Have you noticed that when your plate is full of fresh produce, healthy grains, and basic proteins your thoughts more quickly go to our Creator than when you're eating a big Mac?
I have been ruminating on this little epiphany for a few weeks now. When what I am eating has fewer steps between God's creative process and me there are fewer distractions, fewer man-glorifying details. When a new piece of technology comes out that makes my life easier do I naturally say "Thank you, Lord, for giving us the tools to communicate with every person on the planet" or do I say "Wow! What a piece of human ingenuity!" I am humbled how often I praise the created and forget the Creator. Moreover, I think that deep down we all recognize that the closer our food is to the state in which it is grown the more nutritional and, often, tasty it will be. Coincidence? I think not.
Apparently, the food industry has picked up on this detail long before I did. The Boston Globe ran an article yesterday about how food that looks more like food sells better. So they are working on ways to make food look more "natural" without actually changing any of their policies or handling processes. Sure, this is yet one more way we need to be careful what we buy and from whom but I think this also highlights part of our innate understanding: we're not very good yet at improving on the natural state of food. I wonder if we ever will be.
On a related note, next on my book wish list is Michael Pollan's new book "Cooked". It covers the history of our discoveries of food and how to make that food more nutritionally available for our bodies. Something I plan on learning more about this fall is fermenting. I already do a lot of canning and pickling and the idea of the natural flora on my hands and time as the only ingredients to transforming veggies into something more tasty and nutritious is... maybe holy. I see that process in myself.
"For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb."
Ps. 139:13
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