Gardens and Galaxies Through Child-like Eyes

My daughter will eat peas from the garden, but not from the grocery store.

She’s two years old and has developed a determined curiosity that I have trouble keeping up with. This is the summer she discovered that strawberries, which she devours from the grocery store, actually grow in the ground. One calm evening in a friend’s backyard, she spotted dozens of jewel-like berries nestled among green leaves. Descending upon the garden, she feasted with abandon until every vine lay bare.

But berries are an easy sell for a toddler. Months later, in my father’s garden, I pointed out the green crescents hiding on a trellis—snow peas. I’d offered her peas before (those plump sugar peas from the store) but they were always met with a look of disdain. This time, curiosity won. She plucked a pea from the vine and nibbled, and not long after she was on the hunt for more. Seeing the peas grow from the earth and the act of pulling them from the vine transformed the experience.

As a parent, I want my daughter to have a holistic relationship with food grounded in the garden, and to see how food connects us to history, culture, and story. Food has been an important cultural anchor for me my entire life. Not just eating it, but understanding where it comes from, how it is cultivated or rooted in tradition, and knowing how to prepare it. I've learnt my own heritage from the culinary traditions of my family: how Oma foraged more walnuts than she could use from the tree in her backyard because she was raised during the Holodomor, how we often drove out of our way to Birchwood Dairy for ice cream because the cows reminded my mother of her childhood on a farm outside of Winnipeg, or how my father’s war-torn Vietnam valued food and hospitality so deeply that the common greeting was ăn cơm chưa? [i] If you're paying attention, food can tell you a lot about who somebody is, where they come from, and what they value.

Food is one of humanity’s most creative acts. No other creature prepares food as we do. We intuitively know that food is more than just sustenance: a steak represents abundance and decadence, a dessert carries the memory of your grandparents, and a sandwich connects you to a regional identity. And the act of cultivating or cooking food often represents great care. Your local cafe might partner with an organic farmer in the region because relationships and community are important to them. Your friend might go out of their way to find a special ingredient in preparation for a meal together.

Food reflects our values, for better or for worse. We can cultivate our food by prioritizing efficiency or ecology. And we can make our consumption choices based around community or around individualism. If I've lectured all morning, my instinct is to retreat to my office and eat at my desk instead of sharing a meal with my colleagues, opting for independence and the illusion of productivity over the hard work of community-building. Food, whether you be the farmer or the chef, is human creation. Ultimately, however, it depends on structures that go deeper than our ability to create. I could not command those snow peas in the garden to grow from the ground. The universe submits to a more fundamental authority.

It's a lot easier to talk about food with people than it is to talk about my work as a professor of physics. People often speak more enthusiastically about food than about their high-school physics class, and most people tend to politely excuse themselves from conversation when I start babbling on about strange quarks or color charges. But just like food tells a deeper story about who we are as human beings, the universe tells a deeper story about a God that created it. At the heart of physics is an urge to understand the universe at its most fundamental level. Physicists understand that nature is both complicated and coherent; that belief in coherence drives us to seek models that explain complexity by starting from the simplest truths. The same physics that describes two billiard balls crashing together also tells us how subatomic particles will collide and scatter. As Christians, we believe that this coherence isn't coincidence but instead points to the deeper revelation of a personal Creator.

Carl Sagan poetically exclaimed that "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" [ii]. Every meal depends on a cosmic story: the chemical elements in an apple were forged in ancient stars. Through the birth, life, and death of a star come the dust from which we are made. Food may be an example of human creation, but when we create, we echo the creativity of God. If our creations tell the story of who we are or what we value, what more does the universe have to say about the Creator? The role of the faith-driven scientist is to seek answers to these questions, and bear witness to them.

Physics then, is a discipline of uncovering the scaffolding on which our universe sits because it reveals something about God. We seek to understand this structure, be attentive to it, and learn to predict its behavior. Most importantly perhaps, is that we learn to delight in this structure. The history of science is full of unexpected twists and turns in our understanding of the universe, with scientists (regardless of religious conviction) repeatedly expressing awe and wonder about the things that they see. The universe is rarely as we expect it to be. To bear witness to creation is not only to celebrate creation, but it is also to speak to how it functions and to the ways we have worked against it as sinful human beings.

The Psalmist says that the heavens declare the glory of the Lord [iii]. Physics taught me how to listen to what the heavens were declaring. Learning to see God in the heart of a star has helped me to look below the surface of ordinary things like the food we eat or the gardens we grow. What message does my daughter hear when she only recognizes peas as something that comes in a plastic bag from the grocery store? What values does she learn when she only eats her strawberries from a carton rather than off the vine? When her tiny hands pick precious strawberries from the vines that have emerged from the Earth as an everyday miracle, I hope she sees the same generosity and abundance that I see when I look toward the stars.