The lies about bread

As I review some of the lessons from my younger days, I find that three outright lies stand above the rest.  I am not alone in thinking that they were “facts” when they weren’t.  Granted, I was young and didn’t really know any better, but I still feel that I was duped.

• The metric system is coming. By 1980, everything from gasoline to meat at the butchers and lumber at the stores will all be measured in liters, kilograms, and meters.  TRUTH: That didn’t happen.  Pound for pound, that was a big lie.
• The world is going to experience starvation if we don’t keep the population below 5 billion. The world can’t support much more food production than we currently do, and if we all don’t do our part and stop having lots of babies, we are all going to be hungry by 1980.  After all, the greatest pestilence that the earth has ever experienced is humanity. TRUTH: We crossed 8 billion at the end of 2022.  The percent of the world’s population living in food scarcity is at an all-time low since it has been tracked.  Makes me hungry for the truth.
• Eating bread is bad for you. It makes you fat and leads to all sorts of diseases.  TRUTH.  Read below.

Many people in my age bracket can retell their experiences hearing these lies when their minds were unformed. We weren’t taught how to question our teachers or the myths that they were perpetuating. When we all heard that we only use 10% of our brains, there was no such thing as a PET scan or an MRI. We did the best we could, but we were wrong.

For the Christian, lies about bread are the most problematic.  Let’s address bread a bite at a time.  To start, let’s look at lessons from biology/anatomy.

If you look at members of the animal kingdom, there is an undeniable connection between function and form.  Lobsters have pinchers specifically to make eating what is available to them possible.  Bees have a system of secretions and digestive systems that make nectar digestion obvious.  Bees aren’t meat eaters, and lobsters aren’t nectar eaters.  Their architecture makes the thought of that ridiculous.

What about humans?  What are we meant to eat? Humans produce salivary amylase (ptyalin) at concentrations above any other life form on Earth.  Pigs, brown rats, and mice also produce it, but not to nearly the same extent as we do.  Ptyalin uniquely breaks down starches and complex carbohydrates into simple sugars at a very high speed.  That means our bodies are designed to break down bread.  Put a cracker in your mouth; 1 minute later, it is unrecognizable.  Put a piece of bacon in your mouth.  Ten minutes later, it is still bacon.

In contrast, carnivores have negligible ptyalin or lack salivary glands, relying instead on pancreatic forms of amylase.  Even other primates, like baboons, have lower levels of ptyalin than we humans.  Even people who spend extended periods without eating any carbohydrates immediately produce ptyalin once they introduce a complex carbohydrate into their mouths.  The point?  It doesn’t turn off or get selected against.  The use of pytalin is core to our architecture.  To somehow conclude that we aren’t supposed to eat bread is to conclude that a lion should not eat meat or an anteater shouldn’t eat ants.

From a spiritual perspective, this lie that bread is bad becomes an even greater catastrophic fail.  The bible repeats itself on this topic.  Bread is central to our identity in a relationship with God.  I need to list this out, as the scope of people who maintain this lie is perhaps more problematic than trying to convince us that the metric system is coming.

• Moses’s people were provided manna when they crossed the desert. God could have picked a lot of things besides manna, but he didn’t. Debate what you think Manna was, but it wasn’t meat, and it went bad in a day.
• Jesus referred to himself as the bread of life more than anything else, other than the Son of Man. I can’t count the number of folks who love to tell people that “Jesus referred to himself as the way, the truth, and the life.”  They fail to recall that he referred to himself as the bread of life more than he did as the way and the truth.  If anyone challenges that this isn’t a good enough argument, they need to realize what they are saying.  They are saying that Jesus’ claims about who he is have a component that is flawed or perhaps no longer relevant.  If Jesus is bread, and you insist that there are circumstances in which bread is bad, then you must acknowledge that you also believe there are times when what Jesus said or did isn’t relevant. You can’t have it both ways.
• At the last supper, Jesus selected bread. Consider what he said and did at that moment. He “broke” bread.  Breaking bread is not dramatic, no matter who you ask.  Pick up your favorite loaf of pumpernickel and call out to everyone to come over and watch you break it into two pieces.  No YouTube video can be made from that!  Let’s say Jesus used meat.  If he lifted a chicken and “broke it” in front of his disciples, that would be dramatic.  It would demand attention.  It would have done a really good job at making his point.  Yet, he didn’t.  He is bread.  We are meant to “eat” him as our sacrifice.  It has been that way since he took Moses through the wilderness.

I have a dear friend whose wife is a conspiracy theory person.  You know the type.  Obama is satan.  Elvis is still alive.  Humans use only 10% of their brains.  For her, a chiropractor convinced her bread is bad.  For some folks, the teachings of witch doctors will remain their preference.  This is partially to be expected.  As we read in the Old Testament, God’s people always have a remnant who wish to return to the Asherah poles and the altar of Baal; no matter what is happening around them, the old ways of the Canaanites remain magnetic.  That is where I put her.

Flat Earthers come to mind when I think about those who deny the role of bread in our faith or in the biology that supports it.  These folks claim that denying bread is not the same thing as denying the Savior, and they will die on that sword.  They will insist that they can pick and choose what to believe from scripture and build a “pretty good” theology.  When Jesus said he was the bread of life, he was admitting that he wasn’t here for everyone.  It was just an analogy to address the culture of the times.

I will take their side on one point.  Modern bread, when purchased at a budget price, contains ingredients that can be improved upon to make it healthier for you. To counteract that admission of laziness, I chose to learn to make bread.  Real bread has four ingredients and is easy to make.  It takes a long time to make, as you must let it rise and cook it for 30 minutes, making the act of preparing it take 3 hours.  Most people get impatient waiting in line at checkout at a grocery store for 3 minutes.  If you are one of those, I challenge you to ask the question, “What does it mean to take up your cross daily?”  Any chance that is related to the phrase “daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer?  If God put bread both in his identity and in the words we are meant to use when we talk to him, you might want to reconsider your position on the relationship you have with bread.