[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1602589844″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QfPTRfs9L._SL160_.jpg” width=”107″]Page 2: Jennifer Ayres – Good Food
Moving beyond the horror stories toward a “theology and ethics of food,” Ayers asserts four “moral commitments” stemming from the image of the Eucharistic table, which itself serves as prophetic witness to the eschatological table to which Christians look forward. These moral commitments include “the priority of the hungry,” “justice for those who work the land,” respect for creation, and a commitment to recognizing the “interrelatedness of humanity and, indeed, all creation.” Perhaps it is this final point that drives the book – we are alienated from our food and the vast and complicated system that brings it to us, and we are longing for and nourished by some kind of connection and participation in and with the processes and people, land and animals that feed us: to be “eaters” rather than merely “consumers.”
Ayres is less concerned with what she calls an “ideational theological framework” than she is with telling the stories of actual faith communities who are working toward food that is morally “good” in the ways that Ayres suggests; a “grounded practical theology of food,” she suggests, is “a reflective kind of theology” that’s concerned with how religious belief is lived out by people of faith and their communities. While I wholeheartedly affirm the significance, and perhaps even the necessity, of connecting theological abstraction to embodied human realities, I found Ayres’s theological grounding going into these stories a bit shaky. For a theologian, she seems oddly skeptical of theology, doubting its sufficiency as a foundation. In a note on the section critiquing what she perplexingly calls “thinking only ideationally” about food (isn’t all thinking ‘ideational’ by definition?) she seems to doubt the validity of her whole project:
“the assumption that we might address injustices in our food system primarily through an ideational theological framework also implies that we are capable of discerning the ‘right’ theological framework. […] Although this book presents its own theological framework, we do well to remember that such frameworks will always be limited and perspectival, and sometimes even destructive.”
As she is clearly cognizant of the limitations of human understanding, I would have expected Ayres to perhaps give the reader some clues as to her own possible limitations, blind spots, and perspectives. That the book is scholarly and published by a university press does not preclude the possibility of writing in such a way; scholars have been publishing works at once rigorously academic and deeply personal for decades (Reading the Romance by Janice Radway and A Life in School by Jane Tompkins come quickly to mind.)
Though Ayres herself unfortunately does not appear as a figure in her own pages, the stories – of urban gardens sprouting in church yards; of Christian groups traveling to Mexico to break tortillas with maize farmers whose health and livelihoods are threatened by the flooding of their markets with cheap US corn – which comprise more than half the book, do in some ways overcome what she appears to be pressing against in her argument against “thinking only ideationally.” In an essay on fiction, C.S. Lewis argued that the power of story and myth is that it permits us to experience that which we might be accustomed only to thinking about; stories make abstractions concrete and put flesh on disembodied ideas.
An important strength of Ayres’s book is that it offers a tempered hope, affirms that even little movements of protest and grace are worthwhile, and does not take the scolding tone that so much contemporary writing on food is rife with. Readers will not come away feeling personally rebuked, but with a sense that “the symbolic significance of the decision to purchase at least one item directly from a farmer should not be trivialized,” for it is an act of “re-membering”; one that moves the individual eater into a closer relationship–membership–with the community of creation (land, other creatures, other people).
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OK. So this review made me not want to read the book. Was that your intent?