Food in Christian preaching often symbolizes both physical sustenance and spiritual nourishment, reflecting our dependence on God for life and growth (Matthew 4:4). Illustrations commonly use images of hunger, feasting, fasting, and the contrast between gluttony and self-control to highlight the soul’s appetite for righteousness and the discipline required in the Christian walk (Psalm 34:8).
Overeaters Anonymous, OA, seeks to break compulsive eating. 9,000 meetings weekly. Based on a belief that compulsive overeating is a progressive disease that can be arrested, though not cured, by turning one's will over to a higher power. Often it is God. One said, it's not about weight, exercise or recipes; it's a process, a lifestyle. It is also about 'core' changes in who they are and how they live.
Sermon in 1 Corinthians series.
1. We live in an age of rampant appetites.
2. Christian view of the body.
a. Body is part of God's plan.
b. Body is united with Jesus.
c. Body is temple of Spirit.
3. Freedom and slavery.
a. Loose freedom leads to slavery.
b. Pornography.
4. Honor God with your body.
In the Antarctic summer of 1908-9, Sir Ernest Shackleton and three companions attempted to travel to the South Pole from their winter quarters. They set off with four ponies to help carry the load. Weeks later, their ponies dead, rations all but exhausted, they turned back toward their base, their goal not accomplished. Altogether, they trekked 127 days.
On the return journey, as Shackleton records in "The Heart of the Antarctic," the time was spent talking about food - elaborate feasts, gourmet delights, sumptuous menus. As they staggered along, suffering from dysentery, not knowing whether they would survive, every waking hour was occupied with thoughts of eating.
Jesus, who also knew the ravages of food deprivation, said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." We can understand Shackleton's obsession with food, which offers a glimpse of the passion Jesus intends for our quest for righteousness.
Sermon for Communion. John 6:48-58
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SPIRITUAL CANNIBALISM
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I. Transferred life.
II. Fast food, versus real food.
A. Materialistic outlook. 6:26
B. Jesus points to a more substantial food - his own body. 6:60
III. Applications to communion.
A. Many churches teach that this passages focuses on communion.
B. Transubstantiationism. Roman Catholic
C. Consubstantiationism. Lutheran
D. Spiritual presence/memorial meal. Presbyterian/Baptist
IV. Salvation is what is really in view.
A. No salvation apart from closest relationship with Jesus.
B. A very graphic way of saying that people must accept Christ.
V. Feeding on Jesus.
A. Faith must be personal. 6:58
B. Faith is not a hobby, but full-time devotion. 6:57
C. Those who eat Jesus "remain" in him. 6:56
It is hard to know just how to take an invitation to write about gluttony. “We thought you would be the perfect person,” the editor’s letter read. “Gee, is it that obvious?” I thought, alarmed. “No, no, that’s not really me. It’s just these horizontal stripes.”
But, if I am honest, I have to admit that it is me. It’s most of us. Food is an intoxicating pleasure, and it appears superficially like an innocuous one. What is so bad about engaging in a little gluttony, anyway? It’s not one of the bad sins, like adultery or stealing -- we wouldn’t do that. All gluttony does is make you soft and huggable. It’s the cute sin.
But gluttony is not about appearance; our inclination to associate it with external effects alone shows how reluctant we are to confront the sin in the heart. The gluttonous impulse is a sign of disharmony with God’s provision and creation, and it can disrupt the spiritual lives of people of every size. External dimensions are no predictor of internal rebellion.
Previous generations of Christians knew this. Overindulgence in food did not just lead to thickened waistlines and arteries; it led to spiritual disaster. These words from a nineteenth-century Russian monk, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, build in an alarming crescendo: “Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance.”
If that doesn’t make you take a second look at your second helpings, nothing will.
The key word in the passage above is self-control. Gluttony is not wrong because it makes you fat; it is wrong because it is the fruit of self-indulgence. Gluttony says, “Gimme”; Jesus says, “Come to me.” When we come to him, we give up all claims to be coddled; we come to shoulder our own rough cross. The path to the buffet table and the path to sanctification lie in opposite directions.
Yet anyone who has tried to diet knows that the will to eat indulgently is surprisingly strong and unruly. Plans to eat reasonably and with an eye to good health may look attractive on Sunday night, when sketched out on a full stomach. (Oh yes, and we’ll get up early every day to jog, too.) About 3 p.m. on Monday afternoon, however, it’s a different story. The stomach that was placid and amiable has become a bucking, rebellious pony, with a defiance that was never evident until it was made to wear a bridle. Dieters are often shocked at their deep-seated and ungovernable compulsion to eat, as facets of unconverted willfulness, never suspected, are being brought to light. What makes gluttony such a hard sin to break?
FOOD AS POWER
Of course, food is pleasurable; that alone can make a sin enticing. But while some pleasures can be relinquished with a melancholic pang, the attempt to discipline food sins prompts a ferocious, angry resistance. Something more is going on here. The urge to overindulge in food is powerful, I think, because it is linked to a desire for power. A complex net of submerged assumptions teaches us that food grants some limited, but tangible, control over the exterior world. We bite the apple (or the doughnut) because we have heard a whisper, “You shall be as gods.” This plays out in various ways:
1. EMPEROR BABY.
Eating is the first pleasure. Researchers have found that if amniotic fluid is sweetened, unborn babies will gulp it more greedily. For a newborn, many sensations are unpleasant or frightening, but food, glorious food, is a constant and dependable comfort. Controlling access to food, crying to be fed, and winning the reward of sweet, warm milk is the first task of newborn life. No wonder we retain into adulthood a zeal to gather as much good, sweet food as we can grab; it was the first job we ever had, and it felt like an urgent one, indeed. “I don’t think it’s fair that they changed the rules,” my husband said one day, looking forlornly at the ends of his belt; they would no longer quite meet in front. “I can remember a time in my life -- in fact, it lasted quite a long time -- when people were constantly affirming me with, ‘My, you’re becoming such a big boy!’” He tried once more to make the belt ends meet. “Now that I’ve gotten really good at it, suddenly they changed the rules.”
His whimsical protest conceals a grain of truth. The baby that focuses all its attention on getting food soon grows to be a child that is praised for eating, indulged with treats, and admired for getting bigger. Not only is getting food our first job, not only is it intrinsically pleasurable, but it’s a talent for which most of us were praised throughout our childhoods, the way in which we elicited praise and admiration from our elders.
2. I’M IN CONTROL.
Succumbing to the desire to overeat may be a straightforward way that people demonstrate power. Life is complicated and fraught with compromises, unmet desires, and nettling disappointments. We cannot make other people do right. Friends, neighbors, spouse, children all may resist our will, but, darn it, that chocolate cream pie is going to know who’s boss. Overeating can become a secret, habitual way to reassure yourself that you are not powerless, that you can subdue and conquer as much food as you choose. Viewed in this light, anorexia has the same root as gluttony: a desire to demonstrate control. Women starve themselves to prove that they are the Empresses of Ice Cream, wielding a scepter of iron rejection where a plumper sister might choose the tactic of conquering by consuming.
3. SQUIRREL AWAY.
A related impulse is the need to hoard. Perhaps a cream pie this perfect will never cross my path again; it is only wisdom to tuck away as much as possible before the waiter clears the plates and we must part forever. Hoarding food discloses our need to establish ourselves as independent resources, free from dependence on God. There is an intrinsic mistrust of his ability to provide, though he owns the cream pies on a thousand hills.
4. BOREDOM.
A constant stream of pleasant sensations coming in may help keep more troubling self-confrontation at bay. The continuing work of repentance is lifelong, and comparatively less jolly than a bag of gumdrops; those gumdrops may be just enough to keep us distracted one more day. Bishop Brianchaninov, cited above, insisted that an evil of gluttony was its ability to dull the mind. Pennsylvania pastor Pat Reardon says, “When people ask me why God seems so distant, I ask them ‘How much TV have you been watching? What thoughts are you allowing into your mind?’” We could add: And how much idle junk food do you nibble for no apparent reason?
5. BIG.
The title is clumsy and forbidding, but Fat Is a Feminist Issue delivers a startling insight. Author Susie Orbach writes that many dieters self- sabotage because they fail to realize that “compulsive eating is linked to a desire to get fat.... Many women are positively afraid of being thin.” This strikes us as howlingly counterintuitive, but Orbach’s research is intriguing. She has women imagine themselves in a social situation; they are to envision every detail of dress, posture, with whom they talk, how others react to them. Orbach has them imagine themselves in the same situation, but immensely fat; then she has them repeat the exercise, but imagine themselves with ideal slimness.
In a culture where slimness equals beauty, women have powerful reasons to want to be thin; but, surprisingly, when they imagined it, they found they did not enjoy it. Slimness was associated with being “cold and ungiving,” “self-involved,” burdened with others’ expectations, the object of unwanted desire from men and uncomfortable jealousy from women. The fat self, on the other hand, was relaxed, free from unwanted sexual attention and the need to compete, and able to talk comfortably with others. As the study demonstrated, another reason people subconsciously desired a greater girth was because they sensed that, as a result, they had more authority. One woman put it this way: “The fat in the situation [made] me feel like a sergeant major-big and authoritative. When I go through the fantasy of seeing myself thin, what immediately strikes me is just how fragile and little I feel, almost as though I might disappear or be blown away.” Men have as many reasons as women do -- maybe more -- to want to be bigger. Our attempts at self-control in eating fail, in part, because part of us really doesn’t want to risk shrinking. We want to be big.
A “Bizarro” cartoon by Dan Piraro showed an enormously fat man looking into a refrigerator, while a smaller man stood nearby, holding up a finger of admonition. “You are what you eat,” the scolder said. The fat man replied, “Good. That makes me omnipotent.”
SATAN’S PLOY
One of the crueler tricks of temptation is that it exacts painful dues while failing to deliver the promised pleasure. A really clever temptation can impose the very opposite of what was promised. This is the case with gluttony. If overeating is about gaining power, the stomach may indeed feel a gratifying, temporary dominance-after which the overeater will likely feel ashamed and, ironically, out of control. Overeating may be an assertion of power, but the classic confession is, “I have no will power.” Far from establishing the glutton as a master, it exposes him as a slave.
This is not a slavery merely to self; it is worse than that. The apostle Paul speaks of those whose “god is the belly” (Phil. 3:19; all Scripture references quoted are NRSV), and Saint John Climacus, seventh-century abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai, writes of “that clamorous mistress, the stomach.” Those who succumb to gluttony experience themselves not as rulers, but as helpless prey. Prey, indeed, we are; this is not just a matter of deficient self-control, but of slipping under another’s control, into another’s trap. “Like a roaring lion, your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). It is in the nature of evil to consume, and those who feast wantonly become themselves morsels.
In “The Screwtape Letters,” C. S. Lewis has the senior devil write to his nephew: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy [God the Father] demands of men is quite a different thing....We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in; He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.”
When Screwtape’s nephew finally fails in his mission, the senior devil gloats in a fashion that any glutton would find chilling: “I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on.”
“He is full and flows over,” Lewis’s devil wrote. The flowing over by which God would fill us extends from Genesis to Revelation. He does not merely decline to devour us, he feeds us. Eden was planted with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (Gen. 2:9); in the New Jerusalem there is “the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month” (Rev. 22:2). In the Song of Solomon we sing, “He brought me to the banqueting house” (Song of Sol. 2:4), and at the end we hear, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9). We are invited to ask, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
He feeds us. Safe in his pasture, we will not become food. The task is learning to eat the food he gives, in the measure he gives it. Our whole lives consist of learning what he meant when he said: “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32).
Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day. (Alexander Schmemann, “On Fasting at Great Lent”)
THE GRAYNESS OF GLUTTONY
“Which we still break every day.” How do we restore the food-life-God relationship? Mastering gluttony is a tricky task, because you can never be sure you have arrived. With the broader sins, you can swear off the behavior and know with certainty at the end of the day that you either kept your promise or did not. The thief does not wonder whether or not he stole. The person struggling with homosexual longing either went out and picked up a date, or didn’t. With some sins, there is not much gray area.
With gluttony, it is almost all gray. You cannot simply swear off eating, and learning to eat aright seems such a slippery, indefinable goal. The standards we concoct for ourselves seem to mock us. Sallie Tisdale wrote of dieting in “Harper’s” (March 1993), “Eating became cheating. One pretzel was cheating. Two apples instead of one was cheating -- a large potato instead of a small, carrots instead of broccoli.... Diets have failure built in, failure is the definition. Every substitution -- even carrots for broccoli -- was a triumph of desire over will....I saw that the real point of dieting is dieting -- to not be done with it, ever.”
Yet overcoming gluttony must mean getting a handle on our intake of food, and Christians through the ages have discovered various helps. For example, Saint John Climacus gave his monks specific, concrete advice. “He who fondles a lion tames it, but he who coddles the body makes it still wilder,” he warned. But he cautioned against excessive discipline, criticizing one who advised taking only bread and water: “To prescribe this is like saying to a child: ‘Go up the whole ladder in one stride.’” Saint John recommended, rather, varying one’s discipline: “Let us for awhile only deny ourselves fattening foods, then heated foods, and only then what makes our food pleasant. If possible, give your stomach satisfying and digestible food, so as to satisfy its insatiable hunger by sufficiency, and so that we may be delivered from excessive desire.”
Learning to eat rightly usually means, in our modern age, dieting. But dieting can merely be a substitute of one of the Seven Deadly Sins for another: forsaking Gluttony, we fall into Vanity. Christians have, from the earliest times, wrestled with the temptation to misuse food, but the weapon they used wasn’t dieting. It was fasting.
[see #3647]
FASTING FOR THE MASSES
Many Western Christians, particularly Protestants, think of fasting (if they do at all) as a tool for intensifying prayer; Richard J. Foster, author of “Celebration of Discipline,” says that “the central idea in fasting is the voluntary denial of an otherwise normal function for the sake of intense spiritual activity.” Narrow-focus fasting like this can powerfully enhance intercession, repentance, and other spiritual undertakings.
There is a broader use of the discipline in the history of the church, however: regular, corporate, extended fasting, as a means of broader spiritual growth. The earliest existing Christian document outside Scripture is the Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (dates vary; but it may have been written as early as A.D. 70). The Didache reminds believers that the Jews fast on Tuesday and Thursday-remember the publican in Luke who stated, “I fast twice a week”? But the Didache does not say, “So avoid that foolishness, because we don’t need it.” No, this earliest church-discipline text instructs that Christians should fast as well, but on Wednesdays (the day of Judas’s betrayal) and Fridays (the day of the Crucifixion).
Doesn’t this veer uncomfortably close to salvation by works? Southern Baptist minister Dallas Willard writes in “The Spirit of the Disciplines,” “We have simply let our thinking fall into the grip of a false opposition of grace to ‘works’ that was caused by a mistaken association of works with ‘merit.’” This confusion results in lives that are not spiritually pure or healthy, as we do not know how to harness the power that made Christians of other ages spiritual giants.
Willard proposes that we take seriously the disciplines of the spiritual life: “Disciplines of Abstinence” (including solitude, silence, fasting, chastity, and sacrifice) and “Disciplines of Engagement” (like study, worship, service, prayer, and confession). If we want truly changed and empowered lives, we must be as self-disciplined, and as constant in our disciplines, as an athlete. Willard says that it is not enough to be like the boy who, admiring his baseball hero, imitates the way he holds his bat. The athlete did not win success by holding the bat a distinctive way, but by disciplining himself to a lifetime of training and practice.
Willard is not the first to use this analogy, of course; Paul wrote, “Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. Well, I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after preaching to others I myself should not be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:25-27).
Fasting is a key, not only to overcoming gluttony, but to other self-disciplines as well. Willard writes: “Since food has the pervasive place it does in our lives, the effects of fasting will be diffused throughout our personality. In the midst of all our needs and wants, we experience the contentment of the child that has been weaned from its mother’s breast” (Ps. 131:2).
This psalm had always puzzled me; it was only in researching this article that it became clear. I had seen the contentment of a nursing child and wondered why the psalmist didn’t use that image. I believe the point is this: the weaned child has learned to be satisfied with another food. We do not live by bread alone.
While the discipline of fasting has gone through seasons of use and disuse in the West, Eastern Christians have maintained it consistently. In fact, from the date of the Didache to this, Eastern Orthodox Christians still abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays. In the weeks before Easter, Orthodox heighten their fasting; for those seven weeks they eat no meat, fish, or dairy products. It is a rigorous discipline, one eased by the knowledge that millions of other Orthodox around the world are fasting at the same time. It is not seen as a way of earning salvation or anything else; the recurrent metaphors are of “exercise” or “medicine” for the soul.
DARE TO BE DISCIPLINED
In the midst of Lent, I spoke with several Orthodox Christians about the experience of that discipline. Because several had previously been members of other churches, they were able to contrast this extended, corporate discipline with individual, one-day fasting. Among the comments:
“There’s definitely strength in numbers.”
“Because it’s not just intensely focused on one day or one prayer need, it can spread through all your life and change you.”
“We all fast together, just like we all feast together. It wouldn’t be fun to feast by yourself.”
“The first year I did this, it was like ‘Let’s hurry up and get through this and get to Pascha [Easter], get back to regular eating.’ Now its more like a chance to get back on track, to try to bring the rest of the year up to this mark of discipline.”
One woman had been Orthodox for all her 86 years. She said, “My mother taught us as little kids to thank the dear Lord for the opportunity to have this fasting. I feel like it cleanses my body. I look forward to it every year.” In fact, many Orthodox I talked with agreed: somewhat to their surprise, every year they look forward to the Lenten fast, much like an athlete, on arising in the morning, may look forward to going for a jog.
Only by testing can believers discover whether fasting bears fruit for them. Taking on fasting means pursuing self-discipline through some irksome trials, an ability many modern-day Christians can well afford to learn. But heed Saint John’s advice: Do not attempt too discouragingly much at once; do not try to go up the whole ladder in a single step.
The law of the jungle is “Eat or be eaten.” Indulging in gluttony seems like a private vice, a “cute sin,” a matter between only the tempted diner and the eclair. But undisciplined indulgence in the pleasure of food costs us more than we dream: it coarsens and darkens our minds and ruins our powers of attention and self-control, of sobriety and vigilance. It hobbles and confuses us. It makes us prey for another Eater.
The one who bids us to his marriage supper will not devour us; in fact, he promises to feed us. But there is more; he does not feed us only with the good things he has made, or even the goodness of supernatural food like manna. He feeds us his very self. It is this other bread we must learn to eat, not “bread alone” but the Word of God himself. At the Communion table this becomes not just theory, but a true encounter-a feast that binds hungry sinners together and links us to the One who alone can feed our souls.
“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.... Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:49-53).
Lord, give us this bread always!
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Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author of “Real Choices” (Questar), a syndicated columnist with Religion News Service, and khouria (priest’s wife) in the Antiochian Orthodox Church.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine ctcurrmrj5TD0445B6r
[see #3646]
I once sat in an audience of about seventy-five people in Yellowstone National Park and watched a bear cub amble across the side of a rocky hill no more than twenty yards behind the speaker. The man was oblivious to what was happening behind him. And the audience was equally oblivious to whatever he was trying to say.
So it caught my attention the other day when I read a piece about the bears of Yellowstone. They are no longer as plentiful or visible to park visitors.
People coming to the park were no longer simply seeing and photographing the bears. They had begun feeding them -- in violation of notices posted throughout the park area. And the things they were giving the bears were quite different from their normal diet of wild berries, fish, and small animals. Cupcakes and sandwich bread simply aren’t good for them. Park rangers began noticing the terrible consequences.
Have you ever wondered how bears survive long winters in hibernation? God created them with a marvelous mechanism for storing fat in their bodies during the warmer times of the year. Then, as they sleep through the cold months in their dens, those layers of fat burn off slowly and keep them alive until spring arrives.
But the fat buildup in bears from human junk food burns off much more quickly than the fat residue from their customary diet. Thus, during the winter months, dozens would exhaust their reserves, effectively starve, and then freeze to death. So the bears have now been moved to the high country and away from the tourists.
I think I’ve known some believers whose lives came unraveled because they had lived on a diet of spiritual junk food for so long. Things like devotional books, Christian music, bumper stickers, and inspirational TV can serve a good purpose. But they can also be a sweet-tasting substitute for the serious pursuit of God.
Things like “The FAX of Life” or even your church’s Sunday worship experience just aren’t enough to nourish your faith. If they are all you are getting, you are relying on secondhand spirituality. Even if you eat them often and take your fill, they are relatively empty calories compared to personal time in the Word of God, serious prayer, and conscious imitation of Jesus Christ. Malnutrition may set in. You can die!
Like you, I’ve been taught and encouraged by others. But their experiences of God cannot count for our own. Each of us needs the nourishment of a balanced diet from healthy spiritual resources. Occasional “treats” should not be the main course.
Christian discipleship in a fallen world is no picnic. So eat and live accordingly.
Once there was a man who had two peas up his nose, a carrot in one ear and a hunk of steak in the other ear. He went to the doctor and said, "I'm not feeling well."
The doctor said, ... "You're not eating right."
"When it comes to eating, you can sometimes help yourself more by helping yourself less."
Richard Armour, Instant Quotation Dictionary, p. 110.
"I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand."
Benjamin Franklin, Instant Quotation Dictionary, p. 110.
George Klingman, a preacher who taught at David Lipscomb College years ago, was heard by Mrs. Betty Kennamer when she was girl in Virginia to remark after an especially good meal: "My gastronomical satiety tells me I've reached that state of delectation consistent with dietetic integrity." In other words, "I'm full."
Since 1994, when Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul began its 150-week run on The New York Times best-seller list, there have been nearly 800 books published on the soul of this and the soul of that. The granddaddy of them all is Aritotle’s De Anima (Treatise on the Soul), out in a new English translation but not yet booked for Oprah. The really hot reads are books by the therapy industry’s reigning household gods. To name a few that are coming soon to bookstores near you: Denial of the Soul, by the well-traveled M. Scott Peck; Buddha Nature: Death of the Soul, by the Dalai Lama, who says we don’t really have one, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems From Many Cultures, by Robert Bly, who says we do. They’ll be competing with Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, the current No.1 paperback on the New York Times list in the advice category. That’s not to be confused with the five previous volumes in the Chicken Soup series, which has 12 million copies in print.
Hladomor svírá miliony Etiopanù
P r a h a - Viditelným pøíznakem jsou mrtvá dìtská tìla rozervaná hyenami.
Ale také na kost vyhublí lidé belhající se celé dny za potravou èi vyschlé pastviny pokryté mršinami uhynulého dobytka.
Patnáct let po znièujícím hladomoru, pøi nìmž zahynul témìø milion lidí, zaèíná Etiopii opìt rdousit stejná katastrofa.
Pracovníci humanitárních organizací pøímo na místì odhadují, že hladomor hrozí osmi milionùm lidí.
Jen v provincii Ogaden na jihovýchodì zemì umírá na následky hladu zatím každý den ètrnáct dìtí, uvedla tamní Ogadenská dobroèinná spoleènost.
Pøitom hladomor teprve zaèíná a úplná èísla jsou zøejmì podstatnì vyšší.
"Dìti, starší osoby a ženy umírají vysílením, zabíjejí je akutní prùjmová onemocnìní," uvedl ve své zprávì tým britské humanitární organizace Oxfam, který zkoumal situaci pøímo na nejhorších místech.
"Lidé trpí nedostatkem jídla, tekutin a sužují je nemoci vyvolané podvýživou a nedostatkem èisté vody," napsal tým ve zprávì zveøejnìné na internetu.
Celé vesnice se vydaly na pochod a lidé migrují z jedné oblasti do druhé, aby našli jídlo a vodu.
"Z tìch, kdo se oslabeni hladem snaží dojít do distribuèních støedisek, kde mohou dostat nouzové dávky jídla, mnozí prostì zmizí ve vyprahlé stepi," uvedla Ogadenská dobroèinná spoleènost.
Zasaženy byly jižní a jihovýchodní oblasti zemì, ale situace je zøejmì ještì horší: "Zdá se, že postižen je nyní už i sever Etiopie," øekl odborník na africkou problematiku Mesfin Gedlu z Ústavu mezinárodních vztahù.
Pøíèina hladomoru je zøejmá, ale souèasnì velmi složitá: stala se jí kombinace sucha, války a nadmìrného využívání pùdy.
Pøedevším oblasti na jihu již tøi roky èekají na skuteèné srážky, nebo dvojí období dešù, v únoru a v létì, se stala spíše obdobími sucha.
Na srážkách však v tamním horkém klimatu osudovì závisí zemìdìlství a pastviny, jež se zmìnily v prašnou pouš.
Dobytek pošel hlady a žízní.
"Témìø všechen skot a ovce uhynuly v navštívených oblastech a naživu zùstalo snad pìt až deset procent koz a velbloudù," popisuje souèasnou situaci zpráva Oxfam.
"Bylo otøesné vidìt hromady mršin povalujících se všude v polích." Druhým dùvodem je samo zemìdìlství. "Pùda, která musela uživit stále více lidí, je zemìdìlsky velmi vyèerpaná a její úrodnost je snížena. Potøebovala by velký regeneraèní program," øíká Mesfin Gedlu.
Podle zpráv z Etiopie lidé zabíjejí i zbylé kusy dobytka, jež jim zbyly, a suší si jejich maso jako poslední potravu. Je to považováno za výraz zoufalství, nebo pastevci zabíjejí skot, na nìmž jsou životnì závislí, pouze v okamžicích nejvyšší nouze.
Stát nemá sílu postiženým pomoci, nebo jej právì vyèerpává válka se sousední Eritreou.
Odborníci se obávají, že válka zbrzdí distribuci potravin, na niž Etiopie nyní èeká. Souèasnì se prodlouží cesty zásob, nebo konflikt Etiopii odøízl od pøístavù v Rudém moøi, jež leží v nyní znepøátelené Eritreji.
Jako obvykle svìt navíc reaguje pozdì. Vèera to kritizoval i generální tajemník OSN Kofi Annan. "Situace v jižní Etiopii je velmi kritická a pro tamní obyvatele krutá," dodal.
Avšak pokud jde o pomoc, má Etiopie konkurenty i v sousedních zemích. Sucho deptá celý Africký roh, kde hlad, ne však tak strašný jako v Etiopii, svírá dalších osm milionù lidí.
MILAN VODIÈKA
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The "Worst" Restaurant
Read: Colossians 2:16-23
Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility. --Colossians 2:18
Some years ago I read about the "Worst Food In Oregon" restaurant. The owners said they served the "worst food you ever ate, and the service is even worse."
Actually, the food was good, diners were served generous portions, and the prices were reasonable. The name was just a clever gimmick. It was the idea of the owner, who figured he might get more attention by calling his food "the worst."
His strategy worked. Customers who came the first time out of curiosity soon came back for more.
This creative business tactic reminds me of religious practice described by the apostle Paul in the second chapter of his letter to the Colossians. He warned his readers not to be deceived by false teachers who appeared to be very religious and very humble but who were really satisfying their own desires by calling attention to themselves. Such persons go to great lengths to advertise their unworthiness. Yet, from God's point of view, their actions are merely a coverup for pride and self-promotion.
Let's make sure that our humility and self-denial are motivated by submission to Christ rather than a self-made strategy for personal profit. --MRDII
When all is done, renounce your pride,
Self-praise and boasting scorn;
So shall you glorify the Lord
And thus Christ's name adorn. --Hallan
You can't glorify self and Christ at the same time. Does God Forget?
It was the day before Thanksgiving - the first one my three children and I would be spending without their father, who had left several months before. Now the two older children were very sick with the flu, and the eldest had just been prescribed bed rest for a week.
It was a cool, gray day outside, and a light rain was falling. I grew wearier as I scurried around, trying to care for each child: thermometers, juice, diapers. And I was fast running out of liquids for the children. But when I checked my purse, all I found was about $2.50 - and this was supposed to last me until the end of the month. That's when I heard the phone ring.
It was the secretary from our former church, and she told me that they had been thinking about us and had something to give us from the congregation. I told her that I was going out to pick up some more juice and soup for the children, and I would drop by the church on my way to the market.
I arrived at the church just before lunch. The church secretary met me at the door and handed me a special gift envelope. "We think of you and the kids often," she said, "and you are in our hearts and prayers. We love you." When I opened the envelope, I found two grocery certificates inside. Each was worth $20. I was so touched and moved, I broke down and cried.
"Thank you very much," I said, as we hugged each other. "Please give our love and thanks to the church." Then I drove to a store near our home and purchased some much-needed items for the children.
At the check-out counter I had a little over $14.00 worth of groceries, and I handed the cashier one of the gift certificates. She took it, then turned her back for what seemed like a very long time. I thought something might be wrong. Finally I said, "This gift certificate is a real blessing. Our former church gave it to our family, knowing I'm a single patent trying to make ends meet."
The cashier then turned around, with tears in her loving eyes, and replied, "Honey, that's wonderful! Do you have a turkey?"
"No. It's okay because my children are sick anyway."
She then asked, "Do you have anything else for Thanksgiving dinner?"
Again I replied, "No."
After handing me the change from the certificate, she looked at my face and said, "Honey, I can't tell you exactly why right now, but I want you to go back into the store and buy a turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie or anything else you need for a Thanksgiving dinner."
I was shocked, and humbled to tears. "Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes! Get whatever you want. And get some Gatorade for the kids."
I felt awkward as I went back to do more shopping, but I selected a fresh turkey, a few yams and potatoes, and some juices for the children. Then I wheeled the shopping cart up to the same cashier as before. As I placed my groceries on the counter, she looked at me once more with giant tears in her kind eyes and began to speak.
"Now I can tell you. This morning I prayed that I could help someone today, and you walked through my line." She reached under the counter for her purse and took out a $20 bill. She paid for my groceries and then handed me the change. Once more I was moved to tears.
The sweet cashier then said, "I am a Christian. Here is my phone number if you ever need anything." She then took my head in her hands, kissed my cheek and said, "God bless you, honey."
As I walked to my car, I was overwhelmed by this stranger's love and by the realization that God loves my family too, and shows us his love through this stranger's and my church's kind deeds.
The children were supposed to have spent Thanksgiving with their father that year, but because of the flu they were home with me, for a very special Thanksgiving Day. They were feeling better, and we all ate the goodness of the Lord's bounty - and our community's love. Our hearts were truly filled with thanks.
________________________
by Andrea Nannette Mejia (c) 1995, from Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Patty Aubery and Nancy Mitchell.
*
Over 20 years ago, my eldest son was badly burned in a grain elevator explosion and fire that occurred in North Vancouver. He was 33 and had two children. His wife and I were the only visitors he was allowed during the first couple of months because the hospital had to be careful of infection.
The staff in the burn unit were busy and overworked because 16 burn victims had been admitted from that fire. My daughter-in-law and I always made sure one of us would be there at meal-times to feed my son because his hands were so badly burned, he couldn't use them and we knew the staff appreciated the help. His very favourite dessert was (and it still is) the trifle I made every Christmas. He wasn't eating as much as we hoped and he seemed so thin. I decided to make him something I knew he would love, so I made my Christmas trifle and brought a good-sized bowlful to the hospital.
After he had eaten what he could of his dinner, I said "I have a surprise for you," and put a spoonful of trifle in his mouth. His eyes lit up and he ate every last spoonful then smiled and whispered, "An early Merry Christmas, Mom."
Today my son and his wife have a good life. Although he has pins in all his fingers, he can do almost anything. He always keeps busy and seems happy. Some of the boys didn't make it, so we are thankful we still have ours. Merry Christmas to all, and especially to the doctors and staff of the burn unit at Vancouver General. They were magnificent. Thank you all.
Catherine E. Smith
Saskatoon, SK
Food For The Year
Read: Jeremiah 15:15-21
Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart. --Jeremiah 15:16
It's a good thing I grew up liking black-eyed peas, because my mother served them every New Year's Day. She didn't think this tradition would bring good luck, as some people believe, but the practice persisted at our house.
Many Americans welcome the new year with cabbage, herring, honey, sardines, or salt. The Japanese eat long noodles. The Greeks bake a special bread. In Spain, the custom is to eat 12 individual grapes in the seconds leading up to the new year. Anthropologists say that eating certain foods to change one's fortune dates back to ancient Babylonia.
The prophet Jeremiah wasn't looking for good luck. As God's spokesman during a difficult time in Israel's history, he suffered rejection and persecution. Yet God's Word produced deep joy in his heart. In a vivid statement, he said to God, "Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart" (Jer. 15:16).
Eating black-eyed peas won't influence the year ahead of me one bit. But if I'll make God's Word a part of my life each day through reading, study, and memorization, that will make a difference. The Bible is food for thought and nourishment for the new year. --DCM
Then let me love my Bible more
And take a fresh delight
By day to read these wonders o'er
And meditate by night. --Watts
The Bible is bread for daily use, not cake for special occasions.
Come And Get It!
Read: Psalm 104:19-35
What You give them they gather in. --Psalm 104:28
A bird-feeder stands outside the window of my study where I sit and write. Every day, wonderful wordless sermons are preached to me from that feeder. The preachers are my feathered friends, and the message they illustrate so effectively is this: Dependence on God is right and reasonable for all of God's creatures, including you and me!
Here is the three-point sermon on God-dependence that the birds live out faithfully:
* Seek God's provision daily.
* Seek His provision expectantly, for He has satisfied you before.
* Seek His provision actively, taking responsibility to gather it in.
The birds illustrate Psalm 104:27-28, "These all wait for You, that You may give them their food in due season. What You give them they gather in."
The Bible is like a table, laden with nourishing food we need every day: promises, instruction, wisdom, comfort, and encouragement. Like any good host, God tells us, "Come and get it!" But we often fail to do this. We depend on everything but Him and wonder why our faith is feeble. But if like our feathered friends we'll come and feast daily, expectantly, and actively, our divine Host will provide for all our needs. Depend on it! --JEY
God's Word provides the nourishment
We need to have if we're to grow;
But if we do not feast on it,
Vitality we'll never know. --Sper
God feeds the birds, but He doesn't throw the food into their nests.
The Lord had visited his people in giving them bread. — Ruth 1:6.
The well-known Ghandi of India said, “To millions who have to go without two meals a day the only acceptable form in which God dare appear is food.” We know God can dare appear in any way He sees fit, yet the remarkable fact is that this is the very way in which God did appear. We hear the Lord Jesus say, “My Father giveth you the true Bread from Heaven. For the Bread of God is He which cometh down from Heaven and giveth His life unto the world. I am the Bread of Life: he that cometh to Me shall never hunger and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst. This is the Bread which cometh down from Heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.” — M. J. Carter
Guide us 0 Thou great Jehovah,
pilgrims through this barren land;
We are weak but Thou art mighty,
feed us with Thy powerful hand;
Bread of Heaven, feed us now and evermore.
— William Williams translated from the Welsh by Peter Williams (adapted)
A 49-year-old woman in Scotland passed away in 1999, only the third starvation death among the world’s alleged 5,000 disciples of Australian Ellen Greve who follow a no-food, no-water, “breatharian” diet. Greve sells her philosophy (“liberation from the drudgery of food and drink”) to Westerners in part as conferring a spiritual connection with third-world hunger.
________
Edmonton Journal-The Times (London), September 26, 1999
===========
More information on Breatharianism from Wikipedia:
Jasmuheen (born Ellen Greve) was probably the most famous advocate of Breatharianism during the 1990s. She claimed “I can go for months and months without having anything at all other than a cup of tea. My body runs on a different kind of nourishment.” Several interviewers found her house full of food, but she claimed the food was for her husband. In 1999, she volunteered to be monitored closely by the Australian television program 60 Minutes for one week without eating to demonstrate her methods. Greve claimed that she failed because on the first day of the test she had been confined in a hotel room near a busy road, saying that the stress and pollution kept her from getting the nutrients she needed from the air. “I asked for fresh air. Seventy percent of my nutrients come from fresh air. I couldn’t even breathe,” she said. On the third day the test moved to a mountainside retreat where she could get plenty of fresh air and live happily. After Greve had fasted for four days, Dr. Berris Wink, president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, urged her to stop the test.
According to the doctor, Greve’s pupils were dilated, her speech was slow, she was “quite dehydrated, probably over 10%, getting up to 11%.” Towards the end of the test, he said, “Her pulse is about double what it was when she started. The risks if she goes any further are kidney failure. 60 Minutes would be culpable if they encouraged her to continue. She should stop now.” The test was stopped. Dr. Wink said, “Unfortunately there are a few people who may believe what she says, and I’m sure it’s only a few, but I think it’s quite irresponsible for somebody to be trying to encourage others to do something that is so detrimental to their health.” She challenged the results of the program, saying, “Look, 6,000 people have done this around the world without any problem.” Though she claims thousands of followers, mostly in Germany, there is no evidence that any have lived for long periods of time without any food at all.
Jasmuheen was awarded the Bent Spoon Award by Australian Skeptics in 2000 (“presented to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle”). She also won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature for Living on Light. Jasmuheen claims that their beliefs are based on the writings and “more recent channelled material” of the Count of St Germain. She claims that her DNA has expanded from 2 to 12 strands, to “absorb more hydrogen”. When offered $30,000 to prove her claim with a blood test, she said that she didn’t understand the relevance.
DEATHS
The well-publicized deaths of 49-year-old Australian-born Scotland resident Verity Linn, 31-year-old Munich kindergarten teacher Timo Degen, and 53-year-old Melbourne resident Lani Marcia Roslyn Morris, while attempting to enter the Breatharian “diet,” have drawn further criticism of the idea. Jim Vadim Pesnak, 63, and his wife Eugenia, 60, went to jail for three years on charges of manslaughter for their involvement in the death of Morris. Verity Lynn, the Scottish woman who inadvertently killed herself by choosing the Breatharian “diet” was a nominee for the 1999 Darwin Awards. She “took to the highlands”, the article says, “with only a tent and her grit and determination.” She died of hypothermia and dehydration, aggravated by lack of food. Jasmuheen claimed that her death was brought on by a psycho-spiritual problem, rather than a physiological one.
Jasmuheen has denied any involvement with the three deaths and claims she cannot be held responsible for the actions of her followers. In reference to the death of Lani Morris, she said that perhaps Morris was “not coming from a place of integrity and did not have the right motivation”.
A good piece of chocolate has about 200 calories. As I enjoy 2 servings per night, and a few more on weekends, I consume 3,500 calories of chocolate in a week, which equals one pound of weight per week.
Therefore... in the last 3 1/2 years, I have had chocolate caloric intake of about 180 pounds, and I only weigh 155 pounds, so without chocolate, I would have wasted away to nothing about 3 months ago!
I owe my life to chocolate.
________
Source: Molly's Quotes of the Day
For their book, HUNGRY PLANET: WHAT THE WORLD EATS, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluiso asked 30 families around the world to buy a week’s worth of groceries and display it for the camera.
A family in Darfur, Sudan, had the most meager spread, with grains, sugar and salt provided by the United Nations and supplemented with purchases of limes, onions, salt and dried tomatoes. A week’s bill ran to $1.23 for a diet of congealed porridge and soup, three times a day, seven days a week.
Most abundant was a German family’s cache of breads, fresh produce, meat, beer, milk and pizza for $494.19.
________
Source: Peninsula Daily News, December 28, 2005
Do you know why there are parties early into the minutes of the New Year? Traditionally, people believed that their coming year would be affected by what they do or eat on the first of that year. So, people held parties to be in the company of friends and families.
Some parts of the U.S. celebrate the New Year with foods that they consider lucky: black-eyed peas, pork, rice and even cabbage. Of course, many traditional New Years foods have been brought over to the U.S. from abroad. Hallmark Magazine has put together a list of what people from around the world eat for luck:
Holland - Doughnuts
Japan - Soba noodles
Germany - Marzipan pigs
Italy - Sausage
Spain - Grapes, 12 of them (one at each stroke of the clock at midnight)
Sicily - Lasagna
Norway - Rice pudding (with one lucky almond hidden in it)
Greece - St. Basil’s cake (a sweet bread with a coin baked inside)
“Put down that cheeseburger and listen up,” said George Will in THE WASHINGTON POST. In a provocative essay in POLICY REVIEW, scholar Mary Eberstadt offers a deliciously provocative analysis of the relationship between our attitudes toward sex and food. In some very fundamental ways, Eberstadt argues, food and sex have traded places. Two generations ago, most Americans observed strict moral codes regarding sex, but happily ate frozen steaks and canned vegetables. Today, society encourages sexual freedom, but condemns those who don’t eat locally grown organic veggies and free-range chickens. So we are left with “mindful eating and mindless sex.” There’s nothing wrong with eating more healthfully, of course, said India Knight in the London TIMES. Eberstadt’s point is that we seem to have transferred the notion of “taboos and rules” from sex to foodgiving rise to an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and out-out-wedlock births.
The problem, said Mary Eberstadt in her POLICY REVIEW article, is that we increasingly think of our sexual activities purely as matters of personal taste. When it comes to food, we are more aware than ever of what our choices mean for our health and for the planet. But while “the all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized, the sexual smorgasbord is not,” and I believe there is a direct connection between the two trends. All the new rules being drawn around food reflect the fact that many people, in their heart of hearts, are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone. “Not sure what to do with it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat.” So in a very real sense, “junk food” has been replaced by “junk sex.”
[see also #35242]
Imagine inviting some new neighbors to a dinner party. The first couple tells you they’d love to come. But, they warn, they think it’s immoral to eat animals, so please — vegetarian options only.
The second couple also wants to come, but — they’re almost embarrassed to mention it — they only eat locally grown food. No strawberries from Chili, or shrimp from Asia. Importing food from faraway countries damages the environment, they explain.
Couple number three also wants to attend — but, they ask, you aren’t serving genetically enhanced vegetables, are you, or meat produced by industrialized breeding practices?
At this point, you might be tempted to cancel the party and go out for a cheeseburger, followed up by a banana split — made with bananas from Ecuador. But you might wonder, as you bite into that greasy hunk of beef, just why it is that people have become so moralistic about food. Especially when so many are immoral in other areas — like their sex lives.
One person who has wondered about this is Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In her article “Is Food the New Sex?,” Eberstadt notes that food is cheap and plentiful in the West. The same can be said for sex. Technology has tamed many of the dangers associated with sex, like pregnancy and disease. Moreover, social and religious strictures have all but disappeared.
Which leads to an interesting question: What would happen, Eberstadt wondered, when, “for the first time in history ... [people] are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?” Would they pursue both food and sex with equal ardor?
Oddly enough, they don’t. Instead, many engage in a sexual free-for-all — but put stringent moral strictures on anything to do with food. A modern young woman might think nothing of living with several different men, and having abortions when she gets pregnant. But she would not dream of eating anything from a factory farm. That would be immoral.
In effect, some people have reversed the “moral poles” of sex and eating, Eberstadt writes. They are engaging in “mindful eating and mindless sex.”
Why is this happening? As Eberstadt writes, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone.”
“Not knowing what to do about it,” she says, “they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat.”
Or, as my former colleague Jim Tonkowich notes, “For all our relativistic talk” about encouraging people to make their own moral choices, “we cannot get away from an inner sense of right and wrong and the desire to codify [it].”
Jim is right. As the apostle Paul put it, God’s law is written on our hearts. We can deceive ourselves into believing it doesn’t exist, but when we do, we find our God-given sense of morality breaking out in other forms. In this case, in food — though it would be better the other way around.
This is what we ought to lovingly share with our unsaved friends — maybe over dinner — people who may think nothing wrong with living together out of wedlock, but who wouldn’t dream of eating mandarin oranges from Spain.
________
Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
[see also #35219]
The fourth Thursday in November, most Americans across the country will sit down with family and friends to share nearly the exact same meal.
But the Thanksgiving menu wasn’t always so set in stone. At the holiday’s inception, turkey was a mere part of the meal, not a necessary centerpiece. Mincemeat pie would have made an appearance. And green-bean casserole was undreamed-of.
The story of how modern Thanksgiving came to be is filled with myth, commercialization, regional influences and a dash of pragmatism, food historians say.
“Thanksgiving is based on a national myth,” said food writer Cynthia Bertelsen.
A brief history of Thanksgiving
First, the basics: As you’ve likely heard, the whole Pilgrims-and-Indians’ first Thanksgiving tale is more legend than fact. Yes, English colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans got together for a harvest festival in 1621. Harvest festivals are a common tradition in many cultures, as a matter of practicality. In late fall, the crops are in, the livestock need to be slaughtered and it’s time for one last feast before the lean times of winter.
And so harvest festivals continued throughout the colonial days and early years of the United States, celebrated by different states at different points throughout the autumn. Northern states, in particular, celebrated the fall with harvest feasts, while the tradition was largely ignored in the South.
These harvest celebrations would have set the table groaning with their variety, according to Sandy Oliver, a food historian and co-author of “ Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie” (Clarkson Potter, 2005). The turkey, a bird that matures for slaughter in the fall, would have made an appearance, as would chicken, pork, beef and goose. Semisavory, semisweet foods — such as plum pudding — would have made up the side dishes.
Thanksgiving was a good excuse to serve mincemeat pies, which were filled with chopped meat, dried fruit and spices. At the time, mincemeat was strongly associated with Christmas, a holiday spurned by Protestants as too Catholic. Because of the hostility toward the holiday, Protestants broke the mincemeat-Christmas association by eating it on Thanksgiving instead.
There was no official Thanksgiving holiday until Sarah Josepha Hale, a 19th-century writer, made it her mission to combine all of the states’ harvest festivals under one national umbrella. Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, then-President Abraham Lincoln got on board, and Congress established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 — 150 years ago.
The turkey takes its place
The foundation of Thanksgiving as an official holiday set off a process of myth making. Even though venison (deer) is the only meat confirmed to have been present at the Pilgrims’ harvest feast in 1621, turkey gradually became the centerpiece of the new holiday, thanks, in part, to Hale.
In her 1827 novel “Northwood, A Tale of New England,” Hale rhapsodizes about the ideal Thanksgiving menu, including the turkey at a “lordly station” at the head of the table. She also mentions beef, pork and mutton (sheep), however — not to mention pickles and preserves, vegetables, custards, cheese, cake and pies.
“In the 19th century, the turkey has the additional charm that most Victorians in Yankeeland were positive that the Pilgrims had it too,” Oliver said. “[The Victorians] were 200 to 300 years after the first settlement here, and they were romanticizing the past pretty energetically.”
The turkeys of the 19th century weren’t like today’s big-breasted Butterballs, said Andrew Smith, a lecturer on food history at The New School in New York City. There were six or seven varieties of wild bird that would have been consumed depending on the region of the country. In the last few years foodies have embraced the past with heirloom turkeys that boast more dark meat than modern farmed birds.
A parade of sides
Like the turkey, some Thanksgiving sides were associated with the meal from its official beginning. Stuffing poultry with bread chunks dates back to Roman times, Bertelsen said. Cranberries and pumpkins are both Northeastern crops that are ready in the fall, making their inclusion in a fall harvest feast a no-brainer. Potatoes’ place in the meal reflects their general popularity.
“We like having potatoes at Thanksgiving because people like having potatoes at every meal,” Oliver said.
Potatoes originated in South America and were taken to Europe by Spanish explorers. They made their way back to the United States with Scots-Irish settlers, ethnic Scots who were resettled in Ireland and then immigrated to the Americas, Smith said. White potatoes didn’t become a keystone of the American diet until about 1872, Bertelsen said, when botanist Luther Burbank developed the Russet potato that is ubiquitous today.
Some Thanksgiving staples, however, reflect a non-Northern heritage. The South took its time jumping on the Thanksgiving bandwagon, as the holiday was seen as a Yankee invention. When the Southern states joined, though, their influence was felt far and wide. Cornbread stuffing (or dressing, as Southerners call it) hails from the South, as do sweet potatoes. In fact, both dishes reflect African American cultural heritage, said independent culinary historian Michael Twitty.
“Sweet potatoes were one of the many root crops that were a staple in the West Indies,” where enslaved Africans were pressed into service on sugarcane plantations, Twitty told LiveScience.
Slaves were given small plots of land unfit for sugarcane production on which to grow food to feed themselves, Twitty said. Some of these slaves worked as sugar-boiling men, who took harvested sugarcane and boiled it down into molasses to make rum. These men would take a cast-iron dish of sweet potatoes to the boiling house and spoon ladles of the molten sugar over the dish. The boiling sugar was so hot it cooked the potatoes as it cooled.
“If you think about one of our favorite dishes at Thanksgiving — candied yams — that started out as food for slaves,” Twitty said. (Sweet potatoes are often called yams, but they’re actually different plants.)
Cornbread is a Native American food adapted by European Americans and African Americans alike, Twitty said. West African meals typically include “mushes” like couscous or other grains, he said. Cornmeal played that role for enslaved Africans, who would mash up day-old cornbread with pepper, salt and herbs.
“People loved it,” Twitty said. “It came to be part and parcel of the enslaved table and the table of their owners as well. So, it was a clear influence on how we eat.”
The modernization of Thanksgiving
In many ways, Thanksgiving remains a throwback to old ways of eating: Whole roast birds, a giant meal at midday instead of a big evening dinner, foods cooked from scratch. But modernization has influenced the holiday meal, to some extent.
Green-bean casserole — usually made with mushroom soup and fried onions on top — was a 20th-century invention. In 1955, a Campbell Soup Company home economist named Dorcas Reilly invented the recipe, which was made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s French fried onions. It caught on.
“About 50 percent of French fried onions are sold during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter because of that casserole,” Oliver said.
Canned cranberry sauce is relatively new on the scene, too. In 1912, the Cape Cod Cranberry Company started selling canned cranberry sauce under the now-familiar Ocean Spray name, Bertelsen said. Cranberries had long been associated with the holiday, but now there was a convenient food that made serving them as easy as wielding a can opener.
Of course, various regions have their own spins on Thanksgiving. The South prefers its sweet-potato pie to the pumpkin variety, Twitty said, and pecan pie has Southern roots as well. Norwegian Americans make a potato flatbread called lefse, which they serve with meatballs, Bertelsen said. The deep-fried turkey is catching on around the country, perhaps inspired by Southern ways of cooking.
“I speak as a connoisseur: The deep-fried turkey has a flavor all to its own,” said Smith.
It remains to be seen how Thanksgiving will evolve next, but individual menus are usually open to at least a little bit of change. As people join new families by marriage, they bring their Thanksgiving traditions along with them, Oliver said.
“It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without ... fill in the blank,” she said. “That’s one of the most interesting things anyone can ask.”
After numerous mission trips, I have seen how traveling to foreign cultures can yield a new perspective by immersing yourself in a culture -- sleeping where the people sleep, playing where they play and eating like they eat. In every society, people have blind spots. They become so immersed in their culture that they can’t see what is painstakingly obvious to others.
Such was the case a few years ago when some brothers from the Zambian International Theological College came to West Virginia. After visiting with believers in several African nations, I wanted to give them the opportunity to visit us. Our church raised the money to bring a few to a statewide conference. When they arrived, we wanted to give our guests the best we had to offer. A few families hosted them; everyone made sure they didn’t miss a meal.
Two weeks into their visit, a pastor said quietly, “I have a question for you. It seems as though in America every meal is a feast. You people don’t eat, you feast. I have never seen so much food.” Ouch. I thought these gentlemen would enjoy the opportunity to sample America’s varieties and quantities of foods. After all, it was only for a few weeks.
Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t our gluttonous practices that bothered the pastor most deeply. His next question socked me between the spiritual eyes: “We’ve been here two weeks and we eat three or four times every day. When do you take the time to fast?”
He didn’t have to say another word. I had to admit that we Americans don’t fast much. I wasn’t aware of one church in West Virginia that fasted regularly.
Ironically, the lack of discipline to fast and pray doesn’t square with the scriptural record. Consider a few verses from Matthew 6:
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others” (verse 5).
“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen” (verse 6).
“But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face” (verse 17).
Jesus never said “if” you fast or “if” you pray. He assumed His followers would do both. Every church prays during their worship services and they usually take an offering. But what happened to fasting?
One cannot help connecting the spiritual dots between our national obsession with food and a lack of fasting. Food has such a stronghold on the American church that even its leaders don’t abstain for spiritual reasons.
Fasting is God’s way of transforming us. Much like prayer, it’s a mechanism God uses to change us into who He wants us to be. He doesn’t ask us to fast for only His sake, but ours as well.
Fasting is not about the parts but the whole. As we fast, we gain spiritual, mental, emotional and physical benefits, helping us achieve multiple breakthroughs.
“There’s really no way to describe it,” said a pastor from our church who followed a fruit-and-vegetable diet for three weeks. “We thought better, prayed better and ate better, but most importantly we learned to discipline ourselves in the area of food.”
This experience is not unique. Fasting can bring mental and spiritual peace while making us aware of the symbiotic relationship between mind, body and spirit. There is no easy three-step plan to follow. Yet just skipping one meal and devoting that time to prayer can give you an idea of the benefits. I am convinced America’s Christians will achieve closer connections to God when they aren’t so stuffed with food.
“I remember thinking, I am eating myself to death and I can’t stop it. I remember saying, ‘I give up. I’m not even going to try anymore.’ I really felt hopeless, and that hopelessness was very dark,” Kimberly Bensen reveals.
Kimberly weighed in at almost 350 pounds, and she was miserable.
“My back hurt all the time. My knees hurt all the time. It was uncomfortable sleeping. I couldn’t buckle up in a car; the seatbelt didn’t go all the way over. And it was just unsafe and unhealthy all the way around,” she says.
But she kept her sense of humor.
“I was going to this restaurant that was in Boston,” she explains, “and I sat down on a bench and the arm of the bench broke when I leaned against it. That wasn’t the first that something like that had happened to me.”
Kimberly wasn’t always overweight. Looking back, she remembers how it all began.
“In high school I kind of fluctuated at 10 or 15 pounds over and over again. I would go up and down, and then the spread grew to, like, 30. Then I got down for my wedding, and after my wedding, the weight started increasing more and more. I got over 200. So I’ve been pretty much over 200 for the first 10 years of my marriage and over 300 for the second,” says Kimberly.
Kimberly’s husband, Mark, loved and encouraged his wife despite her excessive weight.
“My husband is the most wonderful man on earth. God gave him to me,” she says. “He told me I was beautiful when I was 350 pounds. He’s always loved me. He supported me. I mean, he hurt for me because he knew I was hurting. He was concerned for my health. He held me when I cried about how I looked and felt. But he always told me I was beautiful.”
“My prayer for her was that somehow she could be free from the burden,” says Mark. “It was a huge burden in a literal sense and a figurative sense. It was a huge burden.”
One day an amazing thing happened, and it wasn’t at a weight loss clinic. It was at Kimberly’s church in Trumble, Connecticut.
“I still remember I was sitting in church and Pastor Dave was talking about the fact that the Israelites craved meat more than God. I remember going, Who can love meat, food, more than God? Think about it — God, food. There’s no comparison. Then I just sat there and said, That’s me. Where’s my time and my focus and my enjoyment? That’s when I first realized that I had put food above God. I was able to say that to myself.”
She continued her struggle with weight, but on October 1, 2001, Kimberly thought about that sermon. She prayed that God would change her heart and that He once again would be number one in her life.
“I finally said, ‘God, You know I love food more than You. I’m sorry. I really am. But You can change that, God. I can’t change that, but You can change my heart. O God, please. Change my heart, please. I beg You.’ I was praying and I really felt a stirring in my soul. I don’t know what to call it. I really felt a difference in my life.”
Just days later, at 347 pounds, Kimberly joined Weight Watchers with a friend. Then step by step, within two years Kimberly lost an astonishing 212 pounds. And she has kept it off!
Kimberly Bensen nowSays Kimberly, “I think I have unending energy. I’m up early with the two little guys, and I stay up late with the two older guys. It’s wonderful not to feel exhausted all day.”
In one of her favorite pictures, Kim stands in a pair of her “old pants” with two of her children.
“Those pants, my daughter is in one leg — she’s my oldest, and my youngest is in the middle, and I’m in the other leg. I remember buying those pants with my mom. I had outgrown all plus-size stores. I was past a 4x,” says Kimberly.
Says Mark, “She’s filled with more joy than I have ever seen. She has always been a happy, upbeat, positive person. The energy she’s got to go with it now wears me out. I can’t keep up with her.”
Kimberly thanks God daily for her new lease on life. She wants to share her story with others.
“I feel like the guy in Luke when he was healed and he went around town shouting what Christ had done for him. That’s how I feel. I just want to give hope to people who’ve lost theirs,” she says.
A recent study from Purdue University professor of sociology Ken Ferraro reveals that of all believers, Baptists are the most likely to be obese.
“This cause could be from less healthy eating patterns in the South, home to many Baptists,” Ferraro says. “But we controlled for residency and still Baptist women were more likely to be obese. This trend could be related to the strong emphasis for Baptists to avoid alcohol and tobacco, and, as a result, many of them indulge in overeating instead. More research is needed to learn how denominations view overeating and obesity.”
Obesity cases increased from 24 percent to 30 percent from 1986-94 among Baptists, Ferraro said.
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Adapted from the January 31, 2008, issue of the Baptist Messenger, the newspaper of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.
It’s that brief season of the year when most people are still on track with their resolutions to eat more healthfully and lose weight. In pursuit of that goal, millions have consulted Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, online diet plans, calorie-counting apps and a host of other nutritional guides -- most of which have great value.
But what about the Bible? Does it have anything to say about our eating habits?
Certainly it does. Incorporating Scripture’s wisdom into our New Year’s resolutions could mean the difference between success and failure.
First of all, we should make a distinction between healthy eating and fasting. The Bible says a great deal about fasting, but that’s abstaining from food for a purely spiritual purpose.
Healthy eating habits are a different matter, which the Bible also addresses. For one, the apostle Paul calls the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit” and urges, “You are not your own ... glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). The context is an exhortation to flee sexual immorality and not profane the body that was created to honor God, but there’s an application to diet as well. Honoring our bodies as sacred temples certainly includes eating healthy foods that keep them functioning well.
The Old Testament, in fact, includes an example of God’s blessing people who eat healthy food. When Daniel and his three friends resolved not to eat the rich food of Babylon but instead make their diet vegetables and water, “they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food” (Daniel 1:15 NIV). Of course, health was not the reason for Daniel’s food choice. It had to do with ritual purity and being set apart from the pagan culture of Babylon, and God honored his obedience. Nevertheless, it was also an occasion when God brought positive consequences from healthy eating. (It’s worth noting that the Old Testament ceremonial laws on diet are no longer in force under the New Covenant, though moral principles related to food still hold. See Acts 10:9-16.) Add Proverbs’ warning about the ruinous effects of gluttony (Proverbs 23:20-21), and this is enough to assure us that God cares about our caloric intake.
Thankfully, though, that’s not all the Bible has to say about eating. Paul says that God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17). The writer of Ecclesiastes makes the connection to eating explicit, telling us that we should enjoy food as a gift from God (Ecclesiastes 3:13). Perhaps that is part of the reason why the Old Testament law required Jews to participate in a series of feasts every year and why scriptural examples of godly hospitality commonly include large quantities of food (see, for example, Genesis 18:6-8; Judges 6:19; 2 Samuel 9:10-13; Luke 15:23).
Jesus Himself instituted the New Covenant at a feast, the Passover meal. And when God wanted to picture for the apostle John the joy that will occur in heaven at Christ’s second coming, He showed him a vision of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:6-10) -- another meal. God not only cares about healthy eating, there’s also a place for feasting in His economy.
So what does all this mean for dieters? While the Bible doesn’t prescribe any specific diet plan, it does highlight the principle of balance -- between healthy restraint and enjoyment of rich foods. In other words, make a habit of disciplined, healthy eating, but on occasion let yourself enjoy a feast of God’s good gifts. Looking forward to the feasts will help keep you going during the seasons of restraint. Interestingly, that distillation of the Bible’s wisdom on eating is the same conclusion that dieticians have reached after thousands of years of scientific research. In Scripture God truly does provide “all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3).
Mark Post, a physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has figured out how to grow meat in his laboratory. It’s not soy or another meat substitute, but lab-grown “in vitro” meat. And he has grown a 140 gram (5 oz) hamburger patty, which he plans to grill at a press event in London. The single patty took two years of development and cost 250,000 euros (US$338,000) to create -- more than a million dollars a pound.
“The vision for this burger is really to attract support, to attract funding,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales. “And I’m sure it will because it’s a very enticing idea for many people.” Like who? Animal rights activists, who think raising animals for meat is unethical, and environmentally unfriendly. But none of this explains what the researchers are calling this new food product: “Schmeat.”
In December of 2012, three young men were living in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, working on a technology startup. Their project - a plan to make cheap cell-towers - had failed and they were down to their last seventy thousand dollars. They resolved to keep working until they ran out of money. There was only one part of their budget they had some control over - food. They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas — supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy — but the grocery bills were still adding up.
Rob Rhinehart, age 25, one of the entrepreneurs, began to resent the fact that he had to eat at all. Food was a burden to him - its cost, the time and hassle to prepare it. He tried to live on McDonald’s dollar meals and felt like he was going to die. An all-kale diet didn’t work, either. He was starving.
Rhinehart, who studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, began to consider food as an engineering problem. Humans don’t need milk, but amino acids and lipids. Fruits and vegetables are mostly water. He began to think that food was an inefficient way of getting what he needed to survive. So he decided to reduce food to the raw chemical components. After some study, he compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival and ordered them off the internet, mostly in powdered form, and put them into a blender with some water. Then he started living on it.
His formula is smooth but grainy in your mouth, and it has been compared to Cream of Wheat, and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” It is like sipping a bowl of watered-down pancake batter. The downside is that it produces a lot of flatulence (though less now than with the original formula, which had too much sulfur).
He called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dehumanized future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh. Rhineheart’s family and friends have urged him to change the name but he insists on keeping it. (One variation by another experimenter is even labeled Soylent Green.)
After Rhinehart blogged about how healthy it made him feel and how it dropped his food bills by 89%, interest skyrocketed. He used the internet to raise funds to manufacture Soylent and got the amount in two hours. He has tapped into some deep concerns of modern life. Food is a big component of climate change - livestock cause almost fifteen percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions and a large percentage of all human usage of water goes toward agriculture. Soylent is more of a factory product than a farm product. He would even like to design a Soylent-producing “superorganism”: a single strain of alga that pumps out Soylent all day. Then even factories won’t be necessary.
The notion that we can nourish ourselves with something purer and more effective than food has long been part of our collective fantasy life. The ancient Greeks wrote about ambrosia, the food of the gods, which conferred immortality on whoever consumed it. The dawn of the space age had people dreaming about “meal pills”: in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” a character keeps several weeks’ worth of food pills in a matchbox; on “The Jetsons,” food pills produce delicious taste sensations but can cause indigestion. Food dreams can easily turn into nightmares: there’s Willy Wonka’s disastrous three-course-dinner chewing gum, and, in “The Matrix,” humans are grown synthetically, in pods, where they are fed the liquefied remains of other humans, pumped in through umbilical cords.
Liquid food has been given to patients in hospital settings for decades. Fifty years ago, when a patient was too sick to eat, doctors ground up regular food and put it into feeding tubes. Eventually, companies like Abbott Nutrition, the maker of Ensure, got into the game. Food replacements became more standardized and scientific. In the early nineteen-sixties, NASA made powdered drinks famous by using Tang in its space flights.
Doctors who have looked at the formula agree that you could subsist on Soylent. But would it be a good idea? Real food contains complex chemicals which have not been fully studied yet. There are other issues as well. You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.
We are what we eat, literally. It is interesting to think that after a lot of people eat Soylent, Soylent becomes people. Charlton Heston might appreciate that twist. So would Jesus Christ, who said, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. … For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him" (John 6:51,55,56).
Come And Get It!
Read: Psalm 104:19-35
What You give them they gather in. --Psalm 104:28
A bird-feeder stands outside the window of my study where I sit and write. Every day, wonderful wordless sermons are preached to me from that feeder. The preachers are my feathered friends, and the message they illustrate so effectively is this: Dependence on God is right and reasonable for all of God's creatures, including you and me!
Here is the three-point sermon on God-dependence that the birds live out faithfully:
* Seek God's provision daily.
* Seek His provision expectantly, for He has satisfied you before.
* Seek His provision actively, taking responsibility to gather it in.
The birds illustrate Psalm 104:27-28, "These all wait for You, that You may give them their food in due season. What You give them they gather in."
The Bible is like a table, laden with nourishing food we need every day: promises, instruction, wisdom, comfort, and encouragement. Like any good host, God tells us, "Come and get it!" But we often fail to do this. We depend on everything but Him and wonder why our faith is feeble. But if like our feathered friends we'll come and feast daily, expectantly, and actively, our divine Host will provide for all our needs. Depend on it! --JEY
God's Word provides the nourishment
We need to have if we're to grow;
But if we do not feast on it,
Vitality we'll never know. --Sper
God feeds the birds, but He doesn't throw the food into their nests.
Over 20 years ago, my eldest son was badly burned in a grain elevator explosion and fire that occurred in North Vancouver. He was 33 and had two children. His wife and I were the only visitors he was allowed during the first couple of months because the hospital had to be careful of infection.
The staff in the burn unit were busy and overworked because 16 burn victims had been admitted from that fire. My daughter-in-law and I always made sure one of us would be there at meal-times to feed my son because his hands were so badly burned, he couldn't use them and we knew the staff appreciated the help. His very favourite dessert was (and it still is) the trifle I made every Christmas. He wasn't eating as much as we hoped and he seemed so thin. I decided to make him something I knew he would love, so I made my Christmas trifle and brought a good-sized bowlful to the hospital.
After he had eaten what he could of his dinner, I said "I have a surprise for you," and put a spoonful of trifle in his mouth. His eyes lit up and he ate every last spoonful then smiled and whispered, "An early Merry Christmas, Mom."
Today my son and his wife have a good life. Although he has pins in all his fingers, he can do almost anything. He always keeps busy and seems happy. Some of the boys didn't make it, so we are thankful we still have ours. Merry Christmas to all, and especially to the doctors and staff of the burn unit at Vancouver General. They were magnificent. Thank you all.
Catherine E. Smith
Saskatoon, SK
Over 20 years ago, my eldest son was badly burned in a grain elevator explosion and fire that occurred in North Vancouver. He was 33 and had two children. His wife and I were the only visitors he was allowed during the first couple of months because the hospital had to be careful of infection.
The staff in the burn unit were busy and overworked because 16 burn victims had been admitted from that fire. My daughter-in-law and I always made sure one of us would be there at meal-times to feed my son because his hands were so badly burned, he couldn't use them and we knew the staff appreciated the help. His very favourite dessert was (and it still is) the trifle I made every Christmas. He wasn't eating as much as we hoped and he seemed so thin. I decided to make him something I knew he would love, so I made my Christmas trifle and brought a good-sized bowlful to the hospital.
After he had eaten what he could of his dinner, I said "I have a surprise for you," and put a spoonful of trifle in his mouth. His eyes lit up and he ate every last spoonful then smiled and whispered, "An early Merry Christmas, Mom."
Today my son and his wife have a good life. Although he has pins in all his fingers, he can do almost anything. He always keeps busy and seems happy. Some of the boys didn't make it, so we are thankful we still have ours. Merry Christmas to all, and especially to the doctors and staff of the burn unit at Vancouver General. They were magnificent. Thank you all.
Catherine E. Smith
Saskatoon, SK
A good piece of chocolate has about 200 calories. As I enjoy 2 servings per night, and a few more on weekends, I consume 3,500 calories of chocolate in a week, which equals one pound of weight per week.
Therefore... in the last 3 1/2 years, I have had chocolate caloric intake of about 180 pounds, and I only weigh 155 pounds, so without chocolate, I would have wasted away to nothing about 3 months ago!
I owe my life to chocolate.
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Source: Molly's Quotes of the Day
For their book, HUNGRY PLANET: WHAT THE WORLD EATS, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluiso asked 30 families around the world to buy a week’s worth of groceries and display it for the camera.
A family in Darfur, Sudan, had the most meager spread, with grains, sugar and salt provided by the United Nations and supplemented with purchases of limes, onions, salt and dried tomatoes. A week’s bill ran to $1.23 for a diet of congealed porridge and soup, three times a day, seven days a week.
Most abundant was a German family’s cache of breads, fresh produce, meat, beer, milk and pizza for $494.19.
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Source: Peninsula Daily News, December 28, 2005
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