Usually it’s gross to find something unexpected in your food, but when the surprise is holy, it’s a miracle. The best-known sighting in the last half century happened in October 1977, when Maria Rubio of Lake Arthur, New Mexico, gazed at the browned area on a tortilla she had heated in a skillet and saw Jesus. Family, neighbors, and friends were summoned to corroborate the kitchen vision, and Mrs. Rubio convinced a local priest to bless it. She subsequently created the Shrine of the holy tortilla, mounting the flatbread under glass in a shed behind her home. Tens of thousands of pilgrims journeyed to Mrs. Rubio’s backyard exhibit to pray for the tortilla’s blessings.
Mrs. Rubio did not turn her vision into cash, but the rapture of an edible advent is often complemented by financial good fortune. One of the most famous eBay auctions, in November 2004, was for a ten-year-old, partially eaten melted cheese sandwich that had come off the grill with an image of the Virgin Mary and, according to the auction listing, had brought its original owner a decade of good luck in casinos. The hammer price for the sandwich was $28,000; its seller soon also auctioned the pan in which it was cooked for $5999.99. (The buyer of both sandwich and pan was the online casino GoldenPalace.com, which also has been winning bidder in auctions for Britney Spears’s egg salad sandwich and four toilets once owned by Jerry Garcia.)
Godly victuals are not confined to Christianity. After a Kazakhstani chicken laid an egg with Allah’s name inscribed on its shell in 2006, the chicken farmer said he was convinced that the egg’s sanctity would keep it from spoiling. But not all such apparitions are eternal. Being food, they rot. By the time we saw the legendary Jesus tortilla of New Mexico in the mid-1990s, Southwest sun and natural decay had transformed His three-by-three-inch face into an abstract pattern that not even Hermann Rorschach would recognize. And five years ago, when Maria Rubio’s granddaughter brought the tortilla to school for show and tell, it dropped and smashed to pieces on the floor. The shrine was closed and the tortilla’s remains were entombed in a drawer at Mrs. Rubio’s home.