Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given on November 28, 1999

First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

What better time to give a sermon on "conscious eating" than after Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is the day when all of us who are not heavily into tofu stuff ourselves much in the manner of the turkey we got up at 5:00 a.m. to prepare. This is the day when it’s all high carbohydrate and high fat—and devil take the hindmost. The day when in just one meal we take in around 5,000 calories and then sink into oblivion, drugged into a semi-conscious state.

But I do not preach on this topic at this time to make you feel guilty. If you did not thoroughly clean your plate as a child, did your folks do what mine did—tell you to think of the starving Chinese? Or starving whatever? And did you, like me, sit there sullenly thinking, "I wish you would send it to them." No, guilt I have found to be a singularly useless tool in leading people to ethical behavior—in fact, it is downright counterproductive. So let’s leave guilt at the door. If you wish to pick it up on the way out, it’ll be there, waiting for you. No, instead let’s spend a few minutes just thinking about our relationship to food. How we feel about food, and why.

In thinking about our culture at large, I think we could describe our feelings about food as a love/hate relationship. We spend $15,000,000,000 annually on snack food, and then spend $33,000,000 on weight loss programs and books and tapes to lose the excess weight from the snacks. We are obsessed with dieting, and yet we keep getting heavier and heavier. Late at night we go to the fridge to assuage feelings of loss or loneliness, but we don’t respect ourselves in the morning. Something isn’t working. Let’s dig a little deeper.

Let’s first look at the way we view our bodies in general. In Western civilization, we can trace a definite and destructive split between the body and the spirit—it is there in the writing of very important philosophical and theological thinkers: Plato, St. Paul, Augustine, and Descartes, to name a few of the most influential. Our intellectual heritage is colored by the assumption that the rational mind and the spirit are separate from and superior to the body. We are through our flesh heir to a dangerous animal nature, which will surely lead us to ruin, unless we control it.

And then being conscious of ourselves as animals makes us conscious that we will, like all animals, die. Yes, eating right is good for you, and yes exercise is essential. But when I watch people on the treadmill or on the stationary bike, or running out in the rain in our Portland winters—and that includes me, incidentally—I wonder if we’re not at least partly running from death. The fact is that no matter how many sit-ups we do or oat bran muffins we eat, we are still going to die.

Furthermore, in the United States we have developed a compulsive concern with the way our bodies are seen and assessed by others. How well we control our errant bodies is a measure, then, of the person—a moral issue fraught with judgment. In a study at Arizona State University, fictitious students who were said to eat a healthful diet of homemade whole wheat bread, chicken, and potatoes were rated by test subjects as more moral, attractive, and likable than identical students who ate hamburgers, fries, doughnuts, and double-fudge sundaes. I have to say I’m so judgmental about food. I’m the sort of person who looks into other people’s grocery carts, just to be appalled at their choices. Those awful cookies! But the worst is white bread. Now if you came to me and confessed that you had been committing adultery I could understand that. But white bread, I just can’t get my head around.

These moral judgments are gender-dependent, too. In one study, subjects watched videos of the same average-weight woman eating one of four different meals. When the woman ate a small salad, she was judged most feminine; when she ate a big meatball sandwich, she was rated least attractive. Well, ladies, I guess that means when you go out on your first date with somebody, you shouldn’t say to the waitress, "Well, I think I’ll just have me one of them big meatball sandwiches."

Since our subversive flesh cannot be considered holy stuff, but rather must be controlled, it follows that the body must be objectified. For men, it becomes primarily an instrument, a machine which will function to produce, to perform. These days, possibly because of the advertising industry, men’s bodies are seen not only as instruments of production, but also as objects of strength and beauty. Muscles and abs are somehow taking on increasing significance.

And for women, of course, Barbie has set a standard which real women can never live up to. And that standard is becoming thinner and thinner. A 30-year survey of Miss America contestants and Playboy magazine centerfold models shows these women becoming thinner and thinner each year. By the standards these days, Marilyn Monroe would look absolutely chubby. The ideal female body type is now at the thinnest 5 % of a normal weight distribution. The ideal has become the body of the child-woman, the 13 or 14-year-old. I have wondered how much of this infantilization of women is a reaction to the growing power and independence of the female.

But we buy into it, and many of us are in a constant state of dieting—either off or on. The fact is that dieting is destructive. Seventy-six per cent of dieters are fatter after 3 years, and 95% are fatter after five years. At the height of the diet and fitness craze, from 1980-1991, the weight of Americans increased 8%. Our bodies all have a different set point, a different genetic makeup, and when we eat what is right for us, not everyone is going to be thin. Not being thin does not mean we are bad and does not mean we are out of control.

The fact is that virtually all women, with very few exceptions, don’t like their bodies. A while back I was sorting through some old boxes of books and came across a Weight Watchers cookbook--and tucked inside it was a faded yellow paper outlining menus that I must have followed when I was in my 20’s, in order to lose weight. The reality of my body, though, was much different from my harsh judgment of it—in fact, when I was married at age 28, I weighed only 128 pounds. My wedding pictures looked almost skeletal. How many of us women look in the mirror every day and judge our bodies wanting, our stomachs too fat, our thighs too flabby? How many of us think that if only our bodies were beautiful, we would be worthy of love?

So food, which comes to us as grace and blessing, has become the enemy. Our bodies--our lovely, luscious flesh through which every earthly pleasure is received--become symbols of our lack of control, ever-present reminders of our frailty, our fallenness. The nutrition and weight-loss industry, the beauty industry, plus the images in the media, have preyed upon our very human fears and have told us over and over again what we always suspected: that we are lacking, somehow, that we don’t deserve to be loved as we are, and that if we will only buy that deodorant or lose that stubborn ten pounds, we will in fact be at last be lovable. It wasn’t always so much that way, though. Let’s take a brief look at a cultural history of food.

The earliest cultures recognized that food was power. The division of the kill marked the earliest social relationships. Certain tastes in cultures became so central that a country might go to war over them—tastes like tea or sugar or spices. In our country early Protestantism allowed no excess—of anything pleasurable—but by the 19^th century, among the wealthier classes, the portly figure was proof of material success. Robber barons reflected their enormous appetites for money in their equally enormous girth. President Taft weighed over three hundred pounds at his inauguration. Magazines of the day gave instruction to women for adding weight, in order to increase the size of the bosom rising out of their tightly laced corsets. Books were written with titles like How to Become Plump, by T. C. Duncan.

By the 20^th century, our need for innovation and novelty brought food fads. Food reformers like John Kellogg (inventor of corn flakes) focused on increasing health through adding vitamins, a trend that is still going strong. Other reformers criticized the nutritional value of "homemade" food, which was found unsafe, obsolete, and low class. Enter the food industry. Heavily processed foods from hygienic factories were far better for us than food grown in gardens, Americans were told. In 1876, Campbell’s produced the first can of its tomato soup. Wonder bread came in 1920, and Twinkies in 1930. In 1937 came the quintessential factory food: Spam.

These new obsessions with nutrition and cleanliness deemed the average citizen no longer competent to eat "right"—healthful eating required outside expertise and technology. By the end of World War II, consumers were increasingly reliant on advertisements—for cooking techniques and meal planning. Our attitudes were being shaped largely by those selling the food. The food industry was glad to supply an endless variety of instant products: puddings, rice, potatoes. Non-foods like Tang and Hamburger Helper visited our tables. The first TV dinner was by Swanson: turkey, cornbread stuffing, and whipped sweet potatoes. How American can you get? During the 1920’s consumers could choose among only a few hundred food products, but by 1965, nearly 800 new products were being introduced every year. In 1995, 16,863 new food items were introduced to the American public.

I don’t know where you are on the food memory chain, but post WW II is about where I came in. I grew up with the mayonnaise sandwiches on spongy white bread, the lime Jello with marshmallows and fruit cocktail, the Kool-Aid. Fortunately for us, though, we lived in a semi-rural community in the South where most people grew a lot of their own food. So I also grew up with black-eyed peas and new potatoes, fresh tomatoes and spring onions, cantaloupe and asparagus and figs and much, much more from our own garden. What we could not eat, my grandmother canned, and so we had many of these foods all through the winter as well. We also kept rabbits and chickens, and so I have memories of reaching down into a still-warm nest and finding a brown egg. We also did the killing of these animals. "Running around like a chicken with its head cut off" is a simile that is exceedingly clear to me. But we knew where food came from, and it was not all wrapped in cellophane. We caught fish, and we ate from time to time doves and squirrel and venison, for the men in my family were hunters.

We have had subsequent food revolutions in this country--fast food, caught on in a big way, and now KFC and Taco Bell cover the civilized world. Fast food epitomizes efficiency, cleanliness, predictability, and cheap prices—the cornerstones of American values. One anthropologist even suggested that fast-food restaurants serve as a kind of church, whose decor, menu, and even the words between clerk and customer are so predictable that they have become a kind of comforting ritual. The Church of the Big Mac.

What have these convenience foods done for family life? Not a lot. The social cohesiveness and pleasures once associated with the breaking of bread together are being fast eliminated: ¾’s of American families don’t breakfast together, and sit-down dinners have fallen to an average of 3 a week. Our approach to food has become utilitarian, and further separates us from the social and spiritual significance of eating. Eating together has been one of the many rituals of cohesion that have been dropped in our increasingly alienated society.

Fortunately, there is a growing backlash against these practices, and the food marketing industry has some serious challenges. Fearing the pesticides of agribusiness, many consumers are turning to organic foods. Vegetarians and progressive nutritionists are lessening our love of meat. Foods that are produced in a way that is destructive to the environment or by repressive regimes are increasing rejected as we learn more about food production. However, for many of us, food continues to be for many of us a painful and confusing subject: we feel guilty when we bite into a hamburger and realize we’re helping to destroy a rainforest, or when we drink a cup of politically incorrect coffee and acknowledge to ourselves that we are exploiting peasants in South America.

Americans have been assigning moral values to food from day one, but I wonder if we can just begin to leave guilt behind, and begin to pay attention to health of body and health of spirit, I wonder if that wouldn’t be a better way to go. I wonder if we can move in a positive way toward our real needs in regard to food—to eating that which our body tells us we want, when we really pay attention.

How can we move in this direction? Perhaps one way is to become more conscious of what real hunger is. Hunger is not wanting a second piece of chocolate cake. Hunger is not having enough food to nourish your body properly. Hunger is going to bed with a gnawing feeling inside. Last year 464,000 people received emergency food boxes from the Oregon Food Bank—an increase of 15% over the year before. In fact, Oregon is #1 in number of hungry people per capita in the nation. And more than 40% of our hungry people are children.

Who are these people? Are they homeless? Are they out of work? Why don’t they just apply for food stamps? As a matter of fact, 87% of people served by the Oregon Food Bank own or rent their own homes. Forty-one per cent of households receiving food boxes have at least one working adult. Only 50% of households who go to the Food Bank receive food stamps—many people’s benefits have been lost or reduced since the Welfare Reform Act. There are two chief reasons for hunger in Oregon: people who are working do not have jobs that pay a living wage, and housing in Oregon is unaffordable for many, so they have to decide between paying the rent or buying enough food.

So how does this knowledge help me, you might say, in my own troubling relationship with food? I don’t know for you—you have to find your own way. But focusing on those who have too little might make us more conscious of the proper use of food—to give life and health. Some people serve in soup kitchens, or make sandwiches for the kids at Outside In. Many of us find ourselves asking, "So why are there so many hungry people in this rich country of ours?" and we work for systemic change—for tax reform, for campaign finance reform, for a living wage for all workers. When hunger becomes visible, when it is connected with real people and not just numbers on a page, we begin to avoid waste. Instead of taking food for granted, it becomes a precious commodity. Somehow we just don’t want to abuse our bodies with too much food or food that is not good for us. We become closer to seeing food as the gift of life.

Our first experience with food is at our mother’s breast, and so food is inevitably connected with physical survival, first of all, and then with comfort and with love. In fact we call it "comfort food," don’t we. So when we are anxious, we eat. I noticed that when I was going with my closest friend in her journey towards death, I became anxious sometimes. I didn’t want to believe she was going to die. I certainly didn’t want to believe I was going to die. So I found myself tremendously hungry, after my visits with her. I would just go home and open the fridge and grab anything to eat. Why am I doing this, I wondered. Then I understood: eat, eat to live.

Let me tell you the story of Trina. When Trina was three, her mother left her at her grandmother’s house, saying she would come back for her the next day. The next day Trina sat on the front porch of her grandmother’s farm house and waited. She waited the next day. And the next. For eight years, she waited. And for eight years, her grandmother complained about having to take care of her. She began to beat Trina, and the child would go to school bruised and swollen. When her teachers asked what happened, she would make up some excuse: "I tripped when I was running." She was afraid that if she got her grandmother in trouble, then they’d do something to her, and Trina would have nowhere to go.

Trina survived. She developed a technique of leaving her body when she needed to and then snapping a rubber band around her wrist when she needed to come back. She also would sneak food from her grandmother and store it under her bed. Sweets from the dresser drawer. Cans from the kitchen. Little bags of food hidden everywhere. If Trina could not get her grandmother’s love, she would steal her food. The following were the messages Trina got about herself and about life, as she grew up:

--I did something wrong, and that’s why my mother didn’t come back. I am bad.

--People lie. It’s better not to trust them.

--Loving hurts.

--When someone leaves me, they never come back.

--I need too much. That’s why my grandmother doesn’t want me living here.

--It’s better to eat than to care about someone because food doesn’t leave and moms do. Food doesn’t hit, and grandmothers do.

When Trina was eleven, her mother returned. She was 33 when she began therapy. In 29 years, she gained and lost over 1,500 pounds. She has been married, divorced, has remarried, has become a mother. She says about her present marriage, "I cannot let my husband in. If he goes away on a business trip for 2 days, I feel like I have to start all over again with him when he returns." She spent too many years waiting for her mother to return. She is not willing to feel the pain of waiting again. When he is away, she eats to assuage her loneliness. She obsesses about how fat she is and how much weight she should lose and the clothes she will buy when she is thin. When her husband returns, they must cover a distance of eight years of confusion, loneliness, and betrayal in order to be intimate again. She knows that people betray you, and she has carefully protected herself from feeling the pain of betrayal. She has taken another lover, one who will never leave, and that lover is food.

No wonder food has become the enemy. The food industry has turned the fruit of the earth into packaged convenience items with a long shelf-life, never mind the nutritional value or taste. The media has told us that eating merely enough to satisfy our hunger will make us overweight and unlovable. The startling lack of community in our culture exacerbates every personal pain and longing we are heir to. How can we move into a right relationship with food? How can we begin to see food as sacred?

We can start by coming closer to the earth itself. Find some space somewhere and grow something. Even a little plot will make a difference. Visit local farms and buy from farmer’s markets. Make the connection between the earth itself and our physical sustenance.

We can trust our bodies to let us know what is good for us. If we can put aside guilt and judgment and fear of fat and just be with our bodies, we will make good choices. We will eat when we are hungry. We will not eat chocolate all day—I know some of you will not believe me here—but we will not eat chocolate all day, because once we are free to eat as much of it as we want, we’ll stop. It will not carry the whole weight of FOOD SIN with it anymore. Again, the key is, we must listen to our bodies and give our bodies what they actually want and need, rather than feeding our fears. Am I saying we will never again eat a hot fudge sundae when we’re depressed or lonely? No, because we will. And that will be OK. If we don’t load up that sundae with guilt, we probably won’t overdose on sweets too often.

We can try to eat mindfully. I remember when a group of us were having breakfast with Gordon McKeeman, who at the time was Acting President of Starr King School, my seminary. The occasion was the morning after my ordination service in Lexington, KY, and we were in a rather expensive hotel dining room. We were served breakfast, and Gordon looked at his bagel and tea and smiled broadly. He said, "Look at that!" I was thinking, "Yeah, look at that: a bagel and a cup of tea for $4.00." But Gordon just said again, "Look at that! Think of all the people who worked to make this breakfast possible." And then he began to name them: the farmer, the baker, the truck driver, etc., etc. And then he paused and looked at us younger ministers, and he said, "This is how to eat breakfast thankfully." And so we did.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, tells of asking a group of children, "What is the purpose of eating breakfast?" One boy replied, "To get energy for the day." Another said, "The purpose of eating breakfast is to eat breakfast." Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "I think the second child is . . . correct. The purpose of eating is to eat. Eating in mindfulness, he says, is an important <spiritual> practice.

Whether we take the Buddhist way or the Christian or the Jewish blessing, it is important that we pause beforehand to give thanks and to be awake to what we are about to do. Being awake, then, we eat slowly, smelling the fragrance of the food and tasting it fully. Notice the sensations in the mouth. Be present with the food and the act of eating, and be present to the others who are sharing the meal with you.

How we eat is a reflection of how we live. We hurry through meals, as we hurry through life. We make rules and judgments upon ourselves, trying to achieve certainty and control. We refuse to be really present with ourselves, because we fear the emptiness. We look for love in all the wrong places.

Food is not the enemy, but a good gift given to us through sheer grace. Let us give up fear and take on thanksgiving. Let us accept the pleasure and leave the guilt behind. Let us love this flesh we have been given, and be awake to its quivering need. Our very wanting will become a golden thread, a sacred connection to our own souls and to every living creature. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, today we come acknowledging your good gifts of nourishment. May we never take for granted these gifts, and may we eat and drink with thanksgiving and with pleasure. May we have the courage to be present with our truest desire, may we follow the thread of this desire, and may it lead us ever to the Sacred. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May we go, ever thankful for the good gifts of the season. Eat and drink and be joyful.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! May the joy of this community bring you joy, may the warmth of this community warm you on this chilly day, may the caring of this community speak to you and let you know you are surrounded with love. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.