Nekeisha Alayna Alexis is an independent scholar with wide-ranging interests related to human and other animal liberation. She orients her life toward undoing oppression through her vegan practice, teaching and writing and involvement in her community. She is a graduate of and on staff at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and a member of St. James AME Church in Elkhart, Ind. She extends gratitude to Alan Kreider for his assistance on early Christian texts.

For many Christians with access to our daily bread, eating meets more than a biological need. Whether it’s family dinners, midday lunch breaks or church carry-ins, meal times provide us with opportunities to celebrate life events and deepen our relationships.

They also offer us space to pause and acknowledge the One who sustains us. In this way, food can be a tangible reminder of God’s love and presence.

However, as a peculiar kind of Christian who expresses love for God in part through my commitments to reparation and restoration—as one who believes the arc of God’s shalom encompasses all God’s creatures—I also experience table fellowship as a site of disturbance.

In the face of ongoing exploitation of our earth home and its most marginalized residents, who and what we eat has consequences. But so, too, does what we say about what we eat. Our table talk matters. In recent years, our frightening ecological forecast, grueling labor conditions and cruelty toward farmed animals have forced many Christians to pay greater attention to our plates. Despite the increased appreciation for the spiritual and ethical consequences of eating, what we say about with whom and what we consume remains largely unexamined. Too often, the everyday religious utterances we offer for and about our food mask and sanction widespread systemic violence.

Because our prayers are not idle words but petitions to God, sacred language seeking to affect the reality of people, places and things, tending to this disconnect between our eating and speaking is crucial.

Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…

Offering words of blessing and thanks before or after a meal is a practice that spans religious, cultural, geographic and other differences. For Christians from various traditions, however, this spiritual discipline is a way to honor the Creative Source of our being. Saying grace calls to mind God instructing all creatures to eat every green thing, feeding the wandering Israelites, establishing dietary boundaries, quenching the animals’ thirsts, giving wine to gladden the human heart and preparing a banquet for us in the presence of our enemies.

Saying grace also calls to mind Jesus feeding thousands with a handful of loaves and fishes, advising his disciples not to worry about what they will eat and drink, eating with sinners and tax collectors, and breaking bread at his last supper with friends and traitor alike. Throughout the Bible, we encounter a Master Chef who nourishes our bodies and spirits. Saying grace is one way to connect to this God.

Praying at meals also situates us within ancient Christian practices, which themselves emerged from Jewish communities and were influenced by surrounding Greco-Roman norms. Writing in the second century, Aristedes credits Christians with giving thanks, “every morning and every hour for food and drink and other good things” (Apology). Similarly, early Christian apologist Tertullian encouraged “the faithful neither to take food nor enter the bath without first interposing a prayer” (On Prayer). A written prayer for food, penned in the late fourth century, blesses the Lord “who nourishes me from my youth, who gives food to all flesh.”

Today, both prescribed and extemporaneous graces abound, steeping us in millennia of Christian practice. Although the words change over time, the sentiment remains the same: we should praise God for what we eat. Yet approaching grace and gratitude in this way has serious consequences.

We give thee thanks, Almighty God…

Despite our associations between food and God’s activity, food also represents creaturely action and experience in the world. As early Christian scholar and author Andrew McGowan reminds us, “food is always a matter of production, distribution and exchange.…Those who control food, who distribute and sell it, who order its consumption by law and custom, control not merely the obvious fact of life but the forms of life as well” (Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals, Clarendon Press, 1999).

Food is both power and a sign of power. And in our time, the dominant power at play is unmitigated violence.

Meals that consist of ocean animals are an especially terrifying example of this reality. Around the world, approximately 1.2 billion people eat fish as a key part of their diet (The End of the Line, a film directed by Rupert Murray, 2009). The primary means of meeting this demand is commercial fishing, which rivals factory farming in its multispecies destruction. Every day, fleets of trawlers drag nets with mouths up to 100 miles wide along the sea floor, catching about 90-100 million tons of fish worldwide every year (Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Europe’s Appetite for Seafood Propels Illegal Trade,” New York Times, Jan. 15, 2008). The nets devastate coral reefs, deplete fish stocks, render waters unlivable and kill newly discovered species. Commercial fishing also results in approximately 38.5 million tons of “bycatch” each year, the industry term for all the other animals that are unintentionally caught and deemed waste. This category includes “hundreds of thousands of turtles, sea birds, sharks, whales and dolphins” who are thrown back, dead (The End of the Line).

In the last 50 years, humans have exterminated 90 percent of large fish populations, and approximately 75 percent of worldwide fish stocks are “overfished or fished to their maximum” (Sharon LaFraniere, “Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow,” New York Times, Jan. 14, 2008). The situation is so extreme that scientists predict “an end to most seafood by the year 2048” (The End of the Line).

However, people around the world, especially the most vulnerable, are already feeling the shockwaves. For decades, West African coastal communities that depend on fish to live have watched as wealthier, more powerful nations empty their once abundant waters. As fleets from the European Union, China, Russia and other countries fill their boats, traditional fishing enterprises are failing and people who are poor can no longer afford to buy what is left. Faced with impossible choices, thousands are risking it all to get to Europe, where people are feasting on seafood they can no longer get since depleting their own waters. In 2007, more than 31,000 Africans from Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau and other countries boarded more than 900 boats in attempts to reach the Canary Islands, a major access point. About 6,000 died or disappeared (LaFraniere). This steady rise in migration has led to increased tensions, which are undoubtedly complicated by legacies of colonialism and white supremacy and present-day racism and xenophobia. As Dr. Ussif Rashid Sumaila, marine ecosystem researcher at the University of British Columbia, put it, “The Europeans like our fish, but they don’t like the people. The fish has visa to come in, but the people are turned back” (The End of the Line).

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