The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
July 13, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 27

Everything But...
           To overstate matters, the Bible seems to be dominated by concerns for food, sex, strangers, and war. We may pray before a meal, but that is one of the few times prayer comes before food in the religious life. Food may seem benign, but more than a few arguments have occurred among individuals and cultures whether what they are eating is proper food.
           When you get right down to it, food is pretty divisive. I still know people who won’t touch anything but meat and potatoes; a taco or burrito is not even food. Some cuisines revel in hot sauces, others by contrast are intentionally bland. In New Jersey I was able to enjoy the culinary delights of my youth: braunschweiger, Taylor’s ham, and scrapple. Most of you don’t want to know what those delicacies are.
           Refusing to eat the food of a host is perhaps socially the worst insult of all. If you remember the banquet scene in the Indiana Jones movies in which sheep eyeballs floated in the soup served to Indy and his sidekick, you too felt the ensuing nausea of another culture’s delight, for you and I do not consider certain kinds of food to be clean. “Eat what is placed before you” has often been one of the more difficult commandments when traveling in a strange land.
           There are many systems of eating that define rather carefully what you are allowed to eat and what to avoid like the plague. Kosher for Judaism is one, various regimens of vegetarianism and veganism are others. “I eat everything” seldom happens and should not be taken literally.
           The Biblical plate is full of talk about food and one of the most intriguing is the story of Esau’s desperate hunger for some of Jacob’s ‘red stuff.’ Is not life more than food? Esau was too hungry to think.