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Soul + Food
Spiritual experiences in a fast food world
By Nyssa Gesch
Americans are fast. And that’s how we like our food. As workers, we strive for efficiency and those traits translate to other parts of our daily lives, including meals. Studies show Americans are more likely to take their food out of a restaurant than sit down and enjoy it. About one out of every five meals bought from restaurants in 2005 were purchased in a car. Even at home, Americans are trying to speed up the eating process, with four out of 10 dinners prepared in 30 minutes or less, according to a study by the market research company, the NPD Group. It’s clear that Americans no longer have time to have a relationship with food. Too many other things are getting in the way.
Yet some Americans have found a way to connect with their meals. These people create meaningful experiences around their daily nourishment because for them, food is much more than fuel—it’s part of their faith.
Many religions have food-related traditions. Some include strict dietary laws found in their religious books, like Islam, which follows food laws as written in the Quran. Other religions, like The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, follow general principles that include caring for and respecting everything on Earth, which can lead to chosen lifestyles like vegetarianism or veganism.
The common thread between most of these religions is that they use the event of eating as something that can be elevated to a higher level of meaning and can help followers enhance their spiritual lives.
Though such dietary practices are sometimes difficult to follow in our fast-paced society, two individuals from the University of Minnesota community hold strong to religious philosophies in our fast food nation.
Buddhism: Everything’s connected
The idea of vegetarianism in Buddhism originates from the religion’s most important principle: interconnectedness. “I would say if there’s a general tenet in Buddhism, in regards to food, it’s basically looking at a person’s diet and pattern of consumption in terms of the big picture,” says Christopher Hafner, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing and “tenzo” (head cook) at the Minnesota Zen Center, a Minneapolis Buddhist organization. “There’s kind of this idea that … everything we do affects everything else, and everything that is affected affects us.”
This isn’t a principle exclusive to Buddhism, or even religion itself. TIME magazine reported in 2007 that what we eat can have a greater impact on the planet than the cars we drive. Eighteen percent of global greenhouse gases are emitted from the international meat industry, a higher percentage than transportation emissions.
In keeping with his belief of interconnectedness, Hafner doesn’t consume or wear animal products—that means no leather shoes or belts. “I don’t buy products that I know are manufactured by or transported by corporations or companies or entities that profit in ways that exploit people or the environment,” Hafner says. “I try to buy as local as possible so as to not contribute to the problem.”
The act of eating provides a great opportunity to live out the ideals of interconnectedness, Hafner says. “It is something we have to do on an ongoing basis, so it affords the opportunity to mindfully engage in our world in a way that actually has huge implications.” Before he goes out to eat, Hafner sometimes consults restaurant guides. “It’s become such a habit, I don’t really even think of it,” Hafner says. “I wouldn’t say it gets in the way of my lifestyle at all; my lifestyle has become that.” Hafner also makes an effort to eat at restaurants that advertise organic food because he says that, for the most part, organic food is produced with a lot more integrity than non-organic foods.
Buddhism’s “everything-is-connected” mentality originated in India nearly 2,500 years ago and would later spread throughout Asia and eventually other parts of the world. Hafner thinks Buddhism is an interesting system of spirituality because it doesn’t try to convert believers. Instead, he says, Buddhism is more a philosophy of life rather than a religion as most understand it. There is a wide variety of schools of thought within the Buddhist tradition, but three larger groups, sometimes referred to as the three “vehicles,” are the Theraveda, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions. Theraveda is practiced in southern Asia, including countries like Sri Lanka and Cambodia. Mahayana was originally practiced throughout China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and the Vajrayana tradition was primarily practiced in Tibet and Mongolia. Of the three vehicles, the Theraveda tradition, also called the Teaching of the Elders, is the most monastic of the traditions, and so has the most rules because of its high degree of structure. In the past, Buddhist monks were almost always strict vegetarians and did not eat any solid food after noon. Some monks begged and would accept whatever was put into their bowl, even if it were meat. Location also creates difficulties for vegetarian practices in some of these traditions. For example, many Buddhists in regions like Tibet do eat meat and dairy products because there isn’t much vegetation available. “Historically it would have been very hard for people to be a strict vegetarian in a high Tibetan plateau,” Hafner says. “But there was still this respect for one’s food and for the life [it] supplies.”
Judaism: Keeping kosher on campus
“Eating for us is a way to sanctify the food,” says Dan Goodman, a University of Minnesota political science and Jewish studies senior. “We try to sanctify every part of our life to connect to our God. In order to do that, food is not a drive-thru or something you just shove down your throat … it’s something that you take time to prepare for, that you take time to sit down and eat.”
Judaism, in contrast to Buddhism, has strict dietary laws, called “kashrut,” that come from the Torah. Like Buddhism, Judaism has different branches and each branch follows variations of Judaism’s general food traditions. Ashkenazic Jews trace their heritage to Eastern Europe, France or Germany, while Sephardic Jews are those whose heritage originates in Arabian countries or the Middle East. Both groups follow the Torah, but their interpretations of Jewish food traditions vary slightly. For example, during the Passover holiday, Sephardic Jews will eat rice while the Ashkenazic will not.
However, both groups honor kashrut. “Kosher” is the kashrut word for clean, permitted food that’s been prepared correctly. For example, Jewish law commands that animals have to be slaughtered in a humane manner. Other restrictions deal with the different types of “representations” foods have. Each food must be treated according to these representations. Milk can signify birth, while meat represents death, and they cannot be mixed. These separations are not only practiced while eating (kosher Jews can’t eat dairy products for six hours after eating meat), but also in the kitchen, which is divided into different sections and where separate flatware and dishes are used for meat and dairy.
Because of these dietary laws, Jews plan their day around what they’re eating. For instance, if Goodman wants to have ice cream with his friends later on, he might eat a bagel with cream cheese for lunch instead of a turkey sandwich. “You plan ahead,” he says. “What you eat now is going to affect what you do later.” Goodman often eats snacks that are pareve (the term for neutral food), because he has to think about whether the seasoning on his chips contains dairy products. He makes sure to take note whenever he learns a product isn’t kosher—especially because ingredients aren’t always labeled correctly. For instance, he recently read a newsletter that discussed the use of carmine in Tropicana’s Ruby Red Grapefruit juice. Unknown to most Americans, carmine is a food coloring actually made of crushed beetles. Kashrut specifically prohibits consuming insects.
Jews’ spiritual connection with food also happens through prayer. There are blessings before and after each meal, thanking God for the food and reflecting on everything that went into making the meal. “Obviously in Judaism, food is not a fast food thing—food is a communal sanctification of God,” says Goodman. Because of these practices, Goodman feels Judaism has a more visible dedication to the act of eating than other religions do.
Religion in a fast food world
Though fast-paced, prepackaged, American ideas of food can pose difficulties for Hafner and Goodman’s practices, recent trends have made it easier for them to stick to their traditions. Hafner sees a growing segment of the population who occasionally stop to think about the greater implications of their dietary patterns on the rest of the world. The increasing green, organic and sustainable agriculture movements have given Americans—and vegetarian Buddhists living in America—more food choices with identifiable sources.
To help kosher Jews like Goodman identify what food is kosher or pareve, symbols called hechsherim have been created and printed on the labels of many items. There are many different kinds, including the letter “K” inside of a triangle. “It basically represents that a rabbi is watching the food being processed or packaged,” Goodman says. “And Jews take this very seriously because essentially it’s from the Torah—it’s a commandment.”
In a larger scope, the sheer speed of the American lifestyle proves to be one of the biggest food-related hurdles for followers of these faiths. As Americans place less emphasis on stopping and focusing on everyday details like eating, they’re creating an environment and culture that completely contradicts the Buddhist idea of slowing down and being present in every moment of life, not just mealtimes. “It’s just a lot harder to live mindfully when everything is going so fast,” Hafner says. “In a cultural setting where your food was relatively simple—non-processed, non-packaged, it came to your table from local sources—it would be a lot easier to be mindful of the patterns of your consumption and how they affected the land and your neighbor,” says Hafner.
Because our food seems to originate from nowhere, appearing on shelves in local supermarkets, Hafner says it’s easy for Americans to lose sight of the interconnectedness of all things. “It just becomes easy to do bad things to people, to animals, and to the planet because we’re not aware of the relationships,” Hafner says. “I don’t think we should underestimate the great harm that comes from distancing ourselves from the relationships we have with other people, animals and the earth.”
Like Buddhist traditions, the dietary laws of Judaism can clash with the American habits of speed eating. The Jewish practices, like keeping kosher, are meant to celebrate the entire process of planting, harvesting and finally consuming the food. The value and importance of that process is often overlooked during typical American meals, Goodman says. “The bread you’re eating has come from a farmer waking up before dawn to till his fields and harvest his grains to bring to the market,” Goodman says. “And I don’t think that that kind of value … is reflected at all in American culture.”