Cookery competitions

It’s a bake-off 

Are cookery competitions a form of blasphemy? I think so. It really upsets me when I see so many programmes on UK television devoted to competitive preparation of food and drink, with so much emphasis on visual presentation and self-promotion, and so little on nourishment and generosity - the core values required for preparing a meal for others to consume. These are not so much bake-offs as show-offs. They should come with a warning: may be harmful to the digestion. 

In the Bible you will be hard pressed to find any form of competition, at least on the part of God Himself. There are of course contests between rival priests (Aaron with those of Pharaoh, Elijah with the priests of Baal); but they are tests of religious competence, in which the winners are the humans, not God, who is and remains master of everything, beyond definition. Even the episode of the miraculous draft of fishes, sometimes presented as a challenge from God to go out and convert the heathen in great numbers, is actually an encouragement to faint-hearted missionaries to trust that the Lord will provide more fish than you can handle, if you only have the faith to spread your net wherever the Holy Spirit indicates. 

Of course there are plenty of battles and wars in the Bible, tribal competitiveness at the mass scale. If Charles Darwin is to be believed, competition is essential for our survival. Our very existence depends on our ability to mark out a territory, to reproduce our species, to nourish a family. But is that all? Our Creator, the one who has given us existence, seems to be beyond all that, unbound by the limits of space and time which constrict our capacities and compel us to fight for our lives. 

 But the crude necessities of existence are not all there is; circumstances require us to fight with others for the essentials, well and good; but we also have access to graces from God, higher values. Whatever the incidentals of the situation we find ourselves in – circumstances which seem to impose limits on our possible choices - we also receive graces which develop the fullness of our human potential: to be generous, imaginative and compassionate; to actually want to give pleasure and sustenance to others; to bring out the best in ourselves and in those we serve. 

 In life we always have the choice, to identify with our existence and risk frustration, or to accept just being, knowing that all things change, except the things that are eternal. This duality gives us a glimpse of a life beyond limits. Being and existence are as different as chalk and cheese. In spiritual affairs, the distinction is an essential one, a key with which to unlock thick doors of non-comprehension. Existence is material, finite, inflexible and mean. Being is eternal, light, timeless and joyful. Now, competition lies almost exclusively in the realm of existence; cookery on the other hand crosses over between the two. Feeding people is (or at least can be) a privilege of the highest order. Hospitality is one of the oldest religious duties imposed on those who live in societies. Who can forget being given a meal in the middle of nowhere by a perfect stranger, even if it is just a single rather greasy egg and a dry bite of bread, washed down by a glass of milky whey? This is what happened to me once on a survey trip in Turkey; it was a marking experience which has never left me. As the French would say, un sacré d’expérience – a sacred memory. 

So when the Archbishop of Canterbury says in an unguarded moment that the recent round of terrorist attacks makes him doubt the presence of God... One has to draw a deep breath and seek among the resources of spiritual wisdom to find the appropriate reply. My cousin Joan who is an Episcopalian priest in the USA, a lovely person whom I deeply respect, wrote me that at least Justin Welby did not say that he doubted the existence of God, only His presence; which got me thinking, not of Simone Weil (as she suggested) but of the fundamental difference between God, and those he has created: in particular that God is being itself, while we exist as His creatures. 

 The distinction is a profound one. Each of us is mortal: we are obliged to exist, but through His mercy we have access to His being and we can see that we do more than merely exist; while He has no necessity to share our existence, except that in His mercy He has chosen to do so in his Only Son. For the most part, He leaves us in our stubbornness to follow our own designs (as the Psalm puts it); and it is up to us to turn to Him in our hearts if we want his advice and his help. When people allow themselves to behave as though God does not exist, they can only blame themselves for his apparent absence. But this does not mean that there is no God; nor that he is not always present. That would be like a fish saying there is no such thing as water. It just means that some of us don’t appreciate how lucky we are that God IS, and that he loves us despite all the stubbornness of heart which keeps us from turning to him at every opportunity. We don’t know much about God. But one thing is certain: it’s not worth trying to compete with Him. He’s always one jump ahead, waiting to share the joke. 

Waiting for us to turn 

Waiting for us to learn 

Hey ho!  

Post Script: When I showed a draft of this talk to my cousin she at once pointed out that the Bible records plenty of competition involving God, for instance between Elijah and the priests of Baal (and she could have added, between Aaron and the priests of Pharaoh), where God’s presence is revealed, and his superiority proven, by the success of the winning side in what is clearly a straight contest. 

But I have to say, it is in fact a contest of competences. Elijah lays out the sacrifice, as do his opponents, and then they invoke “their” God to light the flames. Eventually, after the priests of Baal have prayed all day in vain, Elijah successfully calls down fire from heaven and so completes the sacrifice. In similar fashion, Aaron’s rod once thrown to the ground turns into a snake; but when the priests of Pharaoh succeed in making their rods perform the same trick, Aaron’s snake simply eats them.   These are competitions between priests, but not between Gods. As the God of Israel himself says (Is 45) "I am God, there is no other; by myself I swear it". So what we are witnessing is not a contest between rival deities but an exercise in customer service; the priest who is most in tune with the one God succeeds in his task; the one whose idea of God is false, cannot perform his mission successfully and turns out to be a failure.   

And just as in Master Chef, the credit should go, not to the winner but to the craft of which he is an expert: expertise which he has inherited and learned in order to become – not simply competitive - but competent, in the fullest meaning of the word. The true winner - priest or chef - is the one who is identified, not with his own celebrity but with the tradition he has inherited, and understood, and now represents. There is nothing new under the sun: only new awakenings of the silent partnership, between existence, and being. And preparing food should also be a shared pleasure, not a competition. 

"Alec"