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We’re thrilled to share with you our brand new email newsletter: Taste & Read! In this biweekly free resource, assistant editor Jasmin Pittman sets the table for a hearty conversation about food and faith—featuring theological reflections, highlights from the Century archives, and even the occasional recipe or two.
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I will admit: It feels like an odd time in our collective life to devote time to exploring the intersection of food and faith.

We each have different responses to the headlines, but I imagine that many of you feel an undercurrent of grief. And if you’re like me, when I’m grieving, my hungers—be they physical, emotional, or spiritual—tend to become muted. The table is the furthest thing from my mind when suffering, violence, and division seem to be at the forefront of our public life.

But this may be precisely the time when we need the spirit of the Eucharist ([link removed]) the most. “Sharing a meal together was so much a part of who Jesus was,” writes Century contributor Jim Freidrich, “that we who love him practice table fellowship as our most sacred act.”

Table fellowship is a worshipful experience—whether practiced with bread and wine alongside members of your congregation, serving and eating biscuits in the park with people who call the outdoors home, or savoring a late night bite at the kitchen counter when everyone else in the house is asleep.

Table fellowship grounds me in the marriage between our spirits and our bodies, a visceral reminder of my capacity to metabolize the awe of sacred encounter. It’s an antidote to the kind of dualism to which I sometimes fall prey—that the work of my hands is somehow less than the work of my mind.

Table fellowship is an opportunity to remember Jesus’ proverbial exhortation: If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. Which, in turn, gives me the strength to choose the way of peace when I feel the urge to fight fire with fire.

In a recent editorial about the importance of tactical nonviolence ([link removed]) , our team wrote about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s refusal to concede the authoritarian belief that might is right. If, at the root, violence is a form of spiritual hunger, these days I’m wondering if and how table fellowship might offer the kind of satiety that generates rather than destroys.

Looking to the past often helps me fuel my imagination for the work of the present. Writer Rosalind Bentley lifts up women like Katie B. Harris ([link removed]) who, in the 1960s, cooked meals of candied yams, collard greens, and cornbread for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Albany, Georgia. “What women did in kitchens and gardens wasn’t as obvious as what happened on the streets and in courtrooms,” Bentley notes. But this work wasn’t tangential—it was bedrock to the Albany movement.

I’m also reminded of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative born out of the Mississippi Delta in 1969. Freedom Farm existed to empower farmers, planting cash crops like soybeans and cotton along with a wide variety of vegetables that were distributed amongst cooperative members. Hamer’s grandniece Monica Land remembered Hamer’s sentiment that “hungry is hungry. It has no color lines.”

Today, I know there are just as many people working harder than ever to creatively address our hungers and nourish our spirits. They can be found almost anywhere: in pulpits, at desks, in city streets and rural farmlands, and, most certainly, in the kitchen.

It’s these people and places that I want to visit here in Taste & Read.

Soon I’ll be chatting with noted food writer John T. Edge about his new memoir, House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching For Home. I hope you’ll follow along and join the conversation.
See you at the table,
Jasmin
* House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching For Home ([link removed]) , the new book from John T. Edge
* “Becoming manna ([link removed]) ,” by Isaac S. Villegas

Jasmin Pittman
Assistant editor, The Christian Century

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