Broken Bread

Book Reviews

Jan 26

Broken Bread: How to Stop Using Food and Fear to Fill Spiritual Hunger
By: Tilly Dillehay

[Fulfilled ‘Book about food’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]

“God cares much more about how we eat than he cares about what we eat.”

“A thousand years ago, most of the human lifetime was taken up with the business of getting enough food and cooking it. This is still the case in some areas of the world… We have different challenges to face. Our challenges have to do with decisions, with images, with self-control, with generosity, and with resources. In a word, ours are the challenges of stewardship.”

This is a must-read!

It was written in 2020 but still feels very applicable to the ‘food climate’ today and does a lot to look at how perception of and interaction with food has become complicated— broken. Tilly restores these perceptions and interactions, offering a balanced look at the ‘food pitfalls’ we all find ourselves in and how Jesus speaks into them.

I borrowed this book from a friend, and I have to admit, it sat on my shelf for awhile because the whole ‘make your own sourdough bread’ craze is alive and well around me and in my memory, that was what was on the cover of this book; I thought I knew what the book was going to be about. I am not about to start making my own bread and growing my own garden. I think that’s awesome for a lot of my friends and I often reap the benefits of their endeavors, but that’s not what preparing food looks like for me. I didn’t want to read a book that tried to convince me that that was the most biblical way to feed my family.

Turns out, I shouldn’t have avoided this book for so long! And look, it’s not even a perfect sourdough loaf on the cover!

I also need to admit that once I realized she wasn’t going to make me feed a little yeast monster, I did have some moments of self-righteousness— ‘At least I’m not like those people!’, ‘At least I’m not doing that!’, ‘Oh good, I’m doing the “right” thing!’ (I have always been a person who intentionally avoids trends so dieting or food trends have never been my jam) but then I’d get to the next chapter and get my own dose of conviction and recognition of a different food-related sin that I DO need to own.

That’s what I mean by balanced. No one gets a free ride in this book. Which is important because there has been a lot of judgment towards others regarding their food preparation and food eating habits or practices. I see it everywhere, and I confess I am part of it— maybe not online or to someone’s face, but I feel it in my heart.

Why do we judge? She quotes from this article from The Atlantic:

“You are not merely disputing facts, you are putting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hope they will be saved.” - Michelle Allison

Michelle’s talking about diets specifically, but the principle applies more broadly. We need food to survive. Food affects a lot of things in our bodies and lives. Even if we don’t necessarily want to be super healthy, most of us at least don’t want to be stupid or harming ourselves with what we eat. To make ourselves feel better about our own choices and confident that we’re not stupidly hurting ourselves or our families, we make judgments about other people’s choices to elevate our own choices. Because whether consciously or subconsciously, we’ve put our hope in what we eat.

Tilly says,

“Food is complicated for so many good reasons. It’s complicated by our sin and by our bodily afflictions in a fallen world. It is complicated by scarcity, and it is complicated by plenty. It is complicated by social pressure and pride. It’s complicated by economic forces. It’s complicated by the fact that even though Jesus and Paul tell us that we aren’t contaminated by what goes into the body but by what comes out of it, our default approach to physical things is to assume that the stricter the rule, the holier the person.”

The first part of her book she describes the four major food sins or ‘poles’ that can be seen as two spectrums:

Asceticism vs Gluttony

Asceticism: “too proud to enjoy the enjoyable”
Gluttony: “we cannot be satisfied” (not just overeating)

and

Snobbery vs Apathy

Snobbery: “consumed with being on the right side of food history… acted out mostly in front of others on social media or over the supper table”
Apathy: “refuses to find objective fault with McDonald’s McRib sandwich and is too lazy to learn how to cook”

I was able to peg myself on one of these, and you may too, but even if you can’t at first glance, once you hear her explanations and descriptions of how these sins affect the way we eat, you may be surprised that what you’re doing puts you in one of these camps.

The push of this book is not to argue for a specific diet or food preparation method. It’s to help us understand that what we eat is not the ultimate thing. It’s our heart and our treatment of others while we’re eating that matters.

One of the passages she references is 1 Corinthians 10 including these verses:

“‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor… So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God”

Part of the brokenness food has caused is brokenness of fellowship. Our diets or food restrictions often keep us from being with others. The way we eat often keeps us focused on ourselves instead of serving others. It may isolate us or prevent us from creating a welcoming environment where all can come and eat and build relationship.

“Food can be a means to love people. Food can purchase an audience to talk about the things that matter to both of you.”

“When we use hospitality as an aid and a vehicle for intimacy and truth and worship, we are using it as it was intended to be used, and as I think it will be used in the new heavens and new earth.”

Part of the brokenness food has caused is also a failure to believe that God is enough or that he will provide. It’s a shifting of priorities; we want to be a specific weight or we end up not enjoying God’s gift of food. The way we eat consumes us and becomes an idol. If we’re talking more about what we eat or don’t eat more than we are talking about Who actually brings salvation, we have created an idol.

“Idolatry isn’t a bowing down response to imaginary problems; it’s a bowing response to very real problems. In fact, our problems are the most real thing about idolatry— it’s the solution that is illusion.”

Tilly addresses a lot of things surrounding food including: dieting, eating disorders (which she experienced personally), allergies, fasting, learning to cook, alcohol, and the idealism of international cuisine.

I thought she handled all of these potentially controversial topics really well and really did change the way I look at the ‘problem’ of food in many areas.

What Stuck Out to Me

I love the title— Broken Bread. Tilly reminds us how Jesus called himself the Bread of Life. And on the night when he was arrested he ate the Last Supper with his disciples and told them as he tore the bread, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’

The title has a double meaning. Jesus is the broken bread, broken for us so that we could be free from the slavery of our sin. Yet here we are, a couple thousand years later, broken, living according to our fleshly desires surrounding food that’s keeping us from breaking bread with others. A very good reminder of the broken bread we should be filling ourselves with.

To really experience the joy of eating and tasting and enjoying the gifts of God in food and taste, she suggests every once in awhile hosting a nice dinner party with friends and going all out with it— a shadow of the feast that is to come in the new heavens. I love a good party so this feels a little inspiring to try to make something like this happen— a way to bless others with a nice meal.

When we only had one kid, we would often have our dinners in the living room watching TV. We would pull our daughter’s high chair next to the couch and we would eat while we watched. But we realized that sitting at a table was an important practice that had a lot of benefits. We quickly switched to eat almost all of our dinners as a family, without the TV on (with the exception of Sunday pizza nights). Tilly affirms the value of this and I liked how she described this practice:

“You’re providing a meeting place where the good things about a family can be practiced and enjoyed. You’re putting in a scaffolding, a structure around which much more can be built, with potential for bodily, cultural, relational, and spiritual benefit.”

We also are adding in some new habits around the dinner table from the book Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley (that we’re still reading).

I may not struggle with dieting or food trends, but I have a real struggle with the dailiness of eating. I have to make my family dinner every night for the rest of my life?! That’s a lot of days. I often feel the weight of that or lament the work it takes to prepare a meal with no real appreciation for all my time in the kitchen.

It was convicting when Tilly said, “In some ways, the attitude with which you engage yourself in the menial is the truest measurement of your joy.” She talks about how it’s easy to feel joy in the extreme highs and lows because we are signaled that we should, but it’s harder in the day-to-day steady times to see joy. I think as a mom, that’s the hardest area to find the joy— the menial.

When I was part of a Christian mom’s group, there were social activities scheduled every month and I grew uncomfortable with the amount of remarks made about wine. Almost every event included wine; there were lots of comments at our regular meetings about just getting to the end of the day when they could have a glass of wine.

I really appreciated Tilly’s comments about this ‘I need wine’ mom culture that is so often joked about in Christian women groups.

“The problem is that these jokes are a form of exhortation. What they communicate, essentially, is this: ‘The Holy Spirit is not sufficient for you. What you need is wine.’”

“If we lean into alcohol or coarse jokes about alcohol, we miss opportunities to exhort one another in ways that actually help.”

Tilly does not abstain from drinking (though I do) but she has a really biblical understanding of what that freedom to drink alcohol should look like and how we steward that freedom around others.

At the heart of our preoccupation with food is that we have desires that need to be filled and we so often look to fill those in the wrong place.

“The thing is, your heart is a pursuing heart. It’s running after something at all times; you are full of longings. So which lesser longings are you allowing to dim your longing for God?”

“Your attempts to rein in the chocolate habit—even in the name of Spirit-borne self-control—may be successful, but they’ll only allow you to exchange idols for idols until your heart is in pursuit of the thing it was made to pursue.”

What Was Missing

There was one thing that I wish she would have addressed that she didn’t. My biggest battle surrounding food is something that was not in this book: my four kids. I have always had major struggles with getting my kids to eat their food. I’m sure I messed up my early parenting in some ways that caused this, but regardless, the problem with enjoying my food, or with caring about learning how to cook new things, or just taking the time to make a meal in general is that so often it gets complained about and ends up getting thrown away.

I’m not super motivated to make meals if they won’t eat them. It becomes more of a chore and not super pleasurable when kids are crying because they’re hungry and they don’t like the food.

I would have liked to hear her thoughts on handling that. I have not created an environment where my kids are used to getting special treatment, separate meals than the family, or a steady diet of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese. Yet I’m also not making them eat olives and mushrooms or spicy or slimy food.

How do I appreciate food and its preparation under these circumstances? How do I let go of the waste just to present them with the labored over food?

I had to laugh when she said: “Find ways of cooking things for the whole family that promote wellness and enjoyment. Stumped? Start with beans. Find out ways to cook beans in ways you all enjoy…”

Beans?! I’m doomed. I will eat green beans and baked beans and chili beans if they’re blended up first and then added to the chili, but beans are something I have a really big mental and taste block with. What’s the second option?!

Read as a Study

At the end of each chapter was a ‘Food for Thought’ section that offered a few discussion questions, some practice suggestions to put things into action, and then a couple other related books to read.

I think this book would be a great book to read and discuss in a group to share your different experiences with food and help each other keep our ‘food sin tendencies’ in check, and find ways to use food to serve others, perhaps even together.

A couple books she quoted from that I’ve read and enjoyed- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and Eve in Exile by Rebekah Merkle.

I’m not sure how many of the other books I will read because I’m not a culinary enthusiast, but a couple that seemed at the top of the list she would recommend would be The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon and John Pipers book, A Hunger for God.

Recommendation

This is a very important book to help you see how you can ENJOY food and how you can use food to bring people together because what we eat is not as important as how we eat.

I recommend this book for all people, whether you think you struggle with food or not. It’s for sure for people who find themselves consumed with diets or trends or who eat indiscriminately to no end, but it’s also for the people who cast judgments on other people’s practices. The principles Tilly discusses run deep and will inform even more than just food in your life.

There is freedom and redemption in this book. But it’s a biblical freedom that promotes building up our neighbors and using food to the glory of God.

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery… For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” - Galatians 5:1, 13

You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.