Food and Faith

Officials Scramble to regulate Urban Agriculture

Listen to the story from the Ohio River Radio Consortium.

I'm an idiot

Dairy Fresh non-dairy creamer... Do they think we are idiots?!

My non-dairy creamer, manufactured in Dallas, Texas with 8 ingredients not squeezed from a cow, plus multiple artificial colors and flavors (who knows what the total tally is!) is called DAIRY FRESH.

Then, believe it or not, I put it in my tea.

Maybe I am an idiot.

OKAY. Well, here is what I sat down to write about...

Local food. Or, why not local everything?

Dan Houston, of Civic Economics, in Austin, Texas – not too far from the non-dairy Dairy Fresh factory – reports that New Orleans could boost its economy by $235 million if residents shifted 10% of their spending from national chains to local businesses.

$235 million each year! This would translate into 100s of new jobs. Based on other cities, Dan estimates that about a 1,000 jobs would be created. If your town or city is anything like Louisville, you could use more good jobs, right?

Deep thinkers might wonder if new jobs in your town would cause the loss of jobs somewhere else. Fortunately it doesn’t work like that. While a few jobs might be lost in various locations in the US or overseas, the reason why a small shift to local purchasing -10 cents on the dollar – creates so much new wealth and jobs is the power of local money circulation. The reason: Local money changes hands many more times than money going into chains – most of which ends up accumulating in corporate coffers and in the dividends of a relatively small number of stock holders.

The easiest way to support the local economy is through our food and beverage choices. Even at your local pub, you can choose the hometown brew. For us, it’s the Bluegrass Brewing Company.

But competition in the food arena is fierce. A worker/producer cooperative is often the only way to survive dirt-cheap dairy prices and corporate farm competition these days.  Small-scale dairy farmers, by joining with others in co-ops such as Organic Valley or Hudson Valley Fresh, find they can make a decent living while producing a product healthier for both the cow and the consumer. Organic Valley distributes nationally, but customers of Hudson Valley Fresh, with its eight family farms, must be within 80 miles of the co-op. So the dairy also leaves a small carbon footprint.

Michael Schuman, who I suspect I’ll see later today at the Food and Community Conference, has written about local marketing strategy in The Small Mart Revolution and the “small is beautiful” E.F. Schumacher Society is a hub for information.

So, if you must buy, buy non-chain local.

No meat for you on Monday!

Executive Chef Shawn Fields

Meatless Mondays - One day each week without meat. 

Read about this public health initiative at Johns Hopkins Hospital

When it looks this good, who needs meat? 

Remember, though, it is not simply enough to eat less meat. You should make sure what you substitute is produced in a sustainable way and doesn't fly around the world to get to you! 

See these articles to begin exploring the gray areas! - 

Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study 
and
Eating less meat could cut climate costs
and
Less meat 'means a longer life'

Food for Thought: Question of the Day

Would you rather eat a genetically modified ear of sweet corn...

or

...a bowl of heavily processed but organic puffed corn cereal? 

Leave your response in the comments section below!

Thirst

On the fourth Friday of Lent in Oaxaca, Mexico, it is the custom to hand out glasses of Aguas Frescas to anyone who passes by. We had no idea that we were about to encounter La Dia de La Samaritana when we stepped into the home of the artist Rodolfo Morales in the town of Ocotlán, Mexico. Actually, there were several things I didn’t know when my impromptu tour group passed through the front gate but when I was offered  a glass of Agua Fresca De Chilacoyote, scooped from the large bowl atop the courtyard’s covered well, I paid close attention. It was already pushing toward the day’s high of 93 degrees even though it wasn’t yet noontime and the glass offered was a truly refreshing drink.

The Day of the Samaritan Woman has been celebrated on the fourth Friday in Lent in Oaxaca for over a century. It started in the narthex of a couple of churches and has now become both a major event along restaurant row and a simple act of hospitality outside the front gates of homes and small marketplaces. 

La Dia is based on the story, (John 4), of the Samaritan woman who finds Jesus sitting next to the central well of her village. It is a story rich with the metaphors of what happens when strangers of two opposing cultures encounter each other at the center of a common need. Hours and hours of sermons have been preached and reems and reems of papers have been generated on the conversation between the two but in Oaxaca, every Spring, real people hand out real glasses of refreshment to each other with great big smiles and good wishes. 

It's like Halloween in the United States only without the shadows and the mass marketing of costumes and decorations but with the part where everyone welcomes the children and their parents  with gifts of candy. It’s a ritual of strangers trusting each other to do no harm. Strangers offering to others a small gift and strangers accepting the gift offered. 

I love La Dia de la Samaritana. I think we should be doing this everywhere. It’s such a simple thing really. 

Here, are you thirsty? Please, drink this, it is refreshing. 

Yes, thank you, I am grateful. 

----------

Anitra Kitts lives, works, and writes in Sonoma County, California. A certified candidate for the Ministry of the Word and Sacrament, (ordainable call anyone? anyone?) she dreams of Oaxacan Markets when pushing the shopping cart down the sterile aisles of the local corporate grocery edifice. 

An Agrarian Vision: When Work and Place Jive

Wendell Berry says, "From an ecological and agrarian point of view, the most urgent problem of agriculture, as of the human economy as a whole, is that of local adaptation--that is to say, of making a beneficent and conserving fit between work and place.”

This is from his forward of Ellen Davis' 2009 book - Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, which will be recommended reading for all going on the Heaven on Earth Agrarian Road Trip

Ellen Davis, who will be providing a theological orientation at the beginning of the trip, clearly makes the case that local adaption is a scriptural and therefore religious issue. Berry - 

From an agrarian point of view, the Exodus was a movement from the flat, easily tillable land of Egypt to "the narrow and precariously balanced ecological niche that is the hill country of ancient Judah and Samaria." The people of Israel had to re-make their economic life to conform to a landscape that allowed "only the slightest margin for negligence, ignorance, or error."

The last in a series of questions he asks gets you imagining what might of happened, but also what could we help happen?!

"What would America be now if we white people had managed to bring with us, not just a Holy Land spirituality, but also the elaborate land ethic, land reverence, and agrarian practice meant to safeguard the holiness of land?"

Berry takes the onus of the loss of agrarianism and the widespread destruction of the land off of the Bible itself. Instead it is how people have misunderstood and wrongly applied the Bible. He concludes -

"Applied religion, without a local orientation and a local practice, can be as irresponsible, as dangerous, and as sloppy as modern science similarly applied."

The important lessons in this book, if acted on, can be a remedy to such misapplication. Our hope, too, is that the Agrarian Road Trip will be a small part of reorienting ourselves to the agrarian way, which was so foundational to the teachings of the Bible.

Who started the local food revolution? Cuba or Jamie Oliver?

Roger Doiron, a colleague who I hope to see in a couple weeks at the Kellogg Food and Community Conference, created this great 6-minute video based on his recent trip to Cuba.

Roger says, "The organic and urgan agriculture revolution that is under way there is nothing short of amazing, but what a lot of people don't know is the amount of hardship Cubans have been through to get to where they are.  Unlike with most people in the US and other wealthy countries, growing their own and doing it organically were not really choices for Cubans: they did it to survive. Or to put it more flippantly, when life gave the Cubans limes (mint and rum), they decided to make mojitos." Read from his blog.

Roger, in case you don't recognize the name, is the guy who - along with Kitchen Gardeners International - inspired Michelle Obama and the White House vegetable garden. Here is an interview with him about that and the "This Lawn is Your Lawn" YouTube video that started it all.

Cuba is indeed a fascinating place, especially when it comes to farming. In 1994, I got an early look at this national experiment in organic agriculture while helping to lead a group of  farmers, scientists and students to look at Cuba's forced shift from California-style, industrial agriculture to organic and sustainable approaches. They have come a long way from the time when many were experiencing serious vitamin deficiencies to now when you can find thousands of urban gardens and myriad farmers' markets throughout Cuba. (Here are some gorgeous photos from a similar Reality Tour from February 2010.)

Roger ends his post with these words, putting it back on us to create viable local food economies that are good for our particular place:

In the end, each city will have to make its own path to sustainable food security for its residents and what works in tropical Havana may not translate to Hartford, Connecticut or Hamburg, Germany.  The road is going to be long and bumpy, but as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu so famously said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and the most important thing is getting started on that journey. 

The soil is warming... Is there a better time than now to take that first step?

Food Taxes and Faith

"It's not fair to take from the rich and give to the poor in a Robin Hood-type way, but it's certainly not fair to take from the poor to give to the rich... and that's what we're doing now. That's exactly what we're doing now."

That's from a recent edition of PBS Now about the regressive sales tax on food in Alabama, one of only two states that tax groceries at the regular rate. That's a huge expense for the poorest citizens... say a family of four living below the federal poverty line, who would save $200 to $300 a year with the tax break.

The Alabama state legislature is voting on House Bill 1 this week, which would let voters decide whether to rewrite the state constitution to remove the 4 percent state sales tax from groceries and over-the-counter drugs.

PHP has supported Alabama Arise's efforts to reform the state's tax codes. If you live in Alabama, you can visit their website to contact your representatives.

ecotone

Carol Howard Merritt, who recently wrote about Michelle Obama's healthy food initiatives and her visit to Western Presbyterian Church's Miriam Kitchen, just turned me on to this ECOTONE blog - subtitle, "Experiments in Agriculture and Industry" by C.J. from Joelton, Tenn.

Take a gander...