Biblical eating in the USA

The New York Times recently reported a growing trend known as “biblical eating.” As I read it, I thought that Jesus, Moses and King Solomon would surely all be scratching their heads.

As we head into Shavuot, another Jewish holiday associated with food, I want to pick apart the idea that these people are eating food from the bible, stating with the infographic photo. Sprouts? Pickled onion? Beet hummus? I promise you, no one living in my area 2000 years ago was eating anything like these foods.

Olive oil? Check. Wheat? That’s the main one we celebrate each year around this time. Sourdough bread was mentioned in the article, but biblical bread was likely pita, baked on an open taboon, just as it still is in some places today. The seven species we celebrate are wheat, barley, olives, grapes, figs, pomegranates and dates. None of which appear on that plate. Goats, sheep and cows – they would have had a few animals, maybe saving them for sacrifices to improve their status, maybe giving them a bit of milk and a holiday meal or two. No chicken sausage. Rather than domestic chickens, they would have eaten the pigeons (doves to you Christians), quail and other birds native to the region. Vegetables? They would have supplemented their diets with herbs, wild or cultivated legumes, and plants picked from around the area. A kind of beet, according to Wikipedia, might have been around, but used for its leaves, as would other spinachy plants that are still picked by foraging connoisseurs today. And forget the cultured mushrooms. The foraged kind in the area are a different dish, entirely.  Wild garlic might have flavored their food, along with za’atar.

Pray before eating? Yup. One interviewee suggests praying is a way to avoid the chocolate chip cookie. Jews, as we know, pray before and after eating, and the prayers center on what is consumed, not what is avoided: namely bread. That’s not a diet. It’s an acknowledgement that, for a religion that grew out of settling down and growing crops, bread is, indeed, the staff of life. Bread with every meal, carbs be damned.

You want to diet according to the bible? Forget Daniel’s fast. Try seven fat years followed by seven lean years. If the rains don’t come and the locusts decimate the wheat, leaving you with nothing to eat but locusts, I promise you will lose weight. Go out and grow crops with nothing but yoked oxen and iron tools? You will be muscular as hell.

Another self-proclaimed biblical eater suggests eating local food. And here we are getting closer to the intent, if not the letter of the law, when it comes to eating biblically. Of course, they might still be buying weird hummus in Trader Joes, rather than trekking out to a grower with a farm stand. But eating food grown on land around you; that is getting closer to what those living in biblical days might have eaten, and how they ate that food. If you buy grapes with spots, stunted corn and broccoli with a few aphids hiding among the florets, you’ll be closer still.

That’s not a diet. It’s an acknowledgement that, for a religion that grew out of settling down and growing crops, bread is, indeed, the staff of life

The real biblical eaters had never heard of wellness, and they were, well, afflicted by all manner of illnesses, many of them named in the bible. They had lice and fleas, leprosy and plagues. Their diet was no more healthy for modern people than the fictious paleo diet. They drank all manner of wine, possibly with every meal, and probably wheat beer, as well.

As we head into a holiday that was, once “the kibbutz holiday,” when children wore white, sheaves of wheat were tied to every post and the communal work branches brought their modern offerings in celebration of the agriculture that kept us together, I cannot help but scratch my own head at the idea of biblical eating in the US.

Every biblical interviewer mentioned in the article had a different definition of the practice. So what do I understand by this new diet? I don’t think biblical eating means going back to the land and growing your own food. Even in the days of the bible, some people grew food, others counted it or paid for their bread with other labor, say carpentry. But, on this holiday of actual biblical food, I would like for Americans, in general, and anyone who thinks biblical eating means consuming hummus and sprouts in particular, to get back to the essence of Shavuot. Once or twice a year, celebrate a harvest. When you eat, don’t pray for the willpower to resist a sweet. Even when your pantry is full to overflowing and your fridge completely stocked, give thanks that you have food to put on your table. That a farmer, somewhere, planted, watered and harvested your wheat, that someone else milled it and a third baked it into bread. Give thanks that over the months it took that crop to go from seed to sheaf, a farmer shielded it from insects, kept it watered and weeded, ensured its soil was loose and fertile.

In times like these, when you have food in excess, available 24/7, it would be nearly impossible to truly eat “biblically.” That would entail, for one thing, quite a bit of labor as you grind wheat by hand and bake it into bread over an open fire, milk your animals and sour the milk, forage for each green or herb as it comes into season, make vessels and storerooms to store your wheat, wine and olive oil over the year.

I am not scoffing here. Since I pick fruits and vegetables that I grow on land that goes back to King Solomon; since I have za’atar drying next to my house as I write, you could say I eat biblically. But I believe that truly eating biblically would mean understanding that bread, and by extension meat, fish, eggs, fowl, vegetables, fruit and herbs, are not freely given. We enter into a contract, with G-d, if we like, with our communities, with farmers, millers and bakers, in order to eat our daily bread. When we pray, we are reminded of that contract. Although I do not often pray before or after meals, I do give thanks, in my way for the loaves of bread in my freezer and the slices I toast, thanks to modern technology, one by one.

FYI, in the land of the bible, the religious finance minister is anti-biblical eating as I understand it. Opposed to the status quo, which once included growing wheat all over the country to ensure a store of this precious grain and which provides support for local produce, dairy and poultry, he wants to increase imports and slash the already slim profits of milking parlors, egg producers and growers. His logic is political, not religious, but it flies in the face of recent events, including shaky supply chains and tariffs. It pretty much flies in the face of his religion. But here, kashrut, with its hundreds of rules growing out of a single sentence in the bible, is a thing. Biblical eating, per se, is not.

American biblical eaters, you cannot truly eat biblically, no matter how much you fast on water and vegetables. I suggest, instead, you feast on cheesecake – the traditional Shavuot food – once a year. And if you pray over food, pray to enjoy it, for it is not given freely.