Healthier, Safer, Fairer: Eating as a Spiritual Practice

© 2009, Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway

Listen Now!

“So many things a person wants
Are not found in restaurants
When I suffer from heartbreak
I like some Chocolate Bacon Cake
You have to keep it very quiet
But someday you ought to try it
At night when no one is awake
Chocolate Bacon Cake…

You won’t find it in Julia Child…

But it's so juicy and delicious
You eat it and it softly squishes…

Forbidden tastes, secret delights
Guilty pleasures late at night
So many things a person wants
Are not found in restaurants.”

So sang Garrison Keillor recently on his radio show.

Today as we hold our Bring-Your-Weight-In-Food drive and prepare for Thanksgiving, I want to trace some of my personal journey with food, hoping it will stir your own stories.

My family is from Nebraska.

My grandmother grew up on a farm.

My mother grew up in a small town, but her family always had a big garden.

My father’s father had his own Hamilton’s grocery store.

My father was for twenty-five years a manager of a chain grocery store.

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska’s capital city where we were pleased with our distance from the farm. The price of grains were the headlines on the local television news. My brother and I made fun of the farm news and took pride in not knowing an alfafa plant from sorghum.

My mother cooked. Her specialties were homemade breads, cakes, and pies and chicken soup with homemade noodles. She nourished me in womb and dining room. She provided many a banquet, many a feast.

Relationships with food are all mixed up with self-image, pleasure, people, traditions, celebrations, gifts of labor and love. And it’s complicated. Growing up, my mother might say, “You’re getting a little chunky, Barb. Is that a pimple?...Would you like another piece of chocolate cake?” But Mother never forgot a birthday and always baked your favorite cake.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. As new grocery products came along, we ate Swanson potpies, Wonder Bread, Velveeta cheese, and Jello. I remember the day I found some thing unknown to me in my lunch box—a single Twinkie Mother had packed in a sandwich bag. It looked weird, and Mother was disappointed this treat was still in my lunch box at the end of the day. I grew to like Twinkies and Hostess Cup Cakes, but my first instinct was right…they are weird.

Most nights our family sat down together and we all ate the same meal. That may seem obvious, but in more and more households, each person now microwaves their own packaged meal. Preparing, eating and cleaning up were times for our family conversation. When my parents went to their friends’ homes for dinners, my brother and I ate T.V. dinners or went to the drive-in for hamburgers, fries, and chocolate malts.

The changes in our family’s eating were reflections of the big changes going on in food production—the movement from farms to companies to now a few huge conglomerates, from fresh food to packaged, from diverse crops to production of mostly corn and soy, the ingredients for processed fast food.

Also mirrored in our family were the moves from people raising their own food to family owned corner grocery stores to chain stores, now big box megastores.

All of us know that no matter how contented the pasture cows pictured on labels and in ads look, most cows stand in metal stalls ankle deep in their own waste, without room to turn around. Most chickens, broilers and layers, as they are now called, are crammed into factories, never see the light of day, produced in mass on assembly lines.

One summer I worked in a Kellogg’s factory, dropping toys in boxes of sugary cereals. This glimpse into food production showed me workers, who didn’t work there as summer jobs but for their whole lives, who had lost their hearing because of din of the machinery. You couldn’t hear the person working across the line from you. You could hardly hear your own thoughts. The factory ran three eight hour shifts a day, 365 days a year. And that’s just one factory of one giant cereal company. Imagine all the production lines for all the food products filling grocery shelves.

After college, I left Nebraska to become a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Fiji Islands. My send-off was a family dinner at a steak house, a big slab of corn-fed beef. In Fiji, I lived on a small remote island. The daily meals were cassava, a potato like plant, and bele, greens. Seasonally, mangoes were a sensuous treat. Meat was occasional. Villagers gave me a pig, but I didn’t want to kill it. They gave me a chicken, and I couldn’t kill it either.

I respect farmers who care for animals and raise them for their food, but I couldn’t do the killing myself. Yet I’d grown up eating meat offered on Styrofoam, covered with shrink wrap or on a bun or a platter, disguised and distant from the slaughter.

At the time I was reading Diet for a Small Planet about how if all the land used to raise feed for cattle was raising food for people, everyone on the planet could have enough to eat. I became a vegetarian.

When I returned to Nebraska, some relatives didn’t understand, but my mother was accommodating. She made, I remember, Asparagus Loaf one Thanksgiving.

I was vegetarian, but what about those late night eating delights?

Eating is connected to rewards. After the Peace Corps, I was for a decade a high school English teacher. I loved the students and teaching. I really did. Grading papers got old. Stacks of essays and reports to read. And I couldn’t just give grades and circle spelling errors, I wanted to engage, affirm, ask questions, write responses. So some nights I needed rewards. I would melt butter, stir in cocoa, powdered sugar and a little milk and after every five papers, I could eat chocolate frosting right out of the pot. There, I admitted it.

I still sometimes eat when I’m frustrated or bored or needing a quick reward. Sometimes I eat after I’ve finished a meal, because I don’t feel satisfied. What I’m longing for is probably not food. I’m longing for deeper connection to what I’ve eaten and those with whom I’m sharing the meal.

During the 70s I was part of a food co-op where members milled grain for flour to bake bread. Twenty years later, when our son Ben was in college, he dropped out for a time and moved to a communal sustainable farm in upstate New York. When he got there, the farm was only a couple of guys who found it easier to dumpster dive behind the Amish market than toil the soil. More adventures in eating.

As the family grew and moved away from my parents in Nebraska, mother would bake cakes on birthdays and decorate them. She cut out photographs of each family member and made little stands for them so they could be stuck into cakes as decorations. Whether family members could be present for celebrations or not, she remembered the family in this way.

When I had my own children, we carried on the tradition of having evening meals together as a family. I’m glad when I hear my adult daughter say she can always count on a healthy meal when she is at our house. But I also have followed trends like the low fat diet which increased everybody’s intake of carbohydrates, followed by the low carb fad. I have been a flexitarian. There have been times when I’ve eaten turkey, chicken or fish, but mostly I feel the choice of vegetarianism is right for me.

I feel pretty good about how I eat, but I know ways I’d like to change. There’s food on my shelves with ingredients my grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. There’s food that has traveled too many miles to my door.

It’s a crime that a McDonald’s burger costs less than broccoli. One way to change this craziness is by our purchases. Food production will provide what we demand. I want to eat more fresh locally produced organic vegetables and fruits, eat without hiding from the story of the food, more carefully select the dairy and eggs I eat, and know if the workers were treated fairly, the cows and chickens treated respectfully. Fast food isn’t cheap when you count the costs to the workers, our health, the environment.

I want to sit down at a table for meals even when I’m alone, cook more and microwave less. Preparing, touching the food we eat enhances our connection to life.

What a joy to share more meals with family or friends, across cultures, continents and life experiences. It would be good for all of us to pause before we eat, to speak a grace or a short reading, hold silence, and become more aware of what is before us. Then we can slow down, savor our food, and be grateful.

At a recent Thursday evening program, people gathered to explore the spiritual practice of gratitude. Among the litany of thanks for good fortune, health, education, opportunities, family, friends, homes, cats, sunsets, green earth, poetry, singing, piano, violin and cello, Matisse’s Blue Nudes, Van Goghs starry skies and waving grain… were fresh bread, homemade soups, blueberries and strawberries.

Strawberries. When my mother was dying, my son Ben came to visit her. She was in hospice care, in bed, eating little, mostly sleeping. Her memory was pretty much gone. Mother told Ben she was hungry for strawberries. Ben crawled in bed with his Grams, held her, fed her strawberries and memories. “Remember when you showed up at my school? You’d just come for a visit, and I hadn’t seen you yet. You stood right in front of me. I was a first grader off in my own little world, staring at my shoes. I didn’t look up. I moved aside. You kept blocking me, and I kept moving. I moved, you moved. I moved you moved. Finally I looked up. I was so happy to see you. I remember laughing and laughing.”

“I remember,” Grams says.

“Remember,” Ben says, as he feeds her another bite of strawberry, “when you were visiting us, and you put bubble bath in the tub and put the jets on? Bubbles were everywhere. All the way upstairs, we could hear you laughing.”

“I’ll never forget,” Grams says.

Like the Buddhist story where a man hangs over the edge of a cliff, a tiger chasing after him. With one hand he grasps a vine which mice are chewing away. With his other hand, he reaches for a strawberry.

Mother had cancer spreading in her body; strokes that had diminished her physically and mentally and falls that had set her back. Her grandson fed her strawberries and memories.

Oooooh, how sweet those strawberries!

How sweet for me this memory.

Food links us to loved ones, to our health in mind, body, and spirit.

When my father was in the last days of his life, his two grandsons made him his last supper and served him as an act of gratitude and love.

Bill’s dad was always a hands on, active, independent guy who provided for his family. When Bill’s father was in his last days, he couldn’t feed himself. What a tender gift that Bill could feed his dad.

Eating connects us to body and spirit, to all who have come before, all who will come after, to the web of life.

I want to make my own covenant for my shopping, preparing, and eating. I want a support group with others who are setting their own consumption goals. I’m looking for people who are deepening as Unitarian Universalists, who attend Sunday services regularly, give 5 – 10% to the church or are committed to doing so, who want to support one another in our consumption, spiritual practices, and living our values. I want this, do you?

Through the years on the anniversary of my mother’s birth, I have decorated a cake with Mother’s photograph decorations. I’ve cut out photos of new members of the family to add.

On Thursday when we gather around the table for Thanksgiving, should I decorate the pumpkin pie with those family photos?

I do know if you look closely my grandparents and parents are at the table.

My mother lived to hold her first great grandchild. Since her death another child has been born. More generations will follow. They too are at the table.

What is true for me is true for you, true for our human family.
When I think about what other photos I need to add, there are more than the pie can hold. Look closely. Sun, water, plants, the land, animals, strangers and friends, the dead, the unborn, the love we long for and the love we know… they’re all there.

So many things a person wants are not found in restaurants but around the dinner table.

We are all at the table, our ritual of connection, the promise of living, our holy communion.

Happy Thanksgiving!