Eating Biblically

I am a recovering food addict. I practice (and have written two books about) Twelve Step spirituality and regularly turn to Bill W.’s Big Book for guidance. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the New York Times article by Madison Malone Kircher, “Eating Healthy? No, They’re Eating Biblically” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/style/biblical-eating-tiktok-maha-rfk.html).

The article is about MAHA Christians who follow what they call a biblical diet, meaning they eat only foods mentioned in the Bible.

I, too, grew up on a biblical diet, meaning we ate only foods God permitted. We called it kashrut. We never mixed meat and dairy. We had separate silverware, dishes, pots, and pans for meat and dairy (and separate sets for everyday use, for guests, and for Passover). We never ate pork, shrimp, oysters, crab, lobster, shellfish, or any animal that wasn’t slaughtered by a certified butcher using techniques that were ethically advanced in Moses’ time, though arguably cruel by modern standards.

As a kid, it never occurred to me to ask why desert nomads would proscribe shrimp, oysters, crab, lobster, and other shellfish that don’t live in the desert, or how they managed to schlep all these household items from place to place for forty years without leaving any archaeological evidence of their presence. Today I keep kosher by eating a pescatarian diet, limiting myself to tuna and salmon (seriously, an Ashkenazi Jew without lox?) and by owning only one set of kitchenware.

Still, as a public service to MAHA Christians who want to follow a biblical diet, let me note that the original biblical diet is vegan: “I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:30).

After the Great Flood, when the earth was too wet to plant, people began eating their pets on the ark, marking a dietary shift that put “the fear and dread of humans” on every living creature. The only thing people couldn’t eat was blood—so no rare steaks and—despite antisemites who insist otherwise—no drinking the blood of Christian children (Genesis 9:2-4).

Contrary to the Bible itself, Annalies Xaviera, a biblical eating influencer, defines biblical eating as whole foods and home cooking. Kayla Bundy, another biblical diet influencer and “Christian content creator,” says that biblical eating is more than a diet. “Sin entered into the world through food, and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon I can use to fight back.”

Christian food fights, aside, she is, of course, referring to Adam and Eve eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3:6). While the Bible doesn’t specify what the fruit was, Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” immediately after eating it (Genesis 3:7), so we might assume it was figs. Since the Bible allows eating figs (and apples, for that matter), and since fig leaves are edible, the idea that the original loincloth was more Victoria’s Secret than a Mormon undergarment also seems plausible. Given that and the fact that Adam and Eve weren’t married, I’m not sure how food is a weapon against sin.

With all due respect to Christian content creator Kayla Bundy, I prefer the teaching of Jesus, the original Christian content creator: “Listen and understand, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth that defiles… whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer. But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person….” (Matthew 15:11-32).

I suggest we all move toward both the original vegan diet prescribed by God and the ethical diet taught by Jesus. Together, this would benefit all life on Earth and perhaps annoy Satan as well.