Tasting Eden

Feb 5th, 2021 | By Se Ri Lee MC ‘23+1

Pictured: A sit down meal set in the woods

My phone started beeping sporadically in the middle of my YouTube workout. Five KakaoTalk messages popped up, all sent from Umma. [1] Dinner was going to be served in five minutes.

Grumbling under my breath, I hurried over to the kitchen. “I’ll eat the leftovers later – is that okay? I had lunch like two hours ago,” I told Umma apologetically. I returned to my mat where I laid down, unable to resume exercising. I brooded over whether I should’ve just stayed in the kitchen and eaten.

I tried counting the times I had eaten with my family in the past four months I’ve been home. It shocked me how easily I could recall those occasions yet struggled to remember the times I had chosen to skip a family meal—there were simply too many. Grimacing at the soundness of Appa’s nickname for me as the “lodger,” I wondered why I had trouble engaging in the simple act of communal eating. [2]

My reason for not joining my family for dinner was, though valid, so trivial: I wasn’t hungry enough to have dinner at that hour. If I had eaten during regular lunch hours, I would have been hungry by the time Umma made the meal announcement. Yet, I ate lunch late because I wasn’t hungry around noon because I had a late breakfast because I woke up late. Everything I did, including the timing of my eating, was at my own convenience.

At Yale, a self-oriented meal schedule seemed perfectly normal. “Oh, I’m a bit busy” or “I’m in the middle of something” had always been passable excuses for declining sudden meal requests, which were so rare in the first place. Scheduling meals while frantically inserting them into GCals was widely the norm. Yet, at home, it felt uncomfortable—almost sinful—to say no to a meal request, even when made last minute.

The discrepancy between eating culture at Yale and eating culture at home confused me. Was I guilt-tripping myself for leaving the kitchen, or was feeling guilty a normal response to situations like these? According to the culture at Yale, the former would be true. But my childhood memories pointed me towards the latter. Before my years at boarding school and college, I remember dropping whatever I was doing at the moment and zooming off to the kitchen as soon as Umma or Appa announced a meal. My time away from home slowly shifted my eating habits from being community-oriented to self-tailored.

Nostalgic for my childhood days, I resolved to comply with what was normal at home. A few days later, Umma made another last-minute meal announcement (coincidentally) near the end of my workout. I quickly dabbed the sweat off my face and walked towards the kitchen, abandoning my usual routine of heading straight into the shower.

I saw that the rest of the family had already started eating. Heart beating faster than normal, I took a deep breath as I slid next to Unnie, trying hard not to meet her startled gaze. [3] The rich aroma of scallions mixed with soy sauce loosened the tension in my stomach. I wondered why the smell of Umma’s cooking never once enticed me to stay. I realized it was because I had never noticed. On past occasions, the frustration I felt at Umma’s sudden interjection blinded my senses from everything else.

Feeling suddenly ravenous, I reached for the half-eaten plate of tofu pancakes when Oppa pointed to an oddly patterned china set scattered on the island table. [4] He looked around the dining table and asked whose it was.

Surprisingly, it was Appa who answered. “It’s from one of my Instagram followers.”

I almost choked. “Wait, you have an Instagram?” Unnie and I blurted out at the same time.

“And one of your followers sent you a present? Is it a sponsorship? How popular is your account?” Oppa added. The rest of the meal went by in the blink of an eye, with Unnie, Oppa, Umma, and I making futile attempts to guess Appa’s username and pry more information out.

As the plates turned empty and Oppa got up to return to his Latin philosophy studies, I fought the urge to stall him and everyone else. The last one to leave, I regretted all the times I missed out on laughing and engaging with my family. All this time, I was blatantly ignorant of how good God was to make food an essential human need. He could have sustained us through some other way; yet, He made food something we cannot live without. “Food must have a purpose other than sustenance,” I thought.

Now that I had this meal, the answer was so obvious. Food is a medium through which humans can put their individual lives on hold, reconvene, and build relationships. Without it, we wouldn’t experience the frequent joys of connecting with each other – we would easily get lost in our own busyness. Why then, in all my years of eating, had I not realized its purpose and power in bringing people together?

While dwelling on this question, Branson Parler’s article in Think Christian led me to the story of the fall in Genesis 3. [5] Parler explained that when Adam sinned, he isolated himself from God. He hid behind the bushes with Eve, both ashamed of their nakedness when God sought him. It was this isolation that broke the relationship between God and humanity.

What Parler wrote next elucidated why food’s purpose—reuniting people—didn’t strike me as obvious: sin broke human relationships too, and this normalized isolation in the world. The normalization of isolation obscured the plainness of food’s glue-like power. It seemed to me, at first glance, that human relationships were untouched by Adam and Eve. “[Eve] also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it... and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:6, 8). Together, they sinned and attempted to hide their shame.

The next couple of verses cleared up my confusion, showing how quick Adam was to turn against Eve. When God started questioning Adam whether he had eaten from the tree, Adam said, “The woman you put here with me––she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12). In a feeble attempt to justify himself, Adam tried to reason with God that he was somehow less guilty than his wife, without whom he wouldn’t have sinned.

It was in this moment that Adam isolated himself from Eve, breaking the first human relationship. It was then that isolation became a part of the human identity. The concept of isolation didn’t exist in God’s original plan for the world; it never had a place in the Garden of Eden, as Eden itself was the state of being in eternal communion with one another and with God. The concept of eating alone, living alone, and doing things alone, which became normalized in fast-paced settings and became at times a necessity because of the pandemic, didn’t exist back in the days of Eden.

I couldn’t even imagine what living in the Garden must have been like for Adam and Eve because existing in unending and unbroken relationships seemed an impossibility in today’s world.

The pervasive isolation made it hard for me to see that food’s purpose went far beyond basic sustenance and gastronomic pleasure. Food is God’s attempt to preserve His original order amid the chaos that entered the world through Adam’s sin. It is one of God’s many gifts that lets us experience Eden, from which sin banished us. The greatest of these gifts, I think, is Jesus, who tore the veil that separated humans from God, permanently mending humanity’s broken relationship with Him. Jesus further united us all in communion by breaking His body as bread and pouring His blood out as wine for us all to share.

Just as God invited me back to Eden through Jesus, He had done His part in giving me food so that I could live out the life He had originally meant for me to experience. All I need to do is to accept and embrace its purpose.

The next time I receive an unexpected meal request, I will remember that a shared meal is like tasting Eden, a place that was once so impossibly out of reach, yet, through the gifts of God, became accessible to me on a daily basis. Though eating solo will still be necessary on some occasions, I now know to treat every meal invite with more respect and caution and to thank God for repeatedly inviting me into Eden––for patiently waiting for me to finally taste His goodness.

Notes

[1] Umma means Mom in Korean. 

[2] Appa means Dad in Korean.

[3] In Korean culture, females call their older sisters Unnie, as it is considered rude to call them by their actual names.

[4] Similarly, it is inappropriate to call an older brother by his actual name. For females, the appropriate title to use to address their older brothers is Oppa.

[5] Branson Parler. “Eating alone, eating with Jesus.” Think Christian, August 31, 2015. https://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/eating-alone-eating-with-jesus.

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