The best selling products in most bookstores these days are cookbooks and diet books. One teaches us how to cook food and the other how to avoid eating it. There’s no doubt that many of us have an uneasy relationship with our eating habits. One scientist in California has calculated that the average person eats fifteen times his or her bodyweight in a typical year. He has also worked out that horses eat only eight times their bodyweight in a year. This seems to suggest that if we want to lose weight we ought to eat like a horse.
However, the Bible has a few observations of its own about our attitude to food. ‘All the labour of man,’ it says, ‘is for his mouth, and yet he is never satisfied.’
That’s why Jesus taught us to concentrate on the one thing that does bring true inner satisfaction – himself, the bread of life.