A Tasteful Conversation

You've got to love a Christian book that starts out with a quote by Virginia Woolf: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

I've just begun an online book discussion of L. Shannon Jung's Food For Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating, facilitated by the author (who is traveling and eating through France -- nice work if you can get it! -- describing his experiences as he checks in on our message board). We're going to be discussing issues like our own relationship with food; food as a sign of God's goodness and generosity, and hunger as a metaphor for our hunger for relationship with God; how food relates to our life as relational beings; eating disorders and food system disorders as indications of our human brokenness; transforming our personal and corporate actions and attitudes in ways that can restore our enjoyment of and appreciation for food as a good gift of God, as well as our desire and will to share that gift with others.

This discussion has come at a timely point for me, because I've made some significant changes in my own eating and shopping habits -- admittedly mostly self-serving changes, to benefit my health, but ones that have led to other positive outcomes -- rediscovering my sense of adventure and experimentation in cooking; shopping and eating more mindfully and gratefully; relearning the concept of "enough"; readjusting how food fits into my sense of the larger scheme of things. On the other hand, I think the fact that I do have to watch what foods I eat these days tends to sometimes put me in an almost adversarial relationship with food, which damages the sense of food as a good gift. So I'm looking foward to exploring some of these issues with others.

One thing that has helped me change my eating habits is giving myself a day off, once a week or so, from my usual regimen. As an example: Today after church Mom and I took a road trip to Standish for lunch at Tony's Tacos. Tony's isn't even a restaurant; it's just a seasonal taco stand and a couple of picnic tables located in the parking lot of a butcher shop at the city limit. The proprietor is from Mexico -- he goes back down south in the fall -- and makes some of the best Mexican fast food I've ever eaten. Today we had delicious, corn-y pork gorditas with tasty shredded pork topped by fresh pico de gallo, washed down with Mexican pop and accompanied by canned tejano music. It was worth every calorie and fat gram. A woman ahead of me in line noted that the place was so busy yesterday she couldn't find a place to park...she drove back and forth waiting for the crowd to thin out, but it didn't, and she finally had to give up. A middle-aged Midwestern surfer dude who sat at our table -- it's that kind of place; strangers wind up sharing tables -- opined that Tony's food was more authentic than that in Mexicantown in Detroit. We enjoyed it muchly; it was a good gift, and we gave thanks. If you're ever on Michigan's sunrise side, going up M-13, just inside the Standish city limit, look for the taco wagon on the west side of the road.