Food for Thought

“Our sisters in suffrage have gone on hunger strike. I have determined to join them in this valiant action. Already my mind is beset by hallucinations. Where once I gave a bun scant attention, now it haunts my every thought. I dreamt last night I was queen of a land of buns, my consort, Osbert, a giant bun with buns for cheeks, a bun nose, and small bun teeth. Oh, how the mind maddens as the body weakens!”

Up the Women S2 E1, ‘The Romance’ (2015)

 

Mmm ... buns. Thanks to Apolonia at freedigitalphotos.net.

Up the Women is an absolutely brilliant BBC sitcom that follows the endeavours of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women’s Suffrage, a group of suffragettes so delightfully hapless and unimpressive that they rarely even manage to take the fight for political rights outside the church hall where they meet. The plot of the first episode of the second series prominently features an attempt by the BICCPRWS to go on hunger strike in sympathy with those suffragettes doing so in prison – and not a very successful one.

“How long have you been starving for?” Eva asks Margaret, arguably the programme’s protagonist and also the one whose diary documenting the hunger strike opens both the episode and this blog post.

“Ah, well, um,” stammers Margaret, “I meant to begin yesterday, only we had a dinner engagement that we couldn’t cancel, so I resolved in earnest to begin this morning, only Cook hadn’t been told, so I felt obliged to finish the breakfast kedgeree, and Osbert’s sausage would have gone to waste. So, um, in all … just over an hour.”¹

It’s far from the only excuse employed in the episode. After Gwen arrives at the hall having purchased a whole basketful of assorted cheeses in a closing-down sale, dubious justifications of similar type abound.

“I, for one, can’t be near a cheese and not eat it,” declares Myrtle, helping herself to a handful of Stilton.

“Does cheese even count as a food when it’s not between bread?” wonders Gwen.

“Surely cheese is merely a hardened form of milk, therefore hardly a foodstuff,” argues visitor Bertie Smuth some time later.

As amusing as the characters’ utter failure to resist their desire for cheese is, it also seems to me to be – as good comedy so often is – cuttingly representative of reality. The sway held over me by my stomach really is quite extraordinary. My mind often tends towards food as the object of its distracted ponderings: long mornings spent struggling through articles about Roman epic, or wrestling Disney songs into singable arrangements,² or trying to pray through the Bible passage prescribed for that day on my Bible-in-five-years schedule, will so often find an alternative occupation in contemplating the components of the lunch that promises to draw them to a close. The obsession only worsens when I am at home for the holidays: couple a kitchen stocked for the feeding of as many as eight people with my parents’ fondness for trips to interesting bakeries, and I find myself helping myself to item after item. In short, if I know there is cake, I will want cake, and I will eat cake.

 

Just looking at this picture is making me want cake, even though I already had some today. I think I’ll go and read my Bible when I’ve finished uploading this post.

The problem I’m identifying isn’t strictly one of overeating, much as that can be a problem in many circumstances; it’s rather one of slavery to one’s own desire for food, to the extent that such a desire begins to win out over other priorities – be they matters of health, or kindness (e.g. nabbing the last cake without asking if anyone else wanted it), or, as in the BICCPRWS’ case, political activism. This kind of priority-shifting is definitely something I’ve seen in my own life: my personal low point would be one particular afternoon this most recent Christmas holiday when I asked my little brother to feed me biscuits, because I wanted some, but was busy playing Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox and didn’t want to pause and set aside the controller in order to take some for myself. He, incidentally, very obligingly did. (Do please feel free to laugh if you wish. It was a pretty ludicrous scene.) I wanted food, so I made sure I got it, even if I had to transgress normal behaviour and inconvenience other people to do so.

It’s an attitude that simply cannot be consistent with following Jesus. If I cannot serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24), and if to love even a family member more than Jesus makes one unworthy of him (Matthew 10:37), then it seems pretty well apparent that placing food at the top of my priorities list is not acceptable.³

Of course, at this point you may remind me that food is one of those things that I do actually need in order to, you know, live. That point I will gladly concede. However, Jesus is uncomfortably firm on the point that, as one professing to follow him, I really shouldn’t be hiring myself out to any other masters on the side. Try Mark 8:34-35: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”⁴ Letting my desire for food, or indeed for anything, take precedence over my desire for Jesus in driving my actions is not on, full stop – even supposing I were in a situation where my life might be at stake. Still, while I do pray that, should I ever be called upon to die for the sake of the gospel, God will give me the courage to do so, it doesn’t exactly look like an especially likely scenario to occur in the near future.⁵ Merely keeping my body functioning is really not the relevant issue here. This being so, it seems all the more striking – and all the more shameful – that I should be so enslaved to my stomach. So how do I extricate myself from such slavery?

In an especially famous section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorts his listeners thus: “Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles (i.e. those who don’t know God) seek after all these things, and your heavenly father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”⁶ You’ve probably heard it a thousand times before (and may even now have stately ‘Alleluia’s playing in your head to the tune known as Lafferty⁷ – I know I have). Still, take a moment to consider what Jesus is actually asking of us here. He is not calling us to simply stop chasing after such things as food and leave a vacuum at the top of the list; rather, he is offering us something infinitely more valuable than food to occupy that space – a relationship with God, who is not only king but also righteous, and who knows our needs. The demand itself – prioritise God – provides the means to achieve the demand: God is the greatest, best, most fulfilling thing one could possibly prioritise.

Another example may be helpful here. Bolt is a wonderful and highly underrated 2008 computer-animated Disney film about a dog, the eponymous Bolt, who believes that the action-packed sci-fi TV programme in which he features is in fact real life. When, therefore, he gets lost on the wrong side of the continent, his determination to save his owner Penny from the evil Dr Calico is entirely undiminished, even though he has lost the superpowers whose effects are usually painstakingly engineered to occur around him. He captures a cat named Mittens, whom he believes to be an agent of Calico, and demands she take him to where Penny is. There ensue various scenes, both hilarious and moving, where Bolt is confronted with the problems and privileges of being an ordinary dog. One of the first unfamiliar sensations he encounters is hunger.

“Argh!” he exclaims as his stomach rumbles for the first time. “What is that?”

“What?” asks Mittens suspiciously.

“That!” replies Bolt. “OK, you have two seconds to tell me what you’ve implanted in me, cat! Poison? A parasite? Poison? Wait, I just said that. See, I’m all discombobulated! I can’t think straight!”

Mittens is unimpressed. “I don’t believe this. You’re hungry!”

“Where is the antidote?” demands Bolt.

Mittens then concocts a plan to use Bolt’s eminent cuteness to beg food from the occupants of various nearby motorhomes.⁸ The said plan is a storming success, as Mittens goes on to enthuse: “I haven’t eaten like this in ages. Look, my stomach’s distended! How great is that?”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it. We’ve got to keep moving,” returns Bolt.

Mittens is incredulous! “But this place is a goldmine! What’s wrong with you? Every week, new RVs bring us new suckers who bring us new food!”

 

An RV is, as I understand it, a rather enormous American motorhome a little something like the above, for which I thank debspoons at freedigitalphotos.net.

The difference between Mittens and Bolt here is that Mittens is driven entirely by her desire for food, while Bolt has bigger things to focus on, namely finding and ensuring the safety of his beloved Penny. It isn’t that Bolt has less need for food, but rather that his first priority, Penny, causes everything else to take a back seat. Seeking after Penny is both the greatest demand on him and his greatest motivation; it’s the reason he can’t stay in the RV park and the reason he is empowered to leave.  

Leave a vacuum at the top of the list, and food may creep up to fill it. This is the position in which we find both Mittens in Bolt, and the Gentiles in Jesus’ statement in Matthew 6; with no greater priority, why shouldn’t a desire for food drive their actions? But when we have as top priority something infinitely better, greater, more valuable, more desirable than food – more precious even than Penny is to Bolt – surely that puts us in the best position we could possibly be in to break free of slavery to the desire for food? Surely we could have no greater weapon with which to fight against that slavery?

I’ll finish with a few caveats to the above. First, just in case this wasn’t already clear, I am not advocating needless abstinence from food to make some kind of point about not prioritising it. Fasting as a spiritual discipline is another matter,⁹ but God makes it pretty clear throughout the Bible that he’s very happy for his people to enjoy food;¹⁰ the issue is, as I have stated, when food takes priority over following God. Second, I’m aware that some people have more complicated relationships with food than allowed for by my argument, and I by no means wish to esteem lightly the struggles of those battling with genuine eating disorders, or imply that those struggles reveal any sort of spiritual inferiority. This post is really aimed at the majority of us who are without excuse with regard to our relationship with food. Third, I realise that the broad argument of this post could be applied to almost any idol or distraction, not food uniquely. I wanted to talk about food, however, because I think it’s a subtle idol, and one we rarely discuss in such contexts – it seems too base, too boring, too embarrassingly ordinary a thing to admit idolatry of. I personally have spent far too long in ignorance of the power it held over me – the biscuits incident mentioned above was a bit of a wake-up call – and such ignorance is not something I would want anyone else, least of all my valued readers, to endure unnecessarily.

Footnotes

¹ The BBC have thoughtfully uploaded the relevant clip to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqKSMknYsPk.

² Because I’m Music Director of my University Disney Society, not just because that’s the sort of thing I do in my spare time – although it probably would be the sort of thing I did in my spare time were I not to be Disney Society’s Music Director. We’re performing this weekend at a collaborative event of different music societies: https://www.facebook.com/events/436089596578427/.

³ Do go and look these things up; unless you happen to have memorised the gospel of Matthew, I could just be sticking random numbers after his name and telling you any old rubbish. Here’s Chapter 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+10&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Have the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Of course, the same cannot be said for many of my brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. Do check out the work of Open Doors, an organisation that aims to serve the persecuted church in whatever ways are most necessary, http://opendoorsuk.org/; their 2016 World Watch List of the 50 countries where being a Christian is most difficult has just been released.

⁶ Whole chapter – you know the drill: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+6&version=ESVUK. Seriously, this stuff is way more worth your time than my ramblings.

⁷ Yep, it’s that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFEtdYGF-Os. If you don’t recognise it within the first three seconds, I shall be very surprised.

⁸ If you’ve not seen the film, you might like to watch a clip of this part and the minute or two leading up to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZPbU0ZqkiA.

⁹ This interview offers a useful discussion of fasting and its purposes: http://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/what-s-the-most-neglected-spiritual-discipline?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dg-articles.

¹⁰ In Genesis 1:29, God gives humanity every seed-bearing plant for food; in Genesis 9:3 he extends this to every moving living thing; the Promised Land is described numerous times (Exodus 3:8, 13:5, and 33:3, for example) as one flowing with milk and honey; Jesus himself was accused of gluttony (Matthew 11:19). I could go on – or you could have an explore for yourself. Here’s Exodus 3 to kick you off: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+3&version=ESVUK. God’s provision for his people in the desert thirteen chapters later might be particularly worth your consideration.