The Feast

We live in a culture where it is expected that you can get whatever you want, whenever you want it. This is true in many areas, but I want to focus on the area of food today. If you live in the US or Canada and are willing to pay for it (most people are), you can get any food you want from any nation on earth at any time of year, and fast, too. You can have fresh strawberries in January (nevermind that they don’t taste quite so “fresh”), a whole dinner ready in 5 minutes from a little box, and if you want a little something sweet, you can grab a box of Krispy Kremes on your way to the checkout. We want everything “gourmet”. Birthday cakes aren’t quite as special as they were when we were 4, because we can pick up a cake from the Walmart bakery any night of the week and eat it after dinner for no reason at all, other than that we happen to like cake. Nathan commented to me after Christmas that even Christmas dinner didn’t seem like a big deal because we eat that kind of food (though not in those quantities!) all the time. I could go on. But my point is that for centuries before us, and still, to a greater or lesser extent, in the rest of the world, “special” food was and is reserved for special times. Even in Germany, which is very much a “Western” country, it is difficult to find fruits and vegetables out of season and Pfeffernuesse, Stollen and Gluehwein are only available in November and December (of course, you can make your own any time of year, but who would? - they’re Christmas foods!). If you live in a small town and want tofu, you might need to travel to a big city to get it. And certainly in more remote and/or poorer areas of the world, daily fare is very simple and based on things that are cheap and readily available - beans and rice, for example. But then, bring on a reason to celebrate and out come the delicacies! A special homecoming, wedding, harvest festival, Christmas… expect a real feast! Except most of us in this continent would only see it as a big meal… nothing special about it, because we eat “special” food all the time.

I want to reintroduce The Feast in our family. By eating more simply on a daily basis, sticking mostly to seasonal fruits and vegetables, eating locally produced whole foods, and drastically reducing the amount of sugar in our diets (the expense of honey, molasses and Sucanat* over refined sugars helps us eat less of it), we will not only save enough money throughout the year to throw real feasts when we have reason to, but those feasts will be looked forward to and savored because they are full of foods we don’t eat all the time. I want birthday cake to be special, not just because it has candles on it, but because cake is a special food, requiring time and more expensive ingredients than our normal fare. I want it to be special because we don’t just enjoy sweets whenever we want. I want food to be a real part of the celebration, not just something to fill our bellies like any other day. I want special occasions to have a meal that reflects, to a very small extent, the incredible feast that will be set before us at the marriage supper of the Lamb, which will be far beyond any comparison with even the best earthly feast you ever had!

The picture is from the movie Babette's Feast, a great classic and good example of a real feast!

*SuCaNat = sugar cane natural: evaporated sugar cane juice granules that retain the nutrients of the sugar cane