God's (Unlimited Meal) Plan
Nurturing a More Healthy Relationship with Our Food
This article is part of the Claritas spring 2022 issue, Flourishing. Read the full print release here.
By Alexander Burnett
When I first walked into Cornell’s brand new freshman dining hall, I was immediately hit with the savory aroma wafting from the massive stir-fry in the center of the hall. The scent of fresh noodles frying in oil greeted me every morning, beckoning to me as I returned from class hungry and tired. Yet as the weeks passed and my paper plates began to buckle under the sheer weight of my meals, the smell turned from a comfort to an acrid odor that clung to my clothes and my mind throughout the day. I wasn’t the only one to notice: many of my friends began rushing through their meals, hoping to avoid this constant reminder of our insatiable diet.
It seems that this miasma hovers over us all – not just at Cornell, but across America. Over ninety-six million Americans suffer from obesity, and it’s estimated that nine percent of Americans will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their lives. [1] [2] It’s clear that we have arrived at an unhealthy and dangerous relationship with what we eat. What forms of wisdom can we use to guide us through this epidemic?
Throughout centuries, Christians have turned to Scripture as a source of guidance, yet the Bible takes a seemingly ambivalent position on how to address our diet and appetite. On one hand, Scripture often relies on gifts of bountiful food as a sign of God’s blessing. From the gift of manna to the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt to the significance of Christ’s Last Supper, the Bible establishes that food can serve as a means to celebrate God’s faithfulness and our salvation by Christ.
On the other hand, the Apostle Paul argues in his first letter to the Corinthians that our appetite can distract us from worship of God. He admonishes the view that food exists simply to satisfy our cravings, arguing that although one may say that “food is for the stomach, and stomach for the food,” it is clear such a life would be deprived of meaning (1 Corinthians 6:13). Thus, having a bad relationship with food is not just physically unhealthy—it’s unhealthy for your soul.
In fact, recent psychological studies have discovered that not only does a poor diet contribute to mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, these conditions often reinforce unhealthy eating habits too. One common treatment to this vicious cycle has been the gastric bypass surgery, which is performed on two hundred thousand people each year in the U.S alone. [3] This procedure gives the illusion of a cure, yet no surgery can eliminate our unhealthy mental and spiritual relationship with food defined by appetite and addiction.
How then do we address these crises of obesity and eating disorders and dispel this cloud hanging above us? The phrase ‘resisting temptation’ is often used as a catch-all when addressing issues such as consumption and appetite. My goal is to dig deeper. I’ve discovered that by looking to the wisdom contained in the letters of Paul the Apostle, the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, and the psychology of Zen Buddhism, we can pave a way forward toward a healthier relationship with food. More specifically, these traditions can help us to cultivate a more temperate lifestyle by interrupting our immediate and uncritical draw towards our appetite.
First, it’s important to ask: what is temperance? Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas defines temperance as a form of human excellence known as a cardinal virtue. He argues that virtues like temperance, justice, and courage are part of our human nature designed by God, and that we are only able to express these virtues because we have been gifted with a rational and divinely created soul. In other words, living out virtues like temperance and justice is what truly makes us human. Aquinas argues that because our virtues stem from this willful soul—and not our crafty minds or fickle bodies—we can only strengthen temperance, justice, and courage by the “perpetual exercise of the will.” [4]
Aquinas inherited this idea of virtue and temperance from an ancient philosophical group known as the Stoics. Today, we use the word “stoic” to mean someone overly serious and austere—and in fact, many Stoics did fit this description, embodying “frugality, simplicity, self-control.” [5] But for the Stoics, these behaviors were just part of a much larger model for how to live and act as a good person. To the Stoics, every activity—from eating a meal to talking with a friend—presents us with the opportunity to cultivate our inner virtues. In the case of our diet, the philosopher Epictetus writes that a temperate relationship with food ought to be our goal. [6]
The Apostle Paul similarly stresses the value of temperance, arguing that while the objects of our desire are temporary—especially the food we consume—the virtues we grow within us last far longer. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that “every man that striveth for mastery is temperate in all things.” Paul argues that the benefits of our actions may be temporary—death and old age will eventually wear away our muscles and memory—yet the virtues we exercise become an “incorruptible” part of ourselves (1 Corinthians 9:35). In this way, Paul clearly demonstrates the value of temperance to his Christian audience by showing that the true reward of the temperate life is the eternal glory of God.
Why then should we choose our diet of all things as the jumping off point for cultivating virtue? Clearly neither Paul nor the Stoics thought that food was the end-all be-all for our moral battles. Paul comments that whatever we end up eating, our connection to God will always remain intact: “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). However, this in no way means that our relationship with food should be free from criticism. The Stoic writer Seneca argued that although our bodies were designed to be sustained by food, our cultural practice of eating far beyond what’s necessary reveals a deep moral or psychological crisis: “only the vice of self-indulgence drives a person to keep stuffing his filled stomach.” [7] Therefore, although the food we eat doesn’t ultimately change who we are, our diet gives us a rare look into the unrest. As Christ observes in Mark’s gospel, although “whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then is eliminated,” it is “what comes from the heart” that is the source of our struggle (Mark 7:17-18).
For this reason, Paul, Aquinas, and the Stoics agree that we must sit down at every meal with the mindset of an athlete. The philosopher Cicero describes this idea with a simple analogy: Each of us are like an archer, who take aim at targets – like eating a balanced diet or working out – not because these specific targets are the final goal, but because our real “ultimate end” is to cultivate our skill as an athlete. [8] Similarly, Paul instructs us to instill the aim and purpose of a marathon runner into our every-day actions, even actions as mundane as eating lunch (1 Corinthians 9:24). Therefore, if we consider every meal a new opportunity to be mindful of our appetites, and to be thankful for the gift in front of us, it will become clear just how important this “perpetual exercise of the will” is to our spiritual growth.
Reflecting on the philosophical and theological importance of cultivating temperance gives us a comprehensive framework for thinking about our relationship with food. But what does this mean practically for our daily eating habits?
One helpful practice is known as “The Middle Path,” an idea that is central to Buddhist belief and overlaps with Christian ideas as well. The Middle Path is a philosophy of temperance espoused by the Buddha, which argues that the ideal lifestyle strikes a balance between “indulgence in sensual pleasures on one hand, and severe asceticism on the other.” [9] In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, we find a similar idea: every virtue has an appropriate “mean” which strikes a balance between two extremes [10]. Just as the virtue of bravery can be taken to the extremes of brashness or cowardice, fasting and binging are signs that our eating habits have fallen away from the golden mean.
The New Testament also portrays Christ as the perfect embodiment of this golden mean. Throughout the gospels, Christ feasts and breaks bread with people from every class, while still taking time to practice fasting and other austerities in his devotion to the Father (Matthew 4:2). By looking to these figures as mentors in virtue, we each can search for this middle path in our own lives.
Similarly, the practice of mindfulness can aid us in bringing temperance to our diet. The main principle behind mindfulness is to become aware of how our appetites arise from our mind and body, so that we can realize the power that appetite holds over us. [11] Once we become aware of this influence, the next step may seem counter-intuitive: Do not try to banish the appetite or craving from your head; even more importantly, don't feel shame or guilt for wanting to grab that second brownie. Why not? The late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh argues that this is a temporary solution to a larger problem. When we sweep our cravings under the rug, we can’t fully address them. Instead, when we notice cravings or automatic habits arising, we need to bring to mind a spirit of compassion and forgiveness. When we use God’s love to strip our desires or addictions of the shame and guilt they may bring, we strip them of the power they hold over our actions.
Finally, we can use every meal as an opportunity to meditate on the connections between us, our food, and He who created both. This is known as “interbeing”: the idea that both our food and our bodies came from the same source, the same creator. To practice this kind of mindfulness, we can visualize how our food arrived at our plate. A tangerine, for example, must have been picked off a tree nourished by the sun and fertile soil—both of which may have originated from the dust of the cosmos, and thus from God. As Hanh puts it, “We can see and taste the whole universe in a single piece of bread!” [12] Therefore, this practice of mindful eating allows our prayer to extend throughout the meal: in every bite, we are consciously aware of how God blessed this food, and therefore us, with life.
There’s far more that Scripture and ancient philosophies can teach us about how to heal our relationship with food in a culture consumed by consumption. The practices of temperance and mindfulness taught by the Christian faith and ancient thinkers can help us to cultivate temperance within ourselves at every meal. By living this way, we are able to reflect on the gifts we’ve been given. to be mindful of our appetites, and know that when tempered our relationship with food can nourish both our body and our soul. Knowing this, instead of walking into the dining hall with a sense of dread, I can now enter with a sense of purpose.
This article appeared in Claritas’ Spring 2022 Flourishing Issue.
SOURCES
[1] Michael Moss, Hooked (New York: Random House, 2021), 29.
[2] “Eating Disorder Statistics,” National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, accessed April 30, 2022, https://anad.org/eating-disorders-statistics/?msclkid=5d923625aedb11ec96cd7094a2fea1ab
[3] “Estimate of Bariatric Surgery Numbers, 2011-2019, ” American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, accessed April 30, 2022, https://asmbs.org/resources/estimate-of-bariatric-surgery-numbers
[4] Prof. Raymond Hain, “What Makes a Person Good?” (Lecture, Thomistic Institute at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, March 24, 2022).
[5] William O. Stephens, “Stoicism and Food,” in P. B. Thompson, D. M. Kaplan (eds.), Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_636-1
[6] “The Golden Sayings of Epictetus.” The Harvard Classics, edited and translated by Charles W. Eliot, vol. Vol. 2, P.F Collier & Son, 1917.
[7] William O. Stephens, “Stoicism and Food,” in P. B. Thompson, D. M. Kaplan (eds.), Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2018.
[8] Cicero, Marcus. On Moral Ends. Translated by Raphael Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2004. (pg. 72)
[10] Aquinas, Thomas. “Question 64: The mean of virtue,” Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Bros, 1947.
[11] Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step (New York: Random House, 1992), 73.
[12] Thich, Peace is Every Step, 38.