Agriculture, Food, and Grace, Part !

Agriculture, Food, and Grace

by Ken Frazier

“Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men.  Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely.  Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?”  (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books.)

I thought I had gotten over all that childhood embarrassment long ago–sitting out in the open in Howard Johnson’s restaurants, on the road again somewhere in North Carolina or Tennessee, all of us with eyes scrunched tightly closed while Daddy offered thanks for our food, in a formula full of “thees” and “thous” and “heavenly Fathers” while my grilled cheese sandwich got cold, and my face warm–with embarrassment–and here I was, again, 45 years later, sitting out in the open in an Atlanta airport snackbar, in full view, with Mother and Daddy–he is still “Daddy” when he “offers thanks”–the three of us holding hands over a rickety snackbar table laden with the greasy fruits of fast food, saying thanks with “thees” and “thous” and “heavenly Fathers,” and me hearing all my friends and colleagues choking over the patriarchal language, while this time the fries got cold.  (Actually, I don’t recall which particular fast food I had, but I do know it was one of the many eminently forgettable varieties of airport fast food.  They all taste the same anyhow, and I have begun to suspect they all are made from the same basic substance, an unknown substance, shaped, flavored, textured and colored to look like chicken, tuna, ground beef, or potato, broiled, or deep fried in yesterday’s oil.  Shades of “soylent green!”)

The “grace” my father said there in the Atlanta airport hadn’t changed any in 45 years, but sitting down to eat had changed, beyond recognition.  45 years ago, the notion of food being “fast” would have been as alien to all of us, waiting in restaurants and diners a decently reasonable time to be served the food we ordered, without a decent wash-up and sit-down, without some family chit-chat around the table, a chance to run the kids around the parking lot and burn off the pent-up road tension, a time to stretch the body and move the cramped muscles from travel position to eating position—such an idea would have been as foreign as would the notion of inclusive language to my father.  (The body knew, I think, that it needed a gentle transition from one position to another.  My wife’s West Tennessee farming family knew that, so they came in from the fields and rested up during the middle of the day, stretched the working muscles into shape for eating, before they ate their big midday meal, and took a long nap before returning to the fields.  I rather imagine the earth, too, needed that midday respite, to let the sun bake a protective tan crust over the darker soil beneath, to give it time to rest, to ease the heat.)  The “Automat,” introduced in 1902 by Horn & Hardart, served “real” food, delicious macaroni and cheese, baked beans, creamed spinach, etc.

But for my father, and for so many others, the great need was for a quiet time at a table when a grace could be said that wasn’t fast, a time when the basic connections of the created order could be maintained, the switches reset, so to speak, the conduits cleaned and straightened, when the graceful flow between God and Creation could be acknowledged and furthered.  Or, as I suspect was the case for my father and others, a time was needed when the faithful obedience of the human part of creation could be expressed in gratitude for some of the non-human parts of Creation.  Duty and obligation were essential in maintaining a proper balance between the Creator and Creation.  We creatures had to acknowledge, in every way possible, the beneficence of the Creator.  The food we ate, by my father’s lights, was truly a gift of God.  On the road, at home, visiting relatives and church friends as we did frequently–wherever we sat at table, indoors or outdoors, full meal or simple snack, a prayer of thanksgiving was always offered.

Eating, then, was always a religious act, and no matter how far I strayed in adulthood from those regular practices of childhood, there was always the sharp awareness that I “ought” to be offering thanks whenever and wherever I ate.  (I must confess to something: I had to be reminded, rather sharply, at one of my daughters’ weddings that I had not “given thanks.”.  I could have plead the noisy room, but no excuses will suffice.)  Food was a gift of God.  The earth which bore the food was a gift of God, fitting for our needs.  It was never something which just “happened to be there.”  There was no element of accident and certainly no element of chance in the marvelous taste of a tomato picked hot off the plant in mid-August, rinsed off, sliced, salted, and eaten then and there.  God made the world and us, so that the tomato would taste that way.  Certain things tasted good, and the body’s delight in what was good for it was God’s knowledge, not a happenstance, not a fluke of nature.  Saying thanks had something to do with making the food appreciate the person who ate it.

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The Platonic Tomato

Tomatoes have become perfect, the epitome of the Platonic ideal applied to the fruits of nature.  Our tomatoes, the ones we picked hot off the vine in mid-August, and ate with a salt shaker in hand, were lumpy, misshapen, veined with deep brown grooves, asymmetrical, sometimes with bird-pecked and sun-healed wounds, no two the same size or shape.  We never knew what they would look like when they were planted in the spring, nor even whether we would have a decent tomato come mid-summer.  Too much rain, or too little, too much sun, too many bugs one year, and the crop would be slender.  The gracefulness, the unpredictable gracefulness of weather, gave us a rich bounty, a diverse tomato harvest, all the more delightful in its surprising appearance, in its sheer unpredictability.

Now, the tomato is perfect, engineered to withstand all weather and all bugs, genetically manipulated to be uniform in color, size, and shape, and flavor.  The tomato of today’s supermarket is the Platonic ideal, the perfect tomato, devoid of the diversity of grace, and so devoid of body pleasure.  The perfect tomato can be seen any day of the week, any season of the year, in any grocery store produce section, stacked neatly, boxed symmetrically, same size and shape and color, a bright and even “tomato” red, world without end, and same bland flavor.  In the world of ideal forms, there is A TOMATO.  All the lumpy, ridged, frilled tomatoes of the Incas, and all their descendants, are manifestations of that ideal tomato.  Now, in fact, we have, at hand, purchasable for a few cents, the actual ideal tomato, the realization of Plato’s dream.

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Food, in our Southern eating, was always comforting, occasionally challenging, frequently exciting, varied and plentiful, always an occasion for gratitude, even if the prayers were said meal-in and meal-out by rote.  This understanding of food as a source of grace was not restricted to the family table.  I recall with deep nostalgia the foods prepared and served in the grade school cafeteria in Asheboro, North Carolina.  To the best of my recollection, all the meats, vegetables and baked goods, save sliced bread and dairy products, were prepared from scratch in the school kitchens.  The meals were rich and varied, marked by fresh vegetables in season, and the folks who prepared them would have walked off their jobs had they been asked to serve the swill that passes for a meal in our public school systems today.  I have eaten school lunches with my granddaughter and have been appalled.  (My eight year old granddaughter had to endure the ridicule of her schoolmates, at times, because she liked to prepare snacks to take to school that didn’t fit the usual school party snack paradigm.  Her parents taught her how to prepare stuffed mushrooms, which she loves, so she took a Tupperware container of stuffed mushrooms instead of sugar-laden cookies and brownies.)  Homeless shelters serve better food than what is served in our public schools, and it is often food obtained through donations or FoodShare, on a tight budget.  (And do we think the students in our public schools do not know what we are saying we think about them by the meals we serve them?  Do we honestly believe they do not understand the message we are sending?)  We could always go back for seconds, as long as they held out, and on a day when “extras” were cooked, and that was often, we could get a small paper bag full–big crisp-on-the-outside and toothsome-on-the-inside homefries, genuine crispy rich pigskins (not these little dried up pieces of brown tough styrofoam in a bag, but real reddish-brown crisp and meaty pigskin pieces, cut off and deep-fried just minutes before, from the day’s ham), corn on the cob chunks, green beans cooked down in bacon grease, turnip greens with nice little pieces of ham swimming in the pot likker, pinto beans so rich and hearty you could live on them, with cornbread, for days.  (My late father-in-law, a sawmiller and journeyman electrician, carried his quart jar of pinto beans, cornbread, and a fresh onion to work as his staple lunch nearly every day for years.  I still remember, with deep nostalgia, that mouth-watering aroma when he opened the jar and sliced the onion.  When I worked for him in the summer months, and we ate lunch together, he would watch me open my lunch box, take a look at my peanut butter and jelly or cheese sandwich, grin, and pass the pintos.)  And, lest we turn up our noses at the high fat content of the meals that were served in schools and in homes, we need to remember that youthful obesity did not exist, not as a widespread and alarming phenomenon, as it does now.

For all of us, then, eating was, in one way or another, a religious act.  It partook of the basic verities—grace, gratitude, humility, hospitality, sustenance, delight.  And, since eating was a religious act and food was one of the basic sacraments, there was a moral dimension to food and eating.  There were ethical aspects to all that.  They may not always have been brought out into the open, but they were there and have begun to emerge in our time.  We once practiced “pounding,” and my family was the recipient of a loving “pounding” on more than one occasion.  A pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a mess of fresh-picked green beans, a pound of salt, a pound of dried beans, a pound of cake, canned goods, a ham or chicken, bacon, a bag of potatoes—all boxed up and delivered to the home of the newly-arrived, or the laid-off millhand, or the widowed, or the sick—the “pounding” was the direct expression of the ethical considerations of the goodness and abundance of the created order.  It was, as was said, our “bounden duty.”