Food as Time Travel
In our house growing up, Friday night was pizza night. I remember being nervous when my older brother would say he was on his fifth piece and I was still working on my third. It was an unspoken race. When he was sick with the flu or if he ever filled his stomach before coming home I would try my hardest to shame him. “This is my sixth piece and Gil is still on his second.”
My mother had six kids and was the wife of a relatively poor pastor in rural Maine, so the dough was homemade and spread thin and, unless it was someone’s birthday, so was the pepperoni. The grease would bleed out from the meat onto the edges, leaving sporadic orange oil stains which rendered those pieces highly coveted. Somewhere around my sixth grade year, a nutritionist from the state visited families around the county and made suggestions on how to eat healthier. My mom began to use olive oil on a regular basis and then the bottom of the pans were coated with this exotic stuff and every single piece was buttery and crisp.
Since then I’ve had a lot of pizza. Pizza all over the country. In St. Louis there is rivalry between Imo’s cracker crust and advocates of regular dough. Of course, Chicago has deep dish which, unlike any other kind of pizza, satiates the hungriest of bellies with one piece and remains uniquely faithful to the concept of pizza as pie. New York houses multiple denominations of the fare, including countless that go by the appellation New York style pizza. There are distinctions between Greek and Italian styles. Some say New Haven, Connecticut has displaced New York. There are dessert pizzas. Peanut butter and jelly pizzas. There is the kind with salad chopped up and diced and tossed on top of the dough. And, of course, there is cafeteria-styled, public school, French-bread cheese pizza, served on a speckled tray.
My father grew up on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the son of a woman who spoke only French, living in an Italian neighborhood. His last name was reworked in order to end it with an i instead of a y in the hopes that it would look less French. A shoeshine boy from a severely dysfunctional home, he spent most of his childhood on the streets of Providence. Eventually, when he quit school in the eighth grade, his mother would sign papers so that he could join the military at 15. All during my childhood he tried to describe Sicilian pizza to us. My mother even attempted to re-create its likeness from his description. Like a victim disappointed in the police sketch artist’s final product he simply said, “No, that’s not it.” Years later when I delivered wine to restaurants around Portland I remember coming across a Sicilian bakery for the first time in my life. There, set out on paper plates, were towering slabs of Sicilian pizza. Tall, yellow, almost cake-like dough with blood red sauce baked into the upper crust and sparsely adorned with cheese and oil. It was one of the best things I’d ever eaten. “This is what my dad was talking about,” I thought.
The Chinese political philosopher, Lin Yutang, once said, “What is patriotism, if not the love of the food one ate as a child?” When seen from this vantage point, food becomes a kind of glossolalic poetry. Pentecost, as the reversal of Babel, does a couple of crucial things: it not only re-administers a unity to the fractalized components of what was once a single thing . . . but it allows them to retain their distinction in the new unity. The emergence of the 70 nations out of the single Edenic family came with a significant damage to the prototype. God, however, used Israel, a single nation, to eventually call all of them back into a new kind of unity. Here is the profundity, God allowed them to continue to display their colors. It is not just tribes and tongues that have representation in the eternal kingdom . . . but nations as well.
The fact that multiplicity is retained in light of the unity which the Gospel will bring about throughout the earth shows that the world will conform more and more to a Trinitarian shape. The unity does not give way to the complexity. As Thai citizens come to saving faith, all Israel is being saved. When Ukrainian children trust in Christ, all Israel is being saved. And in this way, food becomes a sacramental tool of patriotism, not simply to Thailand or Ukraine, but to the Kingdom of God. Nations will find their eternal rest as nations in the kingdom. Every image of glory that the Scriptures give us assures us of the fact that earthly culture is being redeemed as well as earthly citizens. We needn’t rest confident in the fact that there will be eating in Heaven. Of course there will be. The oft missed promise is that there will be El Salvadorian and Eritrean food in Heaven. The nations are still identified in the kingdom by their representatives and tribute is brought into the city. Some of this has to be food trucks.
Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. - Psalm 30:4-5
What we see in these two verses from Psalm 30 is this encouragement to use worship as a kind of wormhole to get back into the joy of the Lord’s presence. Alienation is the fleeting state. Homelessness is temporary. For God’s people, we need to know that the light of His favor is eternal. When the believer experiences alienation from God, as the Psalmist often confesses, we see worship being employed as the medium by which homecoming is achieved. The prodigal son begins to cast his mind on the goodness of his father and to ascribe worth to him inwardly and shortly thereafter his feet are walking home.
Food is capable of doing something similar when it is received with thanksgiving. It is not only that food can take us back in time, back to our childhood with such empirical fortitude that we are tasting and smelling something from the past, but when received with gratefulness of heart as a signification of the God who tastes good (Psalm 34:8), food is able to take us into the future. Whether a Christian nostalgically sits down to a plate full of mac ’n’ cheese with a side of fish sticks or, when, in a foreign city, he finds a woman selling chicharrones out of a plastic bag at two in the morning, we are opening a portal to either access the past or the future . . . or perhaps both. In this way, Thomas Wolfe was wrong. Not only are we able to go home again, but, apparently you are encouraged to bring your friends for supper.
