Five Dollar Biscuits

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 4th

some biscuits I made on election day 2020, to calm my nerves

There are many powerful ways to express identity: language, custom, religion, clothing, dance, music, and art, to name a few. But food might be one of the most important ways. Food offers a lot more than sustenance; it tells us who we are and to whom we belong. Food links us to the past and it carries the stories of the people who passed their foodways along to us. Food, as much as DNA, can bind us to each other and to place, and it can remind us of where we belong.

I can remember having an epiphany, about 25 years ago, in a little restaurant in Nashville. I was doing an internship for my masters degree, and I was out to lunch with my supervisor at one of the soul food restaurants that Nashville is known for. It was my first time at a soul food place; having grown up in a small town without a lot of eating options, I had never heard of that genre of restaurant before. This was the days before you could easily look up a menu on the internet, so I went into the experience without much of a sense of what to expect. As a vegetarian and a somewhat picky eater, I had some anxiety about it. Would I be able to find something I liked? When I sat down and looked at the menu, my anxieties went out the window. Soul food, as it turned out, was not very much different from the food I grew up with: centered around a meat dish (though as a vegetarian I could order a vegetable plate), with sides like sweet potatoes, greens, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, biscuits, slaw, and mashed potatoes.

Since then I have come to realize that my sense of comfort and familiarity at that soul food restaurant was because soul food—as a characteristic cuisine of African-American people—is closely related to southern food, which I grew up eating. In fact, though I am sure that my friend Adrian Miller, the “Soul Food Scholar,” could correct me and offer a lot more nuance, it seems to me that the distinction between “soul food” and “southern food” often comes down to an arbitrary racial distinction: we call it one thing when Black people cook it, and something else when White people cook it. But both genres share a lot of things in common: they both rely on local and seasonally available ingredients, they both pack a lot of nutrition and calories, and they both arise out of the experience of poverty and deprivation. Foods like cornbread and greens and sweet potatoes can be vanishingly cheap to make if you know how to grow the ingredients yourself or know someone who does, and they can tide you over through tough times.

Although I am no food scholar like Adrian Miller, it seems to me that a lot of food traditions start this way: with necessity, availability, and ingenuity. And they all point toward belonging. Lattkes in eastern Europe, corn tortillas in Oaxaca, rice in Cambodia, plantains on Pacific islands—some of the world’s most characteristic dishes are borne out of the staples provided by the land and the creativity of the people who live there. The stories we tell about food often make just this connection: we eat this food, we say to ourselves, because we know this land, and we come from this people. Food becomes a way to articulate the bonds we share, and to maintain those bonds and pass them along to the future.

In the lectionary for August 4^th, three of the texts speak to the importance of food in times of deprivation and scarcity. Exodus 16: 2-4 and 9-15, Psalm 78:23-29, and John 6:24-35 are all related to the story of manna and quail during the Exodus from Egypt. Exodus tells it most plainly: the Israelites were hungry in the desert and began to grumble that, while they had been enslaved, they at least had enough to eat. God heard the grumbling and offered two solutions: quail in the evenings and manna each morning. It’s striking how connected to the land these two foods are: “In the evening quails came up and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground.” These foods are not abstract miraculous appearances, ex nihilo like the work of a magician. God does not materialize food like those replicators on Star Trek, conjuring a pot roast out of thin air. Instead, God leverages the land to provide for the people. God provides the food, but in a very real sense, the land provides the sustenance that the people need.

Many scholars have pointed out that quail migrations over the Sinai Peninsula might have brought flocks near to the Israelites’ camps, but the manna has been harder to figure out. Some have landed on honeydew—the dried secretions of insects—as the thing called manna. There are other explanations too, having to do with certain kinds of desert plants. But it almost doesn’t matter; Exodus is not a cookbook, and the point here is not the food itself but the role it played in the formation of peoplehood. Manna and quail function in this story as a way to talk about a shared experience of migration and scarcity and the way God intervened in a difficult moment. The story is told and retold because of what the manna and quail say about what it means to belong together and belong to God.

That’s what makes Jesus’s words possible in John 6; Jesus is riffing on the story of Israel eating manna in the wilderness to make a theological point. Jesus presumes belonging in this story; he is talking to fellow Jews, and he makes their shared identity obvious when he says that “our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness.” Here, Jesus presumes a shared belonging, and the manna is a tangible expression of that shared history—a way of remembering common roots and ancestral connection. And Jesus, in the way that the Gospel of John often does, is using this story to point to himself. “I am the bread of life,” the “bread from heaven,” Jesus says in John, a continuation and fulfilment of an ancient story of provision in a time of need.

If I have a manna, it’s probably squash. If you’re from the South, you probably know what I mean. Every summer, around this time of year, anyone with a garden is overrun with squash and zucchini. “Don’t leave your car doors unlocked,” the old joke goes, “or someone will leave some zucchini in it.” This time of year, you can’t give the stuff away. People take the squash and they stew it, fry it, bake it, puree it into soup, roast it, or eat it raw. My mother used to dry it to save for the winter. The zucchini is usually grated into an ingredient for a truly delicious bread, but most things you can do with squash you can probably do with zucchini too. Perhaps like the Israelites with manna, I have come to despise squash. I ate enough in my childhood to last a lifetime. (I will still eat zucchini bread; I’m not a monster). I ate a lot of squash on summer nights growing up, and there was a lot more that I didn’t eat, but I pushed it around my plate until my mother gave up and let me leave the table. If you didn’t have a lot to eat in the South, and it was the right season, then squash could keep you going until things got better. The same was true for a lot of the things you can find on the menus of soul food restaurants or southern food places: foods that the land offered easily and in abundance, with just a little bit of work, if you knew where to look.

I actually don’t like Jesus’ point in John 6, when he says that he’s the bread from heaven, the bread of life. (I’m convinced that not only are we allowed to read against the Bible and even against Jesus’ words, but that we ought to do so from time to time—otherwise our engagement with the text and the tradition isn’t very strong. Relationships presume occasional disagreement). Jesus’ words here feel like a co-opting of tradition, or an erasure of it. “Our ancestors” passed through a time of struggle, Jesus is saying, but I’m the logical endpoint of that. I suppose he’s entitled to feel that way, to understand himself as the fullest expression of God’s provision in a time of need. But it feels like Jesus is dismissing a very tangible example of Israel’s belonging with each other and with God, and making it about himself. For the people in the wilderness, Jesus wasn’t the bread of life. Manna was the bread of life. Even if Jesus eventually came along (a thousand-ish years later) to also be the bread of life, the story of the manna and the quail ought to stand on its own as a way for Israel to say how and why they belong with each other, and with God. The Israelites in the wilderness weren’t yearning for a future savior; they were needing food to sustain themselves and their children in the present. Something rubs me the wrong way when Jesus makes this story all about himself. He does that a lot in John, so maybe it’s less about Jesus and more about the way the Johannine community understood Jesus and told his story out of their own experiences and convictions. But I see value in letting the manna be the manna, and remembering the sustenance of the land in the past without pushing it aside for something new.

It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite restaurant chains—a southern food place that has begun to expand all around the country. It got its start in Asheville, North Carolina in a greasy little hole in the wall downtown—a spot you can still visit. We used to eat there a lot when we lived in Asheville a long time ago, and one of our favorite things was that when you sat down at the table they would bring you two biscuits and some honey and blueberry jam, for free, to get you started, as an act of hospitality. But as the restaurant chain expanded across the country and moved upscale, they made the biscuits an appetizer instead of free. When the Denver location opened in a fancy spot downtown, the appetizer that got you two biscuits and some honey and blueberry jam was $10. A biscuit probably has 30 cents’ worth of ingredients in it, and while I don’t want to discount the labor involved, something bothers me about charging $5 apiece for one of the staples of the diets of an entire region of poor folks. Biscuits, like manna, ought to be democratic and available—not behind a high paywall. Something feels wrong about turning poverty food into a luxury item. Maybe if it was squash, I wouldn’t feel so strongly about it. They can keep the squash, but biscuits are delicious, and biscuits fed most everyone I knew growing up and they fed generations of my ancestors. A five-dollar biscuit feels like an insult to all of that history of sustenance and provision in times of need—a rejection of the saving power of biscuits, the same way Jesus had to denigrate manna to claim himself as the bread of life.

Maybe I’m making too much of both Jesus’ words and the $5 biscuits, but there’s something about the story of manna that just strikes me as true and good. The story of ancestors, the story of a people finding plenty in the midst of scarcity, seems like the kind of story that’s worth telling again and again. Soul food (and southern food) isn’t just about a cuisine, it’s about a story and a history, and something gets lost when we try to make it into something new or dress it up to be something it’s not. I’ll always show up for sweet potatoes and cornbread and greens and slaw and mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and biscuits—and even squash, even though I won’t touch it myself—because those foods mean something to my life and the lives of the people where I belong. Some things don’t need to be elevated. Some foods are perfect the way they are, rooted in the lives of normal folk, people working to find a way through. Some stories don’t need reinterpretation or new meanings; they already do just fine at telling us who we are and where we come from. If Jesus’ words in John 6 work for you, then by all means claim them. But as for me, I’m more at home in Exodus with the manna.