“You are What you Eat”

“You are what you eat.” What a strange phrase. Yet, most people know exactly what this means. Essentially, the point is that it is important to eat good and healthy food, so that we can be healthy ourselves. Healthy food is equated with a healthy body and perhaps even lifestyle in general. 

The phrase itself goes back to around the 1820s when French politician Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin first phrased it as, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” In the 1860s, in Germany, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote, “Man is what he eats.” The phrase really started becoming a part of the American milieu in the 1920s. 

But as I was doing some reading this morning, I started to wonder if the idea, “we are what we eat” is actually much older. This morning I was reading a sermon by St Leo the Great. In this sermon he says:

For our participation in the body and blood of Christ has this effect: it makes us become what we receive; it enables us, with our whole being, in our spirit and our flesh, to bear him in whom and with whom we have died and been buried and risen again.

I’m not saying that Leo’s sermon was a direct influence on Brillat Savarin or Feuerbach, but perhaps the idea has been in our cultural and human understanding of the world much longer that the 19th century. Also, where our expression is meant to be figural language, when we as Christians speak about it in terms of the Eucharist, we mean it quite literally. It is our belief as Episcopalians that we, in a mystical way, are partaking of the actual body and blood of our savior Jesus Christ, and that this meal and sacrament are at the very heart of our worship.  

What I am taking Leo to mean is that in receiving the Eucharist we are becoming more like Christ, the one who nourishes and sustains us. Further, when we feed on Christ, our capacity for more Jesus in our life expands and gets larger. ‘We are what we eat’ is a deeply theological statement. As we partake of the Eucharist on Sunday mornings with each other, we become what we are consuming, namely Jesus.