Theology of food

Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Illuminations: Theory & Religion) is an explosive little book.  His “alimentary theology” is not just a theology of food; like Jeremy Begbie’s “theology with music,” Mendez Montoya gives us a theology and philosophy with food.  Food is a doorway into epistemology, ontology, ethics, politics.

One thought inspired by his summary of Carolyn Korsmeyer’s work (briefly noted in an earlier post) is the fact that food “exemplifies the qualities or properties contained in the object.”  That, it seems to me, offers a neat way to think about human creativity and its relation to the structures of creation itself.

Creativity might be taken as an assertion of human will and skill that overcomes created reality.  We might, for instance, make bread by substituting baking powder for the flour.  We might want to make broccoli taste like chicken, but it’s gonna be a long shot.  Not good.

Creativity might be taken as nothing but rearrangement: Cooks aren’t creative.  A baker simply finds the bread that’s – what? – already implicit in the ingredients?  That doesn’t work either.  Bread doesn’t grow on trees.  Bread is not simply a rearrangement flour, bread, oil, salt.  Once it’s bread, the ingredients lose their independent qualities; once it’s soup, there’s no going back.  The qualities of bread are bready, of soup, soupy.  Cooks create.

Creativity might be teasing out, extending, exemplifying the qualities of creation, and of fresh combinations of created things.  Good cooks recognize qualities in their ingredients that most don’t, and, in a flash of genius, a cook might arrange and mix his ingredients in ways that brings out unforeseen and unrecognized qualities.  Something new emerges.  There is a grain of creation.  Chicken is, within a range of variation, chickeny.  Cooking goes with the grain of creation, but it goes with the grain to create something new.