Potluck

Are Potlucks un-Baha'i?

By John Taylor; 2007 January 09

Six of nine members on our Local Spiritual Assembly are obese, which unfortunately is only slightly above the average for the population of Canada. At our last meeting we strayed from the written agenda and discussed this issue for the first time. Before moving on, it was decided to discuss the matter further at the open forum of the Feast -- so I do not think I am letting any confidential information out if I discuss it here in general terms.

The nub of the issue is, should we be having potluck refreshments after every meeting as we have been for time out of memory? This is an unshakable consensus that Potlucks are proper procedure, not for some but for all meetings. Yet this form of supply, be it refreshments or a whole meal, reverses the normal laws of moderation and not only condones but actually imposes an attitude that immoderation is not a sin or excess but a moral obligation. Every must bring something, that is universal participation, and that is a Baha'i principle.

Myself, I have reservations, especially about the Feast. After all, Baha'u'llah in confirming the Bab's institution of the monthly Feast in the Aqdas, says,

"Verily, it is enjoined upon you to offer a feast, once in every month, though only water be served; for God hath purposed to bind hearts together, albeit through both earthly and heavenly means." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, paragraph 57, p. 40)

Why did He add "though only water be served?" Mostly we assume that this means we can hold a Feast at the home of the poorest believer, at a home so poor that they cannot even afford food, only water. This assumes that Baha'u'llah really wanted to say here: have all you can eat at the Feast, stuff your face, but once in a while hold a Feast at a poor person's place where they cannot afford food. Do not leave them out. Maybe there really are Baha'is who are that poor, I do not know. But even if that is the case, the very existence of potluck nullifies the possibility of a water-only feast, ever. No matter how poor that person is, even if their children have been raised up from babes-in-arms on water instead of mother's milk, there will always be a superabundance of food at their home because every member of the community will be expected to carry with them an armful of goodies. Why would He have written that? Had the institution of potluck not been invented yet? Had nobody ever thought, why not make it an obligation for everybody who comes to BYOB -- oh yeah, booze was not allowed in Muslim lands but BYOF bring your own food anyway? Did the idea never occur to them? No, wait, maybe they had thought of it and rejected it. Even here in the West if you brought your own food to a traditional household you were not helping but deliberately insulting the host by implying that they did not know or care or, worst of all, possess the resources to have guests. In Eastern households even if you are dead poor and sworn never to go near an infidel, if one turns up as a guest they feed you anyway and are even more insulted at any offers of help.

Now we are far past such primitive notions of hospitality. Now we reverse the burden. If some poor irresponsible blighter turns up empty-handed at a potluck the implication is clear to all. Here is a moocher, a freeloader. Not an honored guest, mind you, but a good-for-nothing seeking to live off the bounty of others while giving nothing back in return.

Wait a minute. Maybe the idea of hospitality is not dead. Didn't the Master in a Tablet addressed, "O thou steadfast in the Covenant," write,

"The host, with complete self-effacement, showing kindness to all, must be a comfort to each one, and serve the friends with his own hands. If the Feast is befittingly held, in the manner described, then this supper will verily be the Lord's Supper, for its fruits will be the very fruits of that Supper, and its influence the same." (Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 425)

Everybody knows what the Lord's Supper looked like because Leonardo Da Vinci was there and painted it in every detail. In his painting Jesus is being served like all the others, but on another occasion Jesus shocked the disciples by serving them Himself, just like the Master describes above, then even more by ordering them to allow Him to wash their very feet with His own hands. If Jesus tried that today of course He would be gently but firmly informed that although the Aqdas says we should wash our feet every day or every other day, depending on the season, nobody ever washes other peoples' feet. We are beyond that.

Yeah. We are beyond a lot of things today. Beyond justice, morality and moderation; did Baha'u'llah not write, "Whoso cleaveth to justice, can, under no circumstances, transgress the limits of moderation." (Gleanings, p. 342) No circumstances, that is, except when it comes to the refreshments that Adolph Nobody serves after every meeting. After all, diet does not matter much in the Baha'i teachings. No, wait, that is not so either. One's diet, the Master once wrote, does have something peripherally to do with morality, and even had something to do with the provenance of gross diseases.

"But man hath perversely continued to serve his lustful appetites, and he would not content himself with simple foods. Rather, he prepared for himself food that was compounded of many ingredients, of substances differing one from the other. With this, and with the perpetrating of vile and ignoble acts, his attention was engrossed, and he abandoned the temperance and moderation of a natural way of life. The result was the engendering of diseases both violent and diverse." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 152-3)

This idea that our attention becomes "engrossed," that our powerful brains turn us away from natural needs and sensory input, turns up more than once in the words and writings of the Master. Last month the science news sources reported a study that confirms His opinion startlingly. Some researchers, looking for something else, persuaded some gullible students to get down on their knees and sniff around for a scent. Lo and behold, they found that humans can track almost as well as bloodhounds can. We just had never tried it. Every textbook in existence will tell you that dogs have senses of smell millions and millions of times more sensitive than humans. Turns out that ain't quite the case. Turns out nobody had even thought of testing that unproven presupposition. Talk about "engrossed"! That is just gross.

Do you get "simple foods" at a potluck? Not exactly. You get a mix, a hodgepodge of randomly chosen dishes, some homemade, some store bought, some relatively healthful, others total decadence, sweet, fudgey, sticky indulgences that a sensible person would sample once a year, if ever. They are all there, the good, the bad and the ugly, in plenty. If somebody comes down with food poisoning after a potluck the problem of tracing the possible sources of contamination are multiplied a hundred times compared to a meal served by a single host. Responsibility is chopped up into tiny pieces and the dangers multiplied with each chop. In fact the number of bad outcomes is legion -- ah, there is another name for Adolph Nobody, Legion, the name of the demon Jesus chased out of the madman and into the herd of pigs. And I use the word "pig" advisedly, of course.

You may say that there is some evidence that the Master did not think a banquet was a bad thing in itself. After all, in His Tablet to the peace conference at The Hague the Master encouraged us to think of the Baha'i principles as a banquet table where you walk along and heap onto your plate whatever dish appeals to you. But there is a big difference between a banquet and potluck.

You go down the table set out like a hog trough at a potluck and a huge array of other peoples' food is laid out. What could be better? Except that this is no ordinary panoply like one that you would encounter at, say, a salad bar. At a restaurant you know that ultimately nobody there cares if you take this or that dish. The owner might care if you take too many of the most expensive dishes, but rarely is the owner present, only employees who could not care less what you take.

Not so with a potluck.

I remember once my friend Ruth in Hamilton taking her contribution of baked macaroni and cheese to a potluck (a contribution entirely consonant with her income group; like me she was a disabled person) and after it was over she found that nobody had touched it. Small wonder with the abundance of other choices of rich and expensive dishes sitting beside it, but nonetheless it was plain to be seen that she was hurt. She had made a sensible choice and received her due punishment. After that I made a point of finding out what she had taken and sampling it. After that I made a point of looking at all the less popular dishes. I was a bachelor at the time and still only in the category that nutritionists call "overweight" rather than "obese," so I could afford to be "nice" in this way. Now I look back at that and think, this is just wrong. Since when was overindulgence, eating more mixes of already tangled mixtures of foods, an ethical act? This is morality turned topsy-turvy.

Throughout history a spread of unlimited all-you-can eat food laid out in banquet format was very expensive, the lot of kings, and not often encountered by most people in daily life. More to the point, when it was encountered it was not welcomed but frowned upon. Dante put gluttons in the third circle of hell, their skin perpetually torn off by the three headed dog Cerberus. To have a potluck at the end of every meeting at that time would have been quite possible even in those lean times but to do so would certainly have been considered excessive, wasteful and irreligious, especially if there were no host to serve it. No host, that is, save good old Adolph Nobody. He is our designated host at a potluck. Him and his same-sex spouse, the demon called Legion. Yet few Baha'i meeting planners worry that these vast spreads of corner to corner foods might go against the spirit of the Baha'i Faith, a creed that the Guardian called "the religion of the Golden Main."

As the Master says above, it is the responsibility of the host to be kind and a comfort to all. Is a potluck a comfort? Quite the reverse. Opinion polls say that the vast majority of women and a growing percentage of men are worried about their diet and the amount of calories they are taking in. As one of those diet conscious men, I do not go away from a potluck "comforted." I go away with a heavy burden of guilt, regret, despair and even self-contempt. I have overindulged and I know it, and I regret it, and I would like to turn back the clock and go back when I am not slightly hungry and show the world how impervious I can be to temptation, but I cannot. Time goes in one direction and we are all weak at some times and strong at others and if we have any sense at all we will do what we can when we are strong to protect ourselves when we are weak by removing such temptations, by planning to remove such temptations.

After all, society does not leave booze or cigarettes or heroine or pornographic images lying around in the open, selling or giving it away to all comers, why is food any different? Why is it moral for Baha'is not to pander to those immoral weaknesses and turn around and leave out nutritional disorders? One person last night tearfully declared, "I am addicted to food. It is just the way I am. Since I became a Baha'i I have gained fifty pounds." Now that I think of it, I have gained more than that since I became a Baha'i, though slower and over a much longer period. But I resist calling myself an addict. "Addict" is a word that victims of Adolph and slaves of Legion use. True, I am susceptible to the munchies more than most, but that is my physical nature, the result of millions of years of evolution. I have a right to expect that society, and especially loving Baha'is, will respect my weakness and not exploit it needlessly by having more potlucks than absolutely necessary.

It sounds egotistical doesn't it? But consider, this is not personal, it is structural. To use an example from a study I mentioned recently, every time we urinate we harm the sewer system. And of course if we want to minimize our footprint on the environment by going outside, we are likely to be arrested and punished by the law. I am structurally obliged to contribute to our common downfall.

Or, to use another argument mentioned last night, what would happen if we left heroine needles out after every meeting and expected attendees to shoot up. Say forty percent become addicted as a result of this, and the rest just had a high old time without any consequences. Would the addicts be to blame? Could the non-addicts rightfully say, "Just because you get addicted does not mean that my fun has to be spoiled by depriving me of this convenience?" No, it is just that a percentage of human bodies have an addictive reaction to one substance and others do not. A percentage will always become addicted to cigarettes, to booze, to sex, to food, to you name it. The more exposure the more the risk. It is a universally recognized moral duty of planners to take this human susceptibility into account and do everything possible to reduce temptations to vice and overindulgence. The negligence is quite literally killing me, and it is killing my self-professed food-addict friend, and the non-obese and meeting planners, obese or not, simply do not care.

Some may doubt our duty to plan for such things as lifestyle deficiencies. Many doubt our duty to do so collectively, in such apparently trivial matters as planning and catering our meetings. I have been slow-burn, residually angry about that presupposition, in myself and others, for a long time, so I took a dip in Ocean to see how often the phrase "order our lives" turns up in the Master's writings. I discovered the following:

"Surely, when we realize how God loves and cares for us, we should so order our lives that we may become more like Him." (Paris Talks, 120)

"Therefore, you must without delay employ your powers in spreading the effulgent glow of the love of God and so order your lives that you may be known and seen as examples of its radiance." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 8)

"Therefore, order your lives in accordance with the first principle of the divine teaching, which is love." (Promulgation, 8)

"Therefore I say unto you that ye should strive to follow the counsels of these Blessed Books, and so order your lives that ye may, following the examples set before you, become yourselves the saints of the Most High!" (Paris Talks, 61)

"Let us try to understand the commands of the Most High and to order our lives as He directs." (Paris Talks, 108)

So, let us assume that we are ordering our lives to obey and imitate God. Would we be popping pills when we could be making lifestyle changes to accomplish the same thing? Sunk in despair about how my weight increases no matter what I do, I have been reading the medical research literature lately, especially on nutrition, probably as much as some doctors. I notice that researchers are belatedly recognizing that rather than come up with some new drug for disease, it is both safer and cheaper to investigate the properties of some fruit or vegetable and prescribe that as preventive medicine instead. This is just as the Master predicted.

"It is, therefore, evident that it is possible to cure by foods, aliments and fruits; but as today the science of medicine is imperfect, this fact is not yet fully grasped. When the science of medicine reaches perfection, treatment will be given by foods, aliments, fragrant fruits and vegetables, and by various waters, hot and cold in temperature." ("Some Answered Questions", pp. 257-59)

These same scientists are also recognizing that even with the apparently quick and easy, and often cheap, expedient of prescribing a drug, the problem arises that poor lifestyle negates what good the drug does. Neither scientists, nor doctors, nor patients have much control over the structure of peoples' lifestyle, what the Master calls the ordering of their lives. Only planners control that, and their power was handed over to Adolph Nobody long ago. I find the same thing in my dietary efforts. I have managed to improve the quality of what I eat. Now cook my own food, in large part, I eat a healthful diet and feel incomparably better. But no matter how much I try, the bulk amount that I eat stays high, much higher than it should. No doubt I am better off, but the full benefit of a good diet only comes, according to the best study, if there is a much, much lower intake of calories. Which is why I must return to the Aqdas.

Baha'u'llah, in my opinion, is not saying "though only water be served" in hopes that poor Baha'is can host Feasts, He is using the example of water because no matter how stringent your calorie counting, no matter how strictly you are watching everything you eat, you can and should still drink a great deal, an abundance of water. Water is zero calorie, it can be indulged in almost without limit (almost, I say; there are at least a couple of documented cases of people dying from drinking too much water. This is very rare, though). This explanation and this alone, I suggest, reflects the massive amounts of love that Baha'u'llah intends to be indulged in great quantities at Feasts. Check it out again:

"Verily, it is enjoined upon you to offer a feast, once in every month, though only water be served; for God hath purposed to bind hearts together, albeit through both earthly and heavenly means." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, paragraph 57, p. 40)

As things are now the majority of the world's population is either overweight or obese. Take a vote on just about anything, and they will win. Their sad lot is the direct effect of the overlordship of Adolph Nobody and Legion. In the Aqdas I see the true Lord accommodating the physical need of most bodies most of the time to avoid taking in too many calories. Abdu'l-Baha Himself restricted his intake, providing a most perfect example. Eat, the True Lord says, and if eating is bad for you or too great a temptation, then for God's sakes, drink lots of water, My point is that abundant indulgence symbolically expresses the physical and spiritual love-feasting going on, not massive intake of calories.