on eating food and being a Christian, or kashrut

i'm "blogging" through lauren winner's mudhouse sabbath, a book that discusses different jewish disciplines and offers practical ways for integrating the discipline to one's christian spiritual life.  the second chapter discussion the discipline of kashrut, or keeping kosher.

kashrut is a discipline with which i've been familiar, especially since several of my friends in college were jewish.  i used to visit the spirituality house, where there were two stoves in the kitchen: a kosher stove, and a stove for everyone else.  i've always been intrigued with this tradition, with its call to painstaking attention and care to the food that an entire community of faith is permitted to consume and how to consume it.  there are restrictions not only what types of food you can eat, but also laws that regulate how such food is slaughtered and prepared.  scholars posit several reasons as to why kosher laws were imparted by God to the people of israel, and they bear brief mention here:

• hygienic reasons - the fact that some animals, if not thoroughly cooked could be harmful and carry diseases
• allegorical explanations - notion that the character of certain animals determined their cleanliness (i.e. pigs are dirty, lazy, etc.)
• arbitrary testing - the idea that God randomly designated some animals as unclean to test the obedience of God's people
• pagan association - suggests that animals with strong associations to pagan rituals were not deemed unclean
• conformity to an ideal - the idea that one can only consume animals that conform to the "ideal" of their species (i.e. sea creatures without fins and/or scales were considered abnormal and therefore unclean.
• heavenly analogy - the concept that "clean" foods constituted God's own diet.

all of these explanations are purely hypothetical and are unsupported by any specific Biblical teaching.  however, as scholars have also concluded, adhering to dietary laws enabled the people of Israel to maintain their identity as God's covenantal people, and consecrated the Israelites as those who have been set apart by God.  in mudhouse sabbath, lauren winner notes that "keeping kosher cultivates a profound attentiveness to food" and "transforms eating from mere nutritional necessity into an act of faithfulness."  She says, "If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God."  lauren says that the basic principle that underlies kashrut is that God cares about our dietary choices, and that God is interested in how we live with food.  She concludes,

For the first time since I became a Christian, I have found myself thinking about what food I put in my body, and where that food has been - in whose hands, in what countries - before it got to my plate... this reflecting on and participation with my food leads ultimately back to Him who sustains, provides, and feeds.

in the last few months, i'm slowly becoming "more granola," as some people say. i watched too many documentaries and read too many books about the food industry, and they finally got to me. i joined a CSA group (which stands for community-supported agriculture), and i now get my produce from a farm. it's locally grown and i know exactly where my food is coming from because i talk to the farmer who has grown it for me. i've also significantly lowered my meat intake, which is something that confuses people considering how much i love korean bbq and a good burger. the intent toward vegetarianism was not specifically that i have a moral objection to eating animals for food (Jesus says it's okay, although this could be another blog post of its own). what i do have a problem with is how much the meat industry is ruining our environment, and unless i know the meat i am about to consume has gotten to my plate in a socially responsible manner, i do not consume it.

as Christians, we need to dig back into our Jewish roots, and find ways in our dietary habits to show that we are God's covenantal people, whom God has set apart as holy.  i joined a CSA and i consume less meat because i love the idea that God cares about something as seemingly mundane as the food I eat, because the God I worship cares about everything.  i also like the idea that every thing I do can and should be an act of worship, and I believe that making sure the process by which I feed myself honors creation is one ways I can choose to worship the One who has created and continues to sustains us.