Last Sunday’s First Reading was the prophet Amos decrying the religious hypocrisy and wage injustice rife in the Israel of his day. His indictment reads:

“When will the new moon be over,” you ask,
“that we may sell our grain,
and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat?
We will diminish the ephah,
add to the shekel,
and fix our scales for cheating!
We will buy the lowly for silver,
and the poor for a pair of sandals;
even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!”

Those whom Amos attacks are waiting for the “new moon” to pass because it would mark the end of a religious festival (see Nm 28) which interrupted commerce. In other words, these traders were looking to get the religious observance out of the way because it disrupted money making. The same with the “sabbath” and its pause from quotidian affairs for the things of God.

But it’s not just an eagerness to make an honest shekel that drives them. In fact, they don’t want an honest shekel at all. They want a unit of currency whose value they adjusted in their favor at their buyers’ disadvantage. The same with the units of measure: an adulterated ephah and dishonest weights and measures. The value of the poor is reduced to a simple pair of sandals.

We would be wrong to think Amos’s indictment only applied to eighth century B.C. Israel. Religious considerations no longer interrupt commerce; indeed, it’s considered a Constitutional infringement to have blue laws. As Shania Twain cogently observed, “Our religion is to go and blow it all//so we’re spending every Sunday at the mall.” Well, maybe not: malls, like “Ka-Ching,” are soooo 2003. We can blow it all online, never having to leave Our Lady of the Bedcovers.

Maybe we don’t “diminish the ephah,” we just reduce the size of the Milky Ways or the McDonald’s hamburger. Keep the price, reduce the weight. Amos foretold “shrinkflation.”

But what really struck me about the contemporaneity of Amos’s indictment was the last line: “even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!”

Last Friday I was in a local supermarket buying some bread. Alongside the shrinkflated bread, I noticed another commodity: bread chips. They weren’t far from the “donut holes.” Yes, I know that “donut holes” are usually just smaller pieces of fried dough. Once upon a time, consumers would have reacted to these scraps as junk. But manufacturers with no sense of shame in what they want to make money from (disguising it as “consumer choice”) have repackaged such stuff as “donut holes” and “bread chips.” Amos’s enemies were simply too dumb to “re-judaize” (too early to “re-christen”) their chaff as “different wheat.”

Hot dogs and various kinds of lunch meat have been long derided as the ground debris of meat butchers would otherwise have to throw out. It’s why the phrase “learning how the sausage is made” refers to initiating somebody into the less-than-pretty backroom processes by which things happen, often with the add-on “and you might become a vegetarian.” It’s also why Hebrew National hot dogs — wanting to stand out from the crowd — adopted the slogan “We’re kosher—we answer to a higher authority!” (Analogously, the original “meat” product in a can might explain how “spam” came to be the term for junk email. Such castoffs have long been poorer peoples’ food — as I learned when I was a grad student.)

When Jesus initially turns away the Canaanite woman seeking help for her daughter, she replies by reminding Him that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their Master’s table” (Mt 15:27; Mk 7:28). In Jesus’ time, at least those fallen crumbs were free. No doubt today’s disciples of Adam Smith (though not necessarily of Christ’s) might find a way to repackage and sell them as tiny treats.

Profit is legitimate, but not at any cost for anything. Economic injustice, including wage theft (whether by the employer or by a system that minimizes workers’ pay but maximizes sellers’ profits) is a sin crying to heaven for vengeance. And it’s especially egregious when marketed as “food.” Offal is not a differently defined foodstuff. It’s chaff — the kind of chaff Amos called “refuse” some 27 centuries ago. Garbage by any other name…