While I was in Haiti, our local guide John, asked me about Unitarian Universalism. He attended bible college as a young man, studying Hebrew, Greek and World Religions as well as the bible. Not surprisingly, John puzzled over the way not everyone finds God a relevant concept in UU congregations. I gave my one-minute history schpiel on the origins and merger of Unitarianism and Universalism and then sped up to the Transcendentalists in the 1830s with their focus on an unmediated relationship with the divine, touching on the Western Unitarians in the 1860s and the Humanists in the 1930s who left God behind.
“What’s the point of a religious community without God?” John asked. “How does a community worship without a shared faith narrative?” I replied that we seek religious community as a context and container for living out our core values.
No matter what religious tradition one adheres to, the demands of a principled life are great. Living consciously and conscientiously means making ethical choices about how we eat and how we spend, how we parent and relate, commute and communicate, render justice and attempt reconciliation. To truly live out our principles requires stores of patience cultivated within religious community.
Belonging to a religious community affords one the companionship necessary to function without isolation or self-pity when coping with depression, disappointment, anger, or grief. Religious community differs from a social club or professional association by centering on what matters most, not just to the individual but the web of all existence. Like yoga, religious community stretches us into postures of generosity, not just by giving away more, but thinking more about the needs of others.
Religious community turns our view outward, shaping us into communitarians focused on the well-being of the collective and future generations. When we make decisions as a congregation, the central question isn’t “What suits me?” but “What enables us as a community to live out our shared values in a way that honors the interdependent web of life for generations to come?”
When we consider whether to buy the land on Fisher Road, when we discuss how we might re-conceive and renovate this building, we ask and answer in community as community, not as a group of self-directed individuals. That’s part of why we form religious community: to enlarge perspective and possibility by each bringing our conscience, reason, faith, and direct experience to bear. Together we create a mosaic informed by varieties of stone, glass and tile instead of a mural limited to a singular medium of paint.
In the covenant we recite weekly, we uphold the importance of “growing into harmony with each other and the Holy.” That’s not the purpose of a softball team or soccer club. It’s not the purview of a Parent-Teacher organization or a civic league. If religion is rooted in what refastens us, it is not God that is essential to the endeavor but our longing to connect. Holiness comes in many forms, arising in the weave of our interactions. Religious community exists to remind us again and again of the myriad ways we are part of an interdependent web of existence, part of the thrum of life and breathe of the universe. Belonging to a congregation invites us to consider how to live right-sized: sharing our gifts without over-consuming, over-reaching or overwhelming ourselves or others.
Religious community allows us to take risks, to try new roles, to step into leadership and discover ministries we didn’t know we had. Our congregations become gardens where we transform seeds of good intention into the fruit of action. Here we can cultivate patience and compassion by tending relationships we might otherwise not have. Whether we are single or partnered, parents or not, whether we relate to God or we don’t, whether we feel showered by blessing or jilted by life, we come together to find evidence of grace through the salve of presence and power of togetherness.
But frankly, we could use a little better PR. While I was talking to John in Haiti on Ash Wednesday, Stephen Colbert opened his show by pointing to his ash-smudged forehead. As “the world’s most famous Catholic,” he explains he has to give up something for Lent that involves true sacrifice so he gives up being Catholic for forty days. He wipes the ashes off his forehead, sighs, and says, “I feel so empty now. Is this how Unitarians feel all the time?”
The joke works because the perception exists we believe nothing and thus have a well of emptiness inside.
To counter this perception, a colleague is preaching a sermon this morning at his primarily humanist congregation. He is a deeply religious man, and a humanist. He embodies Unitarian Universalism the way St. Francis embodied the gospel of Jesus. In an effort to explain Unitarian Universalism in less time than it takes to say it, he has devised a ten-word summary: Oneness of Being; Oneness of Humanity: An Evolving Faith.
He writes in his sermon:
Obviously, these ten words are just the beginning and lead to hundreds more. …The explanation is a gestalt. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One of the special aspects of Unitarian Universalism is its balanced approach to living. This explanation implies that instead of relying on an outside source of authority or ideology whether it be a certain holy book or the scientific method, there is a dependence on a free and responsible search for truth which is based on a balance of reason, conscience and direct experience.
Complex religious issues are better viewed from a figurative perspective rather than a literal one. Metaphorical language is a cornerstone of being progressive. Non-literal language allows for many meanings of the same reality to exist. Rigid ideology is rooted within literal language. While words are important, the spirit is more important than the letter, if reaching the heart of the matter is the goal.
Reaching the heart of the matter is the goal of religious community. As far as I can tell, the purpose of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning is to do just that. We don’t gather week after week to arrive at a philosophical conclusion or to prove a theory. We gather to lift up what is worthy and in so doing, be a balm for one another when woe abrades us, when the mystery and randomness of life and death break our heart or stir it. We gather to light candles for the incomprehensible suffering wrought by earthquake. We gather to hold one another in the complexity of what it means to send our sons and daughters to war. And we gather to join our efforts to multiply the common good.
Here at First Parish, when anyone asks about social action, the answer is always our participation with MIHN, the Montachusett Interfaith Hospitality Network, a coalition of congregations that pool resources to provide transitional housing for folks at risk of homelessness. Every couple of months we take a turn hosting, providing meals, and paying utilities for the week. For as long as I’ve been here, Genifer Anderson has coordinated the effort. She enlists volunteers, often the Sunday our week begins, and covers many of the hosting shifts herself. She has been a tireless advocate of MIHN and along with Mark Gilbert, deserves the lion’s share of credit for our claiming this as a church endeavor. Many of you have provided meals, some have hosted, and probably most have chipped in for the utilities. As important as this effort is, it occurs to me if we don’t also expend some energy working to eradicate the causes of homelessness and the conditions that perennially lead to it in this area, we won’t be or bring about the change we seek.
It also occurs to me, that if the congregation indeed wants our involvement with MIHN to constitute our social action, then it’s time for the congregation as a whole to affirm this by working together instead of allowing a few individuals to carry the weight. Instead of Genifer having to ask people for each rotation to sign up, and to avoid anyone feeling put on the spot, if we as a congregation commit to supporting MIHN then let’s have a Saturday or Sunday afternoon cook-in or two where several of us sign up to make all the meals for our week together. Let’s create a team for each cycle we host that divvies up shopping, cooking, delivering and hosting. That way the work gets shared and even if someone can’t commit to hosting, cooking and delivering an entire meal, anyone can participate on a team.
Other folks whose interests and talents lay outside the kitchen or hosting could explore what kinds of action to take to truly tackle conditions that perpetuate homelessness. If we purchase the land on Fisher Road, the gardeners among us might undertake to grow veggies, berries, even cultivate fruit trees so that we can use the harvest for our summer MIHN meals. We might also offer residents at St. Joseph’s the opportunity to garden with us this summer.
There are multiple ways to collectively live out our values and commitment to MIHN and the larger cause of increased housing and food insecurity.
It is in the living that values come to life.
I admire the distillation of Unitarian Universalism down to ten words and I agree wholeheartedly we are a people rich in metaphor. Literalism is not our path. Words, images, events are open to interpretation. That’s why as Bill points out, we have a hymnal that ranges from Holly Near’s late 20th century anthem for gay pride, We Are a Gentle Angry People to the turn of the 19th century spiritual, We Shall Overcome, to the 12th century Carol, Jesus, Our Brother to Peter Yarrow’s Hanukah hymn, Light One Candle. The words we sing are portals to the holiness we seek. All words of course are metaphors for what the body experiences so perhaps the clearest distillation of Unitarian Universalism comes not from a phrase we speak but the actions we embody.
Quakers are known not for their words but their silence, and even more, their peace-making. We recognize the Amish by their forgiveness and horse-powered farming; Shakers by their beautifully wrought unadorned furniture. Jews daven, their bodies swaying like reeds in the wind moved by the spirit of prayer. Buddhists meditate. Sufis whirl. What do Unitarian Universalists do? For what action are we known?
Let this be a time in the life of our congregation when we embody what matters most. Perhaps we will become postern-modern builders of the ark, a vessel that preserves creation while moving forward. In our conversations and considerations let us not lose sight of the land that awaits us, the gardens that summon us, and the fruits that attest to our being.
Perhaps the next time a comedian pokes fun at our emptiness, our fullness will fill the void. And when anyone asks what is Unitarian Universalism, the answer will be simple: How we live. Amen.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Food Democracy
From the first chapter of Genesis:
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (vs.29-30, NRSV)
That is food democracy. The radical yet at one time commonplace idea that all beings “have the right to an adequate, safe, nutritious, sustainable, food supply.”
A lot has happened since the sixth century BCE when those verses were likely penned.
The great farmer-poet-essayist Wendell Berry writes:
By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light and darkness, In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination…we align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles into being and that will survive them.
Food is about relationship: ours with the earth, the elements, the soil, the animals, the plants, and each other. Food expresses our relationship to justice and moral sensibility. Because food springs from and relies on death as much as it assures life, there is a primacy to our relationship with food like nothing else. Thus our relationship with food, not just what we eat, but how we eat and by what means, forms a core of our spiritual and physical being.
The word “religion” comes from religare. To refasten, to return to what binds us as beings to one another, and to whatever we find holy. How we relate with food and its creation or production either refastens us to what matters—what is sacred in us and around us—or it sets into a motion a deep sense of alienation—from each other, the earth, the elements, the plants and animals, the soil and cycles, life itself.
Right now in the world, here and abroad, we have loosened the ties that bind dangerously far. By replacing the agrarian with the industrial to point where small farms are under threat of extinction and local economies have been largely usurped by a global one, it’s not simply that people no longer have access to an adequate, healthy, sustainable food supply; nor is it simply that we have traded our souls for sugary non-nutritive edibles that no longer resemble food. We have traded farming for factories, and exchanged the energy of work for dependence on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers. We have cut billions off from food supplies and self-reliance. Two weeks ago I preached on wandering in the wilderness. The state of our relationship with food has turned the garden of Creation into a barrenness more bitter than wandering itself.
Again, Wendell Berry:
The word agriculture, after all, does not mean “agriscience” much less “agribusiness.” It means “cultivation of land.” And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both “to revolve” and “to dwell.” To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, are all bound at the root of the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term “agribusiness.”
John Peterson, a third generation farmer and the subject of a documentary called “The Real Dirt on Farmer John” puts it this way: You’ve got two types of agriculture… One is the agribusiness model, or the chemical model, and it’s very, very dominated by capital. The other model is powered by something that may not be inexhaustible, but it’s more inexhaustible than capital. It’s powered by what I call a moral principle. You have people who are inspired by a moral impulse in relating to the soil and relating to the food, to the farmers and to the planet . . . There was no community supported agriculture farm in this country 20 years ago. Now there are maybe as many as a million people being fed from about 3,000 CSA farms—from zero to a million. This came out of human beings just deciding how to spend their money. It’s an incredible thing.
On an international scale, “agriculture remains part of the global capital market. Peasant, indigenous, and family farmers cannot compete with the rules of free trade, which are biased toward multinational corporations. Small producers suffer not only from failed domestic policies but also from the consequences of economic globalization.”
If we take a look at the seven principles affirmed by the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association in relation to food and the means by which we get it, a path out of the wilderness emerges.
Let’s begin with the seventh principle and work backward. Our seventh principle affirms our respect for the interdependent web of all existence. If we are to embody the respect we espouse for the interdependent web, how we nourish ourselves is the literal expression of embodiment.
Dr. Vandana Shiva who founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, writes, Our study on “Biodiversity based organic farming: A new paradigm for Food Security and Food Safety” has established that small biodiverse organic farms produce more food and provide higher incomes to farmers. [They] contribute both to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change… especially in Third World countries [where they] are totally fossil fuel free. Energy for farming operations comes from animal energy. Soil fertility is built by feeding soil organisms by recycling organic matter. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiverse systems are also more resilient to droughts and floods because they have higher water holding capacity . . . .
In the U.S. we “consume 17% of our fossil fuel . . . to grow . . . food with fossil fuel fertilizers, and use diesel on the farm, and use diesel to move the food and process [it]” ; we subsidize industrial farms that grow corn, soy and cotton while insisting that poorer countries lower tariffs. Yet our seventh principle is about decreasing toxicity in the soil, water, air, plant, animal and human life. It’s about stopping the assault on nature, which is to say the web of existence that contains us all.
Our fifth and sixth principles call for the right of conscience and the democratic process, with a goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. This means food sovereignty: “The right and freedom to grow diverse and nutritious food and the right to have access to save healthy adequate and affordable food.”(Vanda Shiva) As Haitian farmer Jonas Deronzil says, “People in the U.S. need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They’re ruining our chance to support ourselves.” All over the world, people strive to regain food sovereignty, from Haitian farmers vowing to burn Monsanto’s hybrid rice seeds to farmers in Thailand and South Korea “educating their people about the effects of global trade policies and pressuring their governments to respect the role of farmers.”
In the U.S. we call it food democracy not sovereignty but it’s the same thing: “food with the farmer's face on it.”
Our third and fourth principles call for acceptance of one another, encouragement of spiritual growth, and a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This entails examining our food practices and beliefs, not just individually, but as a congregation. What we eat and serve in community. We’re off to a good start with fairly traded coffee and chocolate, and milk from small local dairy farms. And think of the impact we could have buying the land on Fisher Road and gardening it—not just for ourselves, but some of Fitchburg’s more recent immigrants who may have farmed in their home countries but now live in a city with out land of their own to grow—or enough money to buy—healthy fresh food.
When we talk about our future, let us remember that our principles call us to spiritually evolve, to search responsibly, not to sit satisfied. When we have an opportunity to restore our relationship with food, to nurture in our children and in the wider community an appreciation for the earth and its cycles, and our embedded connection, let’s not hold back.
Our first and second principles affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all and express our commitment to justice, equity and compassion. There’s no way to do that if we turn from the reality of food insecurity worldwide. A billion people lack access to clean water or adequate and healthy food. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO’s yield cheap meat by denying the dignity or worth of animals and desecrating the environment.
Marion Nestle, Professor and former chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, says: “I see nationally everywhere people who are increasingly concerned about the quality of what they’re feeding themselves and their children. This is grassroots democracy in action.”
It matters what eggs we buy. It matters to the chickens, the land, our children, and ourselves. When we resist advertising that markets unhealthy products in packaging that gobbles resources instead of insuring people have enough nutritious food to eat, we live out our principles. When we realize the complexity of decisions like buying Stonyfield organic yogurt thinking it’s a New England company that buys from local farms, only to learn the blueberries are trucked in from eastern Canada and strawberries flown in from China, we wrestle with what a responsible search for truth really means.
We cannot solve a global problem ourselves but we can make local choices that impact the world. At the heart of food democracy or sovereignty is a local economy. In the words of Michael Pollan, “Local food economies are our best hope for checking the drift toward the total global economy. And food is where these economies begin.”
Wendell Berry writes,
People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity benefit the local community . . . This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total . . . To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.
In the Spring 2011 UUWorld magazine, Susan Bagby, a member of a New Mexico congregation writes of her family’s efforts to buy locally. They purchase a share in a CSA farm only to be so inundated with eggplants they decide not to re-enroll the next year; but they continue to buy most of their produce from a local farmers’ market.
In the same issue, there are letters to the editor about Monsanto’s ethics, or lack thereof, and an article by Rev. Kate Braestrup about the value of beginning a meal with a table grace. As she says, “Saying grace can remind us every meal is holy.” Across our denomination, we are re-evaluating our relationship with food. To be sure, it is a relationship fraught with geo-political and environmental complexities, but as a starting place we can participate in food production to the extent we can. As we consider the land on Fisher Road, we can cultivate a plan for congregational participation.
We can garden and prepare meals together; we can learn the origins of the food we buy and the ingredients in them. Whenever possible we can buy locally grown or raised food. We can educate ourselves as a congregation about food democracy and food tyranny, and from that stance of knowledge, act and activate for change. We can listen to farmers and insist that our elected representatives do, too. We can find out why the farm bill in Congress is a food bill that affects us all. We can learn best practices for farming and gardening and come to each meal with a deeper awareness of what goes into it, how it gets to us, and whether or not it refastens us, or moves us further apart.
What binds us as beings is the need for food. How we are bound together: in a relationship of mutual respect or exploitation, mindfulness or ignorance, sustainability or profit, is up to us with every bite we take.
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (vs.29-30, NRSV)
To paraphrase Wendell Berry, Let us not make shoddy the work of God.
Amen.
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (vs.29-30, NRSV)
That is food democracy. The radical yet at one time commonplace idea that all beings “have the right to an adequate, safe, nutritious, sustainable, food supply.”
A lot has happened since the sixth century BCE when those verses were likely penned.
The great farmer-poet-essayist Wendell Berry writes:
By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light and darkness, In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination…we align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles into being and that will survive them.
Food is about relationship: ours with the earth, the elements, the soil, the animals, the plants, and each other. Food expresses our relationship to justice and moral sensibility. Because food springs from and relies on death as much as it assures life, there is a primacy to our relationship with food like nothing else. Thus our relationship with food, not just what we eat, but how we eat and by what means, forms a core of our spiritual and physical being.
The word “religion” comes from religare. To refasten, to return to what binds us as beings to one another, and to whatever we find holy. How we relate with food and its creation or production either refastens us to what matters—what is sacred in us and around us—or it sets into a motion a deep sense of alienation—from each other, the earth, the elements, the plants and animals, the soil and cycles, life itself.
Right now in the world, here and abroad, we have loosened the ties that bind dangerously far. By replacing the agrarian with the industrial to point where small farms are under threat of extinction and local economies have been largely usurped by a global one, it’s not simply that people no longer have access to an adequate, healthy, sustainable food supply; nor is it simply that we have traded our souls for sugary non-nutritive edibles that no longer resemble food. We have traded farming for factories, and exchanged the energy of work for dependence on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers. We have cut billions off from food supplies and self-reliance. Two weeks ago I preached on wandering in the wilderness. The state of our relationship with food has turned the garden of Creation into a barrenness more bitter than wandering itself.
Again, Wendell Berry:
The word agriculture, after all, does not mean “agriscience” much less “agribusiness.” It means “cultivation of land.” And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both “to revolve” and “to dwell.” To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, are all bound at the root of the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term “agribusiness.”
John Peterson, a third generation farmer and the subject of a documentary called “The Real Dirt on Farmer John” puts it this way: You’ve got two types of agriculture… One is the agribusiness model, or the chemical model, and it’s very, very dominated by capital. The other model is powered by something that may not be inexhaustible, but it’s more inexhaustible than capital. It’s powered by what I call a moral principle. You have people who are inspired by a moral impulse in relating to the soil and relating to the food, to the farmers and to the planet . . . There was no community supported agriculture farm in this country 20 years ago. Now there are maybe as many as a million people being fed from about 3,000 CSA farms—from zero to a million. This came out of human beings just deciding how to spend their money. It’s an incredible thing.
On an international scale, “agriculture remains part of the global capital market. Peasant, indigenous, and family farmers cannot compete with the rules of free trade, which are biased toward multinational corporations. Small producers suffer not only from failed domestic policies but also from the consequences of economic globalization.”
If we take a look at the seven principles affirmed by the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association in relation to food and the means by which we get it, a path out of the wilderness emerges.
Let’s begin with the seventh principle and work backward. Our seventh principle affirms our respect for the interdependent web of all existence. If we are to embody the respect we espouse for the interdependent web, how we nourish ourselves is the literal expression of embodiment.
Dr. Vandana Shiva who founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, writes, Our study on “Biodiversity based organic farming: A new paradigm for Food Security and Food Safety” has established that small biodiverse organic farms produce more food and provide higher incomes to farmers. [They] contribute both to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change… especially in Third World countries [where they] are totally fossil fuel free. Energy for farming operations comes from animal energy. Soil fertility is built by feeding soil organisms by recycling organic matter. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiverse systems are also more resilient to droughts and floods because they have higher water holding capacity . . . .
In the U.S. we “consume 17% of our fossil fuel . . . to grow . . . food with fossil fuel fertilizers, and use diesel on the farm, and use diesel to move the food and process [it]” ; we subsidize industrial farms that grow corn, soy and cotton while insisting that poorer countries lower tariffs. Yet our seventh principle is about decreasing toxicity in the soil, water, air, plant, animal and human life. It’s about stopping the assault on nature, which is to say the web of existence that contains us all.
Our fifth and sixth principles call for the right of conscience and the democratic process, with a goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. This means food sovereignty: “The right and freedom to grow diverse and nutritious food and the right to have access to save healthy adequate and affordable food.”(Vanda Shiva) As Haitian farmer Jonas Deronzil says, “People in the U.S. need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They’re ruining our chance to support ourselves.” All over the world, people strive to regain food sovereignty, from Haitian farmers vowing to burn Monsanto’s hybrid rice seeds to farmers in Thailand and South Korea “educating their people about the effects of global trade policies and pressuring their governments to respect the role of farmers.”
In the U.S. we call it food democracy not sovereignty but it’s the same thing: “food with the farmer's face on it.”
Our third and fourth principles call for acceptance of one another, encouragement of spiritual growth, and a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This entails examining our food practices and beliefs, not just individually, but as a congregation. What we eat and serve in community. We’re off to a good start with fairly traded coffee and chocolate, and milk from small local dairy farms. And think of the impact we could have buying the land on Fisher Road and gardening it—not just for ourselves, but some of Fitchburg’s more recent immigrants who may have farmed in their home countries but now live in a city with out land of their own to grow—or enough money to buy—healthy fresh food.
When we talk about our future, let us remember that our principles call us to spiritually evolve, to search responsibly, not to sit satisfied. When we have an opportunity to restore our relationship with food, to nurture in our children and in the wider community an appreciation for the earth and its cycles, and our embedded connection, let’s not hold back.
Our first and second principles affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all and express our commitment to justice, equity and compassion. There’s no way to do that if we turn from the reality of food insecurity worldwide. A billion people lack access to clean water or adequate and healthy food. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO’s yield cheap meat by denying the dignity or worth of animals and desecrating the environment.
Marion Nestle, Professor and former chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, says: “I see nationally everywhere people who are increasingly concerned about the quality of what they’re feeding themselves and their children. This is grassroots democracy in action.”
It matters what eggs we buy. It matters to the chickens, the land, our children, and ourselves. When we resist advertising that markets unhealthy products in packaging that gobbles resources instead of insuring people have enough nutritious food to eat, we live out our principles. When we realize the complexity of decisions like buying Stonyfield organic yogurt thinking it’s a New England company that buys from local farms, only to learn the blueberries are trucked in from eastern Canada and strawberries flown in from China, we wrestle with what a responsible search for truth really means.
We cannot solve a global problem ourselves but we can make local choices that impact the world. At the heart of food democracy or sovereignty is a local economy. In the words of Michael Pollan, “Local food economies are our best hope for checking the drift toward the total global economy. And food is where these economies begin.”
Wendell Berry writes,
People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity benefit the local community . . . This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total . . . To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.
In the Spring 2011 UUWorld magazine, Susan Bagby, a member of a New Mexico congregation writes of her family’s efforts to buy locally. They purchase a share in a CSA farm only to be so inundated with eggplants they decide not to re-enroll the next year; but they continue to buy most of their produce from a local farmers’ market.
In the same issue, there are letters to the editor about Monsanto’s ethics, or lack thereof, and an article by Rev. Kate Braestrup about the value of beginning a meal with a table grace. As she says, “Saying grace can remind us every meal is holy.” Across our denomination, we are re-evaluating our relationship with food. To be sure, it is a relationship fraught with geo-political and environmental complexities, but as a starting place we can participate in food production to the extent we can. As we consider the land on Fisher Road, we can cultivate a plan for congregational participation.
We can garden and prepare meals together; we can learn the origins of the food we buy and the ingredients in them. Whenever possible we can buy locally grown or raised food. We can educate ourselves as a congregation about food democracy and food tyranny, and from that stance of knowledge, act and activate for change. We can listen to farmers and insist that our elected representatives do, too. We can find out why the farm bill in Congress is a food bill that affects us all. We can learn best practices for farming and gardening and come to each meal with a deeper awareness of what goes into it, how it gets to us, and whether or not it refastens us, or moves us further apart.
What binds us as beings is the need for food. How we are bound together: in a relationship of mutual respect or exploitation, mindfulness or ignorance, sustainability or profit, is up to us with every bite we take.
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (vs.29-30, NRSV)
To paraphrase Wendell Berry, Let us not make shoddy the work of God.
Amen.
Testimonial of a Burgeoning Locavore
by Rick Caspers-Ross
I started a journey a few years ago when my wife came home
and announced that she had declared war on products containing High
Fructose Corn Syrup. Until this point in my life I had never
thought much about the food we ate and to be honest, I wasn’t
really on board.
Since then I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking about the politics
of food. I have become deeply concerned that our food systems, and
therefore our very survival, are in the hands of corporations. I'm
worried about how healthy and safe the food we eat is and our diet’s
effect on the environment, on the lives of the animals and the workers
it relies upon. The issues are so large that I find it hard to wrap
my arms around them all.
In response to these concerns, and before even moving to Massachusetts, we
started dreaming about the fruit trees, berry bushes, perennial and
annual vegetables we would plant. We wanted to create sustainable
systems that wouldn’t require toxic pesticides or chemical
fertilizers. I learned the words “food forest” and “permaculture”.
We researched bees knowing we would need to create a pollinator-
friendly environment in our garden, and consequently learned about
Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon which caused unexplained and
unprecedented deaths in bee colonies. That day we decided we would
keep bees.
Some of the plans we made have come to fruition, some are in
progress, while others have changed. We are growing mushrooms,
blueberries and raspberries but for now our plans to raise chickens are on
hold due to zoning laws.
I have found great joy in growing our own food and sharing our bounty.
It has led me places I never expected, and I have met some wonderful
people. Food has great power to bring people together, to heal and
nurture. No one likes to eat alone.
This past fall I found a farm in Gill that was still selling seed
garlic late in the season, and I arranged a visit to purchase some one
night after work. Just before leaving the farm I asked if they could
point us to a good local restaurant as it was getting late and I had
my wife and son with me. None of us had eaten. Farmer Dan said,
"Absolutely," and pointed toward his house, saying, “My kitchen is that
way.”
We shared an amazing meal that night and I was blown away by
Dan and his wife’s generosity. When I think back to that night I am
reminded of that simple act of kindness to a total stranger and how I
would like to see more of that in the world. I want to help create more of
that in the world.
I started a journey a few years ago when my wife came home
and announced that she had declared war on products containing High
Fructose Corn Syrup. Until this point in my life I had never
thought much about the food we ate and to be honest, I wasn’t
really on board.
Since then I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking about the politics
of food. I have become deeply concerned that our food systems, and
therefore our very survival, are in the hands of corporations. I'm
worried about how healthy and safe the food we eat is and our diet’s
effect on the environment, on the lives of the animals and the workers
it relies upon. The issues are so large that I find it hard to wrap
my arms around them all.
In response to these concerns, and before even moving to Massachusetts, we
started dreaming about the fruit trees, berry bushes, perennial and
annual vegetables we would plant. We wanted to create sustainable
systems that wouldn’t require toxic pesticides or chemical
fertilizers. I learned the words “food forest” and “permaculture”.
We researched bees knowing we would need to create a pollinator-
friendly environment in our garden, and consequently learned about
Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon which caused unexplained and
unprecedented deaths in bee colonies. That day we decided we would
keep bees.
Some of the plans we made have come to fruition, some are in
progress, while others have changed. We are growing mushrooms,
blueberries and raspberries but for now our plans to raise chickens are on
hold due to zoning laws.
I have found great joy in growing our own food and sharing our bounty.
It has led me places I never expected, and I have met some wonderful
people. Food has great power to bring people together, to heal and
nurture. No one likes to eat alone.
This past fall I found a farm in Gill that was still selling seed
garlic late in the season, and I arranged a visit to purchase some one
night after work. Just before leaving the farm I asked if they could
point us to a good local restaurant as it was getting late and I had
my wife and son with me. None of us had eaten. Farmer Dan said,
"Absolutely," and pointed toward his house, saying, “My kitchen is that
way.”
We shared an amazing meal that night and I was blown away by
Dan and his wife’s generosity. When I think back to that night I am
reminded of that simple act of kindness to a total stranger and how I
would like to see more of that in the world. I want to help create more of
that in the world.
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