Tending Body Life

For deacons, elders, and others in caring ministry and spritual leadership.

Loving food for life

by Jo Pannebaker

I am incurably curious about food and its role in our lives and culture. One of the most interesting questions I have ever come across is: If we didn’t have food, would we have families?

I asked my Sunday school class this question on the first of four Sundays we spent together last summer. How would our daily lives change if food didn’t exist? Our houses wouldn’t need kitchens or dining rooms; we wouldn’t have supermarkets or farms. Our social lives would not encircle food: no wedding breakfasts, birthday cakes, or food preparation for Super Bowl parties. Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving wouldn’t have their own menus.

Paying attention to food helps us to appreciate that the holy is present in the everyday.

While I find it fascinating to trace the many food trails that run through our lives, the point of the question for this class was to consider how connected to food our everyday lives are and how blunted our senses have become to it. Have you ever estimated how much time of your day is connected to food: grocery shopping; planning, making and eating meals; cleaning up afterward? What would you do with that time if you didn’t have to eat?

Our intergenerational Sunday school class was titled Loving Food for Life. It was designed as a hands-on time to play with food and food ideas to encourage us to be more engaged with our food and more interested by it.

How would our daily lives change if food didn’t exist?

The inspiration and menus were taken almost exclusively from the Mennonite cookbook trio: More with Less, Extending the Table, and Simply in Season. While putting menus together I tried to think about busy single people cooking for themselves, older people who already have a lifetime of experience in the kitchen and are looking for new ideas that didn’t take up lots of time or energy, and busy families with young children who would want to help with cooking.

Each week we made a variety of dishes to share together. Each Sunday had its own theme around which the menu was shaped, accompanied by a question or two to think about together. (We requested that allergies were identified on the sign-up sheet for the class.) The group organized itself into small teams, each of which made one of the dishes on the menu. We then sampled the results and talked about the food—and as any cook knows, the kitchen lends itself naturally to good conversation.

Here’s what we covered in 4 weeks:

Week one: the significance of food in our lives
Food fun: Snacks: edamame, quesadillas, microwave popcorn, frozen grapes and peas, grilled peach salsa and chips (Simply in Season), minty orange drink (Simply in Season)

Week two: starting well: the art of breakfast
Food fun: Food detectives on the breakfast case: sweet potato pancakes, tofu fruit smoothie, fried polenta (all from Simply in Season)

Week three: food and families: the importance of eating together
Food fun: Lunch menus

Week four: hospitality: celebrating and including others
Food fun: Build-your-own menus from More with Less

We had a great time working with food and tasting the results. My favorite session was the food detectives one, where people enjoying the fruit smoothie were completely surprised to discover that the secret ingredient was tofu. The children loved the idea of a secret ingredient in something they had helped to make, and this made for fun table conversation during the tastings.

The attraction of this class was the short path between ideal and action: Snacks can be good for you. Tofu isn’t half bad. It is possible to host family or friends and to give everyone something they like.

We all eat and we all have to eat. Loving food for its very ordinariness honors it for the life it gives us and the love it allows us to share. Paying a little more attention to food encourages gratitude and an appreciation for the holy being present in the everyday.

---

Jo Pannebaker is a member of First Mennonite Church of Bluffton in Ohio.