by Samuel Davidson
“Food is God’s love made delicious.”
I. If we take seriously this axiom of Norman Wirzba, the world of ordinary and everyday life begins to take on a different character.
Eating is so fundamental to our lives—not only nutritionally, but culturally, socially, economically and politically—that more often than not it recedes into the background of our conscious awareness. This is especially true in the industrialized food economy of the Global North, in which regional climates, seasons and weather conditions have little observable correlation with the constant availability of fresh produce, eggs, dairy or meat.
Particularly under such conditions, it becomes easy to “consume a wide variety of foods and not really savor any of it as God’s love made nurture for us,” as Wirzba describes.[1] The story of how all of these foods can end up on our plates with so little effort or awareness on our part has been told from numerous angles—theological and otherwise—by many different people, and is not in itself my focus here. But if we can hold Wirzba’s admonition in our heads (and hearts), to “eat with theological appreciation,” by developing and upholding a “reverence for creation as the work of God’s hands,” then the apparently mundane act of eating becomes not only spiritually meaningful, but potentially even apocalyptic.[2]
In biblical, literary and theological terms, “apocalypse” does not mean “disaster,” but rather an unveiling of things. The Book of Revelation, for example (also known as the “Apocalypse of John”), does not primarily foretell future events of destruction, but “pulls back the curtain” of reality, revealing that the self-giving love of God has conquered the dominative power of Rome (and all other empires). To say that eating theologically is apocalyptic, then, is to suggest that sustained attention to food, perceived as a material expression of God’s love, provides a fundamentally different lens through which to see the mundane rudiments of our lives—especially those aspects of life into which great amounts of money and influence have been poured in order to make the absurd appear normal.
Which brings me to a recent and otherwise routine trip to my beloved regional grocery chain where, upon entering I encountered a display of brightly colored pastel packages the size of a small SUV—an image now seared into my imagination—offering a new health food for the hungry masses: Khloud™ Brand Protein Popcorn.
II. My own theological attention to food has been mutually reinforced by an ethical commitment to veganism; and so I have been highly averse (sometimes curmudgeonly so) to the food industry’s ever-increasing emphasis on marketing protein consumption in recent years. For obvious reasons, protein intake is generally seen as the most significant nutritional concern in a plant-based diet; indeed, the advertisements of food corporations give one the impression that herculean efforts at meat, egg and dairy consumption are required in order to prevent one’s body from simply disintegrating altogether.
But one discovers rather quickly when giving up animal products that protein is actually not at all difficult to come by:\It is abundantly available in whole grains, nuts, legumes and vegetables. And in fact, the average American already consumes 50-75% more protein than is nutritionally necessary, the vast majority of which comes from animal products. Even setting aside (for a moment) an ethical commitment to the well-being of other animals, then:, as a vegan who regularly exercises, lifts weights and adds muscle mass through a completely plant-based diet, it is baffling to the point of madness to see protein marketed as though it were a mythically rare, alchemical substance.
And upon further investigation, the protein in protein popcorn (and protein soda, and protein chips, and protein waffles, and protein candy…) actually does appear to be just that—an alchemical substance. All of these products are made protein-rich by adding milk protein isolate: “the substance obtained by the partial removal of sufficient non-protein constituents (lactose and minerals) from skim milk so that the finished dry product contains 90% or more protein by weight.”[3] This substance can then be easily blended into foods and drinks—or added to popcorn seasoning—to increase the protein content of practically any product we can dream of. In a society that has been drastically oversaturated by protein for the last half-century, then, industrial food advertisers have created the illusion of protein scarcity, and they are now very pleased to announce a cure to this imaginary deficiency in the form of magic protein dust sprinkled into every corner of our diet.
III. Lest I be misunderstood, let me clarify in no uncertain terms that my intention is not to moralize individual food choices, which are made for reasons as diverse and complex as the lives of those who make them. Rather, I want to draw attention to the manner in which protein is ubiquitously, relentlessly marketed as an inert alchemical substance of which we are apparently in constant and dire need, and the consumption of which, it is promised, will make us strong, sexy and healthy.
But protein is not an inert alchemical substance, despite the technological and industrialized processes by which it ends up in bags of popcorn and cans of soda. Protein is a basic building block of organic life, which means that it comes from living creatures. And in the case of most protein-enriched products, those creatures are other sentient animals—specifically, dairy cows. Thus even if our diets did require constant protein supplementation (which they very much do not), the ways in which we obtain that protein would be of theological and moral concern for Christians.
Again, my aim is not to apply that moral concern primarily to the dietary choices of individuals. Instead, I want to suggest that the very existence of protein popcorn reveals a profound distortion in our cultural imagination, and a fragmentation of our interrelatedness with creation and other creatures. It reflects a fundamental loss of what Wirzba calls “material intelligence”: an abiding awareness of how the world in all of its material and ecological complexity actually functions. “When people lose material intelligence,” he writes, “they move through the world oblivious to where they are and who they are with. Places, creatures and objects are clearly present, but they remain mute and indecipherable, carrying only surface significance because people have not engaged with them so as to discover their potential and limits.”[4] It is difficult to imagine a more vivid illustration of the alienation that characterizes our lack of material intelligence than the obliviousness with which food companies encourage us to eat protein popcorn. Allow me to explain what I mean by this:
For protein popcorn to exist, it is necessary to manufacture something called milk protein isolate. For milk protein isolate to exist, it is necessary to have milk at a scale that exceeds what can be easily fathomed by those of us who are not industrial dairy farmers. (After all, this is in addition to the milk that is still being produced and consumed as milk.). In order for milk to be available at this scale, dairy cows must be fed specifically formulated food that does not resemble their natural diet of grass; they must be raised in intensive production environments that limit their movement, increase the likelihood of disease and infection by constant exposure to their own excrement, and create ecological wastelands; and they must be milked as often as three times every day. In order for dairy cows to produce enough to be milked three times daily, they must be selectively bred for milk production (a process which has led to drastic increases in rates of lameness, infertility and painful mastitis), and be kept in a stage of lactation for their entire adult lives. In order to be kept in a stage of lactation, they must be forcibly and artificially inseminated (typically by machines), carry a pregnancy to birth, and subsequently be separated from the nursing calf that they have mothered at the earliest possible moment so that their milk can be reserved for human consumption. This process must be repeated as many times as possible until their milk production decreases and their lives are ended.
Whether or not one is moved by this description to consider veganism, the layers of abstraction and obfuscation that exist between the human creature eating protein popcorn in an urban apartment building, and the lives of the innumerable dairy cows across American farmland that are reduced to misery with no chance of flourishing in order to produce that (unnecessary) protein snack, should give Christians profound pause.
We know cows and farmland exist; we know milk comes from cows. But for most of us, the extent of our material intelligence regarding cows, milk and dairy production ends there. We do not know the limits or potential of these fellow animal creatures because we simply do not engage with them, and so they—and their “byproducts,” which we passively consume—remain “mute” and “indecipherable” to us, as Wirzba puts it. Can we conceive of a source of nutrition more mute and indecipherable than “milk protein isolate?”
Can such production and consumption possibly bear witness to what we claim to be true about God’s creation and all of God’s creatures—that they are good, and worthy of honor and care—or possibly evince a “reverence for creation as the work of God’s hands?” If food really is God’s love made delicious, what does the abstract absurdity of protein popcorn say about what we believe divine love to be?
IV. At the risk of stating the obvious, protein popcorn is not itself the problem to which I am attempting to point, but only one pointed illustration of it. The problem is the abstraction and alienation which it reflects, and the manifold ways in which we are disconnected from the material realities that make our lives possible. We are alienated from ourselves and one another as embodied creatures, and so we do not understand our own physical needs and find ourselves at the mercy of corporations who profit from our nutritional disorientation. We are alienated from other creatures and the sources of our food, and so we are unable to even register what is required in order for something like protein popcorn to exist. In this state of alienation, we can relate to ourselves, to the world and to our fellow creatures only as abstractions.
“The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry,” Wendell Berry observed, well before the advent of protein popcorn. “Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.”[5] And, of course, such solitude and exile is true not only of our relationship to the fellow creatures that we eat, but of our relationships to lakes and rivers, forests and plains, watersheds and wild animals.
V. If we as Christians exist in such a state of abstracted isolation and alienation, how can we hope to positively contribute to the care of a world—which we name not merely as nature, but as God’s creation—that is approaching an ecological breaking point? Berry offers a list of suggestions by which we might hope to counter this fragmentation:
(1) Participate in food production to the extent that you can.
(2) Prepare your own food.
(3) Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.
(4) Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
(5) Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.
(6) Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening practices.
(7) Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.[6]
Written nearly 40 years ago, it may be tempting to dismiss such a list as no longer relevant, or as an artefact of a romantically parochial imagination that cannot address the scale or magnitude of our planetary emergency. Yet I would contend that there is simply no other place that we can begin, if we wish to develop the practical knowledge necessary to do any good whatsoever in encouraging the care and protection of our world. Christians and churches of all sorts “care about creation” in the abstract; very few of us have any idea how to stop actively destroying the real creatures with whom we are actually and immediately in relation.
“Do not conform to this age,” Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, the center of the global empire at the time, “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern the will of God” (Romans 12:2 NRSVue). In our age of ecological catastrophe, positioned as we are at the center of today’s global empire, such renewal and discernment demand that we confront our own ignorance, tearing down the layers of apathy and obfuscation placed intentionally between us and our fellow creatures.
Planting a community garden will not save the planet, and neither will shopping at your local farmer’s market. But if eating is our most fundamental relationship with creation, then we cannot hope to transform the powers and principalities that are destroying it without first transforming the way we relate to our food. And if we are to overcome the alienation from other creatures that defines our lives in a technological, industrial and capitalist global economy, we cannot do so abstractly. We must do so through local engagement with real people, real places, real neighbors, real animals, real landscapes, real possibilities and real solutions. We must learn to see real creatures as God sees them: not as nutrient-making machines to be used at will for our snacking convenience, but as those loved into existence as part of the interconnected and interdependent creation to which we also belong.
“The future of a healthy and vibrant world,” Wirzba reminds us, “depends on people seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting fields, forests, waterways, and fellow creatures as gracious gifts and not merely as units of production or consumption.”[7]
Samuel Davidson (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is a senior research associate at the Baylor University Center for Disability and Flourishing. He is also the minister to college students at DaySpring Baptist Church in Waco, TX. His forthcoming book (Deep Ecclesiology: An Ecological Theology of the Church, Baylor University Press 2027) develops a constructive theology of the church as a more-than-human community.
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[1] Norman Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 17.
[2] Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambby: Itridge University Press, 2011), 14.
[3] Sarah Kestner, “What is Milk Protein Isolate,” Vital Proteins Blog (January 14, 2021) (https://www.vitalproteins.com/blogs/stay-vital/milk-protein-isolate?).
[4] Wirba, Agrarian Spirit, 17.
[5] Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (ed. Norman Wirzba) (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2002), 323.
[6] Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” 325.
[7] Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit, 13.
