Food and Faith

Hoodwinked

John Perkins may not know about the Presbyterian doctrine of total depravity, but he sure makes a case for it! If you read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, I'm guessing you'll want to read John Perkins' latest, Hoodwinked. Jill Richardson writes a review on La Vida Locavore starting with these words -

In Hoodwinked, John Perkins exposes the rotten core of a system that we here on this blog have been chipping away at around the edges. The manifestations of the problem come in our lack of a health care system, our unjust, pollution-based food system and its failure to nourish us...

Not for the faint of heart!

For lighter education on another topic related to the food industry, which accounts for a large percentage of carbon emissions, see Annie Leonard's new stick figure animation - this time about Cap & Trade, the proposed solution to global warming.

And if you missed The Story of Stuff, you are in for a treat.

Black Friday and Fair Trade

Please excuse the lack of actual food references in this article. I am posting it as an awareness raising tool about consumer choices in general, to recognize the purchasing power we have in the US (for Christmas gifts or for dinner) and the role our consumption has on world poverty and an alternative to this discouraging reality (Fair Trade). So, Dispatch from the Bridge of Hope Fair Trade Program in Peru:

Yesterday at a fabulous intercultural-expatriate Thanksgiving meal (another blog soon to come), I had the duty of explaining to Peruvian friends what is Black Friday. I described it as a disgusting manifestation of my country´s consumer insanity. A sometimes homicidal frenzy to buy, buy, buy. An oblivion of credit cards and savings spent, of angry drivers and enraged shoppers, of mistreatment, impatience, entitlement, and just plain rudeness.

Why do people act like that, my Peruvian friends asked.

Why, indeed.

A naked greed exposed on the blackest of days.

Is this what we give thanks for, the day before, or how we prepare for a sacred arrival?

Yesterday I gave thanks to be in Peru where I wouldn´t have to deal with this awful custom. I hate it, I really, really hate it. The fact that people stand in line all night, trample each other to enter box stores, or fight over prices and product supply.

The customer is always right, right? So we´ve been taught in our culture. Consumerism is what is valued.

But what about human values? Enjoying Thanksgiving with the family instead of dashing out to spend the night awaiting the Golden Gates to open? Or analyzing the effect of box stores on local economies (destroys small businesses) and the environment (imagine the trees that existed before the massive parking lot). And most importantly, recognizing the now-so-alientaed human effort that went into bringing each Christmas bargain under your tree, including the cashier who got up at 3am, missing her kid´s day off from school, getting paid just about minimum wage  to make sure YOU get the best deal (and the CEO is off on a yacht in the Caribbean...)

There were people who constructed that toy, or molded that dish, knit that sweater, or made those earrings (photo: Ernesto of Fair Trade jewelry group Munay Rumi). Were they paid fairly? Probaby machines played a part in the production. Were the overseers kept safe in the operation? A company shipped that in from SouthEast Asia or Latin America. How many hands did it pass through to get to you, and who made the most money in the exchange?

There are choices we can make as consumers that favor human values over blind bargains. That is, when you like at the price, think about the cost. Who is receiving less because you are paying less? I guarantee the squeeze is hardest at the production level.

I encourage you all today to reflect on your purchasing power. Think about alternatives to the mainstream manic of Black Friday.

One alternative is buying Fair Trade. Besides the fact that it is easy to buy over the internet, to avoid the unpleasant people out in the malls today (and for the next month, and just malls in general which give me a sense of nausea), your purchase means that you are investing in an artisan´s life. It means you recognize, support, and encourage fair prices, producer´s rights, safe working environments, gender equality, democratic leadership, solidarity, justice, communication, transparency, business training, micro-entrepreneurs, and alternative development strategies. Yup, all that in a scarf. (Like from the fair trade Group Warmipa Maqui.)

Another alternative is boycotting. Take yourself out of the equation, and choose to celebrate Christmas in more meaningful ways. Maybe homemade presents, maybe activities instead of "stuff", volunteer, investing time (instead of the money you apparently don´t have because the economic crisis is so bad that donations to humanitarian organizations have dropped significantly), or make a donation to a cause you care about in someone´s name, as an honorary gift.

Why is Black Friday called Black Friday? asked our Peruvian friends.

One USAer said, because companies get of the hole in one day, and their books go from "red" to "black."  I had never thought of that answer before.

My answer was: because it is a dark, dark day.

--------------------

Alexandra Buck is facilitator of the Bridge of Hope Fair Trade program, an effort of the Joining Hands Peru Network, one of 10 country networks that make up the international arm of the Presbyterian Hunger Program. She tries to stay balanced even when she´s walking on ruins, and she´s making this Christmas a Fair Trade Christmas. She hopes you don´t stand in line too long today.

One straw revolutionary lives on

Just over a year after his death, FUKUOKA Masanobu was the main topic of conversation at our Thanksgiving meal table today. Fukuoka was an amazing man who I had the chance to meet at his farm on Shikoku Island back in 1985, when I was living in Japan. His contributions to agriculture, permaculture and profound philosophies undergirding farming, nature and life are innumerable.

Here is a video of Fukuoka and helpers making seed balls for permaculture planting.

You can read a short obituary on 'Permaculture Reflections' and read below of brother Stephen's account of how his life was changed.

By Stephen Bartlett
     It would not be an exaggeration to say that Masanobu Fukuoka's work, thought and farm had a life-changing impact on myself and my family.  In 1987, February, my wife Ada and I traveled from China where we were teaching to Japan to visit my brother, on one condition: that he arrange for us to visit Fukuoka.  We had read the One Straw Revolution with fascination.  To make a long story short, we spent about a week in Iyo, mostly alone in the thatched hut, except for a young Norwegian vegan woman helping Fukuoka with his pine tree disease research.

    We spent the days from dawn to dusk harvesting oranges with Fukuoka's son, in exchange for food, which we cooked over bamboo in the hut hearth.  We didn't see the Old Man until Sunday when we were resting in the spongy soiled orchard surrounding the hut.  Fukuoka came and had a fit, belaboring us verbally, declaring that we were not serious, not sufficiently committed yet to the task of defending the earth.  He showed us the roots of diseased pine seedlings, saying the earth was being unbalanced, that life itself could be destroyed by the ambitions and stupidity of humanity.  We were psychologically shocked by his verbal attack, as he stormed off, saying we should come to his own hut once we had finished eating our breakfast, rice again, that was cooking over the smokey fire. 

Fair Food

A few weeks ago, in a town in Peru called Huancayo in the Central Andes, we celebrated the anniversary of CEDEPAS, one of the founding organizations in the Joining Hands Network Peru (a program of the Presbyterian Church USA Hunger Program).

It was a conference about Organic Agriculture and Food Security with Sovereignty. With a convincing spin, the organizers decided Fair Trade was a relevant theme to present regarding the question of sovereignty....Based on my experience with the Bridge of Hope Fair Trade Program, one of the campaigns of the Network, I related Fair Trade to Organic Agriculture. Here's my take:

Organic agriculture is a development alternative. It is a choice to grow food with respect for the earth and for community. It is an effort to live with solidarity and responsibility, for the land and for our bodies and for our families. Practicing organic agriculture (growing, harvesting, preparing, eating, digesting) means choosing to step outside the easy come easy go meals from a can which benefit neither the producer nor the consumer. It means investing in change and investing in life.

Fair trade is also a development alternative. It is a choice to buy products that respect the earth and the community: products made in conditions that believe in caring for the environment and caring for the rights and health of producers. It is an effort to live in solidarity between producers and consumers, not to exploit producers so that the consumers benefit from the cheapest price possible while the producers embody all of the cost. Practicing Fair Trade means taking a real look at the systems of trade that "can" the global economy and keep the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Fair Trade means investing in change and investing in life.

And that, to me, is the most Christian thing we can do, if you want to put the theological spin on it. What did Christ teach us, if not that life conquers death? That we ought not sit complacent in the face of injustice, but rather confront over-processed, dehumanized, dehumanizing systems and work to change them into real, fair relationships?

Fair Trade is an organic movement. It's an alternative to the big systems of trade that confuse us all into complacency with piles of jargon and rotting bumper crops subsidized against underproductive fields in hungry countries. Fair Trade is a new way of relating, using principles of equity, justice, transparency, solidarity, and empowerment. And this model is one we can use not just for wholesale orders, but in every encounter we have with our neighbor.

Try it. It has a refreshing crunch.

* * * * * * * *
Alexandra Buck serves as facilitator for the Bridge of Hope Fair Trade Program of the Joining Hands Network PERU. She buys her fruit and veggies from the local market and respects the prices that artisans set for their products. She loves the bright blue of the Andean sky and the sunny wind through Huancayo.

Monks, mushrooms and the sacramental nature of everyday eating

Don't miss Fred Bahnson's post from Duke Divinity's "Faith & Leadership. Here are a few morsels...

"But as I wander the monastery gardens I find myself thinking not about the feast days but of ferial repasts. These are the everyday meals which, without a rich sacramental  life to accompany them, become bleak affairs signifying nothing more than the intake of nutrients.

What was the connection between those consecrated elements and the pumpernickel I ate for breakfast or the oyster mushroom risotto I had at lunch? Perhaps our sacramental bread is less a representation of our daily bread than something that actually gives shape and meaning and coherence to it. Eucharistia, in Greek, means thankfulness."

Fred writes of the overflowing goodness of the sacraments that circles around in love -

"During the four years I directed a church-supported community garden ministry we would often hold Eucharist in the garden on our Saturday workdays. I came to learn what was confirmed at Mepkin: that the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood doesn’t end at the communion table. It spreads outward into the streets and fields, the creeks and rivers, the gardens and mushroom buildings, the Thanksgiving feasts and the monks’ Spartan tables and back again to the lifted elements. Had we the “conviction of things not seen” we would recognize this seamless flow of nutrients both visible and invisible, profane and holy. And we would be changed."

Read the post

Local Food at a Stand Still

“The local food movement is going nowhere.” That’s according to my friend Mike. Mike is an intern at a nearby sustainable, organic farm, and he told me this while we were sitting at a locally-owned restaurant eating grass-fed bison burgers raised on a different farm less than 30 miles away. I had to disagree with him.

I live in Louisville, Kentucky (which was just ranked the “10^th fattest city” in the U.S. in a very unscientific magazine survey – a big part of Mike’s pessimistic argument). If this movement is going nowhere, then how are Louisville’s 27 farmers markets staying in business?  How was Rainbow Blossom – one of many nutrition/local produce grocers in town – able to expand to their fifth location last  month?

Here’s more evidence that the local, sustainable food movement is alive and well. While I was channel surfing a few days ago, I saw a segment on Kentucky’s PBS affiliate about a biodynamic farmer from Crestwood, KY who talked about the increased demand for their products. A week earlier, I was browsing the shelves at a movie rental store and noticed a prominently displayed section full of food and agriculture documentaries like Food Inc, Fresh and King Corn. Jump back two weeks before that, and I’m in a mostly full theater listening to Will Allen of Growing Power call this movement a full-fledged revolution. If he can fill a theater for an urban gardening lecture at 8:45 AM on a Saturday morning, I’d have to agree with him.

Growing Power is an organization in Milwaukee that produces fresh, affordable and healthy food in the middle of an urban food desert. A similar project is underway in Louisville called Breaking New Grounds. Louisville is also home to the Food Literacy Project and Neighborhood House which received a grant from the Presbyterian Hunger Program to teach children about the local food system and let them get their hands dirty in the vegetable garden. Read about that grant, or better yet take a look at all of the grants PHP has awarded to dozens of similar organizations.

Maybe I’m more optimistic than my friend Mike because I’ve read all about those organizations, but I say the local food movement is on its way up… and fast. Maybe that’s because it has nowhere to go but up. Mike was kind of right, the Center for Disease Control put Kentucky as the 6^th most obese state last year (see for yourself). Minorities are the most at-risk for obesity and diabetes. The agricultural industry is now more consolidated and powerful than it ever has been before (see the Food and Faith website). Sure, things are bad now, but that’s no reason to be pessimistic.

Change starts with one person. So start buying local, find a farmers market and go to it, buy fair trade when you can’t find it close by, and stay up-to-date about food/agriculture legislation with the Washington Office. The local food movement will only go nowhere if you let it.

Good farms capture carbon!

Hearing the word 'data' may not thrill you, but this is juicy!

Data from the Rodale Institute’s long-running comparison of organic and conventional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effective at removing the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial organic matter in the soil.

Consider this fact: If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, or reducing car miles driven by 14.62 billion miles.

Right now, I'm on an initial conference call of the ad hoc Interfaith Food and Agriculture group convened by Rodale. We are sorting through who else should be part of the conversation and what we might do together... 

In the meantime, check out this exciting article from Rodale!

Organic farming combats global warming -- big time

The Way of Manna

    My eldest son loves blackberries.  They have been his favorite food since he was old enough to pick them himself.  Even when he was quite young he was not deterred by the thorns, which can be vicious on the wild plants.  We would go out on long blackberry hunts, buckets tied around our waists, wading through brush and poison ivy to find these tasty treats.  When we would come upon a gold mine, I would start picking and he would start eating.  "One for me, and one for you," he would say, gently putting a berry in my mouth.  In those moments, I wondered, why is he being so generous?  Its been hard work getting here, we're sweaty and the baby on my back is crying.  Why is he not hording his favorite food?

    In the story of Exodus, God's people find themselves in the desert with nothing to eat.  They are hungry, tired, and it is not hard to imagine a lot of babies crying.  They complain to Moses and God responds with a gift--manna.  God rains bread down from heaven, providing food for God's people for their entire sojourn through the desert.  But, there are a few rules that go along with this free meal--they can't horde!  "No one is to keep any of it until morning," Moses says.  And those who do not obey this simple rule, will find it full of maggots in the morning.  Manna has not shelf-life, it requires full trust in God's provision, every single day.  Of course there is one exception.  On the Sabbath, God's holy day of rest, manna is miraculously preserved from the day before.

    The Exodus story teaches us what Ellen Davis calls "the art of sufficiency."  As she puts it, "We come to see the beauty of enough and actually prize it over 'too much.'"  In our society, we are encouraged to want more, to spurn God's gift of enough, to the extent that we are using resources faster than any other generation before us.  How can we train ourselves to see food as manna, a gift from God, and remember that there is enough, if only we do not horde?  I think I've learned a lesson from a child, who is in total wonder at found food.  This fall we moved to the mountain of North Carolina and there is a Chinese Chestnut tree in our yard.  These nuts are covered in a husk that is totally covered with very sharp spines.  Yet again, undeterred by the thorns, my son was determined to get at the delicious, crispy nuts inside.  After hours of work, he would bring them into us, and divide them evenly among us. He had learned the Way of Manna--when we see food as a gift, there is no reason not to share it.  There is always enough to go around.  

FolkPsalm is currently working on a cd/booklet entitled The Way of Manna and I am indebted to Charles Pettee for this title.  To learn more about our band and our current project visit www.folkpsalm.com

Dry and important? Yes.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, preempts the World Summit on Food Security coming up in Rome with important recommendations. Spending 9 minutes with Olivier, who has a lovely accent, will give you a grasp of the directions we need to go to ensure that all are fed and can feed themselves! Days ahead of the Summit, the negotiations on the Draft Declaration of the Summit are entering their final stage. 

What is at stake is our ability to take the necessary steps towards a global food system that will make decisive progress towards realizing the human right to adequate food and building our resilience against the risk of future economic shocks and increasing volatility of food prices. 

The Declaration coming out of the Summit should be coherent, ambitious and unambiguous on five issues: the right to food, governance, sustainability, trade, and the strengthening of international cooperation. From the Special Rapporteur's website

Liquid Justice

While it may be obvious to say this, it's sometimes hard to remember: Our food, everything we eat and drink, comes from somewhere, not just the back room of the local grocery store. Coffee, in particular, has to get from the coffee tree somewhere else in the world to my coffee cup every morning or my day doesn't go well. Yet, like everything else in my life, the liquid in my cup is connected to more then just the start of my day but to the lives of people I'm never going to meet. The choice I made last week to buy a pound of coffee for my morning has implications for the people who grew it, harvested it, shipped it, roasted it, bagged it and placed it on the shelf in the store. Out of all the people in that supply chain, my choice effects the farmer most of all.  

My morning coffee may come from one or several several different places in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, or the Caribbean. Coffee grows on a tree that is indigenous to Northern Africa. It was imported to the Americas as part of the European Colonization in the 18th Century and became a major crop in Nicaragua in the 1870’s. It is one of the primary Nicaraguan exports and a critical source of income for the farmers who grow and harvest it.