More than Just Food

Food concerns everyone to some degree. Everyone eats something, and everyone eats at intervals during the twenty-four hours that make up the time in a day.…

God could have created all food as a bland mixture of proper nutrients: something like wheat germ, yogurt, and honey in a cake form, or some sort of fruit which would have contained everything necessary to good health. However pleasant the mild flavor might be, we cannot imagine eating just one single flavor all the time, the reason being that we have been created with taste buds, a delicate sense of smell, and a sensitive appreciation of and response to texture and color. God has not given us sensitivities and appreciations which cannot be fulfilled anywhere in the universe he has created. In his perfect economy of creation God did not create loose ends. God made man with tremendous diversity in many areas, including the area of enjoyment of food. To meet this diversity, God made a tremendous variety or diversity of kinds of food.…

Therefore cooking as an art—“Hidden Art,” if you want to call it so—should be recognized and then developed in everyone who has to cook, wants to cook, or could cook! Cooking should not be thought of as a drudgery, but as an art. Talent in this art form differs, of course, and would not be identical in each individual even if developed, but that is not the same thing as not recognizing it as an art form and not attempting to develop it.

The danger today, for both men and women cooks, is to take the shortcut of using prepared and frozen foods all the time, using things from packages, bottles, tins, and cans, rather than starting with fresh food, or food from one’s own garden. I am not advocating that we never use anything prepared, to save time for other things, and I realize that many—perhaps most—people do not have a garden; but one can at least try to get away from the “plastic trend” in the area of cooking and it is healthy, in several meanings of that word, to try to do so. Why not try to make your own bread and rolls once in a while—even once a week? It is possible to have a greater variety if you become proficient in bread making: variety of the basic dough from week to week (adding toasted wheat germ, oatmeal, soya flour, honey, brown sugar, more or less eggs, etc.).…

Perhaps part of the reason why some people dislike cooking, or find meal preparation a bore, is that they get into a rut where menus are concerned. Variety makes food more interesting to cook, as well as to serve and eat. I have cooked for an increasing number of people for an increasing number of years, and I must say that it is not necessary to put aside variety because there are too many people. Indeed it is the other way around. It would become unbearable to cook for so many for so long if there were not the challenge of variety and the interest of making sudden last-minute changes as the mood strikes, or if circumstances, such as an influx of guests, make it necessary. Chicken for six people can become enough for twelve if you cut it off the bones and make it into a Chinese meal by adding onions, peppers, almonds, and pineapple wedges. Or it can just be cut into large pieces and put into the gravy to serve over hot biscuits—which themselves can be made when the influx of people is discovered to be coming in the front door.

Making food “stretch” can be a challenge, as well as a necessity. It is not necessary to have a large food budget to make meals interesting. In fact it is often the other way around. The need to “stretch” the money often gives birth to ideas in cooking and serving.

It seems to me that in a world of starvation Christians should recognize their responsibility to share in a practical way with those who go short. So it is important for everyone, no matter how well off they may be, to be careful not to waste food. There are two ways to avoid waste: first, one plans meals which balance the more extravagant ones with inexpensive ones; and secondly, one uses leftovers—even the tiniest bit of leftover. Bones can be boiled to make broth, bits of vegetable can be used in soups or casseroles. Meat can be used for Chinese fried rice, soup, scalloped potatoes with ham or corned beef, in macaroni dishes, curry, and so forth. To toss out food and buy new is akin to tossing out good furniture or fabric to buy new. This too is a practical side of ecology.

I know one cannot directly help the starving Third World by using the leftover stewed tomato in tomorrow’s meat loaf, but it is really true that one saves money by cooking this way, and the saved money can be given to some project in either doing something personally for someone or in giving it to an organization. As children of God who will someday stand before him to be shown the “treasure in heaven” or the absolute zero in the heavenly bank account, the waste will be realized—it seems to me—by remembering, or being shown, what could have been done with what was wasted, as well as what should have been done with that which was spent with personal extravagance.…

There is no occasion when meals should become totally unimportant. Meals can be very small indeed, very inexpensive, short times taken in the midst of a big push of work, but they should be always more than just food. Relaxation, communication, and a measure of beauty and pleasure should be part of even the shortest of meal breaks. Of course you celebrate special occasions—successes of various members of the family, birthdays, good news, answered prayer, happy moments—with special attention to meal preparation and serving. But we should be just as careful to make the meal interesting and appealing when the day is grey and the news is disappointing.

Children feel the difference in the home that takes this attitude. Father comes home tired and discouraged after some sort of failure or disappointment to find, not food he dislikes, nor burned soup and sloppy serving, but a beautifully set table, with his favorite food served artistically, and a hot drink and some tiny cookies or nuts served afterwards with all the air of a special occasion. The roommate receives a letter which is the dreaded reality of a fear long worried about, but comes back to the flat to find a meal prepared in anticipation, and the comfort of hot broth and melba toast, omelette and muffins, and chocolate scalding hot, topped off by a marshmallow or whipped cream.

Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological, and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavor of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems.

This article is abridged from chapter eight of Mrs. Schaeffer’s book “Hidden Art,” published in 1971 by Tyndale House (copyright ©1971 by Edith Schaeffer).

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