The Sanctity of Food 🌾
What does our problem with food waste say about how we view God?
How often do we actually think about the food we throw away?
The wilted lettuce that was meant for salads, the leftover restaurant food we didn’t really like, the bizarre fuzzy thing that's been making the fridge stink for two weeks...
"Oh well," we think. "It wasn't that expensive. I can always get more."
And into the garbage can it goes, the victim of a food system that has turned the once-precious source of our sustenance into a cheap, easily replaceable commodity.
We've become so distanced from where and how food is produced that we no longer consider the amount of work and resources required to grow, harvest, process and transport what winds up on our plates—or, as is often the case, in the trash.
The farmers who grow our food are no longer our neighbors and friends. With few exceptions, all we know of farms is what we've seen in romanticized advertisements. We've never seen migrant workers picking produce or visited a manufacturing facility.
Everything from seed to final product has been streamlined, commoditized and tucked out of sight to the point where, for many of us, a trip to the grocery store is as close as we ever get to the origin of our food.
Even more troubling is how distanced we've become from the true Source of all provision, including our daily bread: the God Who created us, the earth we live on and all that it brings forth (Nehemiah 9:6, Isaiah 30:23). We've commoditized Him through a casual approach to worship that either ignores or fails to understand His sovereignty and holiness. We take for granted that we always have what we need but neglect to thank and honor Him for it.
This dual disconnect leads us to trivialize food to the point where we don't think twice about letting it rot in the crisper drawer, go stale on the shelves or curdle in the carton. Once it's past the point of being edible, we're perfectly comfortable tossing it and heading to the store to buy something else. (Or, nonsensically, the exact same thing we just threw away.)
It may not seem like such a big deal, but our individual acts of wastefulness impact far more than our grocery budgets. Food waste affects the entire world—and indicates a much deeper spiritual issue that most Christians have thus far failed to address.
What a Waste
Just how big is the food waste problem? In the U.S. alone:
The average household wastes 31.9% of its food, the equivalent of throwing away between between $1,500 and $1,866 every year.
Between 80 and 160 billion pounds of food are wasted annually nationwide, which is at least 1 pound of food per person, per day.
Food waste has increased 50% since 1974.
Even the most frugal household wastes 8.7% of its food.
The global picture of waste is just as shocking:
About one-third of all food produced globally is lost due to issues along the supply chain or wasted at the retail, foodservice and consumer level, adding up to between 1.3 billion and 1.4 billion *tons* per year.
At the farm level, between 15% and 35% of food is lost or wasted; loss at the retail level is uniformly high at 26%.
Consumers in North America and Europe waste roughly 9 to 19 times more food than people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeastern Asia.
In less affluent countries, loss and waste mainly occur due to problems with preservation, storage, infrastructure and transportation; wealthier populations experience more consumer waste.
This last point illustrates a sad truth: The more disposable income we have, the more food we waste. After all, if we can afford to buy more, what's the big deal with throwing some of it away?
Food Frugality
It hasn't always been like this.
Just a few generations ago, being frugal with food was the norm. People farmed, producing food for their families and, when the crop was particularly good, sharing the bounty with others. Whatever couldn't be eaten close to the time of harvest was preserved. Scraps became compost or food for the farm animals. If something didn't grow well or the supply ran out before the next season, it was difficult or impossible to go buy more.
Throughout the lean times of the World Wars and the Great Depression, food waste was unthinkable. In World War I, the U.S. government encouraged less consumption and frowned on waste, pointing out that the troops needed food to win the victory. The following years saw unprecedented food shortages and, when the country entered World War II, actual food rationing. To throw away any of the precious little of what was available would have been, for some, the equivalent of inviting starvation.
No one could have expected the turnaround that was about to happen—or the stunning change of mindset that would sweep the nation as abundance became the norm.
Abundance Begets Triviality
It began after World War II, when chemical fertilizers were introduced and food could suddenly be produced on an industrial scale. It didn't take long for processed convenience foods to begin dominating store shelves—and American kitchens. Cupboards and refrigerators once stocked with fresh, canned and frozen provisions from the farm suddenly became repositories of cheap, fast, commoditized options that promised to make dinner prep that much easier.
All the while, people inched further and further away from the source of their food. When the garbage disposal was introduced, it became not only simple but also fashionable to dump uneaten portions "down the drain"—out of sight, out of mind. Becoming disconnected from food as the fruits of labor that required an intimate personal connection with the earth—God's creation—created an equally troubling lack of connection with the Provider of that food.
Far from being seen as a gift from a God Who cares for the people He created, food became something we took for granted—and still do, so much so that we won't settle for anything less than the most pristine specimens the grocery store has to offer.
Expecting Unnatural Perfection
The apparent necessity of perfection is a sad, but natural, outcome of food's commoditization. Once we moved away from growing our own food, someone else had to grow it for us—on a massive scale. And, since that food gets shipped all over the country to grocery stores where uniform visual appeal is key in driving sales, produce needs to be not only a precise fit for shipping containers but also the shape and size we, as consumers, expect.
The USDA has gone so far as to develop standards to ensure that nary a bruised fruit or discolored leaf graces store shelves. Fruits and vegetables that fail to grow to the proper sizes are also deemed unacceptable.
This, naturally, results in a significant amount of waste. Anything that looks even slightly off gets left in the fields; after all, it can't be sold, so why bother wasting energy picking it? The same goes at the grocery store; one small blemish turns a perfectly edible piece of produce into trash. (Some stores donate this food, known as "cull," or give it to local farmers for animal feed. But currently, about 35% of culled food from retailers winds up in landfills.)
And we've fallen for the illusion of perfection. We don't see the nearly 34% of food left unharvested on farms or the over 10 million tons of surplus pulled from store shelves. All we see is whether or not apples have dimples or lettuce has a wilted leaf. We turn our noses up at anything we perceive as an imperfection, not thinking about where it will ultimately end up if no one else buys it, either.
We take the same mindset with us into settings like farmers markets, where uniform produce isn't the norm. Although tolerance for "ugly" fruits and vegetables is higher than it used to be, particularly among rare or heirloom varieties, we're still apt to reach for the best-looking options at each booth. At the end of the day, seconds and rejects that could have fed us or someone else become fodder for the farmers' compost heaps.
End of (Shelf) Life
As statistics show, there's no guarantee we'll actually use what we bring home from our shopping trips. Whether it rots in the refrigerator or sits on the shelves until the mythical "best buy" date is past, odds are that a significant portion of our purchases never make it onto our plates.
Those "best buy" and "use by" stamps on packages are a big part of the problem. Around 84% of us pitch perfectly good food because we believe it can go from being safe one day to spoiled or dangerous the next. We've become so far removed from food's growth and production that we no longer trust our senses to tell us when something is bad.
So, into the trash it all goes—wasted along with the resources required to grow, process and package it. This practice has become second nature, and yet Biblical history shows that wasting our food is one of the most unnatural—and irreverent—things we can do.
Holy Food
When God created the world, He bestowed a generous abundance of food upon both people and animals:
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. (Genesis 1:29-30, KJV)
Following the global flood, animals were added as acceptable food sources, with one important caveat:
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. (Genesis 9:3-4, KJV)
Blood represented the life of the animal. By not eating it, God‘s people signified their recognition of God as the provider not only food but also of life itself. Animals weren’t there to be indiscriminately killed and eaten based on personal whims; each one, like the abundance of the garden at the time of creation, was a precious gift from the Lord.
Sacrificial Offerings
The most profound example of this is found in the very first Passover, in which God instructed every family of His chosen people Israel to kill a lamb “without blemish“ and place some of its blood on the door posts of their houses before preparing and eating the meat in a certain way as part of a specific meal. (See Exodus 12.)
As a symbol of what God would later do in His redemptive work through Jesus Christ, this meal had spiritual implications that went far beyond the sanctity of food. Food, in fact, was not the central point at all; rather, the entire ceremony served as a memorial and reminder both of God‘s sovereign power over all life and His merciful act of deliverance—both for the Israelites at the time of the exodus and for sinful humanity as a whole in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ.
Both animals and plants continued to play a central role in worship throughout Biblical history. Grain and wine accompanied daily animal sacrifices, and special offerings were given at set feast times throughout the year. (See Leviticus 2.) God’s people were instructed to bring sheaf of the first grain that ripened prior to harvest; when the harvest had fully been gathered in, they were to bring a special offering of two loaves of bread to accompany their other sacrifices. (See Leviticus 23:9-25, 39-43.)
These continual sacrifices kept both the holiness of God and the precious nature of food in perspective. Dedicating food to God was an act of both thanksgiving and trust, and there was no room for waste. As a society that experienced a period of nomadism before settling down and becoming agrarian, the Israelites would have understood the costliness of each sacrifice.
We would do well to look at our own food through this lens. If what we eat is a gift from a God Who loves us and provides for us—the same God Who made the universe—nothing should strike us as less valuable simply because it's not the size, shape or color we expect. To shun His provision because it doesn't fall into our manufactured definition of perfection is to trivialize the enormous wealth our food supply represents.
Heavenly Gift, Earthly Bounty
In Biblical times, having land, flocks and herds was considered a mark of affluence. Men like Abraham, Jacob and Job are all recorded as having significant resources in the form of animals. Great kings like David and Solomon were able to provide abundantly for large households, as well as share their bounty with the people during times of celebration (1 Chronicles 16:1-3, 1 Kings 4:22-24). Having so much net worth tied up in animals and the products of agriculture meant that all the food the people ate or gave as a gift had tangible value.
God's people also carried the memory of a time when food was even more precious. Throughout their nomadic days—40 years of traveling through the wilderness—the Israelites' main source of nourishment was the heavenly food called manna. God provided just the right amount for each family on a daily basis, and it was to be eaten before the next day dawned.
This was another exercise in trusting God, in understanding what it really meant for Him to be a faithful and caring Provider. If anyone began to doubt that there would be enough food for the next day and tried to hoard manna overnight, it bred worms and stank (Exodus 16:16-21).
This early form of food waste provides a graphic picture of the true consequences of taking food for granted—something we now do on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not.
Cheap, Fast and Worthless
Today, it's not unusual for us to toss half-eaten food in the trash or chuck it out the car window when we decide we either don't want or can't finish the rest. We leave half—or more—of restaurant meals on our plates instead of bringing them home to eat later. And those untrustworthy "sell by" dates can lead to stores filling entire dumpsters with discarded food—much of which hasn't actually gone bad.
Artificially low food prices fuel our cavalier handling of food. The total on a grocery or restaurant bill represents only a fraction of the true cost. When social, environmental and human health impacts are factored in, the food we throw away may cost as much as three times what we pay for it. Because most of these costs are "hidden," we never think about them—and we balk when confronted with prices that more accurately represent the amount of work and resources that go into food production.
We're not used to spending—or unwilling to spend—much of our money on what we eat. On average, we dedicate just shy of 10% of our budgets to food. Around 4.7% goes toward food we eat outside the home; food eaten at home accounts for 4.9% of spending. It's a stunning drop from the 17% of disposable income we used to spend in the 1960s. Although lower food prices and higher incomes account for some of the change, it's still a picture of just how little value we place on one of the most important things we can buy.
We don't spend much time on food any more, either. A close look at history—including Biblical history—reveals the amount of work that was once involved in preparing a meal. Animals had to be slaughtered and cleaned before cooking; vegetables had to be picked, cleaned and chopped; and grains required harvesting and grinding when flour was needed. Even after food companies started doing some of the prep work for us, we still had to cook much of what we ate "from scratch."
Contrast this with today, when the majority of us have forsaken regular meals in favor of snacking on the go. We grab whatever is quickest and most convenient to calm our rumbling stomachs as we rush off to the next thing. Whereas we used to spend a couple of hours cooking every day in the 1960s, we now spend around 31 minutes. (This increased a bit to 41 minutes during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's still significantly less time than we used to spend.)
We've minimized food's importance in every area from production to preparation. Food waste has become second nature, something ingrained into our lives and into society at large—and we need to change our mindset if we're going to restore the sanctity of food.
A Return to Treasuring Our Provision
What must we do to reorient the way we think about food and food waste?
The first step is to realize the reason why we place so little value on food: We no longer see it as God's gift. Getting back to the basics of Who God is and recognizing Him as our Provider brings the issue of food into perspective. It reminds us that everything is a gift from God, including the food we so carelessly toss in the garbage (James 1:17).
We need not only to remember this but also be thankful. Simply reinstating the practice of praying before eating—or recommitting to doing so with a focused mind and a grateful heart—gives us quiet moments to pause and reflect on the value of what's on our plates.
From here, with our minds fixed on God, we can take practical steps to begin fixing the food waste problem:
Learn how to choose, store and preserve food to minimize spoilage
Educate ourselves on how to tell when food is still good to eat regardless of the "sell by" date
Embrace the quirky personality of imperfect produce
Take a refrigerator and pantry inventory before every shopping trip
Plan meals around what we already have on hand—and use it up before buying more
Shift our priorities to make cooking and eating more prominent in our daily schedules
Brush up on our cooking skills to ensure we make the most out of everything we buy
Make plans to use restaurant leftovers—or request smaller portions when ordering
Freeze leftovers we're not likely to eat within a couple of days
Avoid "stocking up" on perishables we know we won't use
Whenever possible, purchase high-quality food from local producers
There is, of course, much more to be done in the food system as a whole. Farmers must be given more options for selling produce that doesn't fit the "perfect" USDA supermarket standards. Relaxing those standards to allow for more variation would provide the most direct route to market—and it would go a long way toward shattering the myth of perfection that has driven us to the point of such extravagant retail waste.
Better avenues for redistributing what can't easily be sold or that doesn't sell within an expected time frame would open up opportunities to route food to the millions around the country who don't have enough to eat.
And both retailers and restaurants can start to back off on how much they purchase and serve. Few people require the 1,250 calories found in an average restaurant meal all in one sitting. And if the store runs out of tomatoes before the next shipment arrives, so be it.
While none of us can personally fix every cause of food waste, consciously recalibrating our minds to look at food in light of God's goodness and holiness can help us change our own habits and set an example for others. By shifting our behavior to be more conscientious and frugal, we encourage those around us to consider the value of food and begin to make changes in the way they shop and eat.
A more economical food system begins with returning to a proper reverence for God and all He has given us.
Thanks to Foster member Katherine Canniff for her helpful insights on this piece!
Sam, excellent piece. It made me think and re-think my world, like reading Wendell Berry does. Much to ponder now. Thank you.