Alice Peck

For this book, Alice Peck has gathered all sorts of writings on different aspects of housekeeping. As she does in her later book Bread, Body, Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food, she groups these writings by topic. She could have easily just collected spiritual writings on laundry, on sweeping, on doing the dishes, and produced a decent enough book. But Peck goes further: her early chapters center on these everyday domestic tasks and then she gradually broadens the scope of her anthology until the last chapter, about cleaning up the "Big Messes" (the effects of war, terrorism, pollution, natural disasters, and so on). This really held the book together thematically and was an excellent decision. I enjoyed the writings Peck chose as well as the way she organized them. They come from different spiritual traditions and different genres, but go together remarkably well. I can't say as I enjoyed all of them, but many of them will bear rereading.

Peck states, "I've consciously avoided vast and critical issues of feminism, toxins, and labor injustices..." and I understand that this would've been a completely different book if she hadn't, likely one that I wouldn't have enjoyed as much. But since I read this immediately after reading Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and just as the labor conditions in Foxconn's plants were hitting the news in the United States, it was impossible not to think of those omissions. But because I found the book so interesting, this leaves me willing to consider these issues on my own rather than just checking it off as one more book read and forgetting about these issues.

Now if only it had left me feeling inspired to actually do any housekeeping...… (meer)

This was a quick read: probably nothing in this book is even 10 pages long, and several entries are poems, graces, and other equally short works. While it was easy to race through, I think it would work well to go back again and get into the different works more deeply. Alice Peck has brought together a variety of writings on food, some from spiritual traditions including Judaism, Islam, and Christianity among others, and some not. She has organized them into different stages of producing, preparing, and sharing food, including topics on gardening and hunting, cooking and serving food, eating, fasting, disposing of remains, and giving thanks. I wouldn't have thought of some of her topics, and I'm glad she included them. I appreciated her introductions, although I wish they had been a little longer, to give me a little more to work with. And as far as recommending goes, I think this book will appeal more to people who already have an interest in spirituality maybe more than to people who focus on food and cooking.… (meer)

Nourishing the body can feed the soul
By Rich Barlow | May 31, 2008 - The Boston Globe

A Buddhist master had a cook who was a simple man. One day, the cook burned his hand while preparing a meal and suddenly achieved the Buddhist goal of enlightenment, as the nature of all existence became clear to him. Excited, he asked the master what he should do next.

"Keep cooking," came the answer.

The story comes from Tibetan lamas by way of Lama Surya Das, a Buddhist teacher and author in Cambridge, who values its elemental wisdom: You don't need a house of worship to encounter the spiritual; it's found in the pattern of daily living, such as cooking the food we need. (Emily Dickinson made the same point in a poem, though not about food, that Das likes to cite: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -/I keep it, staying at Home -/With a bobolink for a Chorister -/And an Orchard, for a Dome.")

The story of the cook is Das's contribution in a forthcoming anthology, "Bread, Body, Spirit," which draws on numerous traditions and their takes on eating. Explaining the motivation behind the volume, editor Alice Peck, writes in the introduction: "Everybody needs to eat, to be nourished. It's simple. It's unending. Food presents us with a vast opportunity: through our experiences of food we can sustain a constant connection to the Sacred that pervades our lives."

Glimpsing the divine in a hot dog won't surprise devout believers who say grace before every meal; gratitude for plenty in a world where many starve is a recognition of blessing. Yet "Bread, Body, Spirit" includes contributions from outside organized religion. "Since You Asked," a poem by Williams College English professor Lawrence Raab, comes from the pen of a self-described agnostic.

The poem ponders an imaginary dinner attended by "everyone you expected, then others as well:/friends who never became your friends,/the women you didn't marry, all their children./And the dead -I didn't tell you/but they're always included in these gatherings."

Reached on his cellphone during what Dickinson might call a moment of mundane spirituality, walking his dog, Raab says that as a nonbeliever, "what's sacred [in the poem] would be the communion of one's self and one's family and friends, extended imaginarily outward" to include phantoms from an existence that might have been. The only overt reference to religion and food in this particular poem is a playful mention about multiplying "wine and chickens." Tweaking the Christian story of Jesus multiplying the loaves and fish was a bit of "sly humor" aimed at his Jewish brother-in-law, Raab explains.

The spiritual backgrounds of the contributors are as diverse as cuisine. Das's biography, for example, contains as much kosher as karma. Born Jeffrey Miller in Brooklyn 57 years ago and bar mitzvahed on Long Island, he quips that he's "Jewish on my parents' side." Study and tragic experience (he knew one of the students shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970) drew him to Eastern religions, and he became a Buddhist.

Julius Lester is the son of a Methodist minister who found Judaism in midlife. His essay in the book, "Braiding Challah," describes how he used to bake the Shabbat (Sabbath) bread on Fridays. A retired academic who lives in Belchertown, Lester had been intrigued by Judaism since learning as a boy that his maternal great-grandfather was Jewish. As an adult, he had a vision in which he was Jewish and happy. He converted in the early 1980s.

His essay highlights one of the many ritualized uses to which religions put food. "Cooking for Shabbat each week," Lester writes, "I am becoming a part of the Jewish people. Every dish I cook has been cooked and eaten on Shabbat for centuries." But it's his second sentence that leaps at a reader: "Judaism is not in the knowing; it is in the physicality of doing."

Downplaying knowledge seems an odd stance for an intellectual writing about an intellectually storied religion. Yet in an interview, Lester noted that Jewish ethical teaching stresses mitzvot, the commandments to moral conduct.

His is also one of the more mouth-watering entries in the book. "I especially like the Sephardic dishes like fassoulia, a simple but delicious stew of beef, green beans, and pearl onions, or lamb tangine, a lamb stew with prunes, and almonds."… (meer)