Breaking Bread

We are entering a season of feasting. It begins Thursday with Thanksgiving and continues through New Year’s Day.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I love the gathering of family and friends. I love the rituals of shopping and chopping. I love the laughter and chatter in the kitchen. Oh, and the smells that first fill the kitchen and then the entire house take me back to dozens of other festive Thanksgiving gatherings. I also love Thanksgiving because it is about gathering and gratitude rather than exchanging stuff. This year we will follow our new custom of having two Thanksgivings, one here at JUC on Thursday and one at home on Friday. I do love feasting. Alas, my love of feasting is becoming a bit too obvious. Ah, but that can wait for my New Year’s resolutions.

Feasting is as natural to humans as breathing and walking. Our earliest ancestors hunted and gathered their food. They completely depended on one another, living in small bands. When the hunt was successful, everyone ate. When it wasn’t, no one did. Foods gathered were brought back to the group to be shared. Without sharing and cooperation, early humans would have died. We humans exist because our ancestors learned to share food.

Early religion was part of daily life, not something separate from it. And early religions are very concerned with food. There are prayers and rituals before the hunt and prayers of thanksgiving for food the gods provide. Later, as our ancestors developed agriculture, the connection between religion and food continued. New gods of the harvest were created. Our ancestors prayed for rain and for protection from harvest destroying pests. In agricultural societies harvest time is a time of celebration and gratitude. These ancient rituals came down to us and shape holidays like Thanksgiving, even though only a tiny percentage of people in our society have any experience with a harvest.

For millennia sharing a meal has been a fundamental human experience. Imagine a celebration without food. In fact, every celebration has its appropriate food linked with it — from birthday cake and ice cream to a Seder meal with its rituals linked to specific foods like four cups of wine and parsley dipped in salt water. Every ethnic group has special foods associated with important celebrations. When I grew up Christmas without tamales was inconceivable. Think of your own cultural background and all the foods associated with it.

What people eat (and what they refuse to eat) has helped to define who they are. Just as important, with whom they eat has defined their place in the social order. Indeed, it still does. We would feel fine inviting each other to our home for a meal, but most of us would be very uncomfortable sharing a meal with a homeless person, a Mexican immigrant or an Arab. One of the most revolutionary things that Jesus did was to share meals with all kinds of undesirable people. And think about the imagery surrounding Jesus’s last days. One of the key images is of the Last Supper with his disciples — not the last stroll, not the last trip to the market, not the last sermon, not the last theological discussion, but the last supper.

Breaking bread together has always been a central part of the human experience.

Until now, that is. Somehow, while no one was paying much attention, the age old practice of breaking bread together got broken.

I want to share with you one of the most disgusting, revolting, shocking, nauseating statistics that I have encountered in the past year. I can hardly bring myself to utter the words. Brace yourselves. Nineteen percent of the meals eaten in America today are fast food meals eaten in a car. One out of five meals is eaten in a car! Is that gross, or what? One in three teenagers in America eats fast food every single day. Every single day!

It gets worse. The meal itself is a weird mutant of real food.

Let’s look at a typical fast food meal eaten in a car. I take this example, by the way, from Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s a terrific book. As part of his research, Pollan stopped for lunch with his wife and son at a McDonald’s. However, the results would have been pretty much the same at Burger King or Wendy’s or KFC or some other fast food chain.

Pollan’s wife, no fan of fast food, opted for the Cobb salad with Caesar dressing. At $3.99, it was the most expensive item on the menu. Pollan ordered a cheeseburger, large fries, and a large Coke. And large means large; the Coke is a full 32 ounces, a quart, of soft drink. His eleven year-old son chose Chicken McNuggets, a double thick vanilla shake and a large order of fries.

Salad, burger, fries, chicken, soft drink, shake. It sounds simple enough. It isn’t. This meal is a stunning example of what has happened to the American food supply. It has been industrialized beyond what most of us imagine. Those white meat chicken McNuggets, for example, are not at all what they seem. You and I might think it is, well, a piece of chicken breaded and fried. Silly us. This isn’t about fried chicken. This is about food science. This is about food laboratories creating elaborate concoctions. There are thirty-eight ingredients in a chicken nugget. Among the ingredients in the nugget are some chemicals derived from petroleum refineries and chemical plants. Here are a few of them (forgive my pronunciation of these foreign words): sodium alumimum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate and calcium lactate. These all keep the nuggets from going rancid as they travel around the country before being cooked. These golden nuggets have come a long, long way before they get to us in Denver. And often they have been around a while. They have to last a long time.

Dimethypolysiloxene is added to the cooking oil to keep foaming down during frying. Foaming must be a problem, for dimethypolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector. And then there is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, a petroleum derived form of butane that is used to “help preserve freshness.” Thankfully, very little TBHQ is used. A gram of it can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, suffocation and collapse.”

But let’s go back to the food for a minute. It turns out that this family meal of salad, burger, fries, chicken, shake and Coke is actually largely a meal of transformed corn. The Aztecs used to think of themselves as the people of corn. Aztecs, it turns out, have nothing on us.

I remember four years ago when I drove from Denver to Boston. A few hours into the trip, as I entered Nebraska on I-76, I began to see corn fields. It was August and the corn was high. The corn continued all day as I drove east across Nebraska and then crossed Iowa. Corn continued across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and even into western New York. I drove through a thousand miles of corn, 80 million acres of corn. I remember wondering what where all that corn went. It seemed like too much corn for corn oil or even for feeding livestock.

Well, thanks to Michael Pollan, I know now. Lots and lots of that corn went into that meal at McDonalds. It turns out that corn has a chemical fingerprint. The carbon in corn has a unique structure that can be identified using a mass spectrometer. Taking a duplicate of this fast food lunch to a lab in Berkeley showed what percent of the calories in this meal came from corn.

One hundred percent of the calories in the Coke come from corn. How is this possible? It is because Coke and other soft drinks are not sweetened with sugar anymore. They are sweetened with HFCS, or high fructose corn syrup. This is one of the great inventions of the industrial food chain. High fructose corn syrup did not exist until 1980. Now it is everywhere. It is so cheap that it can be used to sweeten and supersize all kinds of food. Some of us are old enough to remember when a Coke contained six ounces. The large Coke Pollan bought is more than five times that size. Think about the sudden rise of obesity in America. It coincides with the incredible rise of cheap calories produced by the industrial food chain, much of it dependent on hybrid corn heavily fertilized with petroleum products.

Let’s go on analyzing this fast food meal. The calories in the milk shake are 78 percent from corn. The salad dressing calories (all 500 of them) are 65 percent from corn. The chicken nuggets are 56 percent. The cheeseburger is 52 percent corn. The calories in the French fries are “only” 23 percent from corn. From the point of evolution, one wonders whether we are using corn or whether corn is using us.

I hope I haven’t ruined your appetite.

Now, I don’t want to simply cast blame on the industrial food industry and government policies that helped make this possible.

You and I helped to make this mess possible and profitable. And the bad effects of the way we have come to eat are not just poor nutrition. When we got out of the habit of breaking bread together we did damage to our souls as well as our bodies.

Let me share a brief story that got me to thinking about this. Five years ago my family visited Spain for two weeks. As part of our driving tour we were going to pass through the city of Tarragona in northeast Spain. Ten years before we had hosted Andres, a foreign student from Tarragona. Andres was sixteen when he came to visit. Over the years we had stayed in infrequent e-mail contact. Andres is a delightful young man. We wrote and asked if he would be around and if we could get together. We set up a meeting.

Well, Andres’s parents learned that we were coming and arranged to take the afternoon off. They gave us a marvelous walking tour of the Roman ruins and the ancient part of town. Then they invited us to a late Spanish lunch at a favorite tiny restaurant in the old part of downtown. We were treated like visiting royalty. After all, we had hosted their son for six weeks. What a feast! We had a long and delicious meal and delightful conversation.

As we chatted, Andres’s father, Dr. Medina, a psychiatrist, spoke of his one visit to the United States. He had been to New York City. One thing that had impressed him deeply was a visit to Wall Street. Dr. Medina talked about seeing men in thousand dollar suits wolfing down a hot dog from a street vendor and seeing other obviously wealthy people grabbing a bite at their desks. He was mystified. He, a doctor of psychiatry, looked to me, as the handy expert on American culture, to explain this behavior. He could not understand why anyone who was wealthy would eat like that. Day laborers in Spain have a more civilized lunch, he said. If you make good money that means that you eat your two hour lunch in a nice restaurant with friends. What was all this money for if you ended up wolfing down a hot dog at the corner?

What could I say to him? I told him that we Americans are crazy. 

Think of two meals as different as they can be.

The first meal, if I can call it that, is an example of everything that has gone wrong in our lives. The first meal I grab in a panic as I run late in the morning. I rush out of the house and to my nearby fast food chain spot. I drive up to the drive through line, stop at the display, and communicate with a voice box. I order some egg thingy with nugget fries and bad coffee. I drive up to the window as my order, which was already prepared before I arrived, is placed into a bag. I grab my bag, put the coffee in the cup holder (hey, car manufacturers know their market) and drive off. I try to eat most of it at red lights, hoping not to spill anything on myself. I stuff the greasy, salty mess into my mouth. I can feel my arteries clogging. When I get to my appointment I quickly check for crumbs and embarrassing spills on myself. I check my teeth in the rear view mirror in the hope that not too much of this glop has stuck to my teeth. Remember, this is one meal in five in America today.

Now, let’s go to the other extreme. Think of a special meal for family and friends. This meal begins as a shared project. We plan the menu carefully. The ingredients are chosen with care. We shop for fresh, preferably organic ingredients. If meat is on the menu, we choose meat raised humanely, without hormones and antibiotics and, if we are lucky, the animals actually ate food that is natural for them. (Beef do not naturally eat corn. They have to be given all kinds of drugs in order to make them tolerate corn.)

Once we have carefully planned this meal and sought out tasty ingredients raised in sustainable ways, we take the time to cook the meal. Ideally, we cook the meal together. The preparation is a craft and an act of love. It is also lots of fun.

Our guests arrive and are welcomed. After a bit we sit down to our meal. We break bread together. We eat good, nutritious and delicious food. We have leisurely conversation in which we catch up with each other’s lives. We listen. We laugh. We savor the food’s rich flavors.

This meal has fed our bodies and our souls. This meal has also helped to change the world. It has connected us to responsible farmers who care for the land and their animals. This meal is taking pesticides and lethal chemicals out of the food chain.

Now, we can’t make every meal a feast. But we can learn to eat in such a way that sustains life on our planet and sustains our souls. What and how we eat can either destroy our bodies and our souls, or it can help us live with health and joy.

This is a time of feasting. Let us break bread together. Let our feasting be a shared celebration of life. May every meal be a blessing.