Okay, what causes what, and how can we know? Let’s talk a bit about stewardship, epistemology and food.
One of the central problems in food debates is the conflicting nature of multiple claims made about food. And in order to sort through all of it, we have to address the question of knowledge. In a global economy, how can I know how my food was grown, prepared, processed, packaged, and shipped? Where does simple trust come in? What about gullibility?
Take the example of how animals are treated in food production. “A righteous [man] regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked [are] cruel” (Prov. 12:10). Every Christian should be able to agree on this. If Farmer Smith came into the dining room with meat off the grill, and told us that he had spent four or five satisfying hours that morning torturing the animal we were about to eat, basic decency would prohibit partaking — not to mention one of us punching Smith on the nose. This is because the principle is acknowledged by all, and the facts of the case are not in dispute.
But what do I do if someone tells me I should not have that steak my wife bought at Safeway because his cousin read an article once, he forgets which magazine, that says that cattle are horribly mistreated, and are made to stand in their own filth for year after year. Not only that, but they are injected with evil hormones to make them succulent and tempting to us. And not only that, the hormones are supplied to the ranchers free of charge by the CIA as part of their goal to make the American populace more bovine in preparation for the coming coup. How far out there does it have to get before I am allowed to start having some doubts? Or flipped around, how many generations removed from me does “the knowledge” have to get before it ceases to lay any moral claim whatever on me? There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians, as the saying goes.
Now there are plenty of nasty things going on out there in the great wide world that are true, and that I don’t know about. But this is my point. I am not required by God to modify my behavior on the basis of any pretended omniscience. All attempts to gather a “global view” are variations on the “ye shall be as God” theme. If Paul didn’t mind Christians in Corinth getting their pot roast from the local pagan temple, and he didn’t mind it, then why would he mind if some of my food came from a factory where people were working twelve hour shifts? The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Don’t worry about it.
Narative accounts about how the world works are worldview accounts. Narratival worldview accounts depend on their underlying religous assumptions. This applies, across the board, to narrative accounts of how wars begin, how chickens are treated on big chicken farms, how presidents get elected, whether frankenfood will make hair grow on your back, what happens to nutrients when sealed in a can, and so on, down the street and around the corner. When we step out into the world of “how a bill becomes a law,” “how a cow becomes a hot dog,” and “Halliburton became the devil,” we are stepping into a religiously-laden debate. It is not a simple matter of “research,” or “science,” or “facts.” There is no neutrality anywhere. Everyone has an agenda, not just the “bad guys.”
Back on the farm, if someone accused Farmer Smith of mistreating our dinner, and he said, “I did nothing of the kind,” we would be sitting there informally observing Proverbs 18:17. One guy seems really reasonable until you hear the other side, and in our personal, immediate settings it is hard not to hear the other side. Even if we don’t understand the basics of justice, the “other side” often insists that we hear his case anyway.
But if someone at the gym, during your morning workout, tells you in passing that “studies have shown” that “big corporations” are using “an ingredient found in rat poison” in their most popular breakfast cereal, what do you know? You know precisely what you knew before, which is nothing. But you might feel like you know something, and you might pass it on. And when the telephone-game word gets to someone who digs in his heels and says, “I don’t know how that could be true,” and that person is treated as though he is being culpably and willfully ignorant, in the same class with the fellow who refuses to look out the back window to see what Farmer Smith is doing to that poor critter, then we have gotten to the point where one person is being clobbered by another person’s hidden religious dogmatism. The clobbering is not hidden; the religious faith assumptions are. The imperialism is the giveaway, not the position itself. A food nut might tell me something that happens to be quite true. But that doesn’t mean everything is balanced. If someone is thinking about food in the wrong way, letting food get into his evangel, it is not surprising that an ardent and zealous “evangelism” results. But we should actually be able to go for years without worrying what our friends had for lunch today. None of our business, as the apostle Paul might say if he were here. I don’t worry about whether my friends got their teeth brushed this morning either.
But it is the mark of certain kind of dogmatic mind that the farther away from the evidence he gets, the more certain he gets. For him this is a simple way to resolve the problems of “food knowledge” — the old, reliable mechanism of mere dogmatism. Assert, assert, and assert some more. But no matter how many times you tell me, I still don’t know. Not only that, I could read a stack of books that hew the party line and still not know. I can watch thirteen muckraking documentaries on factory foods in a row, and still not know. The truth about global food production has — oh, just estimating now — about fifteen thousand significant variables in it. If I dropped everything right now to begin researching where the chicken sandwich I had for lunch came from, after about ten years I might be getting close. And judging from the behavior of a lot of true believers on the pressing subject of my lunch, I also might be a lot farther away than when I started.
I am not saying this as a nihilistic relativist. I know plenty of things. My doctrine of original sin tells me that if a government provides subsidies to do rotten things, there will probably be some takers. I know that. What I don’t know is whether Company A took such subsidies from Government B with the perfidious intent of killing off Consumer C, that is, me. Maybe Competitor D is paying Propagandist E to tell me lies about Company A and Government B so that they will be in a better position to sell me stuff because they want me dead the organic way. The pharmaceuticals are “big business,” eh? Like alternative suppliers aren’t? Kraft “packages and sells” their products in a way that commodifies unnaturally. Oh, and the Hippie Mama Free-Range Macaroni isn’t packaged and sold? Look around yourself, use common sense, and apply that common sense to everyone in the debate. Take it easy, make your own decisions, and avoid every form of food imperialism.
Prudence and wisdom are good. If a bunch of my friends are in the hospital with salmonella they got at a local bistro, should this affect my behavior? Wal, shore. That is simple prudence, commended to us in the book of Proverbs. But nameless fears and ungrounded guilt are bad, evil, from the devil, straight out of the pit. A lot of the people who traffic in food phobias could have benefitted greatly from an eighth grade logic course. If you tell me that something I am putting into my mouth is going to kill me, you have my attention. But if you waste that opportunity by going on to completely redefine words like “toxic,” “poison,” and “kill,” you have lost my attention again. I have better things to do than try to calculate how many weeks one slice of cinnamon toast is going to take off my life.
A man and his wife were both unfortunately killed in a car accident, and floated up to the pearly gates, as those gates appear in countless cartoons and jokes. St. Peter was giving them the tour, and he showed them their mansion, and the ultimate golf course right next to it, and the celestial country club on the other side, and the buffet at that club was beyond all description. There were mounds and heaps of every kind of delicacy. The wife asked what everything cost, and they were told that this was heaven, and that everything was free. As they continued to take it all in, the husband was getting more and more agitated, upset, worked up, gloomy, and eventually downright sullen. Finally, St. Peter could ignore it no longer and asked, “Is anything wrong, sir?” With that the husband wheeled on his wife — “If it hadn’t been for you and those bran muffins, I would have been here ten years ago!”