On Waste and the World as Gift
Blessed Breads, the Deep History of Consumption, and God's Counter-Economy
When, a decade and a half ago in the dead of winter, I arrived in Morocco for an extended stay of several months, one of the first things I noticed that surprised me was the special relationship everyone seemed to have with ordinary bread. I was admonished not to discard bread, ever, but learned that everyone, from households to restaurants, collected any unused fragments of bread, no matter how small, and placed them outside along the street, to be collected by a man pulling a cart. I honestly do not know for certain what the ultimate end of that bread was, or whether such practices continue, but certainly during my sojourn in Féz the khubz man was a regular morning sight (or sound more often). Where did this practice come from? Beyond a rather vague sense that it was Islamic sunna while also a distinctive aspect of Moroccan culture, I did not get any hard answers, and while I think I can shed a bit more light on the question now, it’s still a bit mysterious as a historical phenomenon, with little to no scholarly treatment, beyond a terse entry in the Encyclopedia of Islam. I’m working at the moment on a translation, which I’ll post elsewhere, of a little early eighteenth century treatise on the ‘respect owed to bread’ by ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, but so far it is the only explicit treatment of the practice I have come across. Like so many of the most momentous things in human cultural worlds, it is simply there, and seemingly always has been, rising to the surface of observation and articulation only when introduced to outsiders or when challenged for whatever reasons internal to a culture.
Shortly after returning to the United States that summer I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and attended my first divine liturgy, something I’d long wanted to do but which had not been possible due to the relative scarcity of Orthodox parishes in the South at the time (though this is far less the case today). While I was familiar from readings and recordings with most of the liturgical elements, I do not recall having read much of anything about the blessed bread—antidoron is the Greek name, ‘instead of the gifts,’ though I cannot recall having ever used the term or heard it in conversation—which everyone received after communion, and which is, at least in some of our traditions, distributed to any non-communicants, Orthodox or otherwise. What I soon learned was that while it was not equivalent to the Eucharist, we treated it as something sacred, such that fragments ought not be dropped on the floor or any remaining pieces of bread discarded in the trash. It is blessed—taken from the same bread as will be used in the Eucharist—and must be treated akin to other blessed things (‘sacramentals’ they are often called in the Western tradition). And while the history of this practice can be descried in broad outlines, it is also more something that is simply there, and which almost certainly has genuinely deep roots, akin to other Orthodox food traditions embedded deep in practice but rarely explicitly articulated or theorized.
Finally, to round out this triptych of exemplars: over the last few years our family has begun composting any and all food scraps assiduously, having the space to do so without attracting the ire of neighbors or landlords (my initial attempts as an apartment dweller using a rotating barrel composter were markedly less successful…). We now keep a bucket under the sink, and once it has filled a third of the way or so I haul it down to the chicken coop; whatever the chickens don’t eat goes into the compost pile in their coop, and will eventually be cycled back into our garden, starting the cycle again. I wouldn’t say that we’ve completely eliminated waste from our household, we’ve still got a long ways to go, but I can say that no food scrap goes to waste. It will deliberately feed someone, human, chicken, invertebrate, or plant, or all of the above in some sequence. Now when I go somewhere else and see food waste of any sort it is viscerally painful to observe, not least because every bit of ‘free’ food I can feed my chickens or compost pile is less money out of my wallet! But of course for the majority of people not just in America but really across most of the world today, throwing food away is simply a cultural given, something that happens without it even being noticed. Waste—of food, of land, of just about everything—is built into our daily lives, into our economy, our political structure, the infrastructure upon which we depend, and into our cultural codes and scripts. As such changing it is a massive challenge, to put it mildly.
The human relationship with food is a complex one, to put it mildly—indeed that very complexity is arguably one of the constituent parts of being human, the way in which what we eat is culturally shaped in a way that is true for no other organism on earth. What we eat, how we eat it, what we do with the remnants—these are all ultimately shaped less by biological exigency and more by the complex patterns of cultural script and technological availability, starting with the (relative anyway) mastering of fire. Our distant ancestors no doubt perceived their food as having spiritual and moral meaning, even if the details of their value systems are largely opaque to us today. Hunting, at least, was not simply procurement of calories, but had some metaphysical significance. There are robust indications of cultural preferences existing in the very distance past—shifts away from eating fish and mollusks, for instance, that do not correlate to shifts in the organisms’ populations but instead suggest changing cultural mores and norms of what is good to eat and what isn’t. And one need only look at the opening chapters of Genesis for ample treatment of food as being more than food, its consumption—or non-consumption—carrying great moral and spiritual significance, even if, again, the precise details and referents are rather murky to us today. At the heart of the Genesis story is a dichotomy between reception of the world as gift, on the one hand, and the impulse to seize as plunder, to reject the gift and to made one’s own demands of consumption.
Conspicuous consumption begins to appear quite late in the archeological record—the earliest burials of which we know featuring ‘grave goods’ in the form of things like tiny beads, perforated fox canines, red ochre, and the like are burials not of people who would have likely been leaders or strong men, but often of children, disabled people, and individuals who died in some unusual manner. Whatever the significance of the goods with which they were buried, I think it is safe to say that they were in some fashion gifts, given in recognition of whatever (and it almost certainly was not possession of power) marked the buried person out in life. Contrast those burials with what we see in, say, Bronze Age tumuli of the Eurasian steppes, or in any number of early kingly tombs in the early centers of so-called civilization: lavish waste of goods and of living things, including in the earlier periods human beings, slaughtered to accompany the ruler into the afterlife. These sorts of lavish displays of conspicuous consumption—with the earth or the flame the physical agent of consumption in such cases—clearly served to reinforce emergent hierarchies of power and wealth, in which the act of gift-giving was now oriented towards holders of power.
Yet despite the steadily increasing signs of conspicuous consumption and the deliberate wasting of resources obtained from the laboring masses that we see in the archeological and then historical record, the sense of the world as gift persisted in many cultures, even up to the present, though rarely without struggle or limitations. Bread has been, as my opening examples suggest, a particular locus of this understanding of food in particular, especially bread for the cultures descended from the Neolithic transformations of western Eurasia. We—not just in Orthodoxy but across the Christian world—after all pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ on a regular basis, so often that we tend to pass over the true significance of what we ask of God: our sustenance from the earth as gift, sustenance to sustain us day by day and not as an object of hyper-accumulation or of thoughtless consumption and waste. Bread is a gift, and when it is taken up and blessed it as if its status as gift is multiplied. For those of us fortunate enough to partake of them still, the small ritual actions and sacred sentiments that still attach themselves to bread and to other products of the earth (in Orthodoxy we bless produce, honey, flowers, and tree branches as well at various points of the year) can and should generate within us a feeling of the sacredness of it all and of our relationship to the earth as the locus of God’s providential distribution in an economy of sheer gift. Traditions such as the special attention owed to bread that are still alive in many Islamicate cultures as another source of a deeper understanding of the world and our place in it, of the web of relations and obligations that out participation in food and the natural order entails.
Attention to food and the natural and social relationships engendered by it are further reinforced in those traditions for which regular fasting is an important occurrence: Ramadan has recently concluded, while in the Orthodox world we have a couple weeks remaining to Great Lent, both seasons in which believers collectively re-orient their relationship to food and to one another. It is not an accident that fasting goes hand in hand (or at least is supposed to!) with care for the poor, with the sharing of what one has been given by God, using fasting seasons as a sort of period of concentration and acceleration into greater participation in the Divine economy (or, better, counter-economy).
And yet. The world that has emerged over the last couple of centuries is one in which the ability to waste, to consume without attention or care or any indication of gratitude or reciprocal obligation, has grown exponentially, particularly for the wealthy nations though also for many middling income ones, as the material largess of industrial capitalism has washed over nearly all shores to some degree or another, if with wildly different levels of wealth and benefit. The unlocking of fossil fuels that ultimately made capitalistic growth possible is a key part of this story: the cheap and abundant ‘labor’ of fossil fuels is a major driving force in making conspicuous waste possible, of inculcating it as a cultural norm (even if it may be the case that for a given household waste is economically dangerous). We live in a world of disposability, in which the very infrastructure of our lives encourages thoughtless use, lack of attention, and entitlement for the self without regard for other living organisms, human or non-human, that might be entangled in the choices we make. I know I should no longer be shocked but I am still constantly amazed—and not in a good way!—at how many bags of finely shredded leaves I am able to pick up (to the gain of the compost piles and mulched beds I help manage!) off the street, the nutrient enriching cycle of the earth’s bounty treated as so much trash to be disposed of, often with the further expenditure of fossil fuels to shred the gift offered before dumping it in a plastic bag at the side of the road.
It would be easy to cast moral judgment upon such displays of mindless waste, of rejection of the giftedness of the world, and while I do think we all have personal responsibilities in these matters, it is also the case that the overwhelmingly dominant cultural scripts and inculcated habits that shape most people encourage, even mandate such behavior. Much of it is built into the very physical and legal infrastructures that shape our daily lives, against which we resist at potential social or legal danger to ourselves. And besides, I am truly not any better—my halting attempts at treating the world as gift, of honoring God’s offerings to us of the earth, of living things, and of human community, are partial, sporadic, and marked by my own selfishness and preference for taking the easy path offered by the industrial capitalist order, even as I know to do otherwise, and from multiple sources of knowledge and perspective. Orthodoxy makes the giftedness of the world and our mutualistic obligations as a consequence an inescapable fact, woven into so many aspects of our liturgical cycle, proclaimed in Scripture and in the tradition of the Church. We have only ourselves to blame for so poorly realizing this heritage in the contemporary world, and presenting evidence of God’s counter-economy on behalf of all with whom we share this good earth.
If we are to reshape the patterns that drive all of our ‘environmental’ crises (which are also human crises, social, political, cultural, and spiritual) it will entail a reworking of the scripts of how we interact with the natural world, with one another, with the food we eat and the material things we use and consume. At a very basic level it simply entails paying attention, genuine attention, to things, quite literally, which can often require envisioning things that are physically distant from us yet immediate in their impact (the electricity and physical infrastructure making this post possible, for instance), of returning to community constituted through mutual gift and responsibility. This seems simple enough, but of course it is not—futuristic technological fixes for climate change or species loss are comparatively very simple indeed, which explains in part their popularity as perceived solutions. We want to be offered ways out of our sins without having to reap the consequences or give anything up in return, a story that is far older than industrial capitalism—only now thanks to fossil fuels, modern technology and economies, and all the rest we can magnify the harms of our rejection of the world as gift exponentially.
Still—we can each of us learn to resist waste, mindless consumption, and the rejection of the giftedness of the world. The current is against us, but that is no excuse. The world remains the beautiful and constantly unfolding gift of God, the rain falling upon us no matter how unjust we become. Let us receive it as gift, and give thanks, and offer it back to God and to one another and to all of creation.
O Lord, how lovely it is to be Your guest. Breeze full of scents — mountains reaching to the skies — waters like a boundless mirror, reflecting the sun’s golden rays and the scudding clouds. All nature murmurs mysteriously, breathing depths of Your tenderness. Birds and beasts of the forest bear the imprint of Your love. Blessed are you, mother earth, in your fleeting loveliness, which wakens our yearning for happiness that will last forever in the land where, amid beauty that grows not old, rings out the cry: Alleluia!
You have brought me into life as if into an enchanted paradise. We have seen the sky like a chalice of deepest blue, where in the azure heights the birds are singing. We have listened to the soothing murmur of the forest and the melodious music of the streams. We have tasted fruit of fine flavor and the sweet-scented honey. We can live very well on your earth. It is a pleasure to be your guest.
Glory to You for the feast-day of life.
Glory to You for the perfume of lilies and roses.
Glory to You for each different taste of berry and fruit.
Glory to You for the sparkling silver of early morning dew.
Glory to You for the joy of dawn’s awakening.
Glory to You for the new life each day brings.
Glory to You, O God, from age to age.- The Akathist Hymn, ‘Glory to God for All Things’
This is so beautiful 🙏💗