Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, July 21, 2023
The other day I was driving past a shopping area near our neighborhood, and to my shock I saw this readerboard message on a sign beside a pizza place.
Thinking it over, I guess I wasn’t so much feeling shock as amused surprise. This pizzeria is part of a chain which flourished for decades in the USA, and it now has actually twice as many locations in the Philippines as it does here!
What caused my surprise is that all along, this pizza parlor has seemed to represent mainline American food, which traditionally hasn’t felt the need to cater to a healthier-eating clientele. But it looks as though that’s starting to change.
I’ve grown up in the Seventh-day Adventist culture since gradeschool. My church has long insisted that since the Bible tells us to honor our bodies, we need to move back as close as possible to the original Eden lifestyle, which was basically vegan. Non-Adventists, meeting a vegetarian or vegan, used to stare at us with mingled glances of surprise and pity. “So where do you get your protein?” they would ask with genuine concern.
But just as surely as the planet rotates on its axis, the past few decades have seen many people rotate inexorably away from traditional US cuisine (fat-salt-sugar). We’re starting to see cauliflower-crust pizzas in the grocery store, and evidently the pizzeria above has received Word From On High (corporate headquarters) that the tastes of the American public are changing.
I, along with millions of other people who grew up in a church where the “health message” has been prominent, now find ourselves having to pick up the pace to stay in stride with the rest of the world as they race toward this new healthstyle.
Is our health important to God? Find out more by clicking the link just below (and when you’re there, also click the two additional links below the main text):