On the craze for eating God’s way

The intersection between trad wifery and highly addictive cooking content, served up on social media, is, of course, the kitchen, where a certain kind of Christian woman is adamant she belongs (even while banking six or seven figures from lucrative brand partnerships). The kitchen is at the apex of the superstructure of how-tos for the perfect life – one of order, health, hearth, fertility, endless youth and God-approved sex.

A recent viral diet trend, or what passes for one, is biblical eating, namely following a diet of foods mentioned, or of the sort that might have been mentioned, in the Bible.

Janice Armstrong has 598,000 followers on Instagram. ‘I help you get closer to God + heal His way’, she promises, along with helpful and popular posts about ‘The Biblical Diet: how humans are meant to eat.’ The influencer Grace Wagner Spradlin has the username @glowingwithgracee and her Instagram bio reads: ‘holistic nutritionist, healthy recipes + low-tox living, lover of Jesus!’. She has nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram, and says that when you ‘realise that [your] body is a gift He has given… to fulfil [your] calling’, then you’ll start to eat right and feel better. Kayla Bundy is a key poster-girl of Christian eating, with half a million followers on TikTok. Her interpretation of biblical eating is ‘raw’ (the Make America Healthy Again movement hates pasteurisation). She has bone broth for breakfast, buys ‘raw’ milk, shuns commercial yeast, loves sardines (itself a trend), and tries to buy local ingredients only. Martha Fry, meanwhile, is all about ‘Faith, Health & Flexible Income’.

Amusingly, in Bundy’s case, local means what’s available in Bali, where she now lives. Bundy started ‘studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating. Sin entered into the world through food, and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back’. Books in this vein published last year include Biblical Superfoods, The Biblio Diet, Eating God’s Way, and The Healing Bible Kitchen.

The biblical eating trend has been glossed up and shot through with jump-cut sleekness, but it is not new – as virtually nothing in the diet world is. Miracle Food Cures from the Bible, What the Bible Says about Healthy Living, and The Weigh Down Diet were all published in the 1990s.

Invoking Christian theology through diet has a longer history, mostly in America. The 1830s saw Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and the ‘father of vegetarianism’, invent the intentionally bland yellow Graham cracker as part of his campaign to control sinful urges through diet. Half a century later, John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist, director of a lust-fighting sanatorium in Michigan and creator of the cornflake, shared the conviction that luxurious foods stimulated lust.

There then seems to have been a bit of a lull in biblical diets in the 20th century, broken in the 1990s with the Hallelujah diet, espoused by George Malkmus, a Baptist minister, who claimed he cured his own colon cancer by switching to the raw, plant-based diet prescribed by God in Genesis 1:29. Malkmus’s diet came with books, ministries and a supplement line. Also notably, in 2004, Jordan Rubin, born to Jewish parents before ‘finding Christ’, published his bestseller, The Maker’s Diet, whereby he claimed to have cured himself of Crohn’s through foods from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, a mix of ‘paleo’ (nuts, meat, veg) and Old Testament kosher principles.

In fact, the unchanging qualities of God’s word have perhaps led to relatively little change in how Christians present the material – so that the new guard of Bible-eating influencers are both on-trend and dated in that American evangelical way that will look and feel familiar to non-Christians. The popular website of Walterina Bindhu Jachin, from Southern India but now living in Wisconsin, exemplifies this; her low-def graphics and words could have emerged at any point in the past 40 years. ‘The one thing that matters most [is] what God wants us to learn through it all’, she says.

Is there any value in biblical eating? Yes, because like every other current trend, it advocates whole, fibrous, protein-rich foods, and steers away from ultra-processed fare – although the emphasis on ‘raw’ milk may not always be the best idea.

Martha Fry and Janice Armstrong show overflowing baskets of eggs and vegetables: all to the good. The Daniel Diet, based on Daniel 1:8–16, is inspired by Daniel’s insistence on eating just vegetables and water, not royal food in Babylon, in order not to ‘defile’ himself – his body being a direct line to and from God. It’s perfectly nutritious: Daniel’s Veggie Platter, from Jachin’s site, has falafel, garlic hummus and roasted skewered vegetables with plenty of spices. Jachin suggests serving it with a naan bread recipe from her entry on ‘Abigail’s platter’.

The gamification aspect of the biblical eating craze is helpful, too, if we’re talking about results rather than spirituality. Kayla Bundy offers up a fun biblical food quiz: what was Jesus’s first meal after being resurrected? The options are ‘fish and honeycomb’, ‘fishes and loaves’, and ‘figs and lamb’ (the correct answer is fish and honeycomb). That is followed by a question on which food Esau sold his birthright for – was it lentils, milk or olive oil? (lentils is the answer).

The secularists among us will balk at all this. And for us Jews, Jesus’ diet is more off-putting than anything else, but I can’t help but wonder how fish and honey would taste, or lamb and figs. And then I realise I’ve had them both, often, just presented as soy and honey-glazed salmon or tagine – and without the side salad of spiritual fervour.