Or, cooking with the Illegiterati!
This stuff was in the bread aisle when I went to Whole Foods today to pick up approximately one gallon of my favorite peanut butter:
Since I’m like a moth to the flame of anything random with a bible quote on it, I bought it, brought it home, re-read Ezekiel 4, and made a sandwich. It turns out that you couldn’t get a recipe from a much weirder biblical source. Ezekiel is one of the major prophets in the Old Testament–I like to call them the crazypants prophets–who basically used his priesthood to warn the Israelites of impending doom while they were exiled in Babylon (approx. 6th century BCE).
You’ll notice that this is pretty much the healthiest, most granola-crunching-hippie bread you can buy. It had lentils. It’s sprouted. It’s got a low glycemic index, it’s vegan, it’s organic. Already my hangnails have healed and my hair is shiny and bouncy.
Anyway, according to God’s orders, Ezekiel eats a scroll so that he can speak God’s words and goes to Tel Aviv. Then he shuts himself inside his house and binds himself with ropes. Then he takes a brick and draws a relief of the city of Jerusalem on it (how he does this while bound is unclear), then puts an iron plate between himself and the brick, and then lays siege to the brick (somehow).
Next, he lies on his left side for 390 days (to represent the number of years Israel will spend in exile), then flips over and his right side gets off easy with 40 days (how long Judah will be in exile).
(It’s turkey and fried egg. Don’t you judge me.)
Finally, we get to the part about the food. God tells him to mix wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet and spent in a big jar and then to cook it into cakes over a fire made with human poop, though Ezekiel asks real nice and gets to use cow poop instead. Basically, that’s a starvation diet–God just told him to essentially mix the dregs together and eat that to keep from dying.
And now you can buy it for only $5.69 a loaf!
I couldn’t find anything at all about the religious views of the company who makes this, sadly. They have some doves on their homepage, so they seem vaguely Christian, though they seem to have bought the Ezekiel bread from someone else up in the Pacific Northwest. My theory is that some guy got really stoned, decided it would be fun to read the bible for a while, and then got some serious munchies around Ezekiel 4:9. It makes more sense than a marketing ploy, because I suspect the audience who would buy a bread because it’s from the Bible doesn’t overlap much with an audience who are into sprouted vegan bread.
The rest of Ezekiel (and the prophets in general) are pretty crazy and excellent rainy day reading. I can’t wait until they come out with more biblically inspired foods. Revelations bee-beast honey!
Four stars, since it’s pretty tasty (if you’re like me and the hippier the bread, the better) and good for vegans, but it does cost more for a loaf than an hour’s worth of minimum wage.
★★★★☆
Sorry for the less-than-stellar photos. I’m no Pioneer Woman.
The Illegiterati 
Well, I’ve tried it myself (it was forced upon me by a relative). Pretty horrible. Like chewing leather. So bad, in fact, I looked up the scripture that inspired this concoction.
Please understand that I am not one of these ranting lunatics who quotes one-fourth of a Bible verse and assumes that all truth has been duly dispersed. No, I tend to read the entire passage.
We’ve had stories in the news, lately, where someone quoted out of context was proven to have been egregiously misrepresented. I believe the Word of God deserves no less than due literary respect and a search for absolute honesty…don’t you?
So. What saith it?
Take the listed ingredients, make a flat, unleavened (approximately 8 ounces) cake, and cook it over human feces*. Yep. Now, eat one of those a day and nothing else.
Next, wash that one shit-flavored cake down with a daily allowance of about 10 ounces of water, taken in small sips throughout the day. Now remember, this is one dry, leathery excuse for baked goods. No creme filling inside, either. 10 ounces of water is hardly the USDA minimum, even if you eat nothing but chicken soup all he time.
Do this for a total of 430 days, while lying all day on one side (the Lord told Ezekiel he’d tie him up so he couldn’t roll over). 390 days on the left side, 40 on the right. Ol’ Zeke was gonna be walkin’ funny.
Personally, I don’t think the Almighty was trying too hard to improve Ezekiel’s health, much less his attitude. This story is about humiliation and the eve of destruction. But go read the passage for yourself.
And if you must be so righteous as to consume this stuff, since, after, it IS in the Bible, then be honest enough to follow-through with the 8 ounce portion, cooked without yeast over crap, 10 ounces of water every day (no more), and, oh, yes…lie on your side for 430 days.
* when Ezekiel protested about human feces, the Lord relented and changed it to cow manure
Yum!This is very much like a bread I used to make all the time. For even more orangey flvaor, try substituting a little orange juice for part of the milk. It will curdle the milk some, but it doesn’t matter because the liquid just gets kneaded into the dough if the milk separates a bit, that doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the final product. As far as I could tell, the orange juice’s acidity did not harm the yeast.