans to go and take care of it and create with it and take it and do things with it. We've lost that sort of intimacy. And it has led to a loss of intimacy with each other.
Because we've lost the art of meals, too. Since the first people, meals have been a gathering of those we do life with to share an experience. When you are guiding creation together and harvesting creation together, naturally, you would sustain yourself with that creation and you would do it together. But today, eating is something to be put on a to do list.
Most people eat simply with the goal not to be hungry. Instead, what if every time we ate something, it was rooted in enjoying this beautiful thing that God created? Meals have been central to the livelihood and community of people for thousands of years for a reason. There is something about how you eat that says something about your perspective of what you are eating and your perspective about the people you are eating with.
We have to realize that the food issue has disconnected us from each other, too.
But beyond these things, one of the biggest cultural phenomenons with food is the business that food has become...another cultural issue that I think God cares deeply about while also being a relatively new concept in the history of the world. Because food isn't a business. Yet for our culture, it is a multi-billion dollar industry. Food is made in factories, managed by distant yet high paid executives, and more thought is put into the packaging and advertising than the actual product [and it shouldn't even be called a product].
Or we could talk about how we eat 300 pounds of meat a year per person.
I don't think anything else needs to be said about that.
Especially when the average person in India only eats 7. There are even estimates that in most cultures before industrialization, some people only ate 4 pounds of meat per year, per person.
Our bodies don't even know what to do with all of that protein except to develop diseases or store it in ways foreign to our body structures. Yet we keep doing it every single day.
But we could also look at the other side of this cultural phenomenon. Vegetarianism is now a fad. It has become more of a statement about how hip you are or a way to fit in rather than an attempt to change your life and the way the world works. So we have to wrestle with this, too.
Or even the simple fact that America wastes almost as much food as it consumes. Which is a big deal when almost half of the world doesn't have enough...yet we continue to have more than we evidently know what to do with. So we fill our plates with more than we need, eat more than our bodies can handle, and then throw the rest in the trash.
Overall, I think it is safe to say that we have some work to do.
But I also think it is safe to say that God is more determined than ever to getting us to counter the very culture that is bringing so much disconnection and pain to this place.
What if we started eating locally? Only ate what was in season. You know, like the rest of world has had to do since its existence.
What if we stopped eating fast and instead took time to care for and create and be connected to our food?
What if our meals were long and rich and in homes? What if they were experiences to enter into with each other instead of just something to hurry up and do so we can keep checking things off of our to-do lists?
What if we refused to participate in the industry of food and began supporting a process of food that looks a little more Genesis-like?
What if we didn't eat more than we needed?
...what if we didn't eat more than we needed?
And what if we didn't waste food that has no business being wasted? Because I realize it is easier, but I have yet to see a picture of God where God wastes stuff...especially things that God found it necessary to call "good".
Followers of Jesus should be the most connected, well balanced, selfless eaters in the world. They should be the best cooks and throw the best parties with an approach different from the culture surrounding them. And when they do go out to restaurants it should be a slow and communal experience starkly contrasting how the rest of the world eats.
These patterns of disconnection...with creation, with ourselves, with each other, and especially with God...we've got to do something about it.
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So what if we decided to take God's advice when it comes to food?
What would it look like to eat and to relate to creation like God originally intended?
When God gives us these dietary laws it is much bigger than God just telling us what we can't eat. What we need to do is to learn what it means to get caught up in that. In the bigger thing.
Because your relationship to food says a lot about what direction you are taking the world. It's either connecting it or disconnecting it. It's either shattering shalom or restoring it. Every single thing you eat, every meal [or the lack thereof] you participate in, every time you buy food...it is either doing one or the another.
So we have to ask:
Is how you eat reflecting God's dream for the world?
Or is it participating in something else...some sort of disconnection?
And we can take these questions and implement them to every single part of our lives and how we are moving in the world. But in Leviticus 11, this is essentially what God is getting at.
The dietary laws are one of God's ways that he is trying to get us back to the garden.
He wants us to exist like that again.
And our eating has a lot to do with it.
