Monday 25 February 2013

Lent for Extroverts 11: Not fed by ham

Online food shopping is a mixed experience. For the joy of having someone else traipse round the supermarket on your behalf and deliver it to your door, you must spend a few intense minutes patiently trawling through lists on the store website and making hundreds of minute decisions. 

'Chicken', for instance, gives you 110 options; chocolate, 408. You need to decide price, brand, fair trade, air miles, etc., all from hundreds of clicks, at least two days prior to when you actually want the food. It can go wrong.

For instance you need to distinguish between choosing by number of items and choosing by weight. Four packets of biscuits, but 0.5 kg of broccoli. So when I spotted a packet of Waitrose hand carved dry cured roast ham costing £4.19, I thought, that's pricey but I bet those thick slices taste good: I'll have ONE of those...Click!

...Just after the delivery man had driven away from my door I unloaded the ham, and then another one... and then another one, and another one, and another one, and another one - I had 8 packets in the end, because it isn't sold by number of packets, but by kilogram. And I had ordered ONE KILO (cost: approx. £28).

The next week I discovered you could re-use the previous week's order and make it the basis of your next order, just adding in the items to your trolley as you go. But it wasn't immediately obvious when you had successfully added them in, so first I added everything in three times. It was then that I noticed I had nearly £84 worth of ham in my trolley. Luckily this time I hadn't yet proceeded to checkout.

Ham somewhat dominated thoughts about food that week. It would be nice not to have to think about food so much. The food Jesus offers in the gospel today (John 6:41-51) is his own self; life everlasting. 'In whom all our hungers are satisfied' is one of the lines of liturgy I most appreciate, because hunger can come in many forms. Jesus refused to turn stones into bread because we are fed by more than just food. In Lent, and always, we are fed by him.

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