Texts: Daniel 1; I Corinthians 6
Let Food Be Thy Medicine
I’ve borrowed my sermon title this morning from the ancient words of Hippocrates, that Greek sage credited with the founding of medical study and practice. “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food,” he wrote. I encountered those words this winter, when I was reading about the many facets of healing that human beings experience. They’ve been part of my own evolution of late, something I’ll share with you a little later. Food. Healing. Ecology. Social Justice. Spirituality. These are all intricately interwoven, and I’d like to spend time considering it all with you today.
You may recall that way back in Lent, I offered several sermons on healing, only to be diverted from that topic by other pressing needs. But today I’d like to circle back to it, in order to consider the healing effect of food on human lives. It’s an urgent topic. One in eight people living in the United States experiences food insecurity. That translates to roughly 40 million people, including some 12 million children. While you might imagine that Connecticut would see lower than average food insecurity, the US Department of Agriculture suggests that in fact we’re quite average, which is to say that food insecurity is higher here than in Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York, or indeed, of any of our neighboring states. That means that the work we do, or don’t do, as the case might be, has profound consequences for addressing that very real insecurity.
But that’s not the only source of urgency around this topic. While enormous strides have been made, the Western diet, and especially the American diet, is one of the least healthy on the planet. Writers like Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and most recently, Dan Barber, have chronicled how, after World War II, mass produced food became cheap and plentiful, but that it wreaked havoc on the land, on animals, and ultimately on our own well being. Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food, Hippocrates says. Clearly that medicine is needed in all sorts of ways, radiating in multiple directions – personal health and wholeness, ecological well being, and around issues of social justice. What I’d like to encourage you to think about this morning is whether adopting a more plant based approach to eating might be considered not only an ethical activity, but a spiritual one as well.
One of the places that I encountered Hippocrates this winter was in Scott Jurek’s book Eat and Run. You may remember a sermon I preached on Jurek’s speed record on the Appalachian Trail. Eat and Run is an earlier account of how a plant based, vegan diet fuels his training as an elite ultramarathoner. In one chapter, he recounts running the Greek Spartathalon, a 152 mile race, while suffering from a broken toe. Throughout his description of the race, he weaves in meditations about food and the Greek diet, recounting how he picked ripe fruit directly from trees on training runs. Jurek believes that a plant based diet provides the body with more energy and nourishment to cover long distances than animal products, and he puts his belief to the test. Plants have the capacity to help the body recover and heal, he argues, and they allow him to cover enormous distances in record time.
Somewhere in the middle of the Spartathalon, maybe 60 miles in, Jurek is flagging. He’s chasing the leader, who is nowhere in sight, and he’s suffering from dehydration. He stumbles into a village and finds a few residents working outdoors. When he tries what little Greek he knows, asking for water, no one understands. Finally, an old woman comprehends the request. She shouts to her husband, miming the gesture for drinking. Soon, the husband emerges with a big glass of water with chunks of ice floating in it. It’s perfect, and Jurek gulps it down. But the woman won’t let Jurek leave, not yet. She goes over to her garden, where she picks a large handful of basil leaves, urging Jurek to put the basil in his small pack. And so he does. But then she takes a leafy stem and places it behind Jurek’s ear, kissing him on the cheek with a smile. With that, he’s off again.
Basil, Jurek reminds us, is the king of all herbs. The word derives from the Greek word, basileus, which means king. It is revered as a symbol of strength and good luck throughout Greece. And while he can’t say if it was the water, the kindness, or the basil, after that encounter, Jurek’s energy revived. “I was the same person,” he writes, “mildly dehydrated, hobbled with a broken toe, fatigued, with quads and calves that felt as if they had been beaten by baseball bats. But I was a different person.”[1]
Jurek is chasing the leader of the race, who he eventually overtakes, winning by a significant margin. But what makes him interesting to me is that his quest is actually a quest of the spirit, to achieve a deeper connection with himself, with other people, and with the natural world. The medicinal power of plants, and the healing qualities they provide when consumed as food, are an integral part of his spiritual quest. It’s something that I’ve begun taking seriously as well, choosing foods more carefully, opting for plant based meals when I can, and reducing, though not fully eliminating, my consumption of animal products. I’ve patronized places like Foodworks over in Old Saybrook more than I had, and I’ve enjoyed experimenting with foods and ingredients I hadn’t used previously, things like spirulina, wheatgrass, chia seeds, quinoa, bulgar, tempeh, and tofu, with lots of greens and fruits thrown in as well. And you know…it’s been kind of fun, to say nothing of any of the other benefits Jurek describes.
So ok, it’s a spiritual journey that Jurek is on, and it derives from an ancient Greek source. It has ethical and ecological ramifications that extend well beyond one’s personal life. But what about the Bible? Why consider food and plant based eating in church, as a means of being connected to God?
It turns out that what the Scott Jureks and Michael Pollans of the world are advocating isn’t new at all. It’s old. They’re recovering wisdom that our ancestors and spiritual forbears knew long ago. The story of Daniel, which we heard just a little earlier, makes that plain. Daniel is one of the great prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible, and his entire story begins with a consideration of the value of a plant based diet. The Hebrew prophets were on to this long before vegans and vegetarians hit the scene. Recall the story one more time. Daniel is an exile. He and many of his friends have been taken into captivity, displaced from a land they understood to be home. They were forced to live in Babylon, under a king who was by turns benevolent and cruel. In Babylon, Daniel and his friends are forced to assimilate to the culture around them. They were, the text tells us, stripped of their names, forced to answer to new identities. They were then stripped of their religious practices – new gods were forced upon them. What follows for Daniel and his friends in those early chapters is a contest to retain their integrity and their dignity within dehumanizing conditions. Daniel’s is a story that has been repeated time and again throughout history: a colonizing power exerts its authority not only through sheer force – by killing or plunder. It does so through the activity of cultural assimilation, erasing the identity of the colonized. You could do worse than to read the book of Daniel as a parable of the American story, to say nothing of other sites around the globe.
But here’s what’s so interesting about the book of Daniel, at least for our purposes: the very first contest of power between Daniel and his captors has to do with food – not language, not religion, but food. That’s because in the book of Daniel, but really in the entire Bible, questions of what and how we eat are central to questions of human identity. You are what you eat is the operative phrase, and Daniel reinforces that truth. The king would have the captives eat what the Bible calls “the royal portion.” That would have meant meat. It would have meant wine. It would have meant eating higher on the food chain, consuming products that only a palace, with an immense budget, could provide. And that would have meant a fundamental shift of identity for Daniel and his friends, who prefer a simpler existence by far. And so Daniel proposes an experiment. For ten days, he asks that he and his friends be allowed to eat a plant based diet, consuming only vegetables. His wager is that he and friends will actually be stronger as result of their diet. The king is skeptical, but he agrees. The end of the story may as well be the beginning of our contemporary story. After those ten days, Daniel is indeed healthier and stronger than those consuming the royal ration, and so he is allowed to continue his plant based diet, a practice that goes on for the remainder of his captivity. Food becomes not only a way of maintaining health. It becomes a strategy for maintaining an identity slowly being stripped away.
It’s not that the Bible everywhere recommends a plant based diet. It’s not that there’s any consistent ethic surrounding food or eating anywhere in the Bible, though once you’ve got eyes to see, it’s remarkable how many of the pages are consumed with prescriptions and prohibitions concerning food. Even so, the story of Daniel is one that resonates across the ages, all the way into our present concerns about the ecology and spirituality of eating. Might it be that Daniel can lend us some much needed wisdom and support as we consider different ways of organizing our habits of eating? Might it be that Daniel is not coming to us from behind, as from history, but from ahead, as so many of the prophets tend to do? Is Daniel the spiritual guide that we need, as we resist the encroachments of an industrial agriculture system, one that has stripped us of so much that is essential to our identity – our health and wholeness, but also our connection to the natural world? Maybe the Wendell Berrys and Michael Pollans of the world are simply pointing us back to…Daniel.
Let me pause here to address a lingering concern. I am making the case for the ethics and pleasures of plant based foods. I am making a case for reducing, though not necessarily eliminating, animal based products from our diets, and I’m doing so on spiritual grounds. But let me give you an out if you need it, if you’re skeptical that this is just the latest hippie dippy thing this church has embraced – I should say, by the way, that I’ve always had a special fondness for hippies, so it’s a charge that I’ll cheerfully accept! But having said that, it’s worth pointing out that we are a non-creedal church, rooted in a non-creedal tradition. We don’t have an established set of beliefs around here that you have to conform to. Neither do we have an established set of ethical codes or practices that you need to obey. New England Congregationalists are an antinomian people, which means that we’re not bound together by a law, as in a state, but by a common, animating Spirit. That means that you’re free to think what you think, feel what you feel, vote how you vote, and eat how you eat – and we’ll still love you. That’s one of the profound gifts of being a New England Congregationalist. We won’t be establishing a new purity code around food and eating, any more than we’ll be establishing purity codes around sex, alcohol, or creedal beliefs. To paraphrase Paul’s words in his letter to the Corinthians, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. But you have freedom. And so whether you eat or don’t eat, whether you consume animal products or don’t consume animal products, do it with reverence. Do it with grace. Do it with gratitude. Do it to the glory of God.
Mark Bittman is a food writer I’ve admired for a while now. He once dated my academic advisor in graduate school, and he happened to be present one evening during a gathering that turned toward theological talk. Someone must have been talking about the Trinity, because at one point, Bittman got up from the living room, where he had been sitting, and quipped, “I can’t figure out why you all are so excited about this Trilogy thing.” After that, he took up residence in the kitchen and cooked a meal, one that felt infinitely more satisfying than the conversation about the “Trilogy.” I remember three things about the meal: it was plant based, it was delicious, and it felt more, spiritually and theologically nourishing, in the broadest sense of that word, than the theology we had been discussing.
It wasn’t long after that that Bittman published his book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. It’s not the first or only such book on the market, but it’s a very good one, and it makes a strong case for cutting way back on meat and processed food, in favor of eating more vegetables and whole grains. Bittman makes his case not with a series of oughts and shoulds, not with a chronicle of prescriptions and rules. Instead, he makes his pitch on the basis of pleasure, of joy, of satisfaction, and of connection: what if you could feel great, taste delicious food, spend and consume less, contribute to a more sustainable environment, and connect more deeply with people around you? Why wouldn’t we do that? To that series of attributes, I would add that we might even deepen our spiritual lives, and that, strange to say, like Daniel, we might encounter manifestations of God when we forgo the royal portion. It is, at the very least, worthy of consideration.
Before concluding, I wish to make note of the overflowing basket of greens that we see on the communion table this morning. It’s been donated from White Gate Farm, just north of us in Lyme, and it serves as a liturgical reminder of what Scott Jurek, the book of Daniel and Mark Bittman have all been testifying to. It’s a basket of goodness. White Gate Farm is deeply invested in growing organic, sustainable, and delicious food, most of it plant based. I wonder: as we address the food insecurity that’s been so glaringly exposed in our efforts to keep the Food Pantry open, might we find ways to strengthen our friendship with places like White Gate Farm, as well as other local food producers? It might not make us run like Scott Jurek. But it might help to alleviate the food insecurity that people in Connecticut are facing. Not only that, eating from local farm cooperatives like White Gate Farm might contribute to our own bodily well being, while also contributing to the healing of our all too fragile ecosystem.
In the meantime, I’ll be curious to know what you think of this conception, both ancient and modern, to let food be your medicine, and medicine your food. Whether from Hippocrates or Daniel, from Scott Jurek or Mark Bittman, I’m curious to know if it’s a dimension of the spiritual life that you’ve experienced, or wish to experience. Don’t worry – I’ll still love you wherever you land, if you ever do. But I’d like to think that perhaps Daniel, to say nothing about the ecological changes that are upon us, is speaking words of wisdom to all of us.
[1] Jurek, Scott, Eat and Run (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), pg. 183. The story of the Spartathalon is told on pages 175-191.
