The good Christian answer is that inner beauty is all that matters, but if you pay attention to society, some Christians might be fooling themselves. Actions speak louder than words in this case. Looks have become everything and I’m not even talking about body image — I’m talking about our relationship with food. Food has taken center stage lately with documentaries like King Corn, Killer at Large, and Food, Inc. courting the topic like a celebrity. Food has been around much longer than the age of celebrity, but since WWII it has taken a similar detrimental route. Just like the pin-up girls in war times were lusted over and pined after (and now has become a multi-billion dollar industry) so can a person lust, want, crave, indulge, and become addicted to food.
When you walk into a grocery store almost everything you see has been picked over, cleaned, sorted through, and genetically modified for your eye-seeing pleasure. Now this also depends on where you live. Take for instance Beverly Hills, California vs. Watts, California… based on zip codes and incomes, delivery trucks are ordered to drop off their best produce in the best neighborhoods. The produce does look different, but that is another very important blog (stay tuned).
Appearance is everything. We will eat a good looking tomato that tastes mealy and gross (or a zucchini or apple, etc.) because it looked like it was “supposed to.” This summer we grew our own and they split due to too much watering (I was really taking care of them). They looked weird and diseased — you would have never found one of these in a store. But they tasted heavenly. It was like eating candy. I began to realize that this is how God intended food to be and maybe I wouldn’t crave “guilty pleasure” food if I knew what real food tasted like.
But what is real? I’ve talked with numerous women in different small groups and Bible studies and they tell me that the most invested dialogue they have at a night’s meeting is not about the Bible — it’s about the scale. No they don’t come out and say how much they weigh (cardinal sin), but from compliments to dessert to dieting there are a plethora of topics to choose from. ”Oh I shouldn’t,” says one woman when presented with the nightly communion brownie and she is lauded for her self-discipline and good morals of avoiding temptation. Then there is the other woman who is on her third and silent comments are made with eyebrows around the room. She responds with her penance soon after, “Oh I am so bad. I will run an extra mile tomorrow.” Great. The world remains in balance.
In the same way the porn industry exploits, manipulates, and feeds addiction, so do food companies. Study after study how high fructose corn syrup and other chemically manufactured preservatives are not good for our bodies. They add to epidemics like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but yet there they are on the food aisle staring back at us… calling out our name with the shiny packaging and cheap price tag. The temptation is there, but who told us it was a temptation?
The problem is that we have turned the act of eating into a moral issue — the good vs. the bad. We all like a bad boy at one time or another — why not indulge the fantasy… with a creme puff? Women are portrayed in commercials clad in silk pjs devouring their chocolate bars or like a herd of wild animals chasing down a truck with 100 calories inside. No wonder — they’re hungry. We need more than 100 calories to live, but this snack is viewed as morally okay because of the calorie content despite the chemicals and preservatives. We can enact our wildest dreams as long as it’s with sugar.
Food is a moral issue, but not one weighted with a scale. It’s the behind the scenes operation that we need to examine in a faith based context. It’s hard to visualize the small child who is working for farm Nestle contracts with as the chocolate bar melts in your mouth. Ignorance truly is bliss. Monsanto, a seed company, is slowly patenting seed after seed and making heirloom produce a thing of ancient history. They also strategically crowd out (or sue) small farmers (See Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by, Kingsolver or the documentary The World According to Monsanto).
Like the porn industry, people are working behind the scenes to make sure you don’t see it for what it is, so you have to do your homework. As in grade school, it’s not fun, but you have to do it to get by to become aware of the answer to the problem and when we have lost our awareness haven’t we lost what makes us human? People don’t generally view the girl in the video (or guy) as someone’s daughter or son… that would make it too real. They view her or him as something to be devoured and consumed. In doing so, people have become commodities just like food. They become victims needing help and recovery and I mean this for those in the porn industry and the cows we will eventually eat who are standing in their own fecal matter eating corn. Corn that they were not designed to eat or metabolize so they are killed before it becomes a problem.
However, it has now become a national problem. The United States has the highest instances of both prostate and breast cancers in the world; both cross ethnic and socio-economic divides — no foody left behind. It is time to realize that this is a national crisis stemming from our food supply. No, not every case is from food, but something is going on. Even when you’re not dealing with cancer, in 2006 112,000 people were killed from obesity — 28 were killed from terrorism. So as we talk about healthcare can we please have the CEOs from fast food joints and sugar cereals not on the food advisory board in the government? This is going to take more than a daily 30 minute jog which is all that is preached.
It is time to wake up to what is real and stop living artificial lives — in our food and our bodies. What is really a moral issue? We need to care about more than the pounds on the scale. We are people not pounds.
