Does US Food Culture Train Our Religious Preferences?

CEFR Level C1-C2

This article comes with a big caveat about economic realities. Nothing I wonder here is a condemnation of people doing what they have to do to survive or the choices someone makes on how to divide their income. This essay isn’t intended to comment on what we do. It is intended to wonder about the unintended, and perhaps hidden, outcomes of what we do. This essay is not advice; it’s curiosity. 

Food

The bread I ate in Belgium has more substance and is less sweet than American sandwich bread, which I sometimes eat out of necessity, but I think it tastes and feels weird, even the more expensive multi-grain types. 

Cabot, Sargento, and similar grade brand cheese has a distinct flavor and texture only found in each cheese type (e.g. cheddar, Colby) while store brand cheese tastes like salty something with a mushy texture making it hard to identify one type of cheese from the other. And American cheese? Is it even cheese? Or just a slice of salty something that might be a cousin to plastic? Wikipedia tells me American cheese is required to have 51% cheese, but that means just under half is something else. Mixed foods aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but for my money, Cabot cheddar has superior taste and texture to any brand of American cheese. 

Margarine is still widely sold despite tasting nothing like butter. 

Common US chocolate brands don’t even taste like chocolate compared to even cheap German brands like Moser-Roth. And don’t get me started on hot cocoa mixes compared to hot cocoa from scratch. The two beverages barely deserve the same name, their flavor and texture is so different.  

Chicken nuggets are strange squishy sponges that bear no textural resemblance to meat and little flavor similarity. 

Fruit-flavored all sorts of things are unlikely to be primarily flavored by fruit. 

The list goes on. “Normal” US foods that are affordable by the average household are a pale shadow of higher quality options. 

There are many reasons for this. An internet search would be an interesting way to spend an hour. Economics is a big factor. Either higher quality food is too expensive or a working family does not have time to prepare the higher quality food. Even something as simple as chocolate pudding can take 15 minutes or longer to make from scratch, and that’s not counting the clean up. A boxed pudding mix takes less time and fewer cooking tools. A pre-made pudding cup is even faster and uses even fewer utensils. In a household where it is economically challenging for an adult to stay home enough hours each day to prepare quality food, good-enough substitutes have to do.

As I thought about how different good-enough food tastes from from-scratch food and the economic reasons that some people may rarely experience the joy of tasting from-scratch cooking from a skilled cook, I started to think about how we might have come to accept good-enough church as top-tier church.

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Church

Andrea D. Price recently wrote, “I am worthy of truth.”  When we accept good enough as the best thing worth pursuing, are we pursuing truth? Are we treating ourselves as worthy of truth? 

This topic will take more research, more hearing other people’s experiences, more thought before I have more than a question. 

But I wonder if somehow, whatever led US culture to recalibrate so that subpar food is seen as normal and delicious has also led us to see subpar church communities as normal and desirable.

Questions

Why would someone disagree with a major, life-affecting doctrine that a church teaches but stay because the youth group or small groups are active? How did this become the measure of a good-enough church? Why isn’t doctrine the top metric and programs a nice-to-have? 

Why do we care a whole lot about the music and the emotional experience in a service but care much less what the outside-of-church lives of church leadership look like? 

Why do we debate the value of custom rituals that can be changed at a whim versus pre-set liturgy but consider discussions on what the purpose of a church service is to be too academic for the average person to think about? 

Why do we let someone else tell us what tastes good, what a good church is? 

Why do we insist food tastes good and church is spiritually satisfying, condemning people who disagree, instead of admitting that the best we can do is offer low quality for [reasons]? If we’re honest, then people can decide if the problem is important enough to them to do something to fix it. Denying the problem trains people to ignore their own senses. Why does the church want to train people to deceive themselves? 

Has necessity turned into a forgetfulness of what goodness tastes like? Have the limitations of necessity trained us to not want to look for better? 

I am curious how the mindset that led to the general acceptance of artificially-flavored, second-quality food may have influenced the way people evaluate what makes a good church. 

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