From The United States, to Canada, and other countries as well, the news has carried stories of various contaminated food products ranging from tainted meats, spinach, and tomatoes to melamine-laced pet food. Recently, a major salmonella outbreak associated with peanut butter has made many headlines.

These examples seem a very far cry from the association of food with family and fellowship. Clearly, fear shouldn't be associated with food. For a couple of years, the United States Congress has been deliberating a Safe Food Act that would bring all food regulation under one administrative roof. This would eliminate the current confusing mix of government departments that presently oversee food issues.

Other countries also attempt to regulate the purity of the food they produce for their citizens and for export. But regulations can't eliminate the possibility that someone somewhere might be careless. So how can we expect to feel safe about the food we eat? This question presents two facets that can be addressed through prayer.

GOD'S POWER ENSURES SAFETY

First, we can turn to God about our fear of susceptibility to contaminated food. Since the early days of history recorded in the Bible, prayer has proved to be an effective means for confronting a whole host of challenges, including this one. In fact, the Hebrew Scriptures tell about the time when the prophet Elisha was in Gilgal, where the people were experiencing a famine. The prophet asked one of the servants to collect some herbs for the stew, but the man also included wild vines that he couldn't identify. When the men began to eat the pottage, they cried, "O thou man of God, there is death in the pot." Accustomed to listening for divine guidance, Elisha threw some meal into the pot and neutralized the poison so that all could eat it (see II Kings 4:38–41).

This story illustrates that one all-powerful God guides us through even the most difficult challenges. He would never meet someone's need during a famine by providing spoiled or poisonous food. Instead, turning to God, and listening for the steps He reveals, will ensure both safety and satisfaction.

Perhaps Christ Jesus offered the best guidance for our prayers when he counseled in his Sermon on the Mount: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" (Matt. 6:25). This statement doesn't advocate being careless or deliberately eating something that might not be good, but neither do we need to be obsessive about food or afraid of it. Jesus explained that it's God's job to take care of us.

In Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy described the effects of leaning on God completely when she wrote, "If we follow the command of our Master, 'Take no thought for your life,' we shall never depend on bodily conditions, structure, or economy, but we shall be masters of the body, dictate its terms, and form and control it with Truth" (p. 228). By leaning on the eternal Truth, or God, we find safety.

PROTECTED WITH SPIRITUAL PURITY

This leads us to the second point that deserves our prayers regarding food safety: the ethics of food production. Jesus counseled, "There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man" (Mark 7:15, New King James Version).

Jesus recognized that spiritual purity can be both a powerful protection against any physical threat and a way to change how food is produced and thought about. In prayer, we can spiritualize our concept of food as representing the nourishment and goodness divinely provided by God rather than as merely material. This will lead to more realization of the innate purity in the food chain and in the individuals handling it. It will help challenge the assumption that it's impossible to change the misguided motives and ambitions of corporations that sometimes allow bad food to go public.

Prayer that helps replace limited thinking and self-serving behavior with purer motives and aspirations will make food safer for everyone. Purification always begins with one's own thinking, then includes all humanity. As thought moves Spiritward, people realize that God's provision can neither defile nor be defiled.

Since God's creation includes everyone, the divine law of infinite good governs all aspects of the human experience. That includes those who make decisions about the food we eat. Feeling anger or resentment toward these individuals when contaminated food gets on the market doesn't lead to progress. But prayer reveals the need for correction to those responsible, and how to do so, in a way that truly reforms.

God never leaves His creation helpless—no matter what the situation. Prayer that starts with God, good, as eternal Truth, proves effective at every level, and all parties feel its benefit.

For ourselves, that may be evident in greater peace, better choices, and the freedom to forgive wrongdoing.

DIVINE LAW: THE ULTIMATE SAFETY

Prayer that starts with a recognition of God's government also has a reforming effect. It might show a corporation a more honorable way of doing business or new ways to eliminate carelessness. This type of prayer removes roadblocks to wholesome and mutually beneficial progress, with the added bonus that everyone will feel its effects and find less cause for worry.

Since all law proceeds from the divine Principle, the First and Only Cause, it includes honesty, justice, fair-mindedness, integrity. These qualities are natural to everyone. Changing your view of men and women—bringing it more and more into line with God's law and creation in His image and likeness—has a profound effect on their behavior, not to mention your own.

It's possible to adapt prayer to these eternal truths, instead of insisting on another's failings. This sets everyone free from fear and resentment, and opens the way for Truth to operate in individual lives. It also enables us to insist that God's government be expressed in the way food is being processed. This prayer starts with God as divine Mind, the one and only Mind that governs all.

The very nature of divine Mind as purely good and benevolent, and as all-knowing, all-wise, and all-loving leaves no place for a secondary self-serving or callous mind. As Mary Baker Eddy observed, "The eternal Truth destroys what mortals seem to have learned from error, and man's real existence as a child of God comes to light" (Science and Health, pp. 288–289).

No one needs to be overwhelmed by the fear of food or of another's dishonest or careless actions. Rather, we can lean mightily on God as Truth—the Truth that undergirds everyone—and expect to see God's law of infinite good in operation here and now. css