I might as well come out and admit it to myself...I've gone crunchy. “Crunchy,” for those of you who don't know, is the official term for “granola-eaters.” Oh. What's that? I'm defining unknown terms by using unknown terms? I'll do better: “crunchy” is the term used to describe those of us who want organic food, grass-fed beef, free-range chicken eggs, homemade soaps, homemade cleaners, no plastic, no processed foods, and so on and so forth with a wide range of opinions that – to the uninitiated eye – must at best seem like paranoia resulting in an infinitely more difficult lifestyle.
It is difficult. I'll grant you that. That's exactly why I haven't gone 100% crunchy. Not many people in this country have, because to go 100% crunchy would require moving into the Amazon and making your own clothes out of banana leaves and eating wild-caught fowl not damaged by the presence of lead or poisoned blowdarts (i.e. you used a bow and non-lead-containing arrow), oh, and you would probably cook the wild-caught boar over an open flame fueled by natural, hand-hewn logs.
Maybe I exaggerate, but I'm just saying. Despite my own determination not to do so, I am going crunchy. I was determined not to for two reasons: 1. I had met too many crunchy people who seemed like egotistic, condemning know-it-alls who judged me harshly if they saw me eating my Chick-fil-A salad with a plastic fork and buying (GASP) pasteurized milk from the grocery store – and 2. the mere prospect of trying to go natural in this imitation-infested environment we live in seemed nothing short of enormously overwhelming.
I was wrong about the 1st point. Whether or not some members of the crunchy movement are obnoxious, it doesn't mean that they all are and it doesn't mean that they are wrong. Obnoxious people have a way of making people Desperately Want them to be wrong even though they may in fact be right. Nobody wants to give an obnoxious person the satisfaction of being right, but in this case I have to admit – even the obnoxious crunchies of the world are onto something. As to my 2nd point...well...I may not have been wrong about that one.
But as I have read and heard more and more about “crunchiness” I have found myself more and more compelled by the single idea that drives my own journey to crunchiness: namely, that God created the world to be very good, and we are fools to think we can do better than He can. Supposing that you were to design an elaborate wooden train track for your child, complete with turntables and tunnels and intricate ins-and-outs...and then you turn your appreciative offspring loose upon it and he (as human nature dictates) takes it upon himself to improve it by rearranging the pieces. Of course, he completely destroys the layout and ends up crying in a heap because Thomas keeps having head-on collisions with Percy in the tunnel and Toby keeps ending up in the quarry. I have to think that this is, on some level, the way that we appear to God as He watches us tamper with our intricately designed immune systems by bombarding them with vaccines, and we try to improve our bodies by loading them up with chemicals of our own concoction. We try to improve cow's milk by pasteurizing it and try to make our herbivorous livestock grow bigger and stronger by feeding them grain and/or dead animals of their own kind – oh, and since many of these dead animals of their own kind died from illnesses resulting from squalid living conditions, all of the animals end up sick, whereupon we pump them full of antibiotics to ward off the illnesses. So we end up consuming antibiotics as a result, and we are also quick to adminster antibiotics to ourselves for any and all ailments. And now, in the height of arrogance, we have taken it upon ourselves to “improve” the genes of plants designed by the Master Designer Himself. Voila: Frankenfood is in our midst.
But it is no real wonder that people have done these things. From an evolutionary standpoint (which is where most of them are coming from) it makes perfect sense. Things are evolving to get better and better, and man has emerged as a sort of demi-god after his long struggle up from the slime. Now that he has pulled himself up by the bootstraps, it's time to help everything else out that's still lingering behind in the stone age. Take corn genes, for instance. If we can put men on the moon, surely we can improve corn to make it better than what it has previously been able to evolve to. We can cure the world of illness – foodborne or airborne – by inventing medicines and processes to make the world a safer place. Evolution must go on, and we are the ones to help it.
Because, to an evolutionist, there is no god, and the closest thing there is to a god is this crowning feat of evolution: man.
Clearly this does not fit with a Christian worldview. Hence it makes perfect sense for us to try to get back to nature – to get back to things the way God made them. In so doing, we are not alone, however – there are many who are crunchy for entirely different reasons having nothing to do with being a Christian. As a result, I have come across a number of articles and widely-circulated opinions that at first seemed compelling, but the more I thought about them I realized that they were troubling. I've struggled to realize why, but it has slowly been dawning on me.
The crunchy movement is not a Christian movement. Crunchiness is not, in and of itself, a thing well-pleasing to God. Like anything else in life, we need to evaluate everything we read, hear, think, etc., in light of God's Word. There is a lot of good in moving towards God's Creation rather than trying to improve upon it. But a great deal of crunchy thinking does not stem from this attitude, but rather from a New Age mindset that is still evolutionary. Only in this case it is not man who is god, but Nature.
To the New Age granola-eater, the world is a place of beauty and wonder and marvelous design that has been engineered over the millenia by the steady march of Nature. Nature has conquered challenge after challenge in the evolutionary procession and always emerges triumphant with improvements that make man's engineering pale by comparison. The world as Nature made it is a marvelous place and we, the evil humans, are Nature's enemies. With our constant attempts to usurp Her authority and stake our flag on every square foot of Earth's surface, we threaten the flora and fauna everywhere and if Nature is to have any hope of surviving man must become subservient to Her great reign.
But this is very different from the Christian Creationist view. To us, the beautiful earth is not placed here to rule over man. Man is placed here to rule over the earth.
- “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” - Genesis 1:27-28
We have been given the dominion mandate of Genesis 1 for a reason. God created the world to be filled with wonder and beauty – to be filled with endless realms of discovery that we are supposed to search out in order to understand more of His goodness and majesty. It exists for one purpose: to bring Him glory. We are to glorify Him by searching out the wonders of His Creation, and by bringing it into submission. This command was given before the Fall of man, so it would have been our job anyway. Now, thanks to the Fall, it is much more difficult than it originally would have been to obey this command. But we are still to seek to understand how to utilize Creation better. How to use it to overcome the negative effects of the curse. How to tap into the incredible resources that the Master Designer has built into His Creation.
We are not to be ruled by Creation. We are to rule over it. We are the crowning touch to God's Creation, but we are not little gods as a result. We are foolish children who need to learn from His Creation rather than taking it upon ourselves to improve upon it. We should not place ourselves too far over Creation, but neither should we place ourselves under it and insist that “Nature should teach us.” No. Because sometimes what comes naturally is not the best. We all know that our sinful natures come naturally, but we aren't supposed to just sit back and say, “Well, apparently that's how God made me.” There is a balance, and I think in many respects the non-Christian crunchy movement misses that balance entirely. And why wouldn't they? They are not coming from a Biblical perspective.
But we are, and I would just caution all of us who are intrigued by all things crunchy – we need to be very careful that we evaluate every claim of the crunchy movement in the light of Scripture.
Now, as an example. I keep running through the same channels trying to figure out what is the right answer about dairy products. What do I mean by the “right answer?” Well, is it better to drink non-pasteurized milk? Is it worth the supposed risks? Or is it better to avoid dairy entirely? I have heard from numerous Crunchy Sources that it is better not to consume any dairy products – and especially not to drink pure milk. Because, after all, milk is intended for baby cows. Not for humans. No wonder it messes us up! We're stealing milk from the baby cow's mouth and drinking it ourselves and wondering why it makes us sick!
I subscribed to this view for some time but drank milk anyway because I wasn't sure how to get along without it. It's such a perfect way to get in some protein and was a lifesaver when I had morning sickness and couldn't get anything down that required chewing. At least, not without a lot of work. If I wanted to just have some easy nutrition for a change, milk was always the perfect answer. Not to mention all of that stuff about calcium – I mean, I know the no-milk types point out that you can get it just as well via leafy greens and such. But what about when the mere mention of leafy greens makes you have to go hang over the toilet for 10 minutes? Yeah. It wasn't happening. So I reluctantly drank milk and loved every minute of it. But I digress.
Just a few months ago, it suddenly hit me that the Lord promised Canaan to His people as a “land flowing with milk and honey.” Why would He have promised that as a good thing if He really thinks it's better for us not to drink milk? Why would milk have been a kosher food if it really was not intended for us to drink? He banned many other foods and it was not pure caprice on His part. I would hazard a guess that, even though we are not required to keep kosher any more, we would do well to study why He might have banned those foods. Pigs eat their own feces. I saw one doing it at a petting zoo last weekend and suddenly my relish for the rapidly approaching holiday hams decreased by a factor of roughly 100. It makes sense to me that perhaps it would be healthier not to indulge in pig on a regular basis. God did not make His laws on a whim. I would like to seek to learn from them.
If He didn't make His laws on a whim, I'm sure it's not a whim that milk was allowed for human consumption. Scripture presents it as a sign of prosperity to live in a place where the cows are able to eat well and produce a lot of milk so that people could partake of it, too.
Perhaps milk as God designed it isn't so bad for us. Perhaps, by virtue of this reasoning, it makes sense that the problem with milk is not milk, but trying to improve it by our pasteurization and homogenization techniques that we have been so clever about implementing. I have not yet reached a conclusion on what I want to do about raw milk. First, I'd want to be sure I knew exactly where it was coming from and what conditions were like there; and second...it's kind of prohibitively expensive and we are milk guzzlers around here.
From an evolutionist's perspective, the no-milk position makes sense. Cows evolved milk to feed their little cows, so it's perfect for them. This is preposterous enough in itself, but to believe that it also somehow evolved to be nutritious for people it was not evolved for, well – that's just going too far.
But from a creationist's perspective it makes perfect sense that God would design the cow to produce milk abundantly for her little one so that there would be enough to share, and then to fill it with vitamins, minerals, beneficial bacteria, healthy fats, and more so that it would also benefit the humans who would drink it. Oh, and it's fantastic for baking with, for making sauces, for making delightfully creamy soups, and it's really nice on it's own, too. Isn't this just what a good and gracious and loving Creator would do?
So I believe it makes sense from a Biblical perspective to believe that God created milk for our consumption. It also makes sense to believe that it would, of course, be its best the way that He made it first – before we tamper with it and try to improve it. On principal, it makes sense to me that raw milk must be the best way to go. I have not actually started bringing it into our home, yet, but I am working in that direction.
That being said, I should qualify that there are people who have actual milk allergies. Of course, we are all affected by the Fall and in some people that means we are sensitive to things that we are not supposed to be sensitive to. In some cases, the fact that lactase is present in raw milk might help the lactose sensitive to tolerate it. But in other cases it may not be that simple. I have actually had raw-milk proponents tell me that if you just drink raw milk long enough your body will get used to it no matter what kind of allergies you think you have. I am sure that for some people it takes some getting used to, but I am sure that others would not be able to adjust because their body just wants to reject milk. That is the kind of effect we should expect from the Fall. So neither do I believe that raw milk is a miracle food that works wonders for all people no matter what. In a fallen world, I think the only miracle food that has ever existed was called “manna.” And if you'll pardon my grammar – manna ain't milk and milk ain't manna.
Hippocrates said it well: “One man's meat is another man's poison.” Raw milk may be good for most people, but it is still milk and could cause serious reactions in some. But regardless, I believe that milk was designed to be useful for humans - not just baby cows.
And for now, I will leave my discussion of being a Crunchy Creationist, to resume at any time when I think of a new topic to cover. :) I already have another installment in the works!
