Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Those three sentences form the thesis of Michael Pollan’s brilliant book In Defense of Food. According to Pollan, those seven words answer “the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.” Eat food means real food, rather than the processed food-substitutes we grab and inhale – mostly by ourselves. The last two maxims – not too much and mostly plants – are pretty self-evident, but we’re consistently eating too much and it’s mostly not plants. Pollan’s book is a fascinating study on how our current eating habits are destroying our bodies and our communities.
I was pondering Pollan’s book the other day as I wolfed down a “Hot Pocket” for lunch. They’re sure convenient; they even cook in two minutes. Unfortunately, they contain a scientist’s lab-full of non-food ingredients. I had to remove my glasses so I could read the fine print underneath “Ingredients”: wheat flour, flour, water – so far so good – but uh-oh there’s also sodium aluminum phosphate, BHA, BHT, distilled monoglycerides, L-cysteine hydrochloride, and oleoresin of paprika.. What is this stuff? And why can’t they just use paprika?
Pollan’s book contains some great suggestions on how to reverse this unhealthy approach to eating. I recommend the book, especially for followers of Jesus. After all, we do live in a sacramental world, which means that stuff matters, food matters, and our bodies matter. God made our bodies. God made the food that we put into our bodies. According to the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, “
All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God … God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World).
(By the way, if you want to read more about what Christians mean by a sacramental universe or praying sacramentally, see chapter 2 in my book The Folly of Prayer).
Rummaging 