The Expansive Table: Food as Formative and Transformative

Liturgical celebrations in Christian communities often feature a meal of thanksgiving: the Eucharist. This meal commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus and his friends (Luke 22:14–20) and invites members of the faith community into a life of shared ministry. That this happens through the sharing of food is significant because food is an essential feature of our lives—food forms and transforms us. That personal and communal formation and transformation are effected through such a ubiquitous agent in our lives as food can, however, become problematic when food’s very ubiquity renders it dismissed from serious consideration. Indeed, in my own North American context where for many people food is easily procured, food can just as easily be taken for granted. To retrieve a sense of gratitude for—and celebration of—our everyday meals and the vital role they play in our lives requires that we be intentional about our relationship with food. This essay explores the farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork) movement and related food procurement principles and practices as means of restoring relationships—of forming and transforming ourselves as beings in relationship. I suggest that reconfiguration of the ways we procure food might be understood as transformative praxis. Reconfiguration may even become transformative liturgical praxis when we evoke the image of an expansive table that extends the sacred (associated with our liturgical meals) to the meals we regularly eat alone or with others in household settings. The term expansive table also means to connect our activities of providing foods at our household tables with the task of making sure everyone has room at the table, including access to food cared for or grown and procured within just conditions. The farm-to-table movement aims to render transparent the process of growing and making food and to draw producers and consumers into closer relationship. This movement invites people of faith to attend to the impacts their food choices have, expansively, on tables beyond their own and to redress the dis-connecting that thoughtless consumption effects. In this essay, I begin with a statement of the problem of contemporary experiences of alienation, recognizing that my context is one in which food is typically plentiful and more easily procured than elsewhere in the world. Many consumers sharing this context nevertheless experience alienation from the foods they consume and from Earth that provides the food. I then suggest a renewal of our relationship with food through engaging food production and procurement practices, food preparation and consumption practices, and finally food disposal practices. Through these movements I patch together reflections by people of faith for whom food procurement and preparation activities have become, in a vital sense, transformative liturgical praxis because these activities function to restore relationships of intimacy with one’s own embodied self, other members of Earth’s communities, the sacred source of food, and the Creator.