Food, culture, and the challenge of the gospel
There is a pocket-size number of television programmes that I dearest to picket regularly when they are on. Mon nights are quiz nights, with Simply Connect and University Challenge; Fridays from the Leap means Gardener's World; but there are 2 less regular mid-week programmes that I love. One is Michael Mosley's 'Trust me, I'grand a Doctor' which conducts pioneering research on common health questions. Just the other is at the opposite end of both science and culture.
'Consume Well for Less?' is presented by Greg Wallace (of Masterchef) and Chris Bavin (a presented and grocer), and a new serial is currently showing on BBC1. They are both from the East End of London, so at that place is plenty of barrack, and the show is pretty formulaic. Information technology follows the same pattern every calendar week, and the two of them practise a keen double act. They kickoff by introducing a family, and they and so lookout man at the adult couple doing a supermarket shop, with Greg and Chris 'hiding' in the stock cupboard watching the 'undercover' filming (how secret can a whole motion-picture show coiffure be in a supermarket?) until they 'surprise' the couple and present them with the facts of their shopping.
Every calendar week, the couple practice appear genuinely surprised at how much they are spending, even in the unmarried shopping trip that has been spied on. In a recent bear witness, the married man like spicy nutrient, but his wife only ever cooked bland dishes, so he used to finish off on the manner dwelling house from work to option up a prepare 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) merely the total nutrient bill for a family of four or five from one week to the side by side is typically between £8,000 and £10,000 per year. Given that most of the people are in semi-skilled rather than professional jobs, that is truly staggering. At the start, Greg and Chris do something of a adept cop/bad cop thing, where they guess how much their advice volition save the family unit. Greg always gives a modest judge, whereas Chris often thinks they volition relieve around £80 a week—in circular terms £4,000 a twelvemonth—and Chris is almost ever right.
At ane level the programme is light-hearted, and everyone ends on practiced terms. But it carries some serious messages, and although Greg and Chris ham information technology upward nicely, in that location are some shocking things that come to calorie-free. In fact, I call back the programme communicates some profound letters.
Commencement, nutrient is never only nearly food. Even the act of simply getting a couple to talk about the food bill throws upwards a serial of painful and deep issues in their human relationship. At the lowest level, this might exist that the couple (and their children) simply have unlike tastes in food, and like to eat different things. Not a few of the couples have handled this (or, rather, not done so) by each having a different, carve up repast every evening, rather than talk and compromise. At a deeper level, conflicting views about the use of money emerge. But from time to time, there are some profound personal problems that have never been resolved.
In i programme, the female parent had given upward her employment in order to spend more than time cooking for her children—and this included blistering a cakeevery 24-hour interval also as cooking the usual meals and additional snacks. The reason, it emerged, is that she was driven by her own feel of poverty, including her parents giving her white bread sugar sandwiches when they had null else to consume, so she saw information technology as an essential expression of her love for her children to give them the opposite. (As my daughter said, sitting next to me on the sofa: 'She doesn't need 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 not practise for themselves. They are not incapable of adding up their expenditure—they are only not in the habit of doing it, or of sitting down together and talking about it. It is not hard to do an internet search on healthy eating or practiced recipes for whatever 1's eating preferences are, but you lot need the will to do it, and for most people they are too busy and too fastened to existing habits to make the alter.
Each programme takes a suspension from looking at the family of the calendar week to explore salubrious cooking, and to practice at to the lowest degree i blind gustation exam. This consistently shows that the more expensive branded products are not the all-time value for money—and often non even the preferred pick in terms of quality and taste. And nonetheless people go on 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 unit's kitchen, then that they cannot tell whether they are nevertheless eating the same variety that they have always bought. And each week they turn down a 'changed' item which they clearly do not like—when it turns out this is the product they are wedded to. It highlights the central prevarication of our economic system: the idea that people make rational choices, and that all nosotros need is more than information in order to make better rational choices. A national health strategy that depends on such assumptions (such as just putting more data on packaging) is certain to fail.
Thirdly, the programme highlights thedestructive ability of consumerism. In one episode, where the family take been banned from eating frozen food and ready meals, and instead given fresh produce, one child picks up an avocado pear and asks 'What is this?' It is clear that one impact of our industrialised farming and nutrient industry has been a profound disconnection between what we eat and where it comes from. In the last two years, I have constitute it a wonderful spiritual and personal field of study to exist able to grow and eat some of my own food—even if it is a very modest part of my overall consumption. Information technology connects me with the world from which all my food ultimately comes, and gives a new dimension to my gratitude for its provision.
Just consumerism in relation to nutrient has besides broken the connections between people and even, as the programme shows, inside families. The ability to choose whatever we want in the supermarket frames our whole approach to life, and so that we cannot see why we shouldn't but brand similar choices in every aspect of our lives. Shared habits and disciplines are lost, and relationships fracture. A couple of years ago, at a Grove Books briefing for editorial groups, Michael Volland from Ridley Hall offered us a listing of key issues in culture and church building that nosotros should be addressing—and high on his list was the loneliness created past a self-service culture.
It is surely no accident that the major field of study of the early on church building was a shared meal together—nor that two significant initiatives in the contemporary church—the Blastoff Course and Messy Church—both involve a communal meal.
This leads to a terminal reality of our culture the programme reveals:the loss of bones disciplines of life such equally managing money, making practiced choices, and keeping to routines of life. The famous Stanford marshmallow experiment demonstrated the connection between personal discipline and willpower, and longer term flourishing and success, by measuring the ability of children to defer gratification. Those who tin await without eating the marshmallow in front of them, on the ground of a hope of a second one in fifteen minutes, take a level of bailiwick and willpower that equips them for life. Merely everything in our consumer civilisation is set upwardly to make war on our willpower, non only in the expanse of eating (where we are encouraged to eat whenever we are hungry), but in amusement (where we can watch any plan wherever and whenever nosotros choose), in relationships, and in sex. The idea that we should delay sexual gratification until union was greeted with derision last calendar week.
Only one of the most telling lessons is this: you tin just hear good news if you have heard the bad news. Information technology would be interesting to look behind the scenes, and see how the plan is set up, and how much of it is genuinely a surprise to the couples involved. But the consistent impression is that they are genuinely taken dorsum past what they notice. Greg and Chris are, in some sense, trusted experts, and they accept come in with the explicit permission of the family—and then the context of all the conversation is an established, trusted relationship where permission has been given. There is a genuine sense that Greg and Chris are concerned for the family'south welfare, and are not setting out either to score points or humiliated them in public.
But when the time comes, they do not concur back from confronting the couple with the reality of what they are doing—and it is sometimes very painful indeed. One calendar week, the woman concerned actually flare-up 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 desire to fast frontwards through the centre part of the show, because the issues are and then painful and so obvious.
And the end event of the process, as Greg and Chris journeying with them—with their permission—is that their lives are measurably improved. Not simply have the families saved coin, simply they have often moved on in their relationships with each other, improved their health, and rediscovered the enjoyment of family unit life together around the repast tabular array where they share a common repast together. Many develop new skills in preparing and cooking food, and genuinely enjoy these discoveries.
I wonder if the church has anything it can learn from all that?
(An earlier version of this was published in 2016)
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