Incarnation and Eating

The Hipster Conservative is honored to feature this guest post from Hännah of Wine and Marble.

October 2012

Loving your food

I love to eat what I eat. My pleasure at the stove and table are sincere and coherent.

— “Learning How to Eat Like Julia Child” by Tamar Adler, New Yorker

I think about this a lot—what food means to us, what it should mean to us, how we use it, how we taste it, how we feel about it, what it means to relate to food as a human being.

It’s frustrating to see people using food, instead of relating to it. “Eating is a chore,” says a friend, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard someone say those words. This utilitarian, eat-because-I-have-to relationship with food is unhealthy at best, and is perhaps a reflection of more serious issues: displacement, non-identification with one’s physical self (is there a word for this?), and a lack of ability to savor life outside of the manufactured world of technology, efficiency, and production.

I would argue, even, that it is anti-Christian to have a merely utilitarian relationship to one’s food. I’ll write more about this later, but if God Incarnate as the man Jesus made such a point of instituting the sacrament of communion and said that the bread was his body and the wine his blood, food can never again be just something we put in our bodies (“fuel” says that horrible industrialist metaphor) to provide energy for our day. God has eaten with us and made the very act of eating together something that he not only identified with, but made a vital part of how we relate to him and each other.