the GOLDEN RULE of FOOD

Photo Credit: Keoni Cabral, Flickr

So I’m sure you’ve heard it- “Do unto others has you have them do unto you.”  Religious scholar Karen Armstrong based her TED award winning Charter for Compassion- on this very idea. I’ll let you hear her explain it a bit more (listen until the 6:55 mark).

From a mystic point of view, the basic message of the golden rule is more than reciprocal kindness, more than “I’ll be kind to you so that you will be kind to me.”  It’s about Oneness.  I’m kind to you because you are me.  Whoa.  Really, what I’m laying down here is, from a mystical point of view God or Spirit is in everything.  I’m kind to you because the God in me recognizes the God in you.  In that way, we are One.

So what does this have to do with food?  I’ll tell you!  To explain myself, I’ll be paraphrasing the outstanding and insightful essay Food/Body/Person by Deane Curtin.  The idea that food is just spiritless matter can be traced back to Plato’s dualistic philosophy, which distinguishes between two worlds – the ordinary world, the world of body, and the extraordinary world, the world of mind.  For Plato, the purpose of life is to pursue the extraordinary and let the ordinary fall away.  Anything related to food, whether it be the production, processing or consumption of it, it is much too ordinary to be considered worthy of philosophical pursuit.  Of course, the body needs food, but from the Platonic point of view it’s just fuel, nothing more.
But, says Curtin, this ain’t right.  In fact this mentality is what allowed us to devalue food so much that we would do anything, including unconscionable damage to the earth, to make it cheaper and easier to get.  For goodness sakes we invented go-gurt! (Listen until the 2:35 mark).

From an economic angle the reason we invented go-gurt (or premade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches… really?) is because we’ve worked out a system of surplus and subsidies that allow food companies to keep cranking out new ways to market food to us.
From a philosophical and spiritual angle, we’ve made go-gurt because we’ve lost the ability to find holiness in the ordinary.  Food seems so picayune, compared with the great questions of life, “Who am I?”  and “Why are we here?”  In this mentality it has become like “yesterday’s breakfast.”  Spiritually stale.

But, there is more to food than its ordinary appearance.  Curtin claims that food and humans are in a “mutually defining relationship.”  How we think about food, in turn is how we think about ourselves.  By objectifying food, disregarding it as if it has no lasting meaning, we objectify everything in relation to food, which is a whole heck of a lot.  Food touches every part of our social lives- politics, economics, employment, poverty, community, health, and even religion.  If we devalue food, we devalue food workers, we devalue land, we devalue farmers, and we even devalue our own bodies.

So my twist on Curtin’s argument is a Golden Rule of Food, “Do unto food as you would have food do unto you.”  Approach food as a gift, as an “implement of magic,” a secret doorway into the mysteries of the universe, and I do believe food will give back to you the same way.  Like Karen Armstrong said, religion is about behaving differently.  If we behaved differently with our food, if we “dethroned ourselves from being the center of the world” and at every meal put food there – the chicken who who once alive and now dead; the onion that became itself under ground, in the earth, with worms and bugs and microscopic bacteria for it’s neighbours; even to reflect and be thankful for the person who grew the food or harvested it, to be aware and to care about their lives and well being – we might just come into the presence of the divine.

This might be what Dogen, a 13th century Zen monk, meant when he wrote “We are, therefore, the personification of the universe when we eat—this is a fact that only the Buddhas fully understand—and the universe is the personification of Truth.  When we eat the universe is the whole Truth in its appearance, nature, substance, force, activity, cause, effect, relatedness, consequence and individuality.  The Truth manifests itself when we eat and, when eating, we can realize the manifestation of Truth.”

References

Curtin, D. W. (1992). Food/Body/Person. Cooking, eating, thinking : Transformative philosophies of food (pp. 3-22). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dogen. (1992). Fushuku-hampo (meal-time regulations). Cooking, eating, thinking : Transformative philosophies of food (pp. 280-285). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nestle, M. (2006). What to eat (1st ed.). New York: North Point Press.