A friend who is something of an expert on the relationship between technologies of food production and American sacramental practices drew my attention to a fascinating essay at Killing the Buddha about the evolution of communion wafers as a mass-produced consumer product.  Evidently, a confluence of factors that are in themselves positive developments -- an upswing in the frequency of communion in many Protestant churches, a directive by the luminaries of Vatican II to make communion bread "more bread-like," a desire to take some of the pressure off overworked and under-resourced baking nuns who were struggling to keep up with the demand for altar bread for local parishes -- led to a state of affairs in which, contra generations of practice, most churches that use wafers for communion no longer purchase them from religious communities for whom baking is a form of prayer, but from a mass producer that makes its wares available off the shelf, in catalogs, or over the internet.

The author notes the similarities of the production process to that of ubiquitous snack food products, and comments that in some areas the hosts have even been marketed as a low-fat snack.  Conceptually, theologically, there's nothing really wrong with this -- everyone involved agrees that, until it's been consecrated, the communion wafer is just bread.  Still, it seems odd to employ the same substance at the two extremes (and only at the two extremes) of the scale of mindfulness with regard to eating.

Snacks are a sort of food (or edible foodlike substances) that are designed to be consumed mindlessly -- that's part of the reason low-fat or low-cal snacks are desirable, because we can inhale them without doing too much damage to our waistlines.  Communion-wafers-as-snacks certainly aren't being marketed for the flavor, as they have none.  I think they have to be sold as a vehicle for the tactile experience of eating, not for nourishment or for savoring.

Communicants at the Eucharist, on the other hand, are encouraged to be supremely mindful of their consumption; to prepare for their reception -- ideally with confession and fasting; to examine themselves and beware of consuming the bread unworthily or without discernment.  Maybe not concentrating on the flavor or the bread and wine per se, but still, a radically different mindset from the mindless consumption of snack food.

Most of our eating lies somewhere in the middle -- neither mindless nor intensely mindful, neither empty of nutrition nor overflowing with spiritual significance -- the meals that sustain our bodies and punctuate our days.  Most of the churches of which I have been a part over the years have used some sort of everyday bread, not a specialty product, for their communion observance, and although it sometimes seems like a dry snippet of plain sandwich bread is not special enough for the enormity of what we observe when we observe communion, I appreciate the way this practice connects the ritual eating with the rhythms of daily life.

I have a draft of a poem that's been incubating for about a decade, built around the observation of an adolescent member of a former congregation that the size of the portions shared at communion make the title "The Lord's Supper" a bit strange -- "this isn't the Lord's Supper," he declared, "it's more like the Lord's Snack."  Perhaps his words were only the flippant observation of a teenage boy with a bottomless pit of a stomach, but I've found them illuminating.  Can snacking be redeemed?  What's the difference between a snack, an appetizer, and a meal?  What is the significance of leaving the table still hungry?  There's an awful lot of meaning in a tiny bit of bread.