My son actually landed the big one that day, a nice, plump rainbow trout just waiting to be caught. When he brought it in, it was so feisty that I had some difficulty keeping it still to unhook it, and accidentally left some ugly bruises on its otherwise beautiful rainbow flanks. Later, when we brought in our catch, the staff at the fish farm cleaned it for us, for our cookout that afternoon.
I have clear memories of watching my Dad clean the fish on fishing trips in the Rockies when I was a kid, so I watched nostalgically as the skilled workman turned our beautiful rainbow trout into a feast fit for a fish fry.
If you’ve never seen a fish cleaned before, I should say that it’s not an especially pretty job, but it’s not all that gruesome, either. I’ve certainly never been squeamish about it. But while we watched, I thought about the bruises I’d left on the side of the trout while bringing it in, and I thought about its sleek body flexing and fighting in my hands as I did, just moments earlier. It might have been because I was standing there with my young son, and was feeling especially, paternally, philosophical, but whatever the case, it struck me in that moment unlike it had ever done before, that this thing that we would be eating later in the day was a living creature, just the same as I was. And from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to this reminder—something we all know but forget so easily—that food not only gives life, it also takes it.
I think this truth—that the food we eat comes from living creatures—is one we need especially to remember in this modern era of industrialized food production, where the foods we consume are produced somewhere out of sight and out of mind, and seldom bear any resemblance to the animals they once were. Time was you raised the goose before you cooked it—it actually lived with you—and you personally participated in the act of slaughter that brought it to your table. Chicken nuggets, of course, look like no part of any chicken I’ve ever seen; and it’s easy to eat a dozen of them without ever thinking about the fact that what you're eating once scratched the dirt with a forked foot, fussing and clucking with the very breath of life.
Any biblical spirituality of food, however, can’t go very far without facing this truth squarely, that food is death and life together, and that what we eat, we eat at the cost of another living creature. You see this idea all over the place in Torah. First, we notice that the original Adam and Eve were actually created to be vegetarian, that eating meat, though it is clearly sanctioned by the Creator, was not the Creator’s original idea. Humans only became carnivores, according to the biblical record, as a result of the Fall, and after they had emerged from the ark on the other side of the flood (Gen 9:3). Similarly, we see the repeated prohibition against eating blood, because as far as the Bible is concerned, the life of the creature is in the blood (Lev 17:14). To eat blood would do violence to the sanctity of life itself. The same logic seems to underscore many of the food laws we find in Torah—the prohibition against cooking a goat in its mother’s milk for instance (Ex 23:19), or the restriction against eating a mother bird and its own eggs together (Deut 22:6). There are probably other reasons for these commandments, too, but one of their cumulative effects is that they require us to respect the “aliveness” of the things we eat.
However important it is for us to feed ourselves, the Bible seems to be saying, don’t do it without acknowledging how sacred the life is that you are taking to do so; after all, that life too is a gift of the Creator, and he has compassion on all things he has made.
Christian theology usually emphasizes the human being’s distinctness among all the creatures in the creation, and for good reason. We alone are made in the Image of God, and in this, God set us apart from all the other works of his hands. It is possible, however, to emphasize this truth in a way that overshadows a second, equally important truth: that we share a sacred kinship with the rest of his creatures.
This is not a philosophical statement; it’s an exegetical one. Genesis 2:7 describes the creation of the Adam in this way: that God “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils,” and so the man became a “living creature.” That’s my translation. Older Bibles translate that last part as “living soul,” but that’s misleading. The term in Hebrew is nep̄eš ḥay-yāh—“living being”—and it is the exact same term that Genesis 1:24 uses to describe all the “living creatures” that God created on sixth day of creation. In the same way, the term for God’s “breath of life” that brings the human being to life in Gen 2:7 (niš-maṯ ḥay-yîm) is the same term that Genesis 7:22 uses to describe all the living creatures that are destroyed in the flood. Inasmuch as the breath that animates us is the same breath of the same Creator that animates them, we have a kinship – what theologian Charles Sherlock calls a “sixth day solidarity”—with all God’s creatures great and small.
If our eating is to be fully biblical, then, it must acknowledge this kinship in some way. This does not necessarily mean we should start eating vegetarian—though I have eaten vegetarian at various seasons in my life, and found it to be an extremely satisfying diet. It does not mean, either, that we should all go back to organic farming—though recently I went to visit a friend who raises chickens and came home with a dozen farm-fresh eggs that were not only more tasty, but also more meaningful to me, since I had actually met the chicken they came from. These things actually may be part of someone’s response to the Biblical witness.
But even without an over-haul of our entire diets and the food system that supports them, there are ways we can be more biblical when it comes to this aspect of life. Here’s a simple idea for starters. The 12th Century mendicant monk, Francis of Assissi, is famous for his deeply spiritual love for literally “all creatures of our God and King.” That hymn, in fact, is based on his second most famous prayer, The Canticle of the Creatures, in which he praises the Lord by singing the praises of the sun—“Sir Brother Sun,” he calls it—his sister the water—his brother the fire. In short, he praises the Lord, by celebrating his kinship with the rest of the Lord's creation.
What if, in our eating, we took a page from St. Francis’s prayer-book? What if the next time we sat down at table and said grace, we actually thanked the Lord for our brother the cow, our sister the chicken, our cousin the rainbow trout, and indeed, thanked them, our creaturely kin, for giving their lives to feed ours? If we did, we might take one step closer to understanding the true meaning of Psalm 104:28-30, when it reminds us that the same ruach of God that throbs in our lungs throbs in theirs also, and like us, when God takes it from them, they too die and return to dust, just as surely as we will do.
