Recently in Food Category

Living as a nomad, it was bound to happen: I left my computer behind. Bouncing between cities (two) and offices (four) as I've done the past semester, I rely on THE LIST -- things to do before leaving the house (empty the kitchen compost, e.g.) and things to bring (er, that'd be the computer, e.g.). The list works great... if I actually use it. Last week, I didn't. The irony is, I'm finally settling in again, finally staying put  -- one city, one office, for the most part, anyway. Maybe that was it. I let my guard down, got cocky.

"Remember." The Bible is full of commands to remember. It is itself a testimony of remembrance, a witness to the power of memory, and its commands humanize with their instructions. Of hospitality and kindness, "Remember that you also were foreigners, strangers in a strange land." Of faith and community, "Do this in remembrance of me." To recognize the sacred and sanctify the ordinary, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."

Being without my computer, the days were different, slower. I wrote by hand, read huge chunks of books for ideas and a big-picture sensibility (rather than recording with detailed notes). Thanks to Audubon, I identified a pair of green herons and watched as Beverly, a large almost black beaver, munched the mini maples around the periphery of the pond out back. I cleared bamboo and braised local lamb shanks. I spent time with the ones I love -- two- and four-leggeds alike. 

Then it was Memorial Day. Dinner with new friends and the invitation to share gratitude. Thanks for this place, these people, the food. But thanks, too, for the ones who have gone before. Honor to their memory -- those who have sacrificed in our armed services, yes, but also to those ordinary and extraordinary individuals whose lives, vision, and selves helped shape the ideas, conditions and company I enjoy today. My great aunt Lucille, Thomas Jefferson, those who fought to ban DDT, Louis Pasteur, my boyfriend's father.

Truth is, I have a terrible memory. I want to remember that as I age so that I don't worry unnecessarily about my forgetting. But, well, you see the problem there. Maybe, though, forgetting can lead, as in the case of my computer, to different kinds of remembering. Deeper remembrances -- of our tiny-ness, of our dependence on and debts to others, of what is holy. Now where did I put those keys?

The storied "sea" (actually a freshwater lake) where Jesus performed miracles among its fisher-folk and from which Jesus called his disciples to become "fishers of men" is now off limits. Galilean fish stocks are so depleted that Israel has instituted a ban on fishing there, in effect for two years, in the hopes that that piscis population will rebound. For those of us who know Galilee from the gospel stories, it's easy to get sentimental, wishing for a 21st century reality just like we read about Jesus' first century one.

But as Louis Jenkins' poem that Garrison Keillor read on today's Writers Almanac reminds us, "Everything changes." He observes, "Dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers and then the bread makers all went to rummage sales along with the exercise bikes."

I've been thinking with church groups lately about what the Bible says about environmental issues, and how different the message can be when we consider that everything changes. That we today can radically transform our conditions, that we can take for granted safety from wild animals and the weather and have no worries about access to food makes Genesis 1's command to subdue and have dominion mean differently than it did in its ancient context.

In the case of Galilee, it means a fishing ban -- active care and wise restraint -- in what would seem on the surface to be directly opposed to Jesus' encouraging such industry. The biblical notion of controlling and ruling over the non-human natural world is transformed into intelligent stewardship. Paradoxically, that would seem to be exactly what the biblical texts promote.

A version of this post first appeared in Christian Century's "Theolog."

It's spring, and Richmond is busting out in lush green. White pompoms of elderberry blossoms are bustling with bees. Hard new figs are attached impossibly to smooth branches, and my grape vine sports countless tiny clusters of lime green nubbins. The cats stretch out in the sunshine to doze. And on Fridays, the kids across the alley fire up their grill. My whole body breathes, with every sense, and exhales in well-being. The luscious smell of sizzling burgers, the hoo-hoo of doves, the heat (ah heat) of a southern, not-quite-summer sun, the tender crunch of sugar snap peas, and the riotous beauty of blood red teacup roses nestled among dripping white honeysuckle. With all five, physical senses buzzing, a sixth, the spiritual, shimmers. In spring, it seems perfectly right that the Bible would include a Song of Songs, also called the Song of Solomon. 
 

Countless visual representations of the Garden of Eden creation story narrated in Genesis chaps 2-3 depict a crisp apple as the downfall of Adam and Eve. Yet the original Hebrew reads simply "fruit." Without knowing that, we English speakers (and readers) can be excused for assuming that it was specifically an apple such as a Gala or juicy Granny Smith, since that's the way that the Hebrew is often translated -- Eve ate from the apple, shared it with Adam, and bye bye Paradise. Translating like that makes a certain kind of sense, since "apple" used to function in English to describe all sorts of fruit. But even before that, when the text began to be translated into Latin, the translators introduced an evocative wordplay: they translated the Hebrew "fruit" with "apple," which in Latin is malum -- not incidentally related to malus, meaning "bad." Poor guys clearly never had my mom's apple pie...

"In the beginning," the Bible says, food meant plants. Everybody -- human beings, birds, beasts, everything that moves and breathes -- vegan. Yup. "It was so... and very good." Or so the authors/editors of the first chapter of the Bible tell it. Not till after the great Flood and Noah's (meat) sacrifice do the biblical narrators tell that God explicitly allowed meat eating. It appears as a kind of concession and seems tied to human incorrigibleness. For, as the story goes, even after destroying all the people at least partly because their mean-spiritedness and violence proved to be such a disappointment to God, God accepted that people would still be bad. In that context (which also thought-provokingly includes disruption of relationships b/w humankind and animals and a warning against murder), God edited God's earlier remarks about diet to include everything, not just plants. But take care, God warned, that you not eat meat with its life. Back in the day, it was thought that blood = life, so: get rid of the blood before consumption. We think otherwise about what vitalizes -- about where is the life source. It makes me think, omnivore that I am, about what it might mean to us today to avoid eating life.