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.