life on planet earth on Nutrition

A lack of nutrition in early life can result in stunted growth. Stunting results in lifelong health complications. According to the WHO: Stunting in early life -- particularly in the first 1000 days...

There is a tendency among readers and scholars of Genesis 2:16-17 to focus on the prohibition of verse 17: “but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” …I want to pause to cons...

No one likes to talk about human population. Christians in particular are rightly wary of the ways in which population discussions have sometimes served to denigrate the value of human life and the bl...

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season,...

There is a tendency among readers and scholars of Genesis 2:16-17 to focus on the prohibition of verse 17: “but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” …I want to pause to cons...

My first call to ministry was in Eastern Washington state. It turned out to be one of the most prolific winemaking regions in the country. One of the things I learned from a local winery was really qu...

An ending can be either good or bad. There are excellent novels that held my attention and moved me for hundreds of pages only to end in a way that made me regret reading the story. Sadly, the same ca...

I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honor...

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

To eat is to be implicated in a vast, complex, interweaving set of life and death dramas in which we are only one character among many...The moment we chew on anything we participate in regional, geog...

Food is a holy and humbling mystery. Every time a creature eats it participates in God’s life-giving yet costly ways, ways that simultaneously affirm creation as a delectable gift, and as a divinely o...

To know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.

To learn what has gone on in the kitchen and the dining room—and what still goes on there—is to discover much about a society’s physical health, its economic condition, its race relations, its class s...

No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.

The act of ingestion and digestion involves the incorporation of food into our own flesh. What we eat literally becomes us, and we become it. Logically, therefore, food is among the most powerful expre...

Food comes first, then morals.

We are called to be food and drink for one another.

Of course we are meant to eat, and even to feast, but only when we fast do we make real progress toward being free of our dependence on food to soothe our depression and anesthetize our anxieties.

When eating becomes a spiritual exercise, it isn’t simply that people will have occasions to become more attentive to each other and the world. They will also have the opportunity to see, receive, and...

The boundary between living and nonliving is actually removed in food. Food is natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world. When I take food, I am eating world matter in general, and in so...

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...

I once heard a description of what meals are like in heaven. The saints are seated on either side of a four-foot-wide banquet table. The table is set with delicious foods on every plate. The only thin...

One of the many technological transformations of the twentieth century took place right on our dinner plates. Because of its cheapness and convenience, most Americans quickly accepted new ways of eati...

To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirst...

The saying used to be that the secret to a long, healthy life was to choose your parents well. But today we know that only about 20 percent of a person’s health is due to genetics, and about 20 percen...

To grow food and eat in a way that is mindful of God is to collaborate with God’s own primordial sharing of life in the sharing of food with each other. It is to participate in forms of life and frame...

Food production entails at every stage judgments and practices that bear directly on the health of the earth and living creatures, on the emotional, economic, and physical well-being of families and c...

One of the lasting contributions of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is to have shown how a considerable amount of contemporary eating is without mercy or art...To “grab a bite on the go” communica...

Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-em...

In recent decades, many Christians have tried to make sense of the tension between our bodies and spirits by swinging to the opposite pole. Instead of saying, “The body doesn’t matter,” they have said...