Food, culture and the gospel
There is a modest number of television receiver programmes that I love to sentry when they are on. The week is regularly bracketed by University Challenge on Mondays and Gardener's World on Fridays, but there are two less regular mid-week programmes that I dear. Ane is Michael Mosley'due south 'Trust me, I'k a Doctor' which conduct pioneering research on mutual health questions. But the other is at the opposite stop of both science and civilization.
In 'Eat Well for Less?' is presented by Greg Wallace (of Masterchef) and Chris Bavin (a presented and grocer). They are both from the East End of London, and then there is plenty of banter, and the bear witness is pretty formulaic. Information technology follows the same design every week, and the two of them do a great double act. They offset by introducing a family unit, and they then watch at the adult couple practise a supermarket shop, with Greg and Chris 'hiding' in the stock cupboard watching the 'secret' filming (how hole-and-corner tin can a whole moving-picture show coiffure exist in a supermarket?) until they 'surprise' the couple and nowadays them with the facts of their shopping.
Every calendar week, the couple exercise appear genuinely surprised at how much they are spending, even in the single shopping trip that has been spied on. In a recent prove, the married man like spicy nutrient, but his wife only ever cooked bland dishes, so he used to terminate off on the way home from work to pick up a fix meal—a habit that more than doubled their total food spending. The families that are featured are not completely typical (otherwise the programme would be less interesting) but the total food bill for a family of four or 5 from one calendar week to the next is typically betwixt £8,000 and £10,000 per year. Given that most of the people are in semi-skilled rather than professional person jobs, that is truly staggering. At the showtime, Greg and Chris practise something of a good cop/bad cop thing, where they estimate how much their communication will save the family unit. Greg always gives a pocket-size gauge, whereas Chris oft thinks they volition relieve around £80 a week—in round terms £4,000 a yr—and Chris is almost always right.
At one level the programme is light-hearted, and everyone ends on proficient terms. Just information technology carries some serious messages, and although Greg and Chris ham it upwards nicely, there are some shocking things that come to light. In fact, I think the programme communicates some profound letters.
Starting time, nutrient is never just about food. Even the act of just getting a couple to talk about the food neb throws up a series of painful and deep issues in their relationship. At the lowest level, this might be that the couple (and their children) simply have different tastes in food, and like to eat different things. Non a few of the couples have handled this (or, rather, not done then) past each having a different, separate meal every evening, rather than talk and compromise. At a deeper level, alien views almost the employ of money emerge. Just from time to time, there are some profound personal issues that have never been resolved. In i programme, the female parent had given up her employment in order to spend more time cooking for her children—and this included baking a cakeevery day as well as cooking the usual meals and additional snacks. The reason, it emerged, is that she was driven past her own feel of poverty, including her parents giving her white staff of life sugar sandwiches when they had nothing else to eat, so she saw it as an essential expression of her love for her children to give them the opposite. (As my girl said, sitting next to me on the sofa: 'She doesn't demand advice—she needs therapy!').
Secondly,cognition does not bring wisdom. When Greg and Chris confront the couples with their spending habits, they are not doing something that the couple could non practise for themselves. They are not incapable of adding up their expenditure—they are just non in the addiction of doing information technology, or of sitting down together and talking about information technology. It is not difficult to do an internet search on healthy eating or expert recipes for whatsoever one's eating preferences are, but you need the will to practise it, and for most people they are too busy and as well fastened to existing habits to brand the modify.
Each programme takes a break from looking at the family of the calendar week to explore healthy cooking, and to do at least i blind taste examination. This consistently shows that the more expensive branded products are not the best value for money—and often non fifty-fifty the preferred choice in terms of quality and taste. And even so people continue on buying the expensive, branded products to their own detriment. One of the programme's ploys is to remove all food labels from the family'south kitchen, and so that they cannot tell whether they are nonetheless eating the same variety that they have always bought. And each calendar week they decline a 'changed' item which they conspicuously practice not like—when it turns out this is the production they are wedded to. it highlights the central lie of our economic systems: the idea that people make rational choices, and that all we need is more information in order to make meliorate rational choices. A national health strategy that depends on such assumptions (such equally simply putting more information on packaging) is certain to fail.
Thirdly, the destructive power of consumerism. In ane episode, where the family accept been banned from eating frozen food and gear up meals, and instead given fresh produce, one child picks up an avocado pear and asks 'What is this?' Information technology is clear that one impact of our industrialised farming and food manufacture has been a profound disconnection between what nosotros eat and where it comes from. In the final ii years, I have establish it a wonderful spiritual and personal bailiwick to exist able to abound and consume some of my ain food—even if information technology is a very minor part of my overall consumption. It connects me with the earth from which all my food ultimately comes, and gives a new dimension to my gratitude for its provision.
Only consumerism in relation to food has also cleaved the connections between people and even, as the programme shows, within families. The power to choose any nosotros want in the supermarket frames our whole approach to life, and then that we cannot see why nosotros shouldn't just brand like choices in every attribute of our lives. Shared habits and disciplines are lost, and relationships fracture. Last week, at the biennial Grove Books conference for editorial groups, Michael Volland from Ridley Hall offered us a list of cardinal bug in civilization and church that we should exist addressing—and high on his listing was the loneliness created past a self-service culture.
Information technology is surely no accident that the major discipline of the early on church was a shared meal together—nor that 2 significant initiatives in the contemporary church—the Alpha Course and Messy Church—both involve a communal meal.
But one of the most telling lessons is this: you tin can but hear good news if you have heard the bad news. Information technology would be interesting to wait backside the scenes, and see how the programme is gear up, and how much of it is genuinely a surprise to the couples involved. But the consistent impression is that they are genuinely taken back by what they discover. Greg and Chris are, in some sense, trusted experts, and they take come up in with the explicit permission of the family unit—then the context of all the chat is an established, trusted relationship where permission has been given. Only when the fourth dimension comes, they do non hold back from confronting the couple with the reality of what they are doing—and it is sometimes very painful indeed. Final week, the woman actually burst into tears in the supermarket as Greg read out the total of all the till receipts from their week's spending. There are times when I really want to fast forwards through the middle function of the bear witness, because the issues are and then painful and so obvious.
But the cease result of the process, equally Greg and Chris journey with them—with their permission—is that their lives are measurably improved. Not just accept the families saved money, but they have oftentimes moved on in their relationships with each other, improved their health, and rediscovered the enjoyment of family life together around the meal table where they share a mutual meal together.
I wonder if the church has anything information technology can learn from that?
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