Jul
28
Dining with Minahasans and Jews
“MINAHASA: an Indonesian people inhabiting the Minahasa Peninsula of northeast Sulawesi” — Merriam-Webster
Do you ever get really grossed out when you see or hear what certain other cultures eat? Certainly, missionaries and other visitors from one part of the world to another will encounter some “delicacies” that seem awfully strange, even disgusting. Why is that? Would you be surprised to learn that some of our heroes from the Bible (e.g., the Twelve Apostles, Paul) would have had similar reactions to such dietary differences and the people who practiced them?
A few weeks ago, I shared an excerpt from a book I’ve been reading off-and-on: Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, by E. Randolph “Randy” Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien. In the greater discussion about becoming aware of our Western biases and assumptions while reading the Bible, the authors discuss various cultural mores and issues, such as those regarding sex, food, and money. The previous post looked at an issue involving attitudes towards sex and money, but this week’s post focuses on the above-mentioned “icky” food encounters….
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“I (Randy) was leading a group of Arkansas pastors to preach in villages in remote Indonesia. Since none of our Indonesian hosts spoke English, I would freely discuss the menu options with my American friends, as long as I smiled when I pointed to each dish. I had warned them to keep poker faces. Our Indonesian hosts had sacrificed much time and expense to provide tables heavy laden with gracious provisions, and we didn’t want to offend them. In one village, I looked over a table covered with dishes with a bit of dismay. I couldn’t see much here that would appeal to Western palates.
After some consideration, I pointed at a dish and said, ‘This is the dog meat.’
One pastor commented, ‘Oh, we’ll want to avoid that one.’
‘Nope,’ I replied. ‘That’s your best option.’
On another occasion, traveling with a group of college students, I chose not to tell them that the main stir-fry featured rat meat. When I mentioned it later that evening, a student ran outside to throw up a meal that had been digested hours earlier. The nausea she experienced was not from the meat itself but from the thought of the meat. The very idea of eating rat turned her stomach (as it might be turning yours now). As these illustrations suggest, biologically edible is a much broader category than culturally edible.
Of course, what qualifies as culturally edible differs not only between East and West, but also from region to region within the same country. I (Brandon) grew up in the rural and small-town American South where many, out of necessity and choice, provided meat for the family table by hunting and fishing. Some of the fare produced in this way was perfectly acceptable by polite standards. You’ll find venison and duck, for example, in the finest of restaurants. But there were other creatures that sometimes crossed our plates — like squirrels and raccoons and crawfish — that more urban folks in the same region looked down their noses at as ‘redneck food.’ This is to say that the Western eyes with which many Americans view food are middle- to upper-class and educated, well removed from the realities of killing and processing the food they eat. This gives many of us a strong cultural aversion to a wide range of foods. Much of the world has a broader definition of culturally edible than we do.
Fried rat on a stick
We may misunderstand the significance of food and dining in the Bible if we fail to understand the powerful cultural mores related to food. We can easily transfer our judgments about foods (that particular food is ‘bad’) to the people who eat them (those people are bad). We may apply negative values to Minahasans who eat rat meat, for example, or rural Americans who eat squirrel (which is essentially just a furry rat that lives in trees). ‘How could anyone, especially a Christian, eat a rat?’ Ironically, our Asian friends are appalled that Americans eat cheese. ‘Do you have any idea where cheese comes from?’ they ask incredulously. As they describe it, you start with baby cow food and then let it go bad until it sours into a solid mass of mold. That’s actually a pretty good description of cheese-making. It is crucial to remember when we read the Bible that this sort of gut-level reaction to food isn’t something that affects Westerners alone. Even the biblical authors and their audiences were prone to attribute something like culinary immorality to someone whose palate was broader than theirs.
Personally, we’re tempted to think of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and 11 as something like an extended parable or metaphor addressing changes in dietary law, a lesson that is essentially theological or doctrinal. And that’s true to an extent. But we should clue in to the fact that something important is happening here because Luke gives almost two whole chapters to the situation.
Three times during Peter’s vision, a sheet full of unclean animals is lowered from heaven and God commands, ‘Kill and eat.’
‘Surely not, Lord!’ Peter replies (Acts 10:13-14).
It’s tempting to read Peter’s response as self-righteousness. ‘I have never eaten anything impure or unclean,’ he says (Acts 10:14). He’s been a good Jew all his life, and not even God can make him compromise his scruples. But perhaps Peter’s reaction to the vision is not simply righteous indignation; maybe it is nausea. No doubt Peter would have been disgusted by the very idea of eating the animals presented in the sheet. Restrictions against eating pork and shellfish are legalities to us. But for first-century Jews, they were deeply entrenched dietary (cultural) mores. The Lord’s command might evoke a similar feeling in Westerners if we were confronted with a sheet full of puppies and bats and cockroaches.
‘Kill and eat,’ says the Lord.
Like Peter, we would almost certainly reply, ‘Surely not, Lord!’
Pigs raised for market
Food in the Bible was often, if not always, a matter of fellowship and social relationships. When the first Christians were trying to decide whether Gentile Christians should keep Jewish dietary laws, they weren’t just quibbling over doctrine. Just like we do, ancients were transferring their feelings about certain food onto the people who ate them. The very idea of a tablemate gobbling down pig meat was enough to send a good Jew scurrying for the latrine. We may be speculating here, but there is contemporary support for our claims. Journalist Khaled Diab, who calls himself a lapsed Muslim, confesses that ‘long after my spirited embrace of alcohol, my “sinful” attitude to sex, my loss of faith in the temple of organised religion and my agnosticism and indifference towards the supreme being,’ he still cannot bring himself to eat pork. This isn’t a religious scruple but a cultural more. For modern Muslims, Diab explains, eating pork ‘is not merely tantamount to eating dogs for Westerners[;] in certain cases, we could go as far as to liken it to consuming cockroaches — so unclean is the image of these animals.’ Diab even quotes a Jewish student who explained that although neither of his parents are ‘particularly religious,’ nevertheless they both ‘find the idea of eating pig repulsive.’
It is reasonable to assume that the faithful Jews who were Jesus’ first followers felt much the same way. That means deciding whether Gentile converts to Christianity should follow Jewish dietary laws wasn’t simply a theological debate. How were Jewish Christians to share a table of fellowship with people whose breath stank of pig fat?”
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Sometimes when reading Acts 10-11, we focus too much on the part of the message that the Jewish dietary laws were no longer in effect for God’s people. This is a good reminder that “God’s people” was expanding to include Samaritans and Gentiles of all sorts, which meant Jews and non-Jews alike had to adjust their attitudes towards some people and things that they had grown up thinking of as sinful and/or disgusting. But — and this is something we need to be reminded of still — “What God has made clean, you must not consider unholy.” (TLV)
Of course, the whole biologically-edible-vs-culturally-edible bit (and being careful not to offend one’s hosts) is also a good lesson for when we may be living and/or socializing in a non-Western culture. 🙂
