What Would Jesus Eat? Or for that matter what would Moses or Buddha or Mohammed eat? Let’s just say, they, in their divine wisdom and knowledge, might be a little upset at what we are eating today.
These holy men ate healthy, even though they all spent time on the road, and, as we know, eating well when traveling can be challenging.
In fact, there was deprivation. After fleeing Egypt, Moses and the Israelites were starving in the wilderness until God rained down the bread, “manna from heaven.” Buddha found spiritual strength, but few calories, fasting on one grain of rice and one sesame seed. Jesus famously fed 5,000 hungry followers with five loaves of barley bread and two small fishes.
But for Jesus and the others, when the food was available, recorded history and archeology tell us it was healthy: melons, figs, dates, grapes, olives, vegetables, whole grain barley and wheat, almonds, pistachios, fish. Chickens and eggs were a part of daily life. Herding was common, providing milk and cheese from sheep, cows, and goats. Because of scarcity and lack of refrigeration, meat would have been reserved for special occasions. Cane sugar was not yet developed, but there was honey, a special treat for the prosperous.
And, though Americans today might gag, grasshoppers and rodents were fine sources of protein, energy, and micronutrients, and welcome on the menu – as they still are in some places!
As the Apostle Paul put it: “Your body is a temple.” Our bodies are precious, said Buddha. But since Buddha’s time, with advances in industrialization and rapid changes in our societies, we have developed a food industry which formulates, manufacturers, and immerses us in foods which are cheaper, hyperpalatable to the point of addiction, and unhealthy.
In fact, the business of food has a tarnished history. Rice was polished to make it white, and Asian populations got beriberi. Midwest milled corn was highly refined to ship it to the American South for the poor farmers and mill workers in the early 20th century who couldn’t afford anything else. With the niacin refined out of the corn, the farmers and factory workers developed an epidemic of pellagra and suffered dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.
Lately, a more drastic, deadlier trend has appeared. Over 50% of our calories come from ultraprocessed food. Our eating habits have been shaped by ultraprocessed food engineering and marketing, creating a global epidemic of obesity and overweight. In America, obesity is a leading cause of preventable death.
Millennia went by with our species thriving on the food that people could find or grow, all minimally processed and nutritionally diverse. Communities and their leaders figured out how to keep their food healthy and nutritionally complete. The rabbis writing the Old Testament or Torah saw trichinosis larvae infecting their people and simply forbade eating pork, the primary way the parasite entered humans. Allah, in the Islamic Quran, banned pork as not halal. Africans and the first Americans learned to combine plant foods like beans and rice to make complete proteins where meat and fish were scarce.
What made modern leaders allow such a weird, industrialized, and unhealthy food environment as we now inhabit? (Yes weird. Exhibit A is Quorn, a pretend meat made from mold, available in your Whole Foods freezer section. Exhibit B is Froot Loops, available at all more affordable supermarkets.)
