“And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.”
It’s funny how each of our senses are tuned differently. While my husband is so sensitive to musical detail that even his dreams can have soundtracks, my brain assigns high priority to flavor.
So many of my memories revolve around food, transporting me to times and places far away.
Sitting here in my kitchen on a cloudy afternoon, I can recall the tanginess of Russian black bread, of calamansi juice squeezed over sweet ripe papaya in the Philippines, of the Vitamin C lozenges my mom used to let us suck on when we had sore throats. I can compare the tastes of three different bread recipes that she used during my childhood. I can travel back in time to taste her favorite chocolate cake with coconut sprinkled over the icing, her homemade turkey stuffing, the broccoli casserole she used to make with blue cheese in the sauce and Ritz cracker crumbs on the top.
Mom taught herself to cook after she was married, and then she taught me. From the time we were able to crawl, we were allowed in the kitchen (there was always a drawer or cabinet the babies were allowed to play in) and she got us involved in food preparation quite early. We helped plant and weed the garden, snap the beans, husk the corn, pit cherries, and turn the handle on the food mill when Mom made gallons of applesauce or tomato sauce. Of course, she had us help with the clean-up afterward, too.
Food became part of my childhood identity.
Mom was zealous about serving her family nutritious food, so while my classmates brought sugary snacks and brightly-colored fruit leather to school, I brought a Tupperware bowl of Mom’s strawberry-rhubarb sauce. She made sure even our desserts had “redeeming value” most of the time: all-natural ice cream, peanut butter cookies, peach cobbler, pumpkin pie. I eventually learned that some of the other children’s mothers were “health nuts” too, and that put me at ease. There was still a place for treats: Mom enjoyed Pepsi on occasion, and pizza was a craving we were all happy to indulge. We ordered it from a place in town or made our own, with mushrooms from a can labeled “Pennsylvania Dutchman.” Since my parents and I were born Pennsylvanians, I felt a kinship with the brand every time I opened a can.
But when I was seven or eight, our lives—and menu—changed dramatically.
My parents had previously attended Bill Gothard’s Basic Seminar, but it was about this time that they attended the Advanced Seminar. Mom quit wearing jeans and got rid of all my pants. From then on, it was jumpers, dresses, and skirts for us females. There were no more bathing suits, and my parents informed my grandmother that she could make the boys pajamas, but us girls needed nightgowns. Dad put a rock through the front of our television so there were no more evenings of “Little House of the Prairie.” My parents pulled me out of public school and started teaching us at home. We began searching for “wisdom nuggets” while reading Psalms and Proverbs every morning.
And just like that, we developed our own spiritual Talmud: an extra-biblical list of rules for living holy lives.
Mom stopped wearing her prettiest cardigan vest—a lacy blue garment that I loved but whose scalloped pattern was knit of cotton and ramie yarn. In those days before Google none of us were quite certain what “ramie” was, but it sounded suspicious. God had instructed Moses not to let the Israelites wear clothing of mixed fibers: the American colonists’ “linsey-woolsey” was a direct violation of God’s Law. Cotton and polyester, we decided, was not a problem since polyester wasn’t actually a fiber but a petroleum product.
Leviticus prohibited hybrid animals (mules, for example) and planting two kinds of seed in the same field. So Mom stopped buying tangelos. Oranges, yes; tangerines, yes. But not tangelos. I remember trying to reconcile my confusion over the Burpee catalog, which was bursting with hybrids.
Genesis said God gave us “every seed-bearing plant” for food. Well, what of mushrooms then? They may be sold in the produce aisle, but seed-bearing plants they are not. No more little Pennsylvania Dutchman cans. No more of Mom’s favorite omelettes at the best breakfast place in town. No more steaming cream of mushroom soup with a winter lunch. No more of Mom’s rich and creamy beef stroganoff. How I missed them all.
The stroganoff was actually out on two counts—it also mixed meat with milk, which was banned under one strict interpretation of an obscure rule repeated three times in the Torah and reinforced in Gothard’s Wisdom Booklets. Mom adapted her meatloaf recipe accordingly, omitting the mushrooms and substituting water for the milk. For a while, her caution against fungi extended to blue cheese, resulting in the demise of her flavorful and creamy broccoli casserole (I rebelliously continued to choose blue cheese dressing at salad bars and to argue that the yeast that made our bread rise was essentially another fungus).
And then there were the unclean meats. Seafood wasn’t a big deal for us—living so far from the coasts, we weren’t used to crab cakes, shrimp, or lobster. But our German ancestors loved sausage. It was a sacrifice to lose bacon with pancakes, ham sandwiches, Mom’s baked orange pork chops, and pepperoni pizza*—not to mention hot dogs!
Thus began a new era in our family history. Eating out became an exercise in selection by elimination. If six of out of eight entree choices contained pork, shrimp, or mushrooms, and one had something else you hated, you knew what you were ordering. When we were invited to other people’s homes, which became a rarer event the larger the family became, Dad was sure to mention to our hosts that we followed certain dietary restrictions. Church folks volunteering to bring us meals after Mom had another baby got the same information (resulting in three variations of chicken and potato salad in one week).
There were exceptions, of course. When our new neighbors invited us across the street for hot dogs the day we moved in, Mom was glad enough not to cook and we were permitted to receive with thanksgiving what was set before us, without inquiries as to the ingredients. When we were visiting family out-of-state and a sweet elderly relation baked a ham, there was a whispered discussion behind the scenes. Dad told us that it would be okay for us to eat it. Seeing that she had prepared it out of generosity and ignorance, it would be gracious of us not to turn it down. I stepped up to that table in her blue dining room with mouth watering, endeavoring to mask my anticipation. It was the last ham I would taste for over a decade.
Our hot dogs were all-beef (soy wieners were nasty). We cheered when turkey pepperoni hit the market, and again when we could serve turkey bacon planks as a salty side to a breakfast of waffles. By then our parents had relaxed on combining meat and dairy, so we could enjoy cheeseburgers again, and browned hamburger on our pizza. We found the stores that sold beef sausage links and became adept at rapidly scanning labels for offensive ingredients. Jiffy cornbread mix and some refried beans contained lard, which was “unclean.” Mom once came home with frozen Salisbury steaks. When I found them in the freezer, I dutifully read her the ingredients. When she realized they contained pork, she threw the boxes in the garbage in exasperation.
When Dad accompanied me to San Francisco where I sat for a law exam in 1996 (required for students of Gothard’s correspondence law school), we were served breakfast sandwiches aboard the jet. I remember being annoyed that the diced ham was cooked into the egg, so it was nearly impossible to separate the two. I would have happily eaten the sandwich all together, but dared not appear to do so with my dad watching from the seat next to me. I remember looking sideways at him to see how he would handle the awkward situation, but I think he felt the same way. Sightseeing later on Pier 39 in the Fisherman’s Wharf district, we carefully avoided the clam chowder that smelled so delicious in sourdough bread bowls. Shellfish, having neither fins nor scales, are an abomination no matter how beguilingly disguised.
Surrounded as we were with religious teaching, I never encountered another teacher who believed that it was beneficial for Christians to abstain from pork. I used to wonder if God liked our family more than others because we didn’t eat bacon, or if He would give us nicer things, or let us live longer. I knew some vegetarians, but I was in my teens before I met other Christians who held similar regard for the rules of the Old Testament (some of them went as far as to wear Jewish prayer shawls with tassels sticking out from under their shirts). Ironically, the only times I was served pork during that long period was when I was volunteering for IBLP and they ordered pizza for the staff (IBLP training center kitchens did not ordinarily serve pork products)!
I knew from my own reading of the New Testament that I had never shared my parents’ interpretation and application of the Old Testament law. When I left home for the first time at age 22, I lost no time shedding the “standard” I had resented for so many years. My first day as an IBLP staff member was spent traveling from Chicago to Oklahoma City. When we stopped for lunch at a Subway, I ordered the Italian sub, chock full of forbidden salami, pepperoni, and ham. Two years later, I savored every morsel of the first real breakfast bacon I’d tasted since childhood. Each new first made an impression: crab Rangoon, New Orleans shrimp, Maryland crab cakes, chowder by the Seattle waterfront, scallops in a pasta dish, calamari, lechon served on palm leaves, pulled pork, BBQ ribs.
When I tell my kids about the way I grew up, they are aghast. They have classmates of various religions who are vegetarian, or don’t eat pork, or don’t get candy at Halloween. But it always jars them to imagine their mother swimming in a dress, or kept from eating bacon, just because of what an ancient scroll said that God told Moses on a mountain in the Sinai desert.
* The famed Duggar family, also followers of Gothard, avoid pork, too. One episode of their program “Nineteen Kids & Counting” showed them visiting a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. and enjoying pepperoni pizza. Curious viewers looked up the pizzeria’s website and discovered that Jumbo Pizza uses all-beef pepperoni.
Jeri Lofland’s parents enrolled in ATIA in 1987. Jeri worked, studied, and taught at numerous IBLP venues before being fired from Gothard’s Headquarters at 11 p.m. on a midsummer’s night in 1999, after which she began to slowly reexamine everything. Jeri lives, and blogs, in the Midwest with her husband of twelve years and their three children, whom she is teaching to challenge inequality and to question everything.
Wow. This--explains a lot. I attended the Basic Seminar as a teen back in the 80s, but at least had balance having been raised "liberal/common sense" Presbyterian. However, a friend of mine who was once a perky, independent, adventurous fellow foodie suddenly did a 180 after she and her husband started homeschooling through ATI.
At 34 years of age, she shelved being an adult capable of making her own decisions, and suddenly followed their dress code, marriage code, child-rearing code, and even diet. No more cruising fisherman's wharf in the City for the freshest Dungeness crab. Her former culinary adventures were replaced by shunning her favorite Chinese restaurant because of the pork products, denying herself most fusion cuisine, and making a daily loaf of whole wheat bread.
When I asked what was going on, she claimed "these are just my convictions." (I've since met other ATIers who all seem to share the same code phrases... is there a preferred vocabulary class they must pass prior to graduation?) She didn't proactively force her exhaustive list of 'convictions' on anyone else, but inadverdently made it difficult on those around her to accommodate the new, and many boundaries she imposed on herself and her family.
Thankfully she's processed out of most of these extra-biblical influences and is finding her way back to who God designed her to be.
Jeri, thanks for sharing this era of your life & Bon Appetit!
I wonder if I would have become such a foodie now if we hadn't been so obsessed with eating the "right things" then.
I remember being excited when I realized that Abraham served his heavenly guests veal and milk together. :)
http://jerushaskitchen.blogspot.com/
I am Italian, so you can imagine the wonderful foods we were raised with. I mean real sauces made from scratch, at home!!!! But somewhere along the line after he became an adult (back story below) my brother became a 7th day Adventist. So there are many foods he will not touch that he used to love to eat. And not only staying away from them, there is a spirit of judgement and hate against them and any one who eats or serves them. He told me the reason why he abstains from certain foods as prescribed in the Old Testament---
pork- a pig is a cross from a man mating with a dog
mushrooms- something to do with being grown from human sperm
I told him if those things were true, we would have learned about it in science class.
Then I reminded him of the verse where Jesus declares all foods clean, he said what Jesus was saying is that all "clean" foods were clean. In other words, if it was already ok to eat a certain food, then it was ok to eat it. Jesus said this because some New Testament Christians were saying some clean foods were NOT ok to eat.
Well, my bother comes to visit just about every Christmas (gives his little Chinese wife a rest from his idiocy) Oops, it is that time of year and I just remembered we have bacon and sausage in the freezer and wine in the closet, and I love mushrooms on my pizza. I am not sure we can use it up before he comes or we may have to find a home for it.
back history- when my mom was little her dad converted from Catholic to Jehovah Witness. He would line the kids up and preach to them about all the "Bible truth" as twisted by JW. My mom learned not to argue and just stand there and let it go in one ear and out the other. After a while he chunked it all and went back to Catholic. After he died, the priest would not allow him to be buried in the Catholic cemetery because he had been another religion for a while. My mom argued, what is the difference, the man is dead and either in heaven or hell. She decided then and there that "religion" was a crock, something much different from what the bible really said on how God meant man to live. So with Jesus as her savior and the 10 commandments as her guide, she lived her life. How this relates to my brother and me is that she never forced us to go to church (dad attended Catholic church but after we got to be a certain age she quit going and said for us to make up our own mind about church. brother never met his grandfather but my mom said he was a carbon copy of her dad after he became 7th Day adventist. I know BG makes a lot about generational demons, and I am sure there is something to it. What I think is that we inherit certain personality traits, temperments, etc and the devil uses these to his advantage in screwing with our lives. ("Hey, Bill, here is something you can put in your wisdom searches to really mess with those Christian minds and emotions. It will look so REAL-igious!!!" saith the evil one)
I was raised as a seventh day Adventist and while I do avoid pork and shellfish, the part about mushrooms is crazy and I have never heard of it before now. SDA members are actually supposed to be vegetarian as part of a healthy lifestyle. Your comment reminded me of why I never worried about joining a church; a lot of judgmental, narrow minded people attend.
By your comment, I meant your account of your brother.
I've also never heard that reason for not eating pig. I think if I mentioned it to my mother, she would die laughing and she is a lot stricter about her diet than me.
Our family definitely picked up a disdain for ham and pork from Gothardism. One year, there was a bunch of hams that we felt was an obvious gift from God, so we "ate it with thankfulness" and always after I wondered about the double standard.
In one of the seminars it was said that someone who had worked with cannibals reported (there was always so much exciting, secret information available at the seminars) that the cannibals said that ham was so similar to human that they could barely tell the difference (or something like that) so if you eat ham you are very close to being a cannibal.
During my brief stints at HQ in Oak Brook, it struck me as very strange and surprising that they would feed us so much turkey ham. That was one little detail that always bothered me. If ham is so despicable, why feed your people so much turkey ham? Why not just avoid it 100%, like my family had done, thinking that's what it meant to have a "higher standard"?
to clarify, we ate the hams that once, and after that I think we were more likely to eat ham if it was served at a potluck or something, but we still kept a safe distance from it, almost never ordering or purchasing it. To this day, I still feel like I'm coloring outside the lines a little bit to eat ham, especially if I happen to like it.
"coloring outside the lines"--yes, exactly! And eating ham at Easter? Or Christmas? Those were memorable firsts. :)
I especially love eating ham now that I'm free from the Gothard talmud! I love to serve baked ham for Easter, after soaking it overnight in milk to remove the excess salt. I'm such a rebellious rule-breaker, mixing milk and pork! ;-)
Great title.
We too went through this whole dietary thing - although in our case it was also mixed with my parents' dalliance with "alternative" medicine.
We didn't believe it was wrong for everyone else, just for us. We didn't cut fungi out, either. I think that would have broken my mother's heart.
Like you, I made a break as soon as I moved out. Bacon and ham (which I missed) were back on the menu. (Like you, I am a devoted foodie - and learned to cook early as well.)
Fortunately, my folks have gradually moved away from Gothardism, and will eat the forbidden again.
I find it interesting that you had the experience of lacking dinner invitations. It ties in with my theory that most of the "Gothard Talmud" has the effect - and quite probably the intent - of making fellowship with the unwashed masses difficult. With the clothing rules, the isolation from culture, and the dietary restrictions, one may really only fellowship readily with "likeminded" families.
Really makes it hard to be a witness to unsaved neighbors and friends when having to live under rules that make people look so strange that the unsaved are scared away,,,
In case there is still any doubt, Jesus himself declared all foods clean! "And he said to them, Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man." - Mark 7:18-21 RSV (the KJV is just as definitive.)
Gothard was a master at cherry-picking O.T. verses and making them apply to today's Christian, while at the same time ignoring N.T. verses which contradicted his stance. To this day, I am baffled at how so many people (myself included) validated and tried to follow his interpretation/teachings. I suppose there is something innate that makes a human being want laws and boundaries.
I think it was the "if you truly love God, you will keep these dietary and other kinds of laws" that had us convinced....plus the argument that these foods were outlawed because they just weren't good for you or dangerous to eat. i.e. pork could have trichinosis worms no matter how well cooked.
Shari, yes!
I always think it's sad when people fail to see the glorious FREEDOM offered us in Christ and choose to live under Old Testament laws. Christ came to set us free. Paul clarified that Gentiles didn't even have to be circumcised, which was a HUGE sign of being a God-follower in the OT! That's how free we are in Christ.
Shrimp on a Sheet-- the title sounds like a delicious recipe (I love shrimp) I can see it now, shrimp, bacon bits, sliced mushrooms, sauteed in a cream sauce (made with heavy cream) served on a dazzling white plate! yum!
I can still to this day remember BG quoting us " the whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead ". So glad to be free of this legalistic view of food! I very much appreciate this article Jeri, thanks for taking the time to write it.
Oh, and real Maryland crab cakes......MMMMMMMMMM. :)
So basically we'll all die healthy. :)
I remember Bill saying that in IBYC seminars. yes, whole wheat bread is healthier for you. But again, that is a personal choice and shouldn't be based on faulty theology. If Bill was true to his own thinking, he would have banned anything with yeast in it because yeast is a symbol of sin. I think he was just promoting his own tastes and preference which is very limited and narrow minded and unbiblical.
Yes, I agree about the whole wheat bread. I believe it is healthier for you but the issue of whole wheat versus white versus rye versus black bread versus no bread at all due to a low carb diet - those are all dietary choices that do not rise above all other dietary choices in some kind of special religious way. To this day, if I eat a piece of white bread, which I rarely, almost never do (and it's not that healthy anyway) I still feel like it is in some way slapping God in the face. That is just ingrained in me. I used to feel that about pork and ham but I'm mostly over that. The word "pork" still has a kind of tinge to it for me, as if it were a bad word.
Rob, what you said about Bill elevating his preferences to near absolute truth makes me wonder if he does that on account of his teaching on the mind and the spirit. I wonder if he takes what are merely strong preferences or emotional notions or prejudices (such as women riding horses) and what he does is mistake those notions or emotions for spiritual insight. Then, he casts about for a reason or a scripture to bolster these notions. So while he thinks he is being led by the spirit, he is really being led by his emotions and prejudices. Putting the cart before the horse in fact, while thinking that is not what he is doing at all.
Bill's teaching pitting the mind against the spirit, which I assume is based on an inaccurate understanding of places in Paul's letters, is a huge factor in what we see here, when he seems pretty confident in promoting preferences as biblIcal truth. You see the same principle in operation doing the shopping mall exercise, and other such "discernment" exercises. I admit here this is just an educated guess on my part, but he does teach wrongly about the mind and spirit, and these examples seem to be the outworking of that teaching. Instead of being led by propositional truth of scripture, rightly divided, which IS being led by the Spirit, and requires that we think and obey, one is led by one's emotions instead, and has to twist scripture to falsely prove one's points. All the while that one is doing the opposite of what he says he is doing, claiming the spiritual high ground. Big, heavy fat sigh. . .
Spot on. And because anything of the mind is evil, everything in Bill's mind MUST be spiritual. HULLOOOO???? ANYBODY HOME?????
Yes, that is good insight. His mind, body and spirit views came from a Chinese Kenswick teacher named Watchman Nee whose books I was reading when I first went to IBYC way back when. I saw the connect then. Kinda interesting he used a Chinese pastor since Bill didn't seem to like Chinese cuisine very much.
I loved reading your descriptions of all the food you enjoyed as a person set free. Have you ever watched the movie Babette's Feast? I think it's a beautiful picture of food and freedom. Thanks for the post.
[…] Jeri Lofland’s parents enrolled in ATIA in 1987. Jeri worked, studied, and taught at numerous IBLP venues before being fired from Gothard’s Headquarters at 11 p.m. on a midsummer’s night in 1999, after which she began to slowly reexamine everything. Jeri lives, and blogs, in the Midwest with her husband of twelve years and their three children, whom she is teaching to challenge inequality and to question everything. All articles on this site reflect the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of other Recovering Grace contributors or the leadership of the site. Students who have survived Gothardism tend to end up at a wide variety of places on the spiritual and theological spectrum, thus the diversity of opinions expressed on this website reflects that. For our official statement of beliefs, click here. […]
I remember when I attended IBYC that Bill at one point bashed "sweet and sour" favors in that eating food with opposite favoring such as sweet and sour, salty and sweet etc was bad for you. I remember at the time thinking "huh?" and concluded that he didn't like oriental cuisine. Really in reviewing the list of dos and don't of eating food, did Bill ever promote a kosher or halal killing of animals? Eating meat with blood still in it is really a bigger issue than eating the meat with dairy. I would think if Bill was really trying to promote a Biblical diet, he would have emphasize the draining of blood from meat before eating it.
...unless he was secretly a vampire.... (I couldn't help myself!)
Your comment made me laugh! I think it shows though how Bill picked and choice what scripture he used and didn't use. Kosher and halal style killed of animal for their meat where the animal is quickly cut in the throat in order to quick drawn the blood is really the hallmark of both Jewish and Islamic dietary laws. It also is the most humane way to slaughter animals as well. Maybe an ATI students can shed more light but I don't remember that Bill ever promoted kosher killed meat as well as cook preparation which would remove any remain blood from the meat. Instead Bill latched onto other minor things like no pork, shellfish, no dairy and meat etc. Things I think went along with his personal tastes.
Speaking of Biblical diets, I think a case could be made (very weakly though) for vegetarianism. Looking at the garden of Eden verses in Genesis as well as the instruction for not to eat meat with blood in it may support that line of thinking. A number of religious orders through the centuries were or leaned to vegetarianism. But again that is not hard or fast rule for all. But this is balanced with the fact that instruction on how to kill animals, kinds of animals is also found in scripture. The idea of not to eat dairy and meat though found in Jewish dietary laws is only based on the one verse not to boil a kid in it's mother milk. Bill thought took this and Jewish practice for his teaching.
I guess if Bill really wanted to promote a "biblical" diet, he would have looked at the foods they ate and formulated a diet similar to middle eastern cuisine which is a flavorful delicious type of food. It seems Bill just used different ideas borrowed from Jews and Muslims to combine with his own tastes which seemed very limited and boring middle American cuisine.
Conclusive scriptures give animals to Noah to eat, and even "unclean" animals shown to Peter to be acceptable food.
The "blood" issue seems to me to have more spiritual import (continually revealing the necessity of the atonement) than any other dietary rule. Funny how BG would fixate on the less spiritually impactful rules while cobbling his own system together. Such a waste of time and energy....