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.

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.

Wilderness

I was sitting in the office of an Episcopal priest trained as a Jungian whom I had sought out for spiritual direction and counsel when I heard myself say, “I feel like one of my ancient forebears wandering in the wilderness. Perhaps I am supposed to be here, but it’s hard.”

I didn’t spend forty years in the wilderness; I spent four. It wasn’t a literal wilderness; in fact I was in a city of 330,000 in southwestern Ontario, the most urban place I’d lived. What made it my wilderness was a sense of wandering, being uprooted, feeling disconnected from any sense of home, homeland or even myself.

I moved in 2003, after a profoundly tumultuous year, in the effort to make the best of a difficult situation. Canada had always appealed to me as a sensible and progressive nation so when the opportunity arose to serve a congregation there, I went.

The first shift I noticed was the flat landscape. None of the rolling hills I knew from Tennessee or the mountains and forests of New Hampshire. Because trees root me spiritually, their absence stirred an existential loneliness that began the way dampness enters the pores on a rainy day and ends up soaking a person from the inside.

Next I realized the absence of familiar cultural markers. While the public library celebrated Black History Month in February there was no one around who shared the personal meaning contained in iconic images of Martin Luther King, Jr. My friend’s father had performed his autopsy. My sister had been born under the curfew that befell Nashville the week he died.

And then there was a feeling of exile that intensified every time I visited New Hampshire and had to leave again. I pored over the local weekly shopper each time I spent a day or two with my mother, imagining that I might drop in on a midweek event instead of flying back to Ontario.

In that way, my experience diverged sharply from the legendary story of the forebears who escaped bondage in Egypt only to be led into a desert where they wandered for forty years. The ancient Israelites, contrary to what their name suggests, had not yet inhabited was to become their homeland. They departed the familiarity of Egypt with its constraint of slavery, and like many of us who prefer the devil we know to the one we don’t, cried out to return. As horrible as their experience in captivity must have been, there were long stretches when it felt preferable to the unknowable wilderness. For in the wilderness, conditions were harsh, resources scarce, and the landscape desolate.

It helped immensely to view myself in relation to a larger story of ancient people wandering in an unfamiliar land not knowing why or what was to come.

Inherent in the narrative of wandering is a sense of disconnection yet paradoxically when we place ourselves within it we feel less alone. When we become part of something larger, identifying with an ancient story we are no longer free-floating nanospecks in an uncaring universe. We are players in an epic drama. Conceiving myself as a wanderer in the wilderness invited me to seek meaning in a trying time.

Understanding my life through a lens of archetypes and archetypal events: figurative births, deaths, and transitions gave me a more nuanced view of the journey.

To look at our lives and recognize wilderness is to confront the ways we find ourselves, figuratively, in exile. I’m not speaking of the literal circumstances and life-threatening situations of political refugees and persons displaced by war. I am speaking of a spiritual condition where any of us might find ourselves removed from the capacity to access the comfortingly familiar, to feel as though we can climb into the lap of what holds us and be cradled for a while. I am speaking of a sense of spiritual disconnection that may originate in any number of human behaviors: addiction for example, wherein the compulsion for a substance to provide relief, to offer escape from one’s own self-alienation only serves to deepen the alienation. We might end up wandering in the spiritual wilderness because grief has uprooted us like a tornado and dropped us into a desert of desolation or despair. We could find ourselves exiled from the source of what grounds us by dint of fear or depression, which limit our choices by obscuring them. Or we might find ourselves wandering after years of living un-attuned to what connects us to the thrum of being.

For some of us, it’s all of the above.

What I came to discover, as did the ancient Israelites, is that the wilderness provides a container—not a warm fuzzy one—but a container nonetheless for a set of experiences that have the potential to inform the rest.

There’s a scene in the story of the ancient Israelites, as told in the Book of Numbers, the name of which in Hebrew is Bimidbar which means “in the wilderness,” where the congregation as it is called, is fed up. They cry out to God in their woe: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there is no water to drink.” (20:5)

How many of us have been there—crying out, “Enough is enough” or in the case of deprivation, “Not enough is not enough”? I suspect most of us know the feeling of being asked to carry more than we can. We look around and instead of seeing the normal plentitude we glimpse only empty stores: no figs, no grain, no pomegranates. Not even water.

It’s at this moment in our own internal wilderness we are invited to relate to the billion fellow human beings who actually don’t have clean water to drink: to realize our interior landscape is an external reality for one out of six people on earth. It is hard to feel alone in that kind of company.

But because alienation makes it hard to feel the presence of others even when they are right beside us, we too, cry out.

In the Book of Numbers, God tells Moses and his brother Aaron to “assemble the congregation and command the rock to yield its water.” What’s instructive here is that neither God nor Moses, neither Aaron nor the rock alone yields water: the water springs as the result of combined stirrings.

If in the wilderness we can attune ourselves to the combined stirrings, if we can hear our voice as one among many, feel in our yearning the pull of each being who longs to survive, we can tap into a collective force that summons humility and evidences grace.

What befalls us and what is bestowed upon us arrives on a wind not of our own making—but how we receive it— whether we welcome it, deny it, or diminish it is ours to choose.

While beloved hymns portray grace as an unmerited gift that appears unbidden, the wilderness invites us to participate in that grace. To take note and avail ourselves. Shortly after my arrival to Canada, when already I had doubts about my decision to move there, a woman in the congregation shyly asked as she exited the building one Sunday if I made hospital visits. I answered yes and asked who might want a visit. “Me,” she said. Within a matter of months, she was in a hospice unit of a large hospital, where I visited daily. “You have made my dying easier,” she told me one afternoon.

T’was then grace first appeared.

The seeming wrong turns I had taken suddenly led me to a threshold of undeniable purpose. To ease the process of premature death for the one dying is an honor beyond words. It comes through the simple act of being present.

Wandering in the wilderness summons our presence. Unsettling, unfamiliar terrain gives no free passes. It demands focus as it enlivens the nerve endings and awakens emotion.

The simple gifts of presence and attention become magnified.

My second year in Canada, the mother of one of the few close friends I made died. I recognized being there is what afforded me the opportunity to be a companion. To serve as a pall bearer. That’s when I understood spiritual exile is not abandonment. This is important because we often confuse the two. The universe does not prevent sorrow; it holds us in it. When Cain sets off as a fugitive and a wanderer after slaying Abel, he turns his face from God but nowhere in the text does God turn from him. The story needn’t be real to be true and a truth of the tale is that the connection is not ours to break.

Though it has become cliché to say a burden shared is halved, being present to someone in grief provides not only purpose but perspective. It regenerates connection. Grief is an underground pool that links one loss to every other. There is value in not feeling unique. In one Buddhist teaching, a woman asks a sage how to relieve her unbearable grief. The sage instructs her to visit every house in the village until she finds the one untouched by sorrow. To wander in the wilderness is to visit every house in every village and realize none remains untouched.

In our pain we are not always relieved, but the wilderness teaches that we are accompanied, if not by the ones we expect, by the ones who also know the dimensions of loss and the scale of despair.

As wanderers we may view the plight as only our own but the wilderness itself sees the big picture and issues a cautionary tale.

As the ancient Israelites bemoan their fate and struggle mightily, they enlist a vengeful genocidal God to exact wrath upon perceived adversaries in language so horrifying as to place contemporary examples of genocide in the larger context of on ongoing story.

From the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.” (17-19)

In this wilderness, the holiest of holies condones infanticide and child sexual slavery. If read literally one shudders to think how modern perpetrators could read it as instruction; but approached figuratively, the call for such brutal desecration bespeaks an alienation so deep as to threaten the divine within each of us. Spiritual wilderness can be so disorienting as to unmoor us completely from our connection with the breath of the universe. When we become unhinged from our connection with the entirety of existence, when we can’t remember what allows us to feel it, when we forget, in Martin Luther King’s words, that “we are tied in a single garment of destiny,” we resort to tribalism, butchery, genocide.

The starkness of spiritual wilderness etches our humanity in sharp relief. In it we will find the gruesome geometry of terror and the unbroken line of connection depending where we look and how we act. For John Newton, the sea captain who penned “Amazing Grace,” the harsh angles of slavery led him to a point of reconnection with his own humanity and the divine.


In a much milder version of wandering, far from the high seas or ancient deserts, I have learned the usefulness of time in the wilderness; the way it tests us, not so that we earn favor or lose it, but so that we refasten ourselves to what matters, reconnect ourselves to what sustains us, and re-member ourselves to the universe that always holds us.

Some of us perish in that wilderness and some of us make it back.

In the office of the Jungian priest, I recounted a dream (because Jungians trade in dreams) in which I stare at a wall covered with vines of electrical cords, frantically searching for a loose plug and socket.

I interpreted the image as proof of my disconnection. “I don’t know how to plug back in.”

I don’t recall the priest’s exact words but they echoed Rumi, who in 13th century Persia wrote,

Listen for moan of dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs no one has heard of.

Give you life to be one of them.[1]


My last year in Canada, I got a dog I brought back with me. She is of course a love-dog sent into the wilderness to bring me home. Every day we walk together on the dead-end road where we live, or in the woods that surround our house. The walk is equal part exercise and prayer. Each step occasions gratitude—for coming home companioned by a dog I would not have were not for my time in the wilderness, a roaming dog who reminds me daily we may wander but we are not lost. Amen.
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[1] The Essential Rumi, Translations by Coleman Barks