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1 . Introduction^

Food consumes us. It affects almost every aspect of our lives –– enriching our souls, sustaining our bodies, transforming our world and filling our minds.

Many people turn to food for comfort, as anyone who tunes in to the Food Network and stares longingly at fresh baked cakes or macaroni and cheese might well attest. For this reason, food is more than a necessity. It is a reward, a thing to anticipate and enjoy without regret. Food also adds a certain spiritual element to our lives. Crème brulée can put us in a Zen-like trance, mushrooms can open doors to divine illumination and bread and wine can bring us closer to our god. Yet food is all encompassing –– while it touches the spiritual and artistic aspects of our lives, it also affects science and the natural world.

Food affects the whole world, and the whole world has food to offer us. Some of our favorite foods come from different countries, like amaretto from Italy. Of course, not every foreign food can be pleasing to every palate. Some of us may not be very fond of beans on toast from England or nshima from Zambia. Yet no matter our personal tastes, food affords us an opportunity to connect with and understand people around the world.

As globalization further expands this world of ours, the issue of food will be forefront in our consciousness. Food is a powerful ambassador of culture, so when McDonald’s finds its way to a city in Saudi Arabia or a little village in Greece, American culture will also be present there. This fact poses many ethical problems. Is McDonald’s food in China nothing more than a representative of American cultural imperialism? Are the American people unwittingly participating in the subjugation of other nations and their people? Perhaps the answer to both these questions is “yes.” For instance, the majority of chocolate sold in America is produced using slave labor. Coffee producers also commonly engage in unfair labor practices. For this reason many people purchase fair trade goods.

Food poses even more ethical questions, and not all of them involve globalization. For instance, is it immoral to advertise unhealthy food products to children? What can we do to lessen the harsh effect contemporary farming practices have on the environment? These moral dilemmas cause much confusion and controversy and will continue to do so into the future. Food can also be a source of major personal confusion and strife. Some people eat too much. Some don’t eat at all.

No matter how much trouble and sadness food causes, it will always be important to us. It is everywhere and will be for as long we live, providing nourishment for our bodies, satisfaction for our senses and food for thought.

–Anne Pauw Charter Editor

2 . Comfort Television by Andrea Crow^

The purpose of television is to entertain. Some would argue that television is also meant to quickly communicate important information to a large audience. The emergence of the Internet, however, has taken television’s place as the fastest way to get information. The only reason to watch the evening news is for the entertainment of seeing people do interesting things instead of reading about it. People don’t watch television to get information but to occupy their attention with something more interesting than their own lives.

So why do people watch the Food Network?

I’ve wondered this since arriving at Gonzaga. I assumed that the only people who watched the Food Network were unemployed or retired and were just trying to pass the time. At Gonzaga, I met many people who not only watched the Food Network, but also had favorite cooking shows that they made an effort to watch regularly. I understood the entertainment value in shows like Iron Chef, but cooking programs don’t show anything I couldn’t see in any dorm kitchen on campus. And unlike watching a television show, in a real kitchen I might actually get to eat the food that was made.

This summer, I worked with a group of Food Network enthusiasts. During shifts, we frequently had down time during which someone would flip on the TV to watch Giada, Paula Dean, or Bobby Flay. Talking with some of my co-workers about their interest in the Food Network, I learned that they never attempted the recipes they watched the stars make on television. When asked why they liked the Food Network, most responded, “I don’t know — it’s comforting.” Watching the shows myself I realized that they were right — there is something very comforting about watching the Food Network.

At first I thought it was comforting because sitting in the kitchen while an adult figure prepares a meal is like reliving childhood. Watching Paula Dean did kind of remind me of watching my grandmother make family meals. But that explanation wasn’t completely satisfactory. Even though every host was doing the same thing, some were enjoyable to watch while others seemed cold or boring. The comfort factor didn’t come simply from watching people cook but from the personality of the specific hosts. It wasn’t until I tried to put cooking shows into a genre of television that I realized why they are especially comforting.

Cooking shows involve first person interaction. That is, the host of the show is talking directly to the individual viewer. Talk show hosts do that to a certain degree: they frequently address their audience, discussing current events or sharing things they find interesting. However, the Food Network’s hosts engage in a different type of audience interaction. Talk show hosts primarily interact with people on their show, while drawing the home viewer in occasionally. Additionally, they tend to address the audience as a whole, specifically acknowledging their studio audience. Cooking shows keep the interaction strictly between the host and the anonymous individual viewer. The host frequently speaks in the first person plural to give instructions, saying things like, “Now let’s add this ingredient” or “Next we’ll preheat the oven.” The host looks directly at the viewer, speaking as though they are friends.

I thought cooking shows could go in the same category as the news. Both communicate information that could be obtained more effectively from the Internet or printed media. Both involve the host or anchor speaking directly to the viewer. And seeing the same news anchors every night does make the audience feel a certain connection with them. Many people were sad when Peter Jennings died because they were used to him showing up on their television screens every night to tell them stories about the world. However, the news does not draw in the audience in the same way. The anchor reports to an audience rather than interacting with them. The viewer watching the news is not involved in the events of the newscast. When watching the Food Network, viewers feel like the host wants to do nothing more than spend their day cooking food in the kitchen with them.

Having considered the type of entertainment the Food Network is, I decided that its cooking shows really belong to the same television genre as Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood or Elmo’s World. The hosts of such shows entertain by providing companionship to viewers. Paula Dean asks us questions and teaches us things and tells us we’re wonderful just like Mr. Rogers, Kermit the Frog and Shari Lewis did when we were children. This type of interaction is probably why the Food Network is especially popular with college students. Being away at college takes the student out of the home. Watching the Food Network allows a student to return to that safe, predictable environment. The host takes the parent’s place, making each viewer feel that the he or she cares about them as an individual, just as children’s television hosts do.

The Food Network’s cooking shows aren’t typical entertainment because they don’t bring extraordinary events to ordinary people. Instead, they bring an ordinary pastime which entertains people by filling a void of comfort in their lives.

3 . Pop-Tarts and Pickled Peppers by Mallory Ferland^

What have we done to food and when did we do it? Food is everywhere and everything; it is the “it” of life for nearly every modernized culture. It is glamour, society, entertainment, a station and status indicator, hobby, art, profession, dread, desire, culture and lurking somewhere behind all that it is a part of the primordial tri-force of life sustenance. When was food celebritized, or has it always been? Television devotes an entire network and a half to cuisine –– aside from the Food Network, there is the Travel Channel with Bourdain and Zimmer, Bravo’s Top Chef, TLC’s Take Home Chef, as well as the plethora of television advertisements pushing mass produced and packaged bounty. Suffice to say food has burrowed quite the permanent residence in the television industry. Food in print media is equal in ambition to its televised cousin — cookbooks, magazines, newspaper columns, web logs (I too have a food blog cavorting as a fictitious bakery), photography and art. Legions of food aficionados receive monthly subscriptions to Bon Apétit and Gourmet magazines, and the cookbook industry is one of the highest grossing in publishing. The Internet has become a hub where traveling foodies can report their dining finds, and demi-chefs can boast of their creations alongside the photographers and artists of stylized food. In all of these various aspects, food represents amusement, comfort and identity. Clearly, food is more than just food.

Though tempting, one cannot pin this reality merely to 21st century commercialism. The charlatan Rachel Ray did not invent the television food industry despite her present day ownership of the genre. Are the 1960s a far enough look backward, with the famed Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet? No, because this essay is neither about television nor articles and pictures. It is, rather, about the role of food as something other than necessity, although for many in the world, even as a mere necessity, it is in short supply. This enlarged role of food is not unique to the present century or to any specific location; indeed it seems to be a phenomenon of all places and all times dating as far back as anyone cares to look. In Christian culture it started with Eve. She didn’t need the fruit, she wanted the fruit. Attribute it to moral lessons if you must, but in this ancient fable, food assumes a value other than simple nourishment. Sadly this particular story relates the misuse of food to sin; separate it please. One can look to a past even more remote than the story of the Fall to find that food has always represented something far more than nourishment — in this case a paradigm of society.

Social status from ancient to modern times produces and is produced by eating habits. It is no mystery that the rich eat more and the poor eat less. We all know how a “peasant bowl” pales compared to a “dish fit for a king,” and it is no stretch to say that one’s girth once reflected one’s social position. Did the peasants not eat millet yet dream of dining on rice? Aztec kings drank spiced cocoa while the villagers pined. Plantation slaves toiled to harvest crops of which they consumed only scraps. And atop all historical clichés stands Marie Antoinette’s detached enjoyment of cakes while the paysans clamored for simple bread. We always want something better than we have. While scraps may be thrown together to make a meal, even in today’s world the thought of more glamorous fare is alluring and exciting. No one eats caviar for sustenance, nor does one consume cakes and treats for the sake of holding body and soul together. So why, for centuries, have daintier foods been needed, been wanted? There has to be something more than mere taste and satisfaction. The answer is that all humans identify with their food, in any language, at any age, in any region. Twentieth century author and chef James Beard commented, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.”¹ As such it is the one thing all people can exalt as the treat, the comfort, the centerpiece of their respective cultures. Today we can see this in media and merchandise, but the reality has been in place, in various forms, forever.

One example of a “Pop-Tart of the past” is the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale. While it may have been uncouth to represent food in high literary forms, there was no problem discussing treats in children’s rhymes and games. Why for any other reason would one sing of a boy picking pickled peppers? In examination nearly all nursery rhymes have some mention of food. We have Little Miss Muffet being disturbed while eating her curds and whey; going to market to buy a fat hog; four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie; Mr. & Mrs. Jack Sprat’s eating habits; St. Clement’s bells ringing of oranges and lemons; Peter the Pumpkin Eater; the plumb on the thumb of little Jack Horner; patty cake, patty cake; the muffin man; little Tom Tucker singing for his supper; hot cross buns; peas porridge hot, etc. Most of these foods are treats; i.e., pies, fruits and cakes –– treats that when the majority of these rhymes came into being were far rarer in appearance than they are today. How fervently a child of yesteryear may have pined for a pint of pickled peppers may be debatable, but fruit and sweets were highly sought-after treats in Europe during the 17th century when the majority of traditional English rhymes emerged (the earliest — sing a song of six pence — dates back to the Middle Ages ).² These rhymes were by no means written solely about food. Indeed most scholarly approaches to nursery rhymes tend to equate the food to symbols of political and social events of the time. For example the rhyme, “A is for apple pie, B bit it, C cut it…” was adapted from a similar refrain found in a critique on clergy preaching methods in 1671.³  But food was chosen nonetheless, and again we have to account for food serving as a representation or diversion from reality and as a desire for something better.

Whatever was done to food was done a long time ago. After serving its function as sustainer of life, it moved on to assume an entirely different role. Should we now eat to survive out of our shame of modern commercialism and capitalism? Live as minimalists or vegans, only eat what has died or what is absolutely necessary to maintain our bodies? If we all carried begging bowls, who would then be left to fill them? But why break the pattern? Eating for mere survival has never been in the books, at least not since the creation of cake. Cuisine is art; like all arts, it is a form of life enrichment. It is not wasteful as long as it is appreciated. Eat, drink and be merry — watch cooking shows, read magazines, pore over recipes and subscribe to web logs; purchase pop tarts and bake little cakes. To the cynic it is all one wasteful bacchanal. Food is both connector and divider. What we do to food has not changed, only how we do it. They say one should not live to eat, but rather eat to live — instead why not just live and eat?

End Notes
1 James Beard.
2 Iona and Peter Opie. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. (Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1997).
3 Iona and Peter Opie. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. (Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1997) 53.

4 . Food in Books and on Film^

Everyone likes food, including writers and filmmakers. Here are some books and movies a food lover might enjoy:

Food Books:

The Gonzaga Bulletin Editor Tim Bross recommends:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Charter Editor Anne Pauw recommends:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown

Student Publications Manager Joanne Shiosaki recommends:

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Food Movies:

Charter Advisor Eric Cunningham recommends:

“Babette’s Feast,” directed by Gabriel Axel

“Chocolat,” directed by Lasse Hallström

“Super Size Me,” directed by Morgan Spurlock

Contributor Daniel Pauw recommends:

“Ratatouille,” directed by Brad Bird

Student Publications Manager Joanne Shiosaki recommends:

“Tampopo,” directed by Juzo Itami

“Eat Drink Man Woman,” directed by Ang Lee

“Big Night,” directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci

“The Wedding Banquet,” directed by Ang Lee

“Soul Food,” directed by George Tillman, Jr.

5 . Food: It’s the New Sex by Mary Elder^

When I listen to my peers talk about Food, I hear about relationships of such dazzling emotional complexity that if I was not listening carefully I might mistake Food for a drug, an abusive boyfriend or a religion. I love Food, but I can’t have it right now because then I won’t stop. Every time you eat Food, you make a moral choice. Food was the best night of my life but he never calls anymore.

A person who says she does not have issues with Food is like a person who says she does not have issues with her parents: she might be really lucky, or she might be lying. Most women I know have been on a diet at one time. I know fewer men who diet, but lots of guys will eat healthier Food, presumably so they can be in better shape, or maybe just sound self-righteous.

This article is not going to be an elegy for girls with eating disorders, a discussion of athletes who puke to keep their weight down or an appeal to eat only Fair Trade goods. Rather, I modestly propose that we examine Food within the category of Things Which Humans Need In Order to Continue Existing. This exclusive list also includes air, water and sex. I am not going to write about air because it bores me.

Water and sex provide excellent examples of how attitudes toward the basic have changed for the better. Our hairy caveman ancestors would drink water from streams and rivers, hoping no mammoth had died upstream to pollute the water. Historically, water has been too essential to human life to question. Now, however, water is a luxury good for those of us living in the United States. We can buy it in bottles. We can buy it flavored. We can filter it. As our society becomes more technologically advanced, things which were once merely essential become pleasurable. This point is even more obvious when we examine sexual reproduction. I am not aware whether it was a Neanderthal, a chimpanzee or a pile of bubbly cells which first made the discovery, but whoever first had the thought “Hey! We could do this even when we don’t want to make more of us!” was right up there on the good idea front.

The same should apply to Food. Food is really neat. I spend time with Food everyday, and I am always satisfied at the end. The question we should ask when we pick up a hamburger is not an emotionally charged, “Is this moral?” or, “Will this make me fat and alone?” but rather, “Do I really want this in my mouth? Will I enjoy it?” If the answer is yes, then swallow on, comrades. In a society of abundance, we should not be transferring our class guilt or body issues to poor, already dead pieces of cow. There is a place for activism, but it is not in my mouth.

This might initially appear to be a blatant call for hedonism, a chocolate and pizza binge of oil and glory. It is not. People who have not yet crippled themselves with Food hang-ups are fairly self-regulating. Sometimes they want an apple, sometimes they want a brownie. No one’s perfect all the time, but neither is anyone wholly a glutton.

I conclude my article with this directive: Eat Really Good Food. As much as you want. Then stop when you are full. And do not think about it too much, because that just kills the experience.

6 . Brooklyn Food Zen by Thuy-Dzuong Nguyen^

I secretly despise cracking crème brulée with a spoon.

It means eating it and relishing it but also swallowing it and swallowing the sunset, a sorry act of demolition until I am forced to rely on metaphysics to consider the dessert I've become.

So I stare at it for ten minutes before eating it. People wonder. Then I take photographs for probably another good ten minutes. I want to preserve everything, all the crisp detail, to someday bring it back to life, and it in turn brings old things back to life.

But at some breaking point, the desire for the experience trumps the fear of its loss and the fear of its temporary nature –– and ultimately, the fear of voids. I sigh and put down the camera. A dessert has put me into submission.

a perfect, well-timed, vintage crack.

The next moments are much too short and kind of vague, the kind of moments people crave if they are impossible to adequately relive, crave because they are forgotten, the way we immediately forget the feeling of touch and desire it again like addicts.

The creamy undersolid melts down my throat like warm velvet after swirling in the mouth, as a bite ends in the surprise of a gritty crunch, then a warmth down my spine on a suspended liquid cord. There is a veil between sleep and life and between the bite and the swallow, a place where language simultaneously has no meaning and every meaning, and a place that is just not here.

Brooklyn and food zen wash over me and a consumption high begins. Sugar is in my molars and thoughts wander to the places of marvelous encounters with marvelous concoctions.

my own personal Willy Wonka repository where Masaru Emoto would be a prophet and Ben Bernanke would be a monster. where there is no hate and all thoughts of all people are completely transparent. things last forever. where New York City is the whole world in a drop of water and everything stays perfectly sharp

At the edge of the world, I close my eyes and press the back of the empty spoon against the roof of my mouth because it fits, press my tongue against its scoop and wonder where the moment went.

Crème brulée involved all five senses. A dessert became an archetype for a memory shard, an isolated bubble to which one can just add water and it transforms into the universe. It’s in that universe where one liquid communion strips away everything else. There, memory exists and will always exist. Preservation is eternal and everything is thick and sweet.

childhood marshmallows, rock candy, poetry

and that Betty Botter story

Then there is laundry on brownstone Sunday mornings when the attendant trades for quarters on behalf of a broken change machine.

a wall of mechanized maids pushes detergent-scented warmth out the storefront door

Brooklyn tastes like the wind, the smoothness of clean white sheets, contrasted with morning light into the gritty texture of cracked shower tile near wooden floors and over soft bare skin,

the sound of rushing water

and finally, the smell of fresh bread.

7 . Eating God by Eric Cunningham^

In a lecture delivered at the Esalen Institute in 1983, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna (1943-2000) drew a comparison between the practice of eating psychedelic mushrooms and the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. Referring to both practices as forms of “theophagy” (god-eating), McKenna asserted that

the classic mushroom cults of Mexico were destroyed by the coming of the Spanish conquest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute monopoly on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the new world they came upon people calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to push the old religion into the mountains….¹

McKenna’s reading of the Spanish conquest of Mexico suggests that part of the struggle between the Aztecs and the Spaniards was a contest between Christian and pre-Christian theophagy, a contest won by the Spaniards who were acting as the vanguard of a relentless juggernaut of Christian culture. Ironically, Christian culture itself was soon pushed “into the mountains” by a force even more aggressive and hell-bent on conquest than Catholic Spain. This force was modernization, and it succeeded, through the watering-down of religion, in reducing the theophagy of the Eucharist to a purely symbolic act. It then succeeded, first through its anthropological definitions of “primitive” cultures, and later through its legal definitions of correct and incorrect modes of consciousness, in turning the psychedelic experience into a bizarre mode of knowledge located somewhere between witchcraft and felony. Thus in the modern world, eating God has become either an absurdity or a crime.

Nevertheless, for a number of contemporary scholars, the debate between psychedelic consciousness and religious insight is still unresolved. What seems to be at stake in the revived contest is no longer which culture will “win,” but rather which form of “god-eating” is most authentic. McKenna, during his long career as a psychedelic spokesman and counter-culture guru, persistently argued that the visions induced by hallucinogenic plants were not only reliable means to the acquisition divine gnosis, but were also the most effective and most valid means. In comparing psychedelic experience to more conventional forms of religious praxis such as fasting and prayer, McKenna asserted the primacy of the psychedelic, maintaining that ascetic and devotional practices were pale substitutes for the immediacy of the divine illumination delivered by psychotropic foods.

Anyone can sweep around the ashram for a dozen years while congratulating themselves that they are following Baba into enlightenment. It takes courage to take psychedelics — real courage. Your stomach clenches, your palms grow damp, because you realize this is real — this is going to work. Not in twelve years, not in twenty years, but in an hour! What I see in the whole spiritual enterprise is a great number of people supporting themselves in one way or another on the basis of their lack of success.²

McKenna understood “eating the god” to be the central act of an archaic religion shared by a variety of cultures in the pre-historic world. The consumption of such plants as peyote, ayahuasca and mushrooms in old religious ceremonies was, McKenna believed, the chief sacrament of the “Ur” religion of humanity, a religion which, in the deepest sense of that word (re-ligio) sought to “reconnect” a fallen species to its true home in the spirit world. Accordingly, McKenna, like a number of 20th century ethnobotanists before him, maintained that those people who ate psychotropic plants did so with the understanding that they were ingesting divine substances and thereby literally eating their gods. The hallucinations resulting from these plants were believed to be the fruits of divine communion.

In the modern world, theophagy remains alive and well in the Roman Catholic Church, whose adherents believe they are commanded to consume the body and blood of God. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,” Jesus said in John 6:53, “you do not have life within you.” By declaring the bread and wine he shared with his disciples at the Last Supper to be one in substance with his body and blood, and commanding his followers to reenact the Eucharist in his memory, Jesus made theophagy the central ritual of the Catholic mass for the next 2000 years.

While some atheists consider the Eucharist to be little but a collective celebration of blood lust and ritual cannibalism, their outrage seems a bit contrived. It seems irrational to condemn people for eating the body of blood of God if you don’t believe in God. For that matter, how can anyone take offense at this attenuated form of theophagy if they don’t believe that bread and wine can become anything other than bread and wine? It would seem that a non-believer can be offended by cannibalism or by the belief in God, but certainly not by both. For the believer, though, these rival theophagies present a thornier problem. If it is possible, even mandatory, to eat God, how do we decide which is the best way? Psychedelics are so dramatically consciousness-shattering and reality-distorting that it would seem that their claims to authenticity may exceed those of the Eucharist. One can hardly compare taking communion on a Sunday morning to the ingestion of five grams of “magic mushrooms,” which according to most reports brings effects that truly approach the realm of the miraculous. Eating God should be a spectacular thing, and yet week-in and week-out, Communion seems to be something quite unremarkable.³

Having done a good deal of research on the phenomenology of psychedelic experience (which, I hasten to add, does not mean research with psychedelics), it has become fairly clear to me that in the most objective terms, the “psychedelic” (a word that literally means “mind-manifesting”) is but one of many modalities of post modern consciousness that seeks to recapture a pre-modern mode of experience — in other words psychedelic consciousness has emerged in modern history as something of a metaphor for recovering the Spirit. Yet, in subjective terms, as volumes of clinical studies, anthropological literature and drug confessionals attest, the psychedelic is no mere metaphor — something truly transformational happens when hallucinogens are ingested. Brain chemistry is changed, reality is distorted, colors and sounds are apprehended extra-sensibly and encounters with what are usually understood to be “spirit beings” take place. Thus from the standpoint of what William James and Nishida Kitaro call “pure experience,” it is the mundane Christian sacrament that appears to be the metaphorical thing.

So, if we believe in the Catholic faith and its sacraments, i.e., if we believe in the truth of the real presence, how do we account for the fact that the taking of Holy Communion is such an undramatic experience?

It may be useful to consider that in 1954, Trappist monk Thomas Merton criticized his friend Aldous Huxley for writing The Doors of Perception, a psychedelic confessional in which Huxley described his experiences on mescaline. Merton also condemned the entire psychedelic experience, arguing that opening the so-called doors of perception through chemical means, rather than waiting for divine wisdom through the infusion of grace, was tantamount to stealing from God what only God had the right to bestow — illumination. To take drugs with the expectation of entering higher spiritual planes was like barging into God’s living room uninvited. Nothing good could come of such an intrusion; indeed, to behold the kinds of realties not intended for normal consciousness would be both an affront to God, and a potentially dangerous use of freedom. There were no guarantees that the spirit beings one might encounter in a hallucination were not in fact demonic.

Given this logic, it seems plausible that the very last thing Christ would have intended was that any special gnosis be gained through the repeated reenactment of the Eucharist. The mass is more of a memorial ritual, or even an earthly recreation of the liminal space between heaven and earth than a wisdom-imputing initiation ceremony. It seems more likely that the very blandness of the tiny host and sip of wine (the metaphysical enormity of the real presence notwithstanding) is emblematic of the spiritual incompleteness, even desolation that we will inevitably experience until we arrive at last in our supernatural home. From the standpoint of chemistry alone, if it is possible to tamper with the operation of the brain through the ingestion of a natural product, then this “eating of the god” is not a spiritual practice at all, but a very easy-to-produce (if hard-to-control) material one. In response to McKenna and other proponents of psychedelic-experience-as-religious practice, we might even propose that the psychedelic experience is really another form of materialism masquerading as a religious worldview.

Ultimately, the key to the mystery of theophagy may be summed up in John 6:54, where Jesus links two seemingly unrelated ideas: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Eating God may not bring instant illumination, but it does bring eternal life, and when we are invited to “taste and see” the goodness of the Lord, we have to accept for now that the true delights of this austere banquet may just lie somewhere beyond this particular reality.

End Notes
1 Terence McKenna, “Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness,” in The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 40.
2 McKenna, “Sacred Plants and Mystic Realities,” in The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 246-7.
3 In defense of the miraculous potential of the Eucharist, I should mention that St Catherine of Siena and Blessed Theresa Neumann were said to have subsisted on no food other than daily Communion for most of their adult lives.

8 . The Covenant Meal by Rob Joyce^

On the night he was betrayed, the Lord invited His disciples to join with him in one last dining experience. At this event, He did something that has changed the course of history. As they were eating together, He took the wine and stood up in their midst and said, “This is the new covenant in my blood.”

These men knew what covenant meant. They were steeped in the culture of covenant. God had made covenants with their people since the beginning of their history. The covenant was the context within which all the events of their lives derived meaning.

A covenant was the joining of two lives together in an unbreakable agreement. The closest thing we have to it today is marriage. If a man were to make a binding agreement with another man, let’s say to share some grazing land, the most serious, the most binding agreement that could be undertaken was the covenant. An animal would be sacrificed. It would then be cut into two halves and laid out on the ground. The two men would make promises to each other and then walk together between the two halves of the dead animal signifying that their agreements were unto death.

This is the image that was conjured in the minds of the disciples that epic evening. He passed the cup. They each drank. His impending death, which He had talked about incessantly for the past few weeks, was in the forefront of their minds. The body that would be broken would be His own.

From time out of mind, we human beings have gathered around the animal that has been slain and received our nourishment. We have felt the visceral joining of our lives in the sharing of the kill. In that common experience we have felt our lives to be so interdependent that nothing could sever our relationships. And that night, God had chosen this context to initiate His new deal with us. In the sharing of the covenant meal of Jesus, our lives are now joined inextricably to God. We are participants in the covenant. We exchange promises with God. We are reconciled. We are made family.

9 . Sustainer of All That Is by Chris Sparks^

There is something strange about the process of eating. You take in food, you strip it of what is useful to you and then release the rest. It’s one long, ongoing transformation of matter, passing through and on its way back into inanimate matter, back then into food, into the animal, back to inanimate matter…

Sometimes, along the way, something a lot more fundamental enters the equation. Animals exist on a different level of being from plants, and humans exist on a different level of being from both plants and other animals. So this means that at some point, matter becomes bound up with spirit. It passes back out again, fairly quickly — the shedding of skin cells, hair loss, cellular decay — the human body is one walking cycle, not a steady, constant thing. Or is it? Are the components of the body in some way independent of the core thing itself? Unless a rather dramatic loss occurs, some truly substantive change, this cycle of flux and change that is us keeps going, manifesting itself in a recognizable form, in spite of the repeated transformations.

It depends on what we take into ourselves. Unlike machinery, we do not merely rely on food for energy. We also depend on it for regeneration, for change, for replacement of the other transmogrified bits of ourselves that had been shed. The human body is almost communal in its structure, each organ processing and functioning in its specified way, each aspect contributing to the whole and the whole then seeing to the needs of the particular.

So we are the ongoing transfiguration of matter, of mere bits and pieces of stuff, into a whole that is animated by something totally other, totally independent of this physical world, of this universe of atoms and energy, of fire and photons. When they leave us, do they fully leave us? Are they marked by this passage, this contact occurring insensibly between matter and spirit? We are the crossroads where this occurs, we are the sanctuaries, we the tabernacles of this strange communion.

Take this one step further — when the source and summit of all things enters the world, He comes in by the acts of these odd worldgates, these odd points of communion between the worlds, these walking, thinking, loving pentagrams, these amalgamations of fire, water, wind, earth, spirit, these wounds of Christ, these joys of Mary, these sorrows of Mary, these beloved of the Creator.  It is by the exhalation of breath, the elevation of the matter, the intent of the spirit, the acts of these points of flux in the universe that the gates of heaven are thrown wide and the fabric of space and time is ripped — for how could it be otherwise? How could it not be that the presence of divinity somehow distorts, somehow warps, somehow twists a fallen world back into the state it was meant to be, back to the broken life, the wounded love, the shattered and shattering truth that is its master?

In sneaks love, into the receptacle, waiting — and who could see it? Who could guess that the mainstay of the universe, the sustainer, the provider, the originator, is, at the end of the day, at the end of the act, at the end of the mass — bread? So do we then pray for the whole world, on behalf of all things, “give us this day our daily bread?” Do we beg for the needs of all things, then? We who are made in the image of God, we images who depend on the closer images, the other Christs, the consecrated, the ones who had hands laid upon them, who were bound to the service of the lamb, led by the lamb to represent his own slaughter — do we all then stand as priests of one sort or another? Standing between our brethren and the gallows, the guillotine, the chopping block, the cross, between one breath and the next that may never come — our forefather and mother through whom sin entered the world, creeping, creeping, acted in the name of the physical world. Their choice infected the world. Does ours, then, do the same? Is life one long string of choosing poison or purity? Do we then nourish or starve the universe with our fallen acts, our foul mouthed words, our life giving prayer, our life giving bread?

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We beg for food, we, the living, the living dead, the dead, those who are dependent on flashes of grace, of times of sharing in the divine life for our life to go on. We who had no life in us until Life became one of us, until Life become man for us, until Life died for us, until Life took the bread into his sacred hands, blessed it, broke it, gave it to His disciples and said, “Take this and eat it, all of you. This is My Body, which is given up for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise taking the cup, the cup of poison, in spite of His pleas, His cries, He drank deep of the cup of our death, the cup made of the fruit of the garden and the work of human hands — it became for Him His deathly drink. For Love is such that it may drink poison for the beloved, and die at the hands of the beloved…and then rise, laughing at the beloved’s surprise, on the third day, on the day after the holy day, the day after hope had faded away.

This is our food, and this, our drink. This is the hope of all things — the smallest of things. A meal. Dinner. With friends. And the main guest of honor is the food itself — for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to be consumed for the life of the world.

10 . The Cooking of Science by Daniel Pauw^

Cooking has been called an art. Reviews of food or places that serve food are usually full of colorful descriptions. This translation of the experience of tasting food into a colorful written description is similar to what you would find in a review of an art exhibit. With such strong connections to art, it is hard to imagine that cooking and science are so intertwined. It would be weird if a review went into full detail, outlining the tasting of food and including a compliment of controls to make sure the reviewer wasn’t biased. Not only would it make for a flat review, it would probably earn the reviewer quite a few stares during the “experiment.”

Still, the art of cooking and the practice of science share much in common. Fundamentally, both include some amount of chemical reactions. For instance, one can cook an egg by heating it in boiling water. This is a good choice because water has a high specific heat, which allows it to easily transfer energy to the egg. Being a nontoxic liquid is also a plus. Still, you could get the same result of a “cooked” egg by throwing it into a vat of acid. The low pH of the acid has the same effect on the proteins in the egg white as high heat does. Unfortunately for acid, it can’t compete with water as a nontoxic liquid. These two “recipes” work due to the chemistry involved in the interactions of the protein. During this process, the proteins are denatured, or taken from their normal, active shapes, and turned into a string. These stringy proteins then interact and tangle with each other and form globs of solid egg.

Not only is there science in cooking, but there is cooking in science. For instance, when a scientist wants to look at protein expression they can use a Western Blot. No, I’m not talking about a Spaghetti Western. Rather, a Western Blot involves dry milk. When using a label to bind to the protein in the blot, the end result won’t be as clear without the dry milk. This is because the proteins in the milk bind to the proteins in the blot nonspecifically. Consequently, this process gets rid of background noise and allows the result from the specific binding of the label, such as an antibody to a particular protein in the blot, to be much more visible.

It isn’t normally part of the fun of eating to think about how your taste buds are converting the chemicals of your meal into an electrical impulse that lets you know the food reviewer was in fact right. However, it is neat to think about in a broad sense. Hopefully, the next time you bemoan how horrible you are at cooking, you’ll at least be able to console yourself with the knowledge that you didn’t have to eat anything you made in Chemistry 101.