Food Glorious Food - Thanksgiving Celebration

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 24^th of November, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
on land that has supported human beings,
animals, trees, fruit and food of all kinds
for thousands of years
to worship, to give thanks that we live at all,
to celebrate all that nourishes us
and to remember we are just one small part
of a vast and astonishing universe.

(together) And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

Clogged airports and freeways and long lines,
the season's first flurries of snow,
grocery stores thronged, beet greens
slapping over the edge of the stuffed cart,
lists and more lists, phone calls and phone tag,
extra chairs up from the basement,
tearing open the packages containing Guest-At-Your-Table boxes down at the church,
worries about Aunt Ophelia and how she'll behave this year,
fretting about what to say to cousin Jerry about his obnoxious jokes,
bittersweet memories of grandma sitting at the table, her eyes staring into your soul.

It must be Thanksgiving time.
But not yet, not yet.

First, this time. This time right now.
Silent time. No lines, no shoving, no jokes,
no phone calls, no planning.
Just silence.

Silence that was there before the earth was first made round,
Silence that will be there past every ending.
Silence that dwells in the heart of an apple,
like the seeds do.

Silence that empties us of our surfeit.
Silence that is our surest communion with
the distant fluttering of stars.
Silence.

(Silence)

On this Sunday before Thanksgiving, we might call to mind all those people about whom we are especially thankful, teachers, authors, musicians, family, friends, heroes, sheroes. We name them aloud or in our heart's own sanctuary, as is our desire.

(Naming)

Now thank we all the Ineffable Source of all That Is, the Great Mystery always ultimately pictured or named in vain, as our living tradition has affirmed a thousand ways. But, in music itself, with its harmonies, its soaring highs and profound lows, we come closer to apprehension of the Ineffable than with any mortal word. (Anthem)

First Reading [Next] [back to top] Two weeks ago I attended my annual Ohio River Study Group for Unitarian Universalist Ministers, where the topic we chose for our papers this year was "Food." This reading comes from the Response Paper of the Rev. Emily Gage, our minister in Joliet Illinois.

A central part of our upbringing concerns issues of food, control, and power. From the beginning we must make our needs known to that omnipotent adult who brings us nourishment. The real contest begins when we are developing our own will. Anyone who has fed a two-year-old can testify to that. Ian Frazier writes in Lamentations of the Father about all the laws parents make pertaining to dessert: "For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert. But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert. But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof. And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear that you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert." I suspect that most of us here today said to an adult, "Well, when I grow up, I'm going to have all the (fill in preferred junk food item here) that I want." Of course, by then, we have often internalized the struggle that we played out with our parents at the dinner table.

It seems like our culture has an almost constant patter around food; we are bombarded with both messages of indulgence and self-denial. In one sitting at the TV, you are likely to hear both: "Treat yourself well…have a double chocolate cake…you deserve it," or "Lose hundreds of pounds on this miracle diet." Even the camps of indulgence and self-denial have conflicting messages within their own ranks. One acclaims meat and fat, another denies them. And so on. There always seems to be some new study which shows what we previously thought was good for us is now thought to be harmful. (Or vice versa.) In Anne Lamott's chapter on recovering from bulimia in Traveling Mercies, she describes how she learned what it meant to be hungry. I remember being struck by that. Not knowing what it meant to be hungry? But with all the various expectations around us about food, it is almost a wonder that we remember to truly listen to our own bodies and feed ourselves accordingly…

Often it seems that it would be so much easier to eat fast food, to not avoid the mysterious "natural flavors" listed on packages, to not search for the apples that are locally grown. The food industry seems designed to disempower us. It is much more convenient to exist on a diet that is unhealthy. But although buying organic food is sometimes more expensive, it is an investment in our world, and it is a form of activism.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is taken from Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry's book of Essays "What Are People For" written 12 years ago.

"To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

Sermon: Food Glorious Food - Thanksgiving Celebration [Next][back to top]

It makes sense to talk about food today. After all, it's almost Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving is the one U.S. holiday with an almost ritualized menu… turkey, cranberries, stuffing, potatoes, pumpkin pie. There are variations in this ritual menu of course…many today are vegetarians after all. But I do have one vegetarian friend who is strict every day of the year, but makes an exception on Thanksgiving.

Second, I just came back from my annual ministerial study group, which this year took the vast topic of food as its focus.

And third, I am from an Emilian-American family. Emilia is that part of Italy in the Appennine Mountains where you find the food-centers of Bologna and Modena and Parma. The Emilians are famous, even in Italy, for talking about food. They talk about lunch at breakfast, and dinner at lunch, and a favorite pastime at family gatherings is to swoon over descriptions of especially marvelous dishes: "Oh, you should taste Imelda's Columba" ( a kind of raisin yeast cake), or "Uncle Carlo really makes the tastiest crescént " (which is a kind of savory muffin). My ancestors are the folks who invented tortellini, those tiny belly-button shaped ravioli. You can purchase a very pale imitation of them in the frozen food section of Kroger's.

In the spirit of their Emilian heritage, my two grandmothers were remarkable cooks. My grandmother Galli's stuffed artichokes on Thanksgiving remain without peer; my grandmother Belletini's holiday Zuppa Inglese, or trifle, was legendary, even outside my family.

But my grandmother Belletini had not always been famous for her Zuppa. Zuppa, I assure you, is a very expensive dish. And my grandmother had grown up dirt poor, grown up a peasant shepherd without Zuppa or many of the fancy foods she used to serve to us. When she served us her mushrooms, her tortellini in broth or her bacala (salted cod) she wasn't just serving us nourishment for our biological bellies, she was serving us her dreams and abundant love. These extravagant foods were a sign to her of how far from her extreme and cruel poverty she had come.

One day I remember I was reading her some poetry in dialect. I found these poems in a journal my grandfather Galli used to subscribe to, a journal from the Emilian region, from his hometown of Sestola. Although mostly written in standard Italian, this journal offered versions of poetry written in the Modenese mountain dialect. They were written out using a phonetic alphabet which I could read.

So thinking this might make my grandma's day, to have her grandson read to her in her own true tongue (even though he didn't really understand the dialect very well) I decided to give it a try. I knelt beside her as she sat in her chair and read from one of those journals. I read to her in a dialect that hardly sounds like any other language on earth.

Fa un gir pr'e' paeS l'éra bel senza pretés
e gir piéu leung lera de Cmant a San Rocc

She smiled and rocked with glee as I read, my grandmother. She was delighted to hear me recite in the language of her heart. Then I read a poem called "La pulent d'castagne." As I read this poem my grandmother's face changed. She appeared to be in pain. Suddenly, tears splashed on her cheeks, and I stopped reading. "What's wrong?" I asked. She shook her head to assure me nothing was really wrong, and then spoke to me with her familiar accent. "Oh, it's a nuthin, nuthin," she said. "It's just that disa poem reminda me of how difficult things were when I vas a little girl. Pulent d'castagne mean chestnut polenta (porridge) and back den, ve vere too poor to eat, we hada no money for farin, flour, to make pasta, so I hada to spend alla day knocking chestnut off da trees in the vood, and thena roasting them tilla thera shell crack-ed open, and then pound the meat inside into flour to make pasta with. It took alla day and somatimes two to make a meal when I was a girl. It wasa awful. I ama so glad to be here witha you, instead of backa there with mya stomach always growling, growling."

My grandmother actually knew hunger of the type that few of us know anymore. Abject hunger. Desperate hunger. Painful hunger.

It's safe to say that instead of fast food, my grandmother knew only about slow food. Two full days to make a plate of pasta, she told me it took, and I assure you, there was no meat in that sauce. In those days, most peasants were vegetarians, not for ethical reasons, but because meat was simply beyond their budget.

Today, in this country, food is abundant. Imigrants to this country who walk into a Kroger's are simply paralyzed by the variety of foods available, the brand-names, the endless aisles with jostling carts.

At my Study Group we talked about the Slow Food Movement, something I had only heard of recently. It's a movement rooted in Italy, not surprisingly, which decries McDonald's and Burger King, packaged foods with half-lives longer than stone, square tomatoes and foods with chemical names on their labels which sound more like the formula for napalm than nourishment.

We also talked about the symbolic nature of food. Oh, not just my grandmother feeding us her symbolic freedom from poverty, but rather, in the words of the first reading, food symbolizing "control and power."

Control and power. Words not often associated with a salad or sandwich. Words often associated with theology. The God who controls the whole universe, for example. The Higher Power.

Emily Gage suggests that food gains its symbolic power very early in our lives. Using that humorous parental reworking on the kosher food laws from the Torah in the Bible, Gage recreates the power struggles between parent and child that are commonplace if not universal. I know my brother and my mother got into it good…she would cook some perch, and he would sit there with arms crossed until bed-time refusing to even taste this nasty abomination from the Great Lakes. Me, I refused to eat salad, but because I loved spinach, I was somehow forgiven for my lapse…I got the necessary "green" in me one way if not another.

Power and control are indeed theological words, words associated with that bugbear word "spirituality," which often asks us to consider the question "What controls our lives?" Or, "Who has true power in this world? Nature? God? You? Local Custom? Tradition? Law? Family? Shame? Pleasure? Guilt? Fame? And how ever do we live with Power and That Which would Control us?"

How we answer questions like these suggests ways we might live our lives. How we answer questions like this helps us to make choices and decisions about every aspect of our lives. Including food.

The wise Mohandas Gandhi once said, "For those who are hungry, God can only appear in the form of bread." This is one reason, I suspect, why my grandmother never went to church, even though she prayed to God and the Virgin daily. The church where a woman with hunger tattooed on her bones would find God would be the kitchen, not the chapel. And please note, my grandmother's God was not a creator God, or a vengeful God, or masculine God, or a thunderbolt God…just a God who is nourishment and pleasure and love.

But power and control get caught up with food in less benign ways too. So many people now are suffering from eating disorders like bulimia or anorexia. And this is hardly some new thing either. My best friend Richard's mother died of anorexia in her seventies just a few years ago, a woman barely 50 lbs when she died. In both bulimia and anorexia, food often symbolizes various forms of control and power, both socially and bodily.

And then there is the larger and more difficult issue of the social, national and even inter-national dimensions of food control. Small family farms all over the world are dying day and night, replaced by vast agribusiness acreage, agribusiness with the money, power and control to take over. The fast-food industry in this country receives more money from the American people than all the colleges and universities and high schools combined. This industry has literally defined America's taste and approach to food with jingles and ads against which few of us have any resistance. Such a numbing assault on the senses reduces our much touted American freedom, that is, our self-control, so that our choices for supper are often made, not about what we eat, but about how we eat it. Is it convenient? Is it speedy? Does it provide instant gratification?

A small percentage of folks in the US are now seeing themselves as activists against such an approach. They study up on the Slow Food journals, they buy organic or local produce or join a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) association or a join a food Co-op like the one here at the church. In the Community Supported Agriculture movement, families not far from a particular farmer join together to help pay his or her salary, and then benefit from getting fresh food grown on the farm. Thus, they support their local cuisine, in the manner of Alice Waters of Berkeley California, whose famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, proclaims, on its menu, the actual fields, farms, ponds or meadows where the food portions before you actually came from. You know what went into the soil that grew the carrot, or you know what went into the fish pond that housed the trout. You know exactly what you are eating, and you know that it does not come from the factory or laboratory, but from the earth.

Ironically, unlike my poor grandmother who wept about it, there are people who rejoice in such slow approaches now. After all, it's fair to say my grandmother knew exactly where her chestnuts were coming from, and exactly which chicken laid the egg to put in the chestnut flour to make the pasta. It's funny, but only three years after my grandmother Belletini died, I went to the Rockridge Grocery in Oakland California and bought homemade tagliatelle de castagne, that is chestnut pasta, just like my grandma used to make in the Emilian hills. She worked two days to eat a plate of such pasta. I paid four dollars and spent a grand total of a minute schmoozing with the man behind the counter, that's all. It's all so different now.

What has changed between my grandma's day and now is the economical reality. I am not poor. My grandmother was most definitely destitute. But both of us ate the chestnut pasta, one with tears, one with smiles of pleasure.

The economic inequalities of the world have been addressed by religious food rituals for years. Poor and rich dined together at the Jewish seder for a thousand years, and the Christian communion ceremony, called the Thanksgiving Supper, or Eucharist in Greek, was originally a great pot-luck to make sure that the wealthy and the poor all had equal access to food. There was no talk of the body or blood of Christ originally…that was a later development based on twists in Greek philosophy and misunderstood biblical metaphors. Besides, the early Eucharistic supper consisted of fish and bread as often as wine and bread. Often, it was just bread alone, or the table was set with a cup of milk and honey. It was open to a wide variety of interpretation…the only thing was, both women and men, slaves and free, rich and poor, the schooled and the peasants all came to the same table and had their fill. The eucharistic food symbolized equality, the family of humanity more than anything else. The communion ritual of the Sikhs, called the Karah Prasa, is similar; it's open to everyone, regardless of station or belief, a sign that sacred food can be a great leveler, a first course in a feast of economic balance and shared power.

In the end, our participation in meals, our participation in "food, glorious food," can serve as an invitation to live our lives mindfully, what Wendell Berry calls sacramentally. Paying attention to what we eat and do not eat, being mindful of who has power over our table, control over our taste, we can begin to take into our hearts the reality that food carries meanings with it as surely as it carries calories. My grandmother was hungry because she had no food; Anne Lamont, mentioned in the first reading, was hungry because she was bulimic and emptied herself of food. Their hunger was the same, but food symbolized different things to both of these women. And both of them were able to come to a place where they were able to leave their hunger behind them.

I affirm that food is always symbolic as well as nourishing. And thus, it is in knowing what food might symbolize in our lives, and acting on that knowledge, that enables us to live our lives freely, deliberately, and yes, spiritually, neither controlled nor controlling, neither powerful nor powerless. I think it's best, therefore, to end with Wendell Berry, who says what I am trying to say so beautifully, by making a reference to the aforementioned Christian eucharist or communion.

"To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

May we live our lives sacramentally, mindfully, consciously, and temperately, and may we feed on symbols that are good for us, on bread that nourishes our desire for peace and love.

Table Prayer [back to top]

(Mark) Bread of the world, be a sign of our life.

First Reader: May this bread be for us our joy. Joy before the good gifts of sun and soil, seed and water, sowing and harvest, kneading and baking. Without such gifts, we would not be alive. Thanks for life.

Second Reader: May this bread be for us a blessing. May it speak to us of the sacred meals of our ancestors when the bread they ate was more than bread, and when they knew they were more than their separate selves.

Third Reader: May this bread be for us a promise. May it speak to us of a day to come when we have worked to see that there is ample food for every human being on earth.

Fourth Reader: May this bread be for us a dream. A dream when men and women and children shall come from north and south and east and west and sit down together to eat in peace.

Fifth Reader: May this bread be for us a call. A call to share the bread as much as eat it. For such bread does not disappear when it has been eaten, but remains present when we welcome each other in love and respect.

(Wendy) And blest are you, Love, our joy, our blessing, our promise, our dream and our call. In you we live and move and have our being. For all that is our lives, we give our thanks and praise.

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