Category: Environment

Farming is trendy again thanks to Facebook.  The simulation game Farmville allows the otherwise farming ignorant to participate in the growing and caring of plants and animals.  It’s addicting and popular, and I’ve even heard it lauded as a great tool for connecting children to the actual sources of our food.

It’s no secret that in modern America, we are disconnected from the food we eat.  Most kids couldn’t tell you where food comes from beyond the grocery store shelves.  Hence, the excitement on the part of some that a computer game is helping kids understand that the food we eat is grown.  On farms.  While I’m not sure that the immediate gratification of harvesting a virtual crop connects children with the earth in quite the same way as actually getting dirt under their fingernails, I resonate with the need to alter this disconnect we have with food.

I have friends who will eat chicken or steak as long as it is not on the bone since that reminds them that it came from an animal.  I’ve had parents at a petting zoo yell at me for mentioning to my daughter that the turkeys we were viewing were like the turkey we ate at Thanksgiving.  I’ve been told by others that they would rather just not know if there are pesticides on their produce or hormones in their meat.  We have disconnected ourselves so far from the sources of our food that we often not only don’t know what we are eating, but we are no longer aware of the implications of our food choices.

But just because we aren’t aware doesn’t mean that our choices don’t have impact.   Disconnecting ourselves from our food, disconnects us from the land, from the people growing our food, from the people receiving our food, and from our God who calls us to care for the earth.

God called creation good and commanded us to steward this earth.  But often we act as absent caretakers, outsourcing the care of the earth to others and losing that intimate connection with God.  This broken spirituality is reflected in our broken earth.  We allow others to destroy fields and groundwater with the excess use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers; we allow animals to be abused and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones; we allow field workers to be mistreated and exposed to hazardous working conditions.  Our food choices have consequences even if we are unaware of the problems they are causing.

I recently met two students who had visited relatives in Mexico for Christmas and were surprised to find oranges everywhere they went there.  The town they visited grows oranges, but that year the companies that buy their crops offered so little for their oranges that it wasn’t worth their effort to pick them.  So the workers earned nothing for their crop and hard work that year.   The students for the first time saw their connection to the food they buy, realizing that buying oranges in the U.S. directly links them to the families they spent the holidays with.

Or consider rice.  Government subsidies encourage the production of more rice than we will ever need each year in America.  So the rice gets sold overseas, often very cheaply to countries where the U.S. has trade policies guaranteeing that imported U.S. goods will not have tariffs or taxes imposed on them.  When a local market gets flooded with cheap food from the U.S., native farmers get put out of business.  They can’t compete with the subsidized food and so the local food supply dwindles and the country becomes reliant on imported food.  When the cost of that food rises unexpectedly, like rice did in 2007, the local people can no longer afford to buy the imported goods and have no local alternatives to turn to.  In the case of Haiti this lead to people literally eating mud to assuage their hunger and taking to the streets in riots.

Or take the migrant workers in Michigan who send their young children out into the fields to pick blueberries because the wages they earn are not enough to sustain their family.  The field owners turn a blind eye, allowing the law to be broken by having six year olds pick the berries we buy in the store.  Or take the families living in the rural areas around factory farms.  When a home is surrounded by literally thousands of cows, it becomes impossible to play outside because the stench is so great.  The local rivers and streams are too full of excrement runoff to swim or fish in, and even the well-water gives local families diarrhea.  The antibiotics given to the cows make that runoff breeding grounds for antibiotic resistant bacteria, causing deadly and difficult to treat illnesses for families who are often too poor to pay the high medical bills.  These families are paying the full cost of the cheap meat we consume.

When we start to see that food has a larger story than just appearing on our grocery store shelves, we see that it connects us to this world.  From the land it grows on to the people who grow it to the people who eat it, food affects us.  If we desire to end our habits of disconnectedness these are the stories we need to know – for only when we understand that we are connected to habits that hurt God’s creation and his people can we start to make changes that help heal.

The simplest change we can make is to start choosing to eat food that is good.  By good, I mean food that doesn’t hurt the earth by dumping toxins, drugs, and disease into our fragile land and food that was produced and sold fairly.  This may involve buying organic or fairly traded foods, but it also might involve getting to know the people who produce your food.  So frequent local farmers markets and get to know the farmers.  Reconnect with the land yourself by growing some of your own food – even a few herbs on the kitchen counter or a tomato plant on the balcony can bring us closer to the cycles of life God called us to tend.  Being aware and choosing to eat what is good will require diligence, research, and sacrifice and it often requires us to simplify and give up the indulgences of cheap but harmful food.  That is all just part of being connected.

Beyond choosing to eat differently, long term changes in our food system are needed to bring lasting healing.  The point of food should not be to get what we enjoy as cheaply as possible, but to nourish all people.  We can support farming reform by encouraging the government to subsidize healthy food not just the crops used to make junk food.  We can tell companies that as consumers we care about how they treat their employees, their animals, and the earth.  We can campaign for trade policies that don’t just benefit American interests, but respect and support the needs of local economies worldwide.  And we can raise our children to be connected – to not need a computer game to tell them where their food comes from, to understand how to care for the earth and its people, to eat simply and healthily, and to be responsible global citizens.

Food is never just food – it connects us to life, to relationships, to the world.  Eating with an awareness of those connections restores our spiritual relationship with creation and provides opportunities for us to love our neighbors and follow God.  It is time to reconnect with our food.

So last weekend I went to go see Food Inc. (I’ll get a review posted about it one of these days…). It was an amazing, and disturbing film, but part of the experience was seeing it at the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin (which imho, is the ONLY place to see movies in town). Before the films they show, the Drafthouse people show clips from other related movies. So, for instance, before Twilight we saw clips from really cheezy old vampire movies or before Star Trek there were clips of trekkies and SNL sketches about Star Trek. For the most part, those clips are always the epitome of the strange manifestations of that genre or theme. So at a movie about the industrial food system, we were treated to some pretty scary propaganda pieces and commercials put out by that very food system.

But watching these commercials from 20-50 years ago was disturbing. They were so far fetched, it is hard to believe that anyone ever thought that they might be persuasive in any way. There was one about fortified white bread that was presented as a documentary – explaining for fortified bread has improved nutrition so that children who eat white bread are smarter and better athletes. Or the McDonald’s commercials presenting a parade of uniformed, pretty, white women singing about how much they love serving a stereotypical small town. It was all about these companies providing helpful services that will improve our lives. Well, I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to believe that processed junk food has improved anyone’s life. And as the film shows, that sort of food is actually destroying our health, our environment, and our country.

So it was amusing to then pay attention to the junk food commercials for the next few days (which, btw, are all food commercials. natural, healthy foods don’t have advertising budgets). Every single commercial was about treating ourselves – giving ourselves the break we deserve. No veiled lies to get us to believe that processed junk helps people, but simply the appeal to self-centered “it’s all about me” mentality. And I know how stupid it is to complain about commercials, but they have big money going into determining what people want to hear. Forget building community, or improving lives – that’s so 1978. Now its all about self-centeredness.

It’s hard not to get cynical when confronted with that attitude. There are people I start discussing my upcoming book on justice with, and I get a blank look in reply. I’ve even had people ask, “why should caring about the needs of others be my concern.” Or I stumbled across this book recently, which decries the evils of environmentalist who are “demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial.” Apparently trying to save the earth must be fought because it threatens “the entire American way of life” and envisions for us “a grim future marked by endless privation.” Well, duh, of course it does. But apparently for some it is far better to be selfish jerks than to have to give up anything to help others. I know this isn’t widespread, but some days it sure feels that way.

But maybe 20-30 years from now people will watch our commercials and ask “how could people be so selfish and stupid.”