Many years ago, when I was in a band, I came home one evening after a practice or a gig or something. I say this because I remember this incident vividly, and I was carrying my guitar. The kids were in bed, and Nancy met me at the door very worried about something. Our duplex apartment was full of a foul smell — and it was really bad. Nancy has an acute sense of smell and she often smells things that I don’t, but this odor registered with both of us in a big way. She was worried about a possible chemical leak in the neighborhood — something like that — and the question was whether we needed to get the kids up and out of there. Before we did that, I began hunting around outside our apartment, looking for some dead critter in the junipers right below the windows. In the course of this investigation, I stumbled across the problem. Our Korean neighbors were having a social get-together, and they were cooking up a batch of ethnic food with their friends, just like mama used to make.
Now it takes all kinds, and I can’t tell you how much this story has delighted me over the years. But I have not just been delighted because I thought it was foul, but it also delighted me that our triune God made people so different. It delights me that they thought it was wonderful. I thought it was foul, but I probably need to get out more. This, along with the backdrop of my other posts on this, should set the stage for the following comments.
My purpose in writing on this subject is that I have seen a number of Christians developing an extremely unscriptural approach to food. And by this, I do not mean that they have started to like things I don’t like, or have started to dislike things I like very much. The issue is not one of taste. This is a free country. Make your own choices. You should be able to go to Arby’s or Wendy’s. Joke. Seriously, joke. Difference in taste is one of the things that keeps us from becoming boring, and keeps us reflecting the infinite character and nature of God. So hooray for differences in taste, whether individual or cultural.
Neither am I a “food egalitarian.” There is great cooking, good cooking, so-so cooking, poor cooking, and carrots out of the bag. Men and women exercise dominion in this area, just as we do in others, and this means that there will be a varied range of accomplishments, with some of them being more praiseworthy than others. So I am not saying that there are no qualitative differences between foods.
Neither is it my intent to say that the apostle Paul, when he said that the weaker brother eats only vegetables, was talking directly about our modern forms of vegetarianism. Of course not. But what he said applies to modern vegetariansism. The same thing goes for the ritual defilements from food that the Jews were so concerned about. A rabbi’s religious loathing of bacon proceeded from a very different source than does a modern (quasi-religious) loathing of refined sugar. The difference is that the rabbi at least had some passages to back him up. My argument here is a fortiori — if Jesus declared all ritually unclean foods from the Old Testament clean (representing the Gentiles as they did), then how much more are all foods declared clean? If bacon is now clean, then how could it be possible for processed cheese not to be? And if processed cheese had somehow become unclean, wouldn’t God have told us about it?
My point is not that sinning with food is impossible. A man can sin by not sharing it, by eating way too much of it, by throwing it across the cafeteria, and so forth. My point is that a man cannot sin by bowing his head over it, saying grace with true gratitude in his heart, and then tucking in — and this truth is not affected by whether what he is about to eat is a chocolate pudding cup from a fast food joint or lots of spinach, rich in iron.
Which brings me to the “poison” objection. It is true that a man could bow his head to say grace over a meal that has been poisoned, and which will still kill him dead. If he eats, he is not spiritually sinning in any way, but he is going to be physically harmed. Surely I am not arguing that poison is okay? Right, I am not. Poison is not okay, and ingesting it is, at best, bad stewardship.
My answer to this objection is that we are now debating a question of fact, and moral indignation simply gets in the way of the discussion. If this is poison, surely it is a very odd kind? My whole life I have been ingesting poisons that my great-great grandfather never, ever encountered, and taking the averages I will probably live 30-40 years longer than he did. To this a reply could be made that there are many other variables and if I hadn’t been eating those poisons I would have out-lasted him by 60 instead of a mere 30, but this seems to me to slip away from the standard definition of poison. You don’t slip someone poison in order to slightly retard the progress of his galloping and ever-burgeoning health. Poison kills people, plunk. It doesn’t issue mild admonitions so that the health is careful not to get too proud. That’s not poison. Put another way, all these other variables, granting their existence, make it reasonable for a ninety-year-old man, who has been eating at MacDonalds since they first came out, to believe that he was not poisoned, not successfully at any rate.
Once a week I have breakfast with a number of men in our congregation, after an early morning prayer meeting. One of the things we enjoy, apart from fellowship and the food, is giving one another a hard time about the things we order. As I recall, there was quite a bit of discussion about the coconut shavings on oatmeal one time. All in good fun, and is actually an important part of the fellowship. But nobody exhibits the slightest bit of moral indignation.
Morality is grounded in religion (and in nothing else), and moral disapproval is therefore at bottom religious disapproval. This is seen in any language that describes food one man gives thanks for as “food pornography” or “feces” and so on. This is a moral and religious disapproval of the eater, who clearly should know better, and it is this kind of disapproval is what I am challenging in these posts. Keep in mind that the guy writing this was once hunting around in the bushes for the Korean food that he thought was a rotting cat. Sure, someone else’s eating habits might turn your stomach. It’s a big world. If our Korean neighbors had offered us some of whatever it was, my response then would probably have been something like, “I don’t know, man.” I think I would try it now, but it is in highest degree unlikely that I would become a big fan. That’s just great.
This is because religious disapproval without clear disapproval from God as recorded in Scripture is legalism simpliciter. It is wrong, and it misrepresents what God is like. It is culinary unitarianism. If a man tells me he lost fifty pounds eating nothing but cashews, I will shake his hand and call him a good fellow. If someone tells me that try as he might, he just can’t get caviar down, I nod sympathetically. I can get it down, but not by much. If someone tells me that mushrooms taste like so many erasers to him, I would urge him to leave them in the bowl for those who can appreciate their hidden excellencies. All these are statements of taste, opinion, or circumstance.
It is when we move from “mushrooms are wasted on me” to “you are a grievous sinner for enjoying mushrooms” that we have crossed the line. And it will not be to the point to write in to say that you are fine with mushrooms because mushrooms are healthy. Let’s doctor them until you are not fine with them. Let’s fry them up in Crisco, with a splash or two of artificial bacon flavoring.
Wisdom, skill, gratitude and taste all have a role to play in the selection of what’s for dinner. Guilt never does. (Sure, if you stole your friend’s lunch, guilt has a role to play. Work with me here.) Christians who feel guilt over their decisions of what to eat need to go to sleep on the roof, like Peter did, so that they might see the entire inventory of General Mills lowered in a sheet from heaven. If your food is your guilty pleasure, or if your parsimonious disapproval of others is your guilty pleasure, then it is time to bring your kitchen (and all the cupboards therein) to the feet of Christ.