After reading A Hunger Artist, it was interesting to find out that Franz Kafka had died of starvation, a complication from the tuberculosis that tore up his throat from so much coughing that he could hardly eat.
OK, so I realize this is an odd topic for Easter Sunday, but I imagine that Jesus died of […]

So God gave Adam and Eve all this great food to eat, but the very idea that there was a tree whose fruit was off limits made them want that fruit all the more.  I don’t really understand the psychology of it, but there’s a real thrill in doing things considered taboo. I just don’t […]

Catholics embrace the story of the wedding at Cana so they can enjoy their liquor and still be like Jesus. Weddings and other earthly celebrations are given the blessing of God because Jesus performed his first public miracle turning water into wine. 
Of course, some Protestants might argue that they were simply using the wine to […]

My preferred translation of Bethlehem is “House of Meat,” and it reminds me that the little manger where Jesus was born was there to house livestock who would one day become supper for the town’s residents. So really, the tiny Messiah came to this world in a little meat room in the big house of […]

I will repeat myself. I am not, nor will I ever be, a Bible scholar. But I do know a few things. The Bible is filled with gruesome and violent tales, there are lots of rules and prophecies, and there’s a whole lot of eating going on.
Since I was raised Catholic, we were not encouraged […]

I know this may sound irreverent, but for my nephew’s First Communion, I gave him a little speech about the awesomeness of ritual cannibalism. We talked about the Karankawa tribes of Gulf Coast Texas who would eat the flesh of their fallen enemies to gain their power. The very idea of eating the body and […]

What if the second coming was a Martian who liked free sex and free meat? Personally, I might become a believer.
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars, who has been taught it’s the worst kind of sacrilege not to eat the flesh of your […]

I sometimes think much of the morality we have manufactured over the centuries comes from humans attempting to deny that they are also animals. After all, the “original sin” is sex, something that we must do to procreate, as animals. So then the next thing to moralize about is what we eat, which again, we […]

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk a little about guilt. Since my mother instilled in us what she called “a healthy sense of guilt,” I became a minor hedonist to balance things out a bit. So I love sex and I love food, and I feel no guilt about eating eggs from […]

I went looking, but I couldn’t find the paper I wrote in college called, “Migrant Farm Workers and Wandering Jews,” comparing the lives represented in Tomas Rivera’s The Searchers with the Jewish people scattered across the globe. Like the dispersed Jews, the migrant farm workers share a faith and a history, a mindset that connects […]