I sometimes feel bad about how often I think about food. Then I remember how much time God spent on it. There are about 1,000 references to food in the Old Testament, 250 in the New Testament, and 170 in the Quran. If anything, I may not be spending enough time talking about it.
Kayla Bundy is doing God’s work for me. On TikTok, where she has more than 500,000 followers, she looks like another 27-year-old former dancer who traded Los Angeles for Bali and now dispenses wellness advice cross-legged on the floor. But before she eats, she crosses herself.
Bundy almost exclusively eats foods mentioned in the Bible. This is called Biblical Eating, and its proponents claim it can reduce weight, improve skin, relieve depression, and keep Satan away. Sin, Bundy explains, entered the world through food in the Garden of Eden, and sugar is still the devil’s way of weakening your body so he can take your soul. She sells a $28 digital guide to superfoods, coaching sessions for $700 a month, and, for $10.97, Bible Babes Guide to Cycle Syncing, which does not have much to do with food, but I thought you should know about.
From Bundy’s Instagram, you learn that you should eat a lot of steak, preferably cooked in ghee. Bread, eggs, and hummus are also great, especially if served on a large wooden grazing board. Also, God is very into cappuccinos. The focus on bread, butter, steak, and eggs is often accompanied by claims that nutrition experts and food companies have spent decades demonizing traditional foods for profit. It’s similar to the message delivered on Facebook by Annalies Xaviera, 32, who sells a $69 biblical eating cookbook and a $147 five-week Biblical Eating Reset diet course, but offers no advice on ovulation biohacking.
Though biblical eating took off with September’s best-selling book, The Biblio Diet by Jordan Rubin, it’s not a new idea. There was What Would Jesus Eat in 2005, the 2006 raw-food-influenced The Hallelujah Diet, and Reverend Charlie Shedd’s 1957 hit book Pray Your Weight Away. But the social media part is new. As is the MAHA-like focus on steak and raw milk.
To find out if this is how religious people actually eat, I called Chef Salvo Lo Castro, who runs Casasalvo, an Italian restaurant in SoHo. Before moving to New York, he cooked at the Vatican for a decade as part of a team that fed Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. “I look at the page with this woman. It’s horrible,” he said about Bundy. “Jesus don’t eat avocado. Two thousand years ago, it doesn’t exist in the Middle East. The wine is no good? The wine is the first thing with the Eucharist. It’s the blood of Jesus.”
Lo Castro was particularly upset that Bundy was so focused on what to eat, not how to eat. It reeked of individualism. “Inside the Vatican and in many convents in Italy, the room where the people eat is the refettorio. The tradition is simple and elegant, [with] food centered around hospitality and community. That’s the mission of Italian kitchen culture: hospitality and community.”
Plus, pasta. He was furious that Bundy was anti-pasta and anti-cheese. Pope Benedict’s favorite dish that Lo Castro made, which he now serves on his New York menu, is “Gnocchi di Papa Benedetto ai 6 Formaggi,” a gnocchi with six cheeses. The pope also liked Bavarian desserts.
A.J. Jacobs, who attempted to live by all the Bible’s rules in his 2007 book The Year of Living Biblically, was almost as dubious. “I feel like maybe they’re not committing enough to eating biblically. You can eat whole grains, but what about crickets, locusts, and grasshoppers, which are all allowed by Leviticus? I made some crickets with olive oil. They were crunchy,” he said.
Also, while Bundy is pushing sourdough, Jacobs says that she should listen to Ezekiel, who was told to bake with human dung as fuel. Though when given the order, Ezekiel shockingly yelled, “Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself,” at which point God relented and lowered the requirement to cow dung. So Bundy should try cooking over cow dung. Also, God told Ezekiel to eat a scroll, which he did not fight back about and apparently really liked (“So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth”), though his main culinary comparison was lentil bread cooked over dung.
But mostly, Jacobs thought the biblical eaters were way overdoing it on the red meat. “There was a lot of goat back then. They should be leaning more into the goat. And sheep. They’re overemphasizing steak,” he said. It makes you want to eat a scroll.
At the end of my conversation with Chef Lo Castro, he asked that I send him this article after I finished it. “I’ll put it on my Instagram and tag you,” he said.
“You’re just as bad as these Biblical Eating influencers,” I responded.
“Now it’s a war with these women for me,” he said.
Two thousand years later, religions still define themselves through food. I’m siding with whoever pushes pasta.
