Latest / The Uncensored Catholic / Show 48: The proper Catholic attitude toward Food
Transcript
- 1:00Hey, y'all, welcome today's show. We're gonna get into a really well
- 1:04it's been a topic of great interest to me, or I should say a
- 1:07copy of great difficulty to me. And it has to do with the proper
- 1:12relationship that a faithful Catholic should have to food. While I am not what
- 1:21one might call glutton, I am a foodie beyond a doubt. Being essentially
- 1:27half French and an avid cook, made a good bit of my living cooking
- 1:34and writing about food. I love food, and Father's Barago said something that
- 1:42kind of threw me for a loop. And let's take a lot of thought,
- 1:46and I think I'm come to the right conclusion. We'll get to that
- 1:49in a minute. But you know, I like to start at the show
- 1:52with a couple of questions and answers from the classic nineteen thirties book Radio Replies,
- 1:59in which people would write in and ask the priest's questions, mainly non
- 2:02Catholics and atheists challenging them. And this gets into well, we'll spend a
- 2:08few days on this, just you know, a couple of questions and answers
- 2:12each show about one of the probably the biggest issues that non Christians have with
- 2:19the idea of a man, a benevolent God. Why would God allow evil?
- 2:25Well, it's just a deep topic, and it's probably worthy of a
- 2:29series of shows. But some things are better taken in small bites. I
- 2:34guess we would say. I think fathers Barago would appreciate that. Let's see,
- 2:39someone wrote in and said, what becomes of God when you think of
- 2:44the misery and starvation in the world. The answer is, we have already
- 2:47seen that there is a God, that they had already discussed that. In
- 2:51other words, inability to comprehend every detail in the universe does not prove that
- 2:55there is no God, but merely the limited capacity of the finite human mind.
- 3:00However, the human mind can propose certain principles which go a long way
- 3:04towards the removal of difficulties. Firstly, evil is really the negation or privation
- 3:10of good, and if there is evil in the world, there is also
- 3:15much good that can be accounted for only by the existence of God. Secondly,
- 3:21the fluctuations of the mutable life cannot affect God's existence. I mean that
- 3:25you cannot have a God when things seem to be all right and annihilate him
- 3:30when things seem to go wrong. If God exists before all things go wrong,
- 3:35he still exists when unhappiness. He still exists despite the unhappiness of the
- 3:38individual, and note the word individual. Reviewing the races as a whole,
- 3:45we find that life is a mixture of comfortable and uncomfortable things. When we
- 3:50are happy, others are suffering. When we are suffering, others are happy.
- 3:53And we cannot say that God is existing merely for the happiness of one
- 3:57and simultaneously not existing for the unhappy unhappy ones. We must not take local
- 4:02and individual views only, but a universal outlook. Thirdly, and particularly as
- 4:09regards to the uneven distribution of this world's goods with the consequent starvation for some,
- 4:15God's providence has not failed. Man's administration is at fault. Whilst individuals
- 4:19suffer. Want we know that the world has produced enough wheat, fruit,
- 4:24meat, and wool to feed and clothe everyone. God has not failed to
- 4:28provide enough to fill every mouth. But He has given the world over to
- 4:31the administ administration of men, and as their bad management they must conrect,
- 4:39rather than to blame God. At least their incapable administration could teach them a
- 4:44saving grace of humility. How true is that if there is one lesson we
- 4:50can learn from the nineteenth century, the nations that rejected Catholicism particularly and Christianity
- 5:00in general, especially the Communists, were responsible for more than two hundred million
- 5:06deaths of innocent people. You think about the starvation of the Ukrainians of the
- 5:11Soviet Union, or the starvation and mass abortions in communist China, the constant
- 5:19poverty and want in communist Cuba, where men said they knew better than God
- 5:27and could better at minister to the wants of humanity. It's never worked.
- 5:33It will never work. It doesn't matter if as a communist or a capitalist
- 5:38society. Whenever a man, or a bureaucracy or a government sets itself up
- 5:46as the highest power to distribute to the needs of its citizens, it inevitably
- 5:54fails. If you don't believe me, go down to any housing project in
- 6:00the United States and see the prosperity of the people living on welfare and food
- 6:08stamps. You will find poverty and want, drug abuse, and violence.
- 6:14You will never never find prosperity or an easy life that was promised. It's
- 6:21a very seductive concept. But take that in contrast to the small farmer who
- 6:30may not have much money at all, but his land produces all his family
- 6:34needs and a little extra. You know, that was one of the great
- 6:40failures of the nineteen nineties when under Clinton, the enacted NAFTA, where they
- 6:45basically said, you know, we're just going to let other countries produce our
- 6:48goods and will be the consumers. And I can tell you here in North
- 6:54Carolina and throughout the rural South Georgia and South Carolina and Tennessee and Virginia,
- 7:00about everywhere I've lived, you find whole towns just hollowed and emptied out.
- 7:05You find farms replaced with trailer parks and a very poor standard of life that
- 7:14people are desperate to get out of. But most of them give up and
- 7:17just go on welfare and disability. And it's really a sad state of affairs
- 7:24that was not the doing of God. God didn't cause that. God gave
- 7:29the plentiful land. You know, you can take all the people in the
- 7:31United States, all three hundred and what fifty or seventy million of US,
- 7:36and give each one ten acres in Texas, and the entire rest of the
- 7:41country would be empty. Forty nine States would be nothing but wilderness. Each
- 7:45person living in the United States would have ten acres. Five acres will produce
- 7:50more than enough food for a family of three, four or five. Each
- 7:57person could have ten acres. How is that God's fault, Well, it's
- 8:01not. It's human kind. Humanity's fault for thinking that we knew better than
- 8:07God. So to look at the relative poverty of some as opposed to the
- 8:13relative prosperity of others and to blame God for it is completely irrational. Blame
- 8:20man for it. I mean most, most of the European immigrants the United
- 8:28States came here for land because the governments of say, you know, England
- 8:33and other countries had taken all the land and put in the hands of just
- 8:37a few. You had a choice to live as basically a surf on their
- 8:43land, serving them on a subsistence subsistence lifestyle, just making enough to survive.
- 8:52Your children can have no better life. They had no ability to own
- 8:56land. Land is actually the only thing in this world that is worth anything.
- 9:01All the currencies paper, money, gold, silver, I don't care
- 9:05what it is, is only worth how much land or food produced from that
- 9:09land it can buy or shelter produced from the timber that came off that land,
- 9:13or the stones that would build a stonehouse that came off the land.
- 9:16Land is the only true thing of value physically in this world, and they
- 9:22had taken it all. The lord's owned the manor and all the property.
- 9:28And anyone that went out to pick some wild greens or shoot a deer that
- 9:33God provided for their sustenance was poaching the king's deer or stealing from the lord
- 9:39of the manor. That's not what God intended. That's what man caused.
- 9:46And the true the same as absolutely true in any city today where people are
- 9:52sleeping on the streets, you know, usually drug addicted, mental illness,
- 9:56etc. Those are other issues, but with a barrier to get ahead,
- 10:01because so much real estate is just sitting empty, being unused. It's not
- 10:07being used for the purpose that God intended. Now a person may say,
- 10:11this is my property, I can do what I want with it. Okay,
- 10:13yes, you absolutely can. But Catholic charity, true Christian charity,
- 10:20would say I should be using this land for its best use for humanity and
- 10:28the world and for myself and for my family, and just letting buildings sit
- 10:31there and rot and fall down and letting vandals tear everything up and encouraging homelessness,
- 10:39which is all the Democratic Party offers. Is encouraging homelessness and poverty is
- 10:46not good, And neither is the other side of that coin, the greedy
- 10:50person who says, I will not share anything of mine with anyone else.
- 10:54If you've got a piece of real estate and you're sitting there and you're wanting,
- 10:58like, you know, a million dollars for a tenth of an acre,
- 11:03and you're you know, you're you're satisfied just to let it sit there
- 11:09and be unused year after year after year. Meanwhile, that piece of property
- 11:15could be rented out to someone who wants to start a business. The bearers
- 11:18are starting a business in this country are insane. There's I mean, the
- 11:22reason many immigrants, illegal immigrants come into this country and start a restaurant is
- 11:28because they're doing everything under the table. We have so many rules and regulations.
- 11:33Look, there was a time when I wanted to start a barbecue restaurant,
- 11:37traditional North Carolina barbecue restaurant, okay, and the first thing I had
- 11:41to do legally was to check with the zoning and the Health department, all
- 11:46the everything right, I found the right piece of property, and it was
- 11:50way too expensive. You know, honestly, it would have been very difficult
- 11:54just to break even to pay the rent on this commerce sual lot with a
- 12:01little you know, old convenience store basically on it to pay the landlord.
- 12:07And you know, that was an issue. But I could. I could
- 12:09work it out. I could make just like five percent over cost, which
- 12:13would eventually work out. And so I went to the health department guy and
- 12:18they're like, wow, you know this would be great. I'd love to
- 12:20have a barbe could join in this town. And I told him I was
- 12:22going to make homemade ice cream too, and they were literally thrilled, you
- 12:24know. And he says to me, well, you we have our zoning
- 12:30in codes inspector and he's going to come on there. And he was a
- 12:35well known person in the area. I'm not gonna say where it is.
- 12:37I certainly don't want any retribution against myself or if for some reason I misunderstood,
- 12:43I'm going to give that little, you know, caveat to be charitable,
- 12:46but I don't think I did. He said he's going to measure all
- 12:50your doors and make sure they're up to the Americans with disability at code.
- 12:54He's there, you have to have a certain size of your parking lot.
- 12:58You're gonna have to have so many restrooms, and you're gonna have to have
- 13:03you know, impervious walls, floors and ceilings, and said, you know,
- 13:05a barbecue joint literally used to just be a center block barbecue pit,
- 13:11outdoors and some picnic tables. Well, they were saying it needed you know,
- 13:15three sinks for this and all that. And he said, but here's
- 13:16the bottom line. And you know, uh, this inspector is a public
- 13:20official. And you know, if you want to get your your license and
- 13:28have no problems and you know, not be shut down, you might as
- 13:31well go ahead and write him a check for at least five thousand dollars and
- 13:35if you can swing fifteen, you're probably gonna have no trouble. So here
- 13:41in the land of the Free and the home of what was once the Brave,
- 13:45I had to pay off an official between five and fifteen thousand dollars just
- 13:48to open the doors of my restaurant. And I said, no, yeah,
- 13:52I'm not doing that. Screw it, I'm done, walk away right.
- 13:56Meanwhile, there's a little tienda run by illegal emigrants down the street,
- 14:01and I'm you know, good people. We went to mass together. You're
- 14:05here illegally. I wish they'd come legally, but that's you know, they
- 14:09were at least productive members of the community, right They're working when others are
- 14:13sitting on their butts taking welfare and social security and disability. And I mean,
- 14:18I don't blame someone for taking so security, but you know, disability
- 14:22is like getting it early because you supposedly hurt yourself or anyway. Some people
- 14:28get legitimately and some don't. I'm not trying to cast dispersions. Meanwhile,
- 14:33you know, like a third of the counties on public assistance, and these
- 14:37people are actually working and working hard. So I had that much respect for
- 14:41them. And I went and they had the most wonderful tomalis. They didn't
- 14:45speak word English, but I'd go down and then their tamalies were a dollar
- 14:48apiece and I'd walk in. I'd buy, you know, for launch,
- 14:50five tomalies and a beer. You know. Great. They had no health
- 14:56inspection sticker on the wall, you know, that placard whatever you call it.
- 15:01And I asked, I said, well, you know, I know
- 15:03of a restaurant, and I didn't specifically say it because I didn't want to
- 15:05get the people in trouble. Why is it they don't have to do the
- 15:09same things, and he said, well, because first of all, we
- 15:13don't know who they are. He says, you know, they come in
- 15:16and they say their name is Hernandez or Rodriguez or whatever, and we just
- 15:20have to take their word for it because they have no documentation. If we
- 15:24find them, they won't pay it. If we try to arrest them,
- 15:30you know when, they won't show up to their court date and they'll just
- 15:33go to the next county and operate under a different name. We have no
- 15:37enforceable law against these people. I said, well, why do you allow
- 15:41them to operate? We said, well, to tell you the truth,
- 15:43mostly it's people from their own community that eat with them and shop with them,
- 15:48and they're not citizens and we're not really responsible for them. And on
- 15:54the other hand, if we shut them down, these people would have a
- 15:58harder time getting food and would be more of a burden on our community.
- 16:03We'd have to give them more in food stamps and subsidies so they could go
- 16:07to the you know, traditional American supermarket up the road. They take care
- 16:15of them their community and we leave them alone. Well, you know that's
- 16:19kind of charitable on the one hand. On the other hand, it creates
- 16:23a huge barrier to entry for the person trying to do it legally, especially
- 16:30when the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is going to try to rip you off and take
- 16:33advantage of you. You know, that's not God's plan. God's plan is
- 16:40equal treatment under the law, which was what our government was actually founded on.
- 16:45And if you think we have eaten equal treatment under the law, just
- 16:48ask yourself why Hunter Biden is still walking around a free man, and why
- 16:52Joe Biden's in the office and Donald Trump is being investigated and indicted for every
- 16:57time someone makes up a story about him. I mean, come on,
- 17:03someone has said about him. He raped me in a public department store thirty
- 17:08years ago. No, there were no witnesses. No, I don't even
- 17:11remember the date. No, I didn't tell anybody about it at the time.
- 17:15Yes, it was out in the middle of the public in you know,
- 17:18it was in a changing room and a Macy's or something, and they
- 17:22were like a million people around, and no one witnessed it. And I
- 17:26didn't call for help, and I didn't call a police. But thirty years
- 17:29later, after he's become you know, a very controversial figure, and the
- 17:34laws probably on my side, and I can get a few million dollars out
- 17:37of the bit and the plaudits of all my peers, I'm going to accuse
- 17:41him of rape. And they're they're delaying that stand. How many people do
- 17:48you think have accused Hunter Biden of rape over the years? How many?
- 17:53I mean, are they all hookers? Does he just pay everybody for sex?
- 17:56I mean, come on, apparently on his laptop he's seen with a
- 18:03lot of underage women, statutory rape at the very least, and no charges
- 18:08being proffered. Look at everything that Clinton's got away with. You remember Bill
- 18:14Clinton? You might want to put some ice on that, you know,
- 18:17after he was accused of rape by Paula Jones and apparently physical abuse, you
- 18:22know, actually hitting her and such, No charges, nothing, not a
- 18:26thing. So you're gonna blame God for that? Are you gonna blame man
- 18:33for that? I know what seems right and rational and reasonable to me.
- 18:41You know, I think we could be the best thing that could happen to
- 18:45this country is if all the liberal Democrats just decided to move to France or
- 18:52something. Just get them the hell out of here. But that's why this
- 18:53is the uncensored Catholic. Anyway, let's get into what father Sparago said.
- 18:57Now that I've gone way off topic, Father's Farrago said, in his words
- 19:03in the eighteen nineties, do not be dainty. And he said that to
- 19:10guard against the scent of gluttoning, one should eat whatever was put before them
- 19:15without complaint. Take whatever you're served. Food is food for the body,
- 19:21just as the Word of God is food for the soul, and we should
- 19:23never turn up our noses at it or disdain it. Wow, that really
- 19:29set me back on my heels because I like quality food. I like good
- 19:33food, and I enjoy cooking, probably even more than I can enjoy eating.
- 19:38I would never wish to serve someone food they wouldn't want to eat.
- 19:44And you know, I don't eat at most restaurants because I don't like processed
- 19:49food. I don't like you know, Cisco frozen pre made food popped in
- 19:56the microwave and serve to me. And I thought, well, am I'm
- 20:00wrong in this? And yeah, there probably have been times I was wrong.
- 20:03They probably definitely have been times I was wrong. But I think we
- 20:08actually have a difference in eras here in the time of Father Sparago, in
- 20:15the eighteen hundreds, there was no such thing as processed food. Food was
- 20:22what God intended. It was airloom, vegetables and grains, meat and fish.
- 20:29It was real, it was nutritious. You know, during his time,
- 20:36if we think about England, food would had been very bland. You
- 20:40know, you can look at all the old English cookbooks. Now, if
- 20:44you were royalty or very rich, you were using a lot of spices,
- 20:47and a lot of these was seen kind of odd to our taste buds,
- 20:51like the Christmas spices. You would have a meat dish that had cinnamon and
- 20:53clothes and you know, all spice and sugar in it. I mean,
- 21:00think of a you know, an English mincemeat pie, a good mincemeat pie
- 21:04that's really traditional for Christmas. Yes, it's pretty good, but it's a
- 21:08little oddly spiced to our modern taste, and it's good on occasion as a
- 21:15treat, absolutely, or a real pork pie, a real English pork pie
- 21:22quite good. Actually English food is not bad, but it does not tend
- 21:26to be highly seasoned. The average person in eighteen hundred seventeen hundred or before
- 21:33that. England would have had boiled meat and vegetables with little to know herbs
- 21:38and spices at all. You know, they may have used some parsley out
- 21:41of the garden. Yeah, that's about it. There would not have been
- 21:45a lot of black pepper because black pepper was very expensive. It would have
- 21:48been salt. It would have been meat, and it would have been some
- 21:52vegetables boiled down to mush, maybe some grains. They might thrown some barley
- 21:57in there. English had bad teeth and the food was really cooked down to
- 22:04mush. I mean think about like something close to baby food and a chunk
- 22:10of unseasoned boiled meat. Yeah, and I collect old cookbooks. I'm telling
- 22:15you this is really how they did. Think Conversely, you know, France
- 22:22and Spain used a lot of spices. Italy used a lot of spices.
- 22:26I think it's very interesting to go back to Apecious and the ancient Roman cookbooks,
- 22:33ancient Greek cookbooks. They used a lot of interesting spices and herbs and
- 22:37fish sauces garum is like the equivalent of the modern day or like an Asian
- 22:44fish sauce like you might have in Thai food, or even like soy sauce
- 22:47or Worcester sauce. Actually Worcester sauce wore kester Shire sauce. If you want
- 22:52to pronounce it as it's spelled. Everybody knows the sauce quite tasty, gives
- 22:57a lot of flavor to the foods. The old ketchups were fermented sauces before
- 23:03tomatoes were even used. Average people in England didn't have these average people in
- 23:07Italy, Spain, you know, France. Actually, the French cooking is
- 23:14more similar to ancient Roman cooking than modern Italian cooking. That would probably surprise
- 23:22a lot of people, but if you check out the old recipes of Appecius
- 23:26and such, you will find that the ancient Romans had very unique food.
- 23:33It's almost more like it's almost almost like a cross between the French food of
- 23:44classical French food, we'll just put it that way. I'm not talking about
- 23:45novelle cuisine or something, you know, classical French food and some of the
- 23:49flavors of China. There was a lot of Asian influence on that food,
- 23:55and it was quite tasty. All the dishes I've tried have been very balanced
- 24:00in salty savory, sweet and sour, with a lot of herbaceous and spice
- 24:04to it as well, a lot of what we might call ummmy type flavors.
- 24:08You can see, I really get into food, and I study this
- 24:12in early America seventeen hundred, So what do you call that? Eighteenth century?
- 24:18The cookbooks, they would blow your mind. A distant relative of mind
- 24:22through marriage as Mary Randolph. She wrote the first truly American cookbook, a
- 24:26cookbook written by a person of American birth in the United States. She was
- 24:32related Thomas Jefferson and the Washington's, a very prominent family. Used a ton
- 24:37of spices. Nutmeg was in just about every vegetable dish. She used a
- 24:41lot of clothes, a lot of allspice. You know, at this point
- 24:45in time on the East coast of America, the ports like in Boston,
- 24:48New York, and Charleston, Chesapeake, certainly Savannah and probably without a doubt,
- 25:00Lands had the best food of all because it had that influence of French
- 25:02and Spanish and Creole and such. But they were using a lot of stuff
- 25:06that by the nineteen hundreds, when even the eighteen hundreds, let's say the
- 25:11seventeen hundreds, it was very sophisticated and spice food. By the Civil War
- 25:17and into the nineteen hundreds with the World Wars, that stuff was like gone
- 25:21from our diet. Our diets had become very simple and basic, much more
- 25:26like traditional English food. So for father's farrago, there was no concept of
- 25:33processed food. It was merely a matter of turning up your nose at something
- 25:38that wasn't quite gourmet enough. So that was he considered an offense to God.
- 25:45God made the plants and the animals and the fish for us to eat,
- 25:48and the cook put their effort into it, and we were supposed to
- 25:53eat whatever was given to us. Well, there was no such thing as
- 25:57margarine. There was no such thing as processed plastic cheese. There were no
- 26:03doritos and chemically laden cheeseburgers that Americans just gorged themselves on. Now, sugar
- 26:12was very expensive and not served a lot we eat. We actually eat about
- 26:18sixty times more sugar per year per person America than our ancestors did just one
- 26:23hundred years ago, and they were eating about one hundred times more than their
- 26:27ancestors did one hundred years before that. You know, we have an epidemic
- 26:32of diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, cancers, largely due to excess
- 26:41consumption of sugar and certainly processed, chemically laden food. So you have to
- 26:47remember that in Fathersparrago's time, food was food. Fish was the food of
- 26:53the poor, the common people. Now fish is expensive delicacy. Seafood costs
- 26:59more than beef in most places in the United States. Not in his time.
- 27:03You know, Catholics were supposed to eat fish on Fridays as a penance.
- 27:08Meat was reserved for the wealthy. Well, that would be the good
- 27:11cuts. In you know, Father Sparago's time, mutton was often eaten.
- 27:17Nobody an America eats mutton anymore, which is a shame because it's actually good
- 27:19meat when prepared the right way. There's a tradition in Kentucky of making barbecue
- 27:23out of mutton. It's very good stuff. But also lamb and veal.
- 27:32These were excess products that came from dairies. You know, the cow has
- 27:36to calve regularly to produce milk, and a male lamb or cow there's another
- 27:45word for that. It's coming to me right now, was sort of a
- 27:49useless object. You would have to grow him out to sell him as beef,
- 27:56you castrate him, and you know, but for essentially so you always
- 28:00had a surplus of lamb and veal. So for poor people and for the
- 28:07humble monks and religious of the day. A knuckle of lamb or a knuckle
- 28:15of veal as they called it, which was like a big joint with some
- 28:18muscle attached to it, the nice cut's already taken off, would have been
- 28:22worth pennies if even that the butcher would even just give them away, the
- 28:26buns and such. Now that's considered gourmet food. Now you know, you
- 28:33get some asabuco and you're going to go pay a lot to have some veal
- 28:37shanks cooked down in a nice you know, vegetable based sauce, maybe a
- 28:41little bit of wine. That's gourmet food. Then it was commoner's food,
- 28:45a meal that he probably would have had very frequently, which goes back to
- 28:51the Old Testament. I mean it was eaten throughout Europe and the Middle East.
- 28:55Would have been lentils with probably a piece of mutton or lamb, a
- 29:00joint piece with a lot of gristle and cartilage on it, and not a
- 29:03lot of meat boiled together with some onions and garlic and probably well parsley,
- 29:11a few other herbs that were common. You know, coriander was very common,
- 29:15marjoram, etc. Salt, and pepper if they could afford pepper,
- 29:21pepper might have been left out. And yeah, wine was a bunnet because
- 29:25wine was you could drink wine without fear of getting food poisoning, whereas if
- 29:30you drink the water you might get really sick. So wine and beer were
- 29:33you know, the common table fair. Again, now wine and beer expensive
- 29:37objects. Cheese was just a way of preserving milk, so there was no
- 29:42doubt in you know, father Soparrago's time, when he sat down to a
- 29:45meal, it was going to be quality and nutritious. It was going to
- 29:49be an honest product from the farm, cooked by someone who actually cooked and
- 29:55didn't just take something from a package and stick it in the microwave. So
- 30:00in his time, the idea of gluttony was one who was eating the finest
- 30:07cuts of meat and a lot of expensive spices which were you know, not
- 30:12necessary. But we're a luxury and you know, probably consuming a lot of
- 30:18fine brandy and the finest wines, not the beer of the common people.
- 30:22And you know, getting fat and getting gout, and becoming attached to the
- 30:29things of this world as opposed to the things of God. And you know
- 30:33that really could it was. It was a temptation, a constant temptation for
- 30:40the religious hierarchy, the leaders of the church, because the bishops and the
- 30:45cardinals and the pope, people out of their charity, wanted to give,
- 30:49and they always had excess, and their diets could be, you know,
- 30:53quite higher than the common man. And father Sparago was chastising his priests and
- 31:00bishops and even the Pope for indulging an extravagance as opposed to keeping the mind
- 31:07on the things of God. So how do we approach this and make it
- 31:12relate to our modern times. Well, now we have an excess of food
- 31:19that is a very low nutritional value. We have all the deritos and the
- 31:26candy bars and the you know, the fast food pizza, and I mean
- 31:30food is like a it's cheap, it's easy, and it's abundant, and
- 31:36it's really not very good for us. So I think the way we could
- 31:41best embody the teaching of the Church when it comes to food is to take
- 31:51a little more thought and seek out quality food, food as God intended,
- 32:00cook it with care. If you go to a restaurant, go to maybe
- 32:06a family owned restaurant who actually does that, who cares about their ingredients and
- 32:08cooks with care because you know they're actually feeding people, They're they're doing a
- 32:15service to their community, as opposed to a commercial chain, which is just
- 32:19about slopping the hogs. Essentially, you know, get us in, get
- 32:22us out, feed us as quickly as much junk as possible. Don't just
- 32:30eat to eat, obviously, eat when you're hungry, Eat to satisfy your
- 32:34needs and nourish your body. Try to stay away from the junk foods that
- 32:42really do nothing for you nutritionally and are actually empty calories. And are you
- 32:49know our junk foods now have more flavor in them than those extravagant gourmet foods
- 32:58of the father Sparago's time and their gear. They're actually they are food scientists
- 33:06who put these flavors together to essentially addict you to to those flavors. The
- 33:10reason people line up at McDonald's to eat really lousy food is because of the
- 33:16way the food is made. I'm not going to say more than that,
- 33:20but I did study food science for a few years, and there are certain
- 33:23ingredients that go into those foods that make people come back. And the more
- 33:31that you eat and the more you just stuff your face mindfully without really thinking,
- 33:36I mean mindlessly. The more you stuff your face mindlessly without thinking about
- 33:39it, the more harm you do to your health. But Father Sparago would
- 33:44say, the more harm you do to your soul. When we have real
- 33:47food, cooked by an actual person, served with care, and we are
- 33:53actually grateful for that food, that's what God intended, you know. The
- 34:00the food is a gift from God, and the skill given to man to
- 34:04produce that food and to prepare that food is also a gift from God.
- 34:09And it's no coincidence that our entire religion is based on a meal, the
- 34:15Eucharist. Every time we sit at the family table, and that's where we
- 34:22should have our meals if it all possibles. At the family table, it's
- 34:27a time to commune with others. It's a time to appreciate the gifts from
- 34:31God. It's time to have gratitude for all we're given. I mean,
- 34:37our main prayers give us this day our daily bread. Food is an integral
- 34:44part of the Christian experience. Therefore, there are times for fasting and there
- 34:50are times for feasting. What's wrong is to take food for granted or to
- 34:57make food your God. Now there are the Epicureans of ancient Greece who said,
- 35:02you know, enjoy everything in life because there's no afterlife. Basically,
- 35:07I think weren't as immoral as they've seen, but a lot of their stuff
- 35:10was a little, you know, pretty bad actually. And then there's the
- 35:16the dainty person, as father Sparago would say, the one that would just
- 35:21not dane lower himself to dine with the common man or to eat the common
- 35:25man's food. You remember when John Carey went to Philadelphia and he ordered to
- 35:31cheese steak, and they asked him if he wanted while was out, so
- 35:36they say, do you want it with cheese whizz or without cheese whizz wh
- 35:39whizz or without? Right, he said, in his John Carey voice,
- 35:47do you have what do you want? Provoload? No, provolo swiss?
- 35:52Do you have emman taller or something like that? You know, it was
- 35:55like so out of place. You knew the man had never walked in and
- 36:00dine with the common man. Ever, on the other hand, his running
- 36:05mate's idea of a good meal was Windy's. That's where he and his wife
- 36:08spent there, spent their anniversary every year, and the Carrs had to lower
- 36:14themselves to eating with the to eating with them at a Windy's, and we're
- 36:22equally out of place. There's got to be a balance somewhere in between the
- 36:25two where food is not just for stuffing one's face and satisfying one's temporal desires,
- 36:32and it's also not elevated to the point of worshiping the food. And
- 36:37of course we know John Edwards was not a man of great self control when
- 36:43it came to satisfying his appetites. The answer is to be grateful for every
- 36:51meal and to treat it as something worthy of gratitude, quality ingredients, as
- 37:00best you can cook them, as best you can eat the meal, understanding
- 37:05that this is our daily bread given to us by God. And as long
- 37:09as we have a heart of gratitude, and we're not over eating, we're
- 37:14not over drinking, we're not taking it for granted, which is really what
- 37:17most Americans do these days, and we're not putting it up on a pedestal
- 37:22of an altar, then we're finding that right balance. And you know,
- 37:30every year we get a chance to cut out some things from our diet in
- 37:35Lent, and every Friday, you know, hopefully if we can, we
- 37:38can abstain from meat and then on Saturday we have a pork chop or a
- 37:45steak and be truly grateful for it. And you know, and and honestly,
- 37:50I absolutely love seafood, so I cannot say fish on Friday's as appenance
- 37:53for me. But for some it is. For some it is sometime times
- 38:00maybe we want to just have vegetables, maybe just some you know, one
- 38:02of my favorite meals is nothing more than pasta parsley, garlic and olive oil,
- 38:09little black pepper, little white white. That's it. That's simple,
- 38:12little crush red pepper. That's I think that's probably where father Sparago was going
- 38:17with that. And if you know, if you have a different opinion,
- 38:22get in touch with me. Let me know. It's Judson at Judson Carol
- 38:25dot com. But I do think there is a good balance we can make
- 38:31between being dainty, as father Sparago would say, turning up our nose at
- 38:36the food of the common man, and focusing on the gifts God gives us.
- 38:42In good quality ingredients and skill in cooking and appreciating a meal, But
- 38:45those we love, after all. The church begins at the family table anyway,
- 38:52in the words of Saint Padre Pio, pray, hope and don't worry,
- 38:55and I will talk to you next time.