Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating

Abstract

Reviewed by: Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating Colleen Carpenter Cullinan (bio) Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating. By L. Shannon Jung. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. 167pp. $15.00. Those of us who live in rural America—and city dwellers, too, who are lucky enough to be members of a CSA farm (community-supported agriculture: buy a share in the spring, get a box of fresh vegetables once a week all summer long)—are blessed with the unusual opportunity to get to know the people who raise our food. This is not something I had ever thought about until I moved to western Minnesota. Industrial agriculture is the norm here, but small organic farms dot the landscape, islands of hand-tended diversity in a sea of chemically-overdosed, machine-oriented monocultures. Knowing where your food comes from is the first step in realizing, with Kentucky farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry, that turning water into wine is a relatively small miracle compared to turning water (and soil, and sunlight) into grapes. Coming to appreciate this humble, everyday miracle leads to ever-more surprising—and theologically intriguing—realizations about food and [End Page 122] food practices in our lives. In a world where the low cost and easy availability of food has made obesity an epidemic here, yet the expense and scarcity of food leaves ten million people a year to die of starvation and malnutrition, we desperately need a theology and ethics of eating. L. Shannon Jung offers us that—and more. "This book will help people learn to enjoy their lives more—perhaps much more," promises L. Shannon Jung in the opening line of Food for Life (xi). While such a bold claim might be perfectly at home in one of the many pop-spirituality, "name-it-claim-it" books no serious Christian would touch, it is an unusual, even shocking, opening for a theologically rigorous reflection on ethics and Christian spirituality authored by a full professor at a respected Lutheran seminary. Yet Jung's promise, rooted in honest joy, bright-eyed delight, and a deep gratitude for the gifts of God's creation, rings with truth. He insists that we were created to enjoy life (xii), and argues that delight and sharing are two basic human experiences that reveal the presence of God (xiii)—yet he does not shy away from difficult discussions of sin, hunger, gluttony, and justice. The everyday act of eating is morally and theologically complex, in ways many of us have never considered; simply opening our eyes and hearts to this fact is a key accomplishment of Jung's book. He locates our experiences of preparing, sharing, and consuming food in the spiritual as well as material realm, forcing us to rethink both the pleasures and perils of every meal. Jung's thoughtful and enlightening consideration of hunger, food, eating, sharing, and the current global food production and distribution system offers the hungry Christian a feast of ideas and practical suggestions for working towards the ideal of eating "to the glory of God" (19). Jung's book is divided into three parts: "God's Purposes for Eating," "Eating and Food System Disorders," and "Eating for Life." In the first part, he examines the biblical witness surrounding food and God, and concludes that the myriad themes organize themselves around the two broad topics of "delighting" and "sharing" (31). "Delighting" indicates the goodness of food, the goodness of God's providence in providing it for us, and the fact that we enjoy it; "sharing" points to hospitality, justice, inclusion, and outreach (or mission). In this opening section, Jung also discusses hunger and desire, noting how both are distorted in our Western consumer society. Finally, he considers why the idea of "a theology of eating" seems so strange to us, and briefly traces the history of how and why we fail to think of God and food as things that belong together. Jung argues that "food is itself a means of revelation. Through eating together we taste the goodness of God" (43), a claim he grounds primarily in the Antiochene understanding that God is fully present in all of life, penetrating and...