While
I’m busy with preparations for tomorrow evening’s seder, our
communications fellow Clare has some timely thoughts for you on food,
justice, and Pesach:
“You are what you eat” is an expression whose literalism used to
annoy me – I ate an apple; have I become an apple? – but I have
come to understand it differently: I must eat everyday, and several
times a day, so that eating is an essential action, and one so vital it
could seem mundane were it not for the joy of good food and the sanctity
of the act of eating. Many of us say a bracha over food,
signifying the sacredness of what we are about to consume; the blessing
is said over bread and not wheat, which emphasizes the necessary
collaboration of man and God to make the world work ethically.
Choosing what I eat reflects who I am, as we now live in the age of
globalized food, in which a visit to the supermarket presents a dazzling
array of options from around the world, complicating the decision of
what to eat, and making every purchase a potential reflection of
personal identity.
But I should not generalize too much, as the saying “you are what you
eat” contains its opposite as well: if you do not eat, then you are
not. Mahatma Gandhi said, “there are people in the world so hungry
that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread,” words
which strike me at once as true and undeniable, even though I have no
idea of what it means to be truly hungry.
So there are two sides to the question of food justice to be addressed:
for those of us who face an overabundance of food, which food should we
eat? Which way of eating is most ethical, the best for the planet? And
for the hungry, how do we feed those living in overpopulated and
impoverished parts of the world, and how do we feed them justly?
We live in God’s world, but we tear it apart, dismantling natural
systems, dismissing what we do not know or understand, and implementing
our own inferior models. And yet, worrying about what we put in our own
mouths is only half the battle: eating is an action, a choice – we must
take responsibility not only to feed ourselves in the most ethical way
possible, but to satisfy the hunger of others as well. For those who
are hungry and cannot choose when or what they eat, they are denied a
full existence: you are what you eat.
In the Pesach seder, the dramatization of redemption is symbolized by
what we eat, when bread is transformed from the bread of affliction into
the bread of freedom. That action, also heralded by the teaching “let
all who are hungry come and eat,” is the blueprint for food justice.
Wishing you all a very healthy and happy Pesach. Please click here to make a donation to Keren B’Kavod to
provide meals for those who would go hungry this holiday season.
And click here to read Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s recent
thoughts on Judaism and food.