Expensive food and simple solutions

A recent cover on the Economist proclaimed, “The End of Cheap Food.”  Part of the worldwide soaring food prices is due to fuel, but the other issue is meat.  As developing countries, specifically China, creep toward the “developed” finish line, and gain wealth, they eat less staple foods like rice and wheat and, instead, opt for a steak.  Since we typically feed cows corn or wheat (a shame since they actually were created to be primarily grass eaters) to fatten ‘em up real nice and quickly, more land is being used to feed cows, instead of people and being that one cow feeds a lot less people than does all that that one cow might consume, there is a less land for the millions and millions of folks who survive on staple foods. 

 

So what do we do about food shortages world-wide?

 

1. Ignore them.  This won’t work because starvation breeds desperation and food shortages on the other side of the globe will ripple in its affects and end up affecting our own back yard.  We can’t afford to ignore our neighbors, and, as Christians, we ought not to, primarily out of love, but also out of the deep sense of connection between all of us.  (Remember the Rich man who ignored the starving Lazarus. Yeah, it didn’t really work out well for him).

 

2. Live more simply. 

            (a) We need land redistribution so that smaller, sustenance farmers can have land to grow food for their families.  The less importing, the less fuel we use, and this is not only good for the environment, but for limiting the effect of food prices.

 

            (b) Eat less meat.  Hey, I like a burger as much as the next Texan. I’m not a vegetarian. But if we care about the food on our neighbor’s plate (or lack there of) we have to think about our eating choices.  So we still eat meet at our house, but we are trying to eat it less and less, and when we do eat it, it is mostly deer that this total city boy that I know actually went out and shot in the woods. I don’t do this because I oh-so-love rice and beans. I do this because it is really yummy to share. And we only have enough land on this little blue-green planet of ours, if we share land.  And I think that Christians ought to care about that because we believe that God created this planet, so I’m thinking that he knew what he was doing when he did it. 

 

Talk back: Food as Grounding Image

All my significant conversations happen over smoothies.

How about you? Any grounding images in your life?

Learning from an Urban Farmer

 

 I said before that I’d have guest writers write about food from time to time.  This week’s contribution is from the gnome.  I have been interested in the meaning of food and nourishment for awhile (hence, this blog)  and have thought/researched/worked on papers about food ethics, creation, and community, but most of what has really jazzed me about food, community, and creation is thinking about it with the gnome and good friends over the years.  The gnome is a brilliant guy, with several degrees, the most interesting (and recent) of which is a Masters in Church History from GCTS.  He also has a giant laugh, a gleaming smile, and enjoys snobby beer, his friends’ cooking, riding bikes, books and coffee, and thinking and living on the deep side of the pool.  Here, he tells about what he’s been learning from a recently discovered friend of ours- who he calls- S. H.  S. H. is one of those beautiful friends who you stumble upon and within weeks feels like family. 

                          _____________________________________

THW is finishing her next to last class in seminary this week, so she asked me to publish something on her blog so that her loyal readership would not get bored and/or despondent in her absence.  So I thought I’d talk a little bit about our mutual friend S.H. 

We met S.H. just a little while ago at church and discovered that though we had a rather shocking amount in common (like New Urbanism, Wendell Berry, and intentional Christian communities), he was so much cooler than us that it was unlikely that we were actually going to be friends.  As it turns out though, he is quite willing to be friends with people less cool than he is, which is a major boon for us.  He is one of those remarkable people that inspires you to be into something simply because he loves it so much and describes it with such beauty, sincerity, and passion. 

One of the things that S.H. loves is urban farming.  Now I myself have never been interested in farming.  I am a city slicker through and through.  I suffer from a certain degree of agoraphobia.  I feel exposed and unsafe when there is not an adequate sense of enclosure due to buildings, tree canopies and the like (which is, incidentally, why I never feel safe in the suburbs), so I have never done well in agricultural environs.   But here is a new thing—the idea of cultivating a very small plot of land (no larger than a quarter acre) in the middle of a standard city block so that you can provide organic food for your family and perhaps your neighbors as well that doesn’t cost a billion dollars. 

When Tish and I got married, she insisted upon eating organic food.  I protested—but it will cost so much money to buy organic!  At first I relented on the grounds that I would rather pay that money to a grocery store now than pay it to a doctor later when I was diagnosed with cancer from all the chemicals in conventional food.  Recently, however, I’ve begun thinking a lot more about how our current industrial food production practices allow us to become mere consumers of food (“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry writes, but we would never know it because we have no connection at all to the land, and therefore no sense of the ecological and human cost of the food that we eat).  And this reflection, along with eating food that S.H. has grown himself, has led me to be all the more in favor of organic food—but organic food grown locally. We need to know the ecological and human cost of what we are eating, and the only way this is really possible is by eating food that has been harvested by people you know.  This is part of the cost of discipleship—the worker is worth his wages.  But urban farming adds levels of coolness to the benefits of eating locally—the satisfaction of craft, the ability to grow your own food in the neighborhood you love, and the ability to practice charity and kindness toward your less fortunate neighbors by sharing your food with them.

Food for thought: The politics of lunch in DC

 Red state. Blue state. Red food. Blue food.

I found this interesting article on the revealer last week about the politics behind what our politicians eat. Interesting.

It compares the purchase of carbon offsets to indulgences? What do you think? Fair comparison?

Make Beauty, Not Money (or Mucus)

 

I’ve been meaning to write quite a lot lately, but the gnome  is illin’ and I’ve discovered that when my husband gets really sick, I get really busy.  So life’s been crazy with my chores, his chores, sick chores like doctor’s visits, soup making, and cough medicine purchasing.  Things have been hectic. 

It is cold and gray outside.  And I think that approximately a trillion folks in my area are sick this week, so I thought I’d take a brief moment to pause and pay tribute to beauty because we need some around here.

So first:

— This is one of my favorite poems/quotes.  I used to keep it posted on my wall.  I think it is a beautiful comment on how the stuff of earth (and, for our purposes, food) can either point us toward  the More and toward worship or can dwindle into mere consumption.  I find both in my own life and this poem reminds me to seek the former.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.
But only those who see take off their shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
  -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And Second:

— My friend Josh is a great guy and an burgeoning photographer.  He is a card-carrying Anglican and his sacramental theology shows in his work.  He takes the mundane and, through it, somehow shows us the transcendent.  I really like this picture he took of a classmate of ours.  Check out his work.

Have a beautiful day. (Even if it is gray and raining and you’re sick.)
 

Happy Eat Local Week!

Eat Local. Find out more about it here.

Sound Bite: Bonhoeffer on meals

 

I’m really busy (my class is due in 1 week and I’m behind and I have to go to work everyday), but Bonhoeffer reminds me that I better enjoy dinner! This quote is from Life Together, which I read for my class (the one that is due) and officially promoted to one of my desert island/top five books.

 The breaking of bread together has a festive quality. In the midst of the working day given to us again and again, it is a reminder that God rested after God’s work, and that the Sabbath is the meaning and the goal of the week with its toil.  Our life is not only a great deal of trouble and hard work; it is also refreshment and joy in God’s goodness.  We labor, but God nourishes and sustains us.  That is reason to celebrate…..God will not tolerate the unfestive, joyless manner in which we eat our bread with sighs of groaning, with pompous self- important busyness, or even with shame.  Through the daily meal God is calling us to rejoice, to celebrate in the midst of our working day.

Talk Back: meal in a can

So I’d like your opinion:

I have a good friend who has never-in his whole life- eaten spaghetti o’s or beefaroni or preservativioli. And though from a food ethics, nutritional, and aesthetic stand point this may be a good thing, I was still quite shocked. I mean, this is America, canned kid food is as much a part of our childhood as wedjie avoidance (and for some of us the love of the chef lasts a whole lot longer). So what do you think…

Chef Boyardee- Friend or Foe?  

Recipes and Resources for Practicing the Sabbath

 

As follow up to my last post, I thought I’d let you in on a few more resources for Sundays, and tell you about some things that we love to eat on our day of rest.

First of all, here is a great site (from one of my favorite authors and thinker/doers Dorothy Bass) about Sabbath keeping.

Secondly, let me just say that feasting doesn’t have to be fancy. Beauty is an important part of the Sabbath day (and we usually use the nice bowls that day), but the food itself doesn’t have to be fine French cuisine (if you don’t want it to be). We usually eat things we like that feel celebratory to us. As we’ve discussed before on Nourish, tacos always taste like celebration to me, so we sometimes have tacos.

When friends come over we make things that can feed a lot of people like this great and easy recipe:

My Mother-in-law’s Comfort Food Potatoes and Chops:

-boneless pork chops
-4-6 red roasting potatoes
-large can of hearty tomato soup (not creamy)
-1 large onion or 2 to 3 shallots, diced
-a lot of garlic, minced
-salt and pepper
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Slice potatoes into half inch slices. Layer potatoes on the bottom of medium-sized, glass, oven friendly casserole dish. (You can make 1 or 2 layers of potatoes).
3. Spread onions evenly on top of potatoes.
4. Half the can of tomato soup on top of potato and onion layers, add garlic (over the soup layer), and lay pork chops on top.
5. Pour remainder of soup on top.
6. Add Salt and pepper to taste.
7. Cover with tin foil, and place in oven for 1 & 1/2 hours.

Ideally, for Sunday lunch, you would make this a day ahead and just reheat in the oven (the husband swears it is better after a day in the fridge).

Our friend Mike visited town with Leo, his super cool son.  They came over on a Sunday, so we served Sloppy Joes (because Leo is a kid and, I figure, kids like sloppy joes).  He really liked it, and it is super easy to make the day before hand. (We served them with sweet potato fries that you can chop the day before hand and either fry or bake the day of and I think we threw in some green beans, just to try to sneak in something green).

Take a break.  Purchase nothing. Rest. Journal. Pray. Sleep. Feast. Worship.  Be alone. Be with community.  But let me warn you–it is a lot more of a challenge than you imagine. (But, after a while, it is addictive.)

Bring back Sunday!

Earlier we discussed a little about how food and the rhythm of time are intertwined, especially if we eat seasonally. But I want to bring up another rhythm- the rhythm of work and rest.

We as Christians affirm earlier Jewish thought, which sees a rhythm of rest and work imbedded in the Creation story. God himself worked and then rested, so, therefore, we work and rest. Sadly, the communal practice of Sabbath rest has largely been lost and for many Christians, Sabbath-keeping is absent from our lives. But I think it will make a come back. I know, at least in my life, it already is.

Our culture is one of busyness. We work really hard and then, when we have time off, we have forgotten how to rest so we either work more (these are the folks with immaculate houses), spend money, or we collapse in front of television and emerge again hours later feeling pale, shaky, and even more worn out. A few years ago I began to question in earnest how the gospel impacts our relationship with time. How should the church repudiate the workaholism, consumerism, or sloth of our culture?
This questioning led me to some books about the Sabbath, and my husband and I slowly began trying to keep the Sabbath. We’ve kept at it now for well over a year with varying degrees of success, but we’re learning, and, at this point, there’s no going back. We love the Sabbath. We both have commented that our very bodies know it is Sunday now, and even if we wanted to do something “productive” (which we don’t), we probably couldn’t.

However, the day (at its best) is not just a day of sheer laziness. We vary the way that we celebrate the Sabbath from week to week, but our celebration always contains 2 activities: worship and rest. We go to church and worship with our community, and some days we also spend time alone or together in prayer. And we rest. This, for me, is the trickier part. What the heck is this “rest” of which I speak? Well, practically, it means that we cease from working or causing anyone else to work, so we don’t spend any money. We don’t go to restaurants (which has been pretty hard since so few of our friends at church keep the Sabbath and we always have to say no to the eating out invites that we get for Sunday lunch). We don’t shop. We don’t buy gas. I try to stop worrying about my “To Do” list for the week. Instead, we usually go on long walks together and catch up with each other (a highlight of the week for me). We often go for hikes or try to relish beauty in some way. We invite friends over. Sometimes we sleep or read. This past weekend it was cold and wet outside, so we skipped the walk, made some kettle corn and hot tea, crawled under the covers, and read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce aloud to one another. It was as splendid as it sounds.

So what does this have to do with food you ask? Well, the Sabbath is meant to be a celebration. A celebration where we remember the first Sabbath when God rested after calling his creation good, and we look forward to the Sabbath to come when we will rest more deeply than we can even imagine now. And like all good celebrations it should have a feast. So this is my request: Let’s bring back the Sunday Lunch!
I don’t always do this, but ideally, on Saturday J or I would make something really, really yummy and then, after church, we’d come home and feast. My husband is dieting these days, so Sunday meals have become especially important as the diet is banished and we enjoy food that day. On Sunday, we remember enjoyment- enjoyment of beauty, of food, of each other, and, most importantly, enjoyment of God. So this Saturday, I’m going to try to make something we love to eat, and on Sunday we will feast. I hope that you join us!

For further reading on the Sabbath here are some recomendations
1. The gnome (aka my husband) wrote a great blog post a while ago about his adventures in Sabbath keeping.

2. Keeping the Sabbath Wholly by Marva Dawn

3.Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner