Hunger, Food, Eucharist: An Interview with Ángel F. Méndez Montoya
- Hunger, Food, Eucharist: An Interview with Ángel F. Méndez Montoya
It’s my great pleasure and privilege to welcome Ángel F. Méndez Montoya today to the DePaul Office of Missions & Values. The second edition paperback of your book is about to come out. This is a fascinating work, and not just from my own personal conviction: the book was nominated in 2011 for the prestigious Michael Ramsey Prize. Dr. Méndez Montoya, welcome to Chicago. Welcome to DePaul.
Thank you, Peter. It’s a pleasure to be here.
The pleasure is ours. Let me begin with something that you state in the preface to your book, The Theology of Food, which is dedicated to your parents, Vicente Méndez Domínguez and Ofelia Montoya de Méndez. You say that “cooking for others is a form of theological rejoicing.” I like that phrase. You state that you learned this from your parents. Could you elaborate a little about that?
Yes, I think that actually my work was inspired by my biography and I have a lot to thank my parents for. Both my parents love to cook, particularly my father, who was an excellent cook. We always had real fiestas every weekend. He used to cook on the weekends, and my mother during the week. It was really fantastic. I think my first theological experience through the family was through cooking and helping my father host big fiestas. It was really awesome to see my father come alive [at these functions], because he was very introverted: When he was cooking, you could see how much love he felt for cooking as well as for hosting and giving food to others. The house was usually very busy with guests, mostly extended family but also a lot of friends and neighbors. I think that is where I started to learn the virtue of hospitality [in theology]: preparing, giving oneself to others, and celebrating. That experience may have been the first inspiration for my book, and I am very thankful for that.
How about a very basic question, one that you address in the book: Should we be thinking about a “theology of food” when so many people in the world today go to bed hungry?
Definitely. I think, right now, it’s very important. At the time that I was writing the dissertation, which later became the book, matters related to food were not very common in the theological discipline. The subject of food is becoming more and more urgent. We are currently facing a terrible food crisis, but the problem is not a lack of resources. The problem is the lack of sharing food with others. My book contemplates a God that is superabundant, but also a God that gives generously. But what does it mean to believe in a God that is superabundant when there is so much hunger in the world? Why is it that in some parts of the world people are eating a lot, and wasting tons of food, when there are other places in the world where people are very hungry?
My book also calls attention to who the people are who are hungry: most of them are children, the elderly, and the great majority are women. So it is called the [End Page 69] feminization of hunger. It also tells us something about marginalization, especially toward women. I think that these are theological matters, and any theologian should be concerned about these matters. We need to become more aware and bring attention to the realities of hunger in the world. So I think that is very theological in itself. The subject of food is important because it’s not only about things related to hunger but also to the things that we eat, and the relationships between food and labor: for instance, relationships between food and the treatment of animals, and between food and the treatment of ecology. Food brings attention to all these relationships, and theology is about opening up our awareness to relationships. The theology of religions is about how we relate to one...
