We are what we eat
A Laudato Si' saint for the Triduum
In his 1959 biography of Peter Maurin, Arthur Sheehan describes the Catholic radical’s home country of the Lozère region in Southern France. Peter was born in a deep pockets of Roman Gaul, just south of Lyons, the episcopal see of Irenaeus, proclaimed a doctor of the Church on January 21, 2022. Peter was born on the slopes of Mount Lozère, in a small hamlet called Oultet.
Peter’s family were peasant farmers, according to his own description, and their landlocked oasis from the rapidly industrialzing and revolutionizing world presented a vision of life that Peter brought with him to the new world.
In one passage, Sheehan describes the Maurin dinner table:
“On the family table were foods they had grown. … No hops grew in the area, so they had no beer. Not even the grapes for which France is so famous grew near Peter’s home, so they could make no wine. Instead, they had plenty of wholesome rye bread from the village oven. Milk, cheese, eggs, and butter were plentiful. Sometimes there was jam as well. And on rare occasions, a treat—candy. Now and then they had codfish brought by Breton fishermen all the way from the Grand Banks or from Iceland. The rest of the menu was mainly vegetables of all kinds, including potatoes and salads.”
Besides bringing up warm memories of Farmer Boy, where basically 90% of the book is Laura Ignalls Wilder describing what her husband ate as a young boy, Sheehan’s description reminded me of Peter Maurin’s adulthood Lenten practice: eating only food grown in the Hudson Valley and New York climate. “Eat what you raise and raise what you eat,” Peter enjoined young Workers. Peter was prophetic in large and small ways, and here his habit is certainly prescient and on trend—how many ads and thinkpieces have we read encouraging us to “eat local" in the past few decade?
One of the fruits of eating what you raise and eating local is that you learn what can and cannot be grown on the soil that you live on. How well would asparagus grow in my backyard, I think, preparing my Easter menu. Goat cheese could be local, right? asks James one morning after brunch. What is the land I live on and how does it differ from lands that produce avocados, oranges, or mangos? Eating the fruits of the earth you live on connects you more deeply to the land in which you live. We come from its dust, as does the food we eat, and to partake of its fruits is to bring it into our bodies.
A New York Times fellow recently penned an explainer on PFAs, the chemicals created roughly 90 years ago by a 27-year-old chemist, traces of which are supposedly found in most organisms on earth. Some preliminary studies are linked to increased risk of cancer and suppressed immune systems. But, nearly a century into their infiltration of the environment, it’s really too early to say. But if we are what we eat, at least part of us is PFA.
In Laudato Si, Pope Francis denounces the “technocratic paradigm.”
The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.
[Now,] we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. (§106)
This is the problem of the technocratic paradigm: it has changed our environment and our relationship to it. We are not just releasing bad actors into the world that can be dispensed with, the problems we create are transforming the world in which we live. It’s as if your opponent changed the chess board, not just moved a piece, at every turn.
And how does one respond to such massive ecological changes? Peter Maurin, before any talk of “the Anthropocene” had entered the chat, had a plan of action. Peter’s program of cult, culture, and cultivation offered a mode of liturgical living that responded to the changes in the chess board the industrial revolution, the dawn of the technocratic paradigm, was wreaking. Peter’s goal wasn’t just to put broken pieces back together. It was to transform the social order—what Pope Francis might call an integral ecology—to create a new society in the shell of the old.
Peter’s life growing up on a farm taught him the importance of cultivation: of knowing the land, caring for it, and living in harmony with it. Land is prior to culture: you must have a land—a place with a singular ecology—and a relationship to it to have culture. Culture is built off singularities and particularities. It’s roots are in a cultivating community: a group of people gathers together to cultivate the earth and builds together a common culture. For us, that means reaching out to receive the past, rather than focusing solely on the present. We receive the past through the stories of the old, family records, reading the histories of the place and people who have shaped us, learning the long story of the human race on earth and the earth that is more ancient than we. And what is a culture for? Peter would say cult. And by cult Peter means the liturgy—the mode of Catholic worship that re-creates human beings and their relationships to one another—that is an hourly practice of “doing the world the way it was meant to be done.” If culture does not have as its ultimate end praise, so liturgical thinking goes, then it will crumble. In the Catholic imagination, culture does not exist for itself, but as a means of binding together a community caring for the world around them and worshiping its creator.
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Over these three days, Christians prepare, as a Church, to re-live the passion and resurrection of Christ. This is not primarily an imaginative or emotional recreation—we do not pretend, or act, watch, or emote these events—nor even is it solely a ritualistic recreation—through our fasting on good Friday and feasting on Sunday—although all of these practices help us embody and embrace the events of the day.
Easter is Easter for us because it is the sacramental commemoration, once a year, where we renew our baptismal promises. As we remember Christ’s death and Resurrection, we remember also the day in which we were sacramentally brought into Christ’s body, the day we once participated in his death and resurrection, a journey that can never be undone.
Easter reminds us of who we are, because of our baptism. It reminds us that we are indeed what we eat each day at Mass: the lamb of God, who offered himself up for a broken, greedy, suffering world, in a gift of self that is love stronger even than death. A love that heals not just the broken pawns and queens and knights, but restores the board itself. A love who paradigm is gift, not control. A love that we are called to live in, to become—to eat.