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64 • 5 • A G R I C U LT U R A L I N T E R L U D E N O . 2 The root cellar held bushels of potatoes; the basement shelves with peeling paint held row upon row of tomatoes canned; applesauce, grape juice, strawberry jam, each in its mason jar; the freezer full of corn, beans, peas, blueberries; the honeycombs boxed and stacked.1 My sister and I did not help much with the canning process—it was too hot, too precise. We would sit at the kitchen table and watch through the steam as my mother turned the summer into winter food. We shared the pink foam skimmed off the top of strawberries turned to jam. When I follow Ruth and Naomi into Bethlehem, I have to bring my travel guide along. Journeys into other countries are also journeys into other cuisines. According to my guide (in this case biblical and other textual material, archaeological investigation, and cross-cultural comparison), the primary foods of the Israelites were the “Mediterranean triad”—bread, wine, and olive oil.2 In addition to this three-legged foundation the people of the ancient Near East ate legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Some fish and dairy products also supplemented the Israelite diet. Meat, however, was eaten only on special occasions, more frequently by the wealthy than by the poor.3 In other words Ruth and her companions lived low on the food chain, on local, sustainable foods. Grains were particularly important, forming the core of the diet. Cereal products were eaten at every meal in a variety of ways—parched or raw, as bread or porridge (like cream of wheat or oatmeal).4 It is estimated that bread alone made up at least 50 percent of daily caloric intake.5 Bethlehem means not only the “house of bread” but also the “house of food.” The conflation of the two meanings for bread appears in languages across the ancient Near East. The dual meaning of lehem underlines the centrality of bread in the ancient diet—food is bread and bread is life. This is not a metaphor. Bread filled the stomach and fueled the body. The production of bread connected the self with the world and the self with others in ways both intimate and essential. One’s relationship to and role in bread making defined gender and economic status in the family and the community . The back-story of Ruth is famine, but the crisis of food that compels the plot is a crisis of bread production. Alone, Ruth and Naomi could not produce their own bread. AGRICULTURAL INTERLUDE NO. 2 65 I I live in the easy cornucopia of a twenty-first-century American city. I buy my food in grocery stores and restaurants. I find neither in Iron Age Bethlehem. When I grow herbs or a tomato plant in containers on my back porch, I am a dilettante who plays with an agrarian past. Again I peruse my travel guide to follow Ruth and Naomi into the Iron Age. In some ways my diet is not much different. I, too, eat bread, use olive oil, drink wine. As a vegetarian my diet, too, consists primarily of cereal products, legumes, fruits, vegetables, dairy. But the similarities end when we leave generalizations behind and look at the specific food products, how they are produced and obtained, how they are incorporated into daily life. Every week I bake a loaf of bread. In this practice I am unusual. Most people living in the United States buy mass-produced bread from grocery stores. Industrial breads are produced in large factories, quickly made with electric mixers and chemical leavening agents, shot through with preservatives and wrapped in plastic to sit on shelves for weeks at a time. Presliced and packaged, these breads bear little resemblance to the foodstuff upon which our ancestors built their diet. A few still do get their bread fresh baked from local bakeries, especially in some European countries where artisan breads are a long and cherished tradition. Slowly risen by yeast and touched by hands, these breads are more akin to the bread that sustained the human community for millennia. But even these breads, even my own loaves, do not require the kind of time and effort needed to make even the simplest flat bread in ancient Israel. Bread is so simple and plentiful now that we barely think twice about it. Yet each one of basic...

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