Douglas Wilson on Food

Douglas Wilson (Blog and Mablog) has been recently posting on a topic very much on my mind lately: food. For whatever reason, the Lord has surrounded me with dear people who seem to care a great deal about food. Is it organic? Natural? Does it have refined sugar? Artificial dye? MSG?

I don’t share this concern. I want to be a good steward of the physical body the Lord has given me, and I want to eat reasonably healthy… but, I just cannot make myself care about whether or not my ground beef came from a hormone-injected cow, or my spinach was sprayed with pesticides.

Honestly, these kinds of food concerns have always bugged me a little, but I’ve never been able to exactly articulate why. It’s not an issue I press with most people, precisely because it is not an important issue to me and it’s certainly not an issue I want to strain a relationship over. (And, I should note, none of the food worriers I know have inappropriately pressed the issue on me.)

Pastor Wilson’s recent postings on the topic have helped me a great deal in figuring this whole issue out. To check out the conversation, look for the posts with the topic “Creation and Food”. (I particularly enjoyed Hippie Mama Free-Range Macaroni, Little Robot Bees and The Corporations are Way Ahead of You.) Here are some snippets:

One of (sic) saddest features (or funniest, depending) of contemporary food snobbery is the notion that rich people are getting in touch with the rythyms of the earth when they shop at the Whole Foods market. Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as you know that you are doing it. But if you think that you are a humble creature of the soil because you are whooping it up on luxuries is one of the oddest things that I have ever seen in my life.

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Now this means that we cannot point to anything in the created order and justify its use in a particular way simply on the basis of its being “natural.” Nor can we reject anything on the basis of it having been “processed.” The creation around us is a damaged good, and this means that when we point to a particular aspect of it, we are not yet clear whether we are pointing to an aboriginal good, or to one of the defects introduced by the Fall. When we approach a particular food for the first time, knowing nothing about it other than that it is “natural,” we still don’t know if it is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. A worm-ridden apple is natural. And the same thing goes for processed foods. It could be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, depending. Because God has commanded us to exercise dominion in a world where those who are to exercise dominion are participants in the Fall, this means that we can screw it up. So then, natural is not automatically good or bad. Processed is not automatically good or bad.

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So those Christians who use “natural” and “organic” as terms of praise, and who eschew the use of “chemicals” in food preparation are failing at two places. First, as I have noted, they are not applying the doctrine of the Fall. They are not capable of finding any food in this world that has an unfallen nature, for which natural would work as a term of unqualified praise. And second, they are not able to find a food anywhere that is not made out of chemicals. Chemical-free food would a sight to behold, and a miracle in its own right. In the first instance, they are not really thinking in Christ. In the second, they are just following along with popular jargon and not really thinking at all.

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When someone objects to “chemical additives” but loudly applauds “nutritional supplements,” we should be forgiven if we believe that some obfuscatory handwaving is going on. Now, please note that I am not saying that all chemical additives are good or that all nutritional supplements are bad. I am saying that, so far as our definitions have gone, they are the same thing, some of them good and some of them bad. Nothing is bad because a factory put it in a bottle, and nothing is good for the same reason.