If You Give a Man a Kit Kat

Feb. 5th, 2021 | By Daniel Chabeda ES ‘22

Pictured: hand holding a donut.

He is crying, quietly because he’s already a spectacle lying in the mulch beside the only path to the laundry room. You wish you didn’t recognize him, but you already made eye contact through his curtain of tears. Maybe it’s an orgo midterm again, you think charitably. Crouching down in the soil next to your new suitemate, you can feel his distress like honey bees in your teeth. Thinking quickly, you tap Brian on the shoulder while reaching into your bag. Brian sits up, and you press a fully wrapped, king-sized Kit Kat into his hands. He wipes his eyes. “Thank you.” You smile, soothed, and offer, “Do you want to talk about it?”

I do. This is a familiar scene: one person feels a negative emotion, someone else offers them food, and both people end up happier. This positive stabilizing effect is termed emotional regulation by psychologists, but does the phenomenon make sense? How does food regulate the emotions of both the food recipient and offerer? If we consider God as an offerer of food to humanity, in what ways do we both become happier?

Behavioral psychologists study the intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms of this social interaction, termed food offering, to understand why eating and offering food makes us feel so good. Within you and me, there is a psychological and physiological feedback loop: our present emotional state changes the way we consume food, which in turn affects our later emotional state. When we experience stress, we are more likely to consume high-caloric, snack-foods: more chocolate and fewer grapes.[1] The raising of serotonin in the blood from eating these high-carbohydrate, low-protein foods can decrease our feelings of being helpless, distressed, or depressed.[2] Food consumption has a calming effect even for 1-day old infants: babies given a sugary solution by pacifier cried much less than babies who were given water.[3] These intrapersonal mechanisms are deeply ingrained in our regulatory systems before we can even feed ourselves.

The interpersonal mechanisms driving food offering between you and me are less apparent. One plausible explanation for the positive emotions experienced by both the giver and recipient of food is Empathic Emotion Regulation (EER). According to the EER model, when an observer sees another person in a distressed state, they experience empathy; this empathy transfers the distressed feelings to the observer. To alleviate this new psychological stress, the observer will aim to soothe the distressed person. In this model, the empathic response of the observer drives them to take action to help the other person feel better. Because eating food can have so many calming emotional effects, we offer food items to one another as a means of interpersonally regulating emotions. Finally (and I think amazingly), this shared experience of stress relief over food leads the two people to feel a closer bond to one another (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1: A flowchart adapted from Hamburg et al. illustrating how empathic emotional regulation functions.

Among the many ways to offer emotional support––verbal encouragement, hugs, direct assistance with a task––food offering is unique and potent. Food is an early need. Food offering from parents is one of the first behaviors that one experiences as an infant, and children inevitably form psychological connections between food, emotional regulation, and social interaction.[4] Secondly, food is such a basic need for survival that to give a food item in your possession to someone else conveys a deep desire for the other person to live, even potentially at your own expense. For those of us who live in food security, we might not consciously make an immediate connection between food offering and survival, but our visceral emotional response when receiving a free donut reveals that those implications are still present. Lastly, food is a universal need, so food offering has the unique ubiquity to be an appropriate interpersonal behavior irrespective of culture, relationship type, age, sex, etc. While it would be inappropriate in Western culture to soothingly stroke the hair of an acquaintance, food can be offered appropriately even to total strangers with little awkwardness. Nigerian chef Tunde Wey hosts a dinner series, Blackness in America, where unacquainted guests of many races come together over a meal to discuss issues of race, violence, and policing in America.[5] The ability of food offering to facilitate meetings of strangers over a meal even turns enemies into allies and friends.[4] In fact, God did it.

In the Judeo-Christian framework, God is the first and ultimate food offerer. Genesis, the opening book of this scripture, begins with the account of God creating a delicious and nutritious world full of edible flora. God offers plants to all creatures for their nourishment and, in a stroke of generosity, plants humanity in a beautiful garden where they lack no good food.

And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 

  – Genesis 1:29-30

This first food offering from God to humanity is analogous to the early-developmental food offering between mother and infant; through this offering, the first sense of connection to, reliance on, and relationship with God is established in humanity. 

By Genesis chapter 9, humanity has fallen. Rebellion against God (through an act of eating) led to division and pride and excess and poverty; humanity existed as enemies of God’s peace, justice, and righteousness. And there is death. In this chapter, God expands his previous food offering of plants to include animals. 

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 

  – Genesis 9:3-4

This second offering corresponds to God’s conveyed desire for humans to live, potentially at His own expense. However, it appears that He withholds a portion of the gift. God prohibits His people from eating meat with blood: its life. Why would a God who desires good for His people withhold something containing life? 

To examine the significance of blood, let’s consider our basic motive for eating. We eat to stay alive. And every living plant and animal we have eaten had to die first. This exchange is so familiar it is forgotten: we need to take life away from our future food to sustain our own lives. This bodily necessity can consume our thoughts and actions, but God communicates in Genesis 9 that physical life is not our only need––and we cannot get everything we need for life in its fullness from some meat! The exclusion of blood reveals a condition of lack which alerts us that though our physical vitality might be sustained by meat, we lack spiritual aspects of life as long as we cannot receive the life of the flesh, the blood. When an Israelite let the blood of bulls and goats spill onto the ground, they witnessed their deficiency as the animal’s blood drained from their diet. God’s command is not an arbitrary prohibition, but a sober, loving signifier of our spiritual need.

This need exists because of sin. I know that this word can evoke strong distaste and maybe even distress due to how some Christians and churches use it to judge, condemn, or prop up their personal morality. But sin is a necessary and accurate word to describe the lack God highlights through the exemption of blood; sin destroys life. Sin separates us from God who is life. Being in sin, we are spiritually dead. This is a huge problem, and requires a huge solution. The prohibition of blood consumption in Genesis 9 serves as a warning against approaching a solution in insufficient ways, “for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4).[6] But what is sufficient?

Let’s return to the EER model and consider a response to a more extreme situation. Imagine another scene. She is standing above the gravestone of her father, her form pale and still like paper mâché. Her soul has let out all its air and cannot stop the walls of her heart from caving into the hollow left behind. You tenderly approach her, trying to catch the slips of paper mâché that the wind is stripping off her back. From up close you notice her eyes are downcast, dragged earthward by the gravity of grief. You take her hand in one of yours and smile empathetically. You draw your other hand from your bag, and gently press the still-wrapped, king-sized Kit Kat into her palm… NO! Kit Kats are not enough for death. And even casseroles, though more appropriate, are not sufficient. The magnitude of the gesture––store bought candy to simple snack to four course meal––must correspond to the severity of the distress. But what kind of food offering is appropriate to regulate distress as large as spiritual death? What meal could be so intimate that it could bridge the gap of enmity between us and God and form a bond of closeness? What food did God offer to humankind when we were left dead in our sin, poor and isolated and proud of our impoverished independence? He gave us His only Son, Jesus: the Bread of Life, the Lamb of God.

In the context of EER theory, God’s food offering is quite provocative. How despondent and pitiful we must have felt––and made God feel!––for God to scour His parish pantry and refrigerator of perishables in search of just the right item to soothe our squalid state. Picture Him, bent on knee and reaching into the back of Cherubim cupboard for the already-sprouting potatoes––those get tossed into Hell––before He turns and perfectly tends to a wok of Seraphim stir-fry. It won’t be enough, He knows. The humans who thought they were generally decent people––merely sometimes at fault––are actually dead in their separation from the Life of God.

But God wants to bring us close (Isaiah 43:1-7). God wants to call us friends (John 15:15). So finally, God walks up to His own Son’s bedroom. The Son has coexisted in unity with the Father from all eternity. They don’t need to make eye contact. The Son is God; He knows the Father’s will. The Son knows that He will be offered as a sacrifice, that the Bread of Life must be eaten by all humans who would seek eternal life. The blood of the Lamb must be shed. Jesus takes the Father’s hand and, in a universal monstrosity, the Father offers Him to us as a free gift: the ultimate food offering. 

Jesus Christ was offered to abundantly satisfy our need for spiritual life. He lived on earth generously, fulfilling the needs of countless distressed people. Then He was unjustly killed. But by the power of God, His body was resurrected to an unending life so that we could receive that same life! Anyone who believes Jesus was resurrected and is living Lord will freely receive life and relationship with God by His grace. If you desire this fulfillment, God has prepared the table.

Through all the psychology and the theology (and the puns), maybe you are still unconvinced that God has anything to do with you. This is a valid doubt. But how would your perspective of who God is and how He wants to relate with you change if He knocked on the door of your heart? What if he was carrying some food? 

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. 

  – Revelation 3:20

Notes

[1] Oliver, G., and Wardle, J. “Perceived Effects of Stress on Food Choice.” Physiology & Behavior 66, no. 3 (1999): 511–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0031-9384(98)00322-9. 

[2] Markus, C.r., Panhuysen, G., Tuiten, A., Koppeschaar,  H., Fekkes, D., and Peters. M.l. “Does Carbohydrate-Rich, Protein-Poor Food Prevent a Deterioration of Mood and Cognitive Performance of Stress-Prone Subjects When Subjected to a Stressful Task?” Appetite 31, no. 1 (1998): 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1006/appe.1997.0155. 

[3] Smith, Barbara A., Fillion, Thomas J., and Blass, Elliott M. “Orally Mediated Sources of Calming in 1- to 3-Day-Old Human Infants.” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 5 (1990): 731–37. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.26.5.731. 

[4] Hamburg, Myrte E., Finkenauer, Catrin, and Schuengel, Carlo. “Food for Love: the Role of Food Offering in Empathic Emotion Regulation.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00032. 

[5] Judkis, Maura. “Discomfort Food: Using Dinners to Talk about Race, Violence and America.” The Washington Post. WP Company, August 23, 2016. 

[6] All Biblical citations are from the English Standard Version.

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