The Supper of the
Lamb Excerpts

As the Center for Faith & Work spends this month focusing on NYC’s food industry, we encourage reflection on these excerpts from the Preface to The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon:

“There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm.  To me, that is a crashing mistake — and it is, above all, a theological mistake.  Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions, and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding ‘Good!’ over his own concoctions.  And it is God’s unrelenting love of all the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment.  So, if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist.

“Food and cooking, therefore, are not low subjects.  In fact there are no low subjects anywhere in the physical universe.  Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and a tongue to taste it.  But more than that, food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world.  Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight and refresh us.  Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things.  Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity…

“Food these days is often identified as the enemy.  Butter, salt, sugar, eggs are all out to get you.  And yet at our best we know better.  Butter is…well, butter: it glorifies almost everything it touches.  Salt is the sovereign perfecter of all flavors.  Eggs are, pure and simple, one of the wonders of the world.  And if you put them all together, you get not sudden death, but Hollandaise — which in its own way is not one bit less a marvel than the Gothic arch, the computer chip, or a Bach fugue.  Food, like all the other triumphs of human nature, is evidence of civilization — of that priestly gift by which we lift the whole world into the exchanges of the Ultimate City which even God himself longs to see it become…

“We are not simply the users of creation; we are, all of us, called to be its offerers.  The world will be lifted, as it was always meant to be, by our priestly love.  We can, you see, take it with us.  It will be precisely because our eyes have relished the earth that the colors of its countries will compel our hearts forever.  The bread and pastry, the cheeses, the wines, and the songs go into the Supper of the Lamb because we do: it is our love that brings the City home.”