Food and Faith

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This blog has moved to a new location with a sleek format.

If you have this blog bookmarked or feeding through an RSS feed, note that the new URL is www.presbyterianmission.org/food-faith.

Join us there!

These Hands

On Sunday morning, May 1st, I was working in the church garden with the kids during worship. Like many churches, we send the kids out to Sunday School after the Children’s Sermon, and then come running back in for communion on the weeks when it is served. My hands were muddy from scooping holes into the ground for the tomato plants and I did not pause to wash them on my way back into the sanctuary. 

We’re trying to do a little Creation-Care as well as Feed-The-Hungry learning in the garden but quite frankly, that morning, the nearby swing set, not to mention the super cool hillside of mulch had more attraction power then the tomatoes & peppers part. Although harvesting, and eating the peas did pull the kids back from tossing the pine cone bombs for a few minutes. I’m thinking the key to Christian Education with this crew will be the ability to talk fast when the windows open up. Also, bribing with food seems promising as well. 

Food Justice: Rooted in the Bible & Rocking Our World

Calls for food justice and food sovereignty are echoing around world. From landless farmers in Brazil to seed savers in India, from urban farms in Oakland to affordable produce drop-offs in Cleveland, from agroecological farms around Lake Victoria in Kenya to farmer-owned cooperatives in Wisconsin, the sprouting of sustainable and just food systems is as sure as spring rains.
 
Hundreds of PCUSA congregations are joining the movement—opening their kitchens, digging food gardens, hosting farmers markets, and advocating forfair food policies.

Sixteen Food Justice Fellows, comprised of pastors, urban agriculturalists, grassroots advocates and students, have begun their work together and in their own communities. The Fellows will develop their own personal agrarian/food justice faith statements to more deeply ground their work. The idea came from participants of the HEART trip and the Presbyterian Hunger Program (PHP) is hosting this national fellowship.

PHP is also hosting two Americorps*VISTAs who are supporting congregations in their efforts to bring food access to neglected parts of of our cities and states.
 
Interested people are invited to join the Fellows, VISTAs and other Presbyterians online on the Food and Faith Groupsite to share ideas about ways you and your congregation can address inequities in your local food economy and around the world. Congregations and faith-based groups are also invited to join the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. PHP is a founding member and has been active in its development. Learn more about the Alliance here.

Finally, for ideas and practical assistance, consider joining the Food Justice for All Webinars for free. Click on the webinar you wish to participate in to register.

1. May 5th 2:00-3:00pm (EDT) - Food Justice for All Webinar: Growing community through local food
2. May 12th 2:00-3:00pm (EDT) - Food Justice for All Webinar: What congregations are doing to build just and sustainable food economies
3. May 19th 2:00-3:00pm (EDT) - Food Justice for All Webinar: SNAP outreach and Summer Feeding Programs
4. May 26th 2:00-3:00pm (EDT) - Food Justice for All Webinar: What congregations are doing to build just and sustainable food economies

Banning documentation of farm animals abuse would make farmworkers more vulnerable

Posted by Harvesting Justice - the blog of Farmworker Justice | 19 Apr 2011 08:42 AM PDT

Written by Jessica Felix-Romero ~ Original article from Harvesting Justice

 The New York Times published an article on April 13^th titled States Look to Ban Efforts to Reveal Farm Abuse in which reporter A.G. Sulzberger writes about pending legislation to criminalize taking or distributing photos or videos taken at agricultural facilities without the express permission of the facility management. The proposed law has a primary focus on stopping animal rights activists from exposing illegal or inhuman treatment of animals. However, this type of legislation has significant repercussions for farmworkers. Farmworker Justice invited attorney Melody Fowler-Green to blog on the potential impacts restricting video collection would have on farmworkers who are often working in isolated settings with limited ability to document violations of law or abuse that they experience.  

Melody Fowler-Green is a Staff Attorney at Southern Migrant Legal Services, a Project of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and has been a farmworker advocate for over ten years.  She found a natural home in the worker's rights community as the daughter of a union autoworker in Flint, Michigan. 

The proposed laws to criminalize surreptitious videos taken at agricultural facilities may do more than thwart animal rights activists. (see NYT article above) Southern Migrant Legal Services  filed a federal suit last week on behalf of 15 farmworkers which  illustrates these laws may also prevent isolated and vulnerable workers from protecting themselves against illegal activity, including pesticide exposure.

In the decade that I have represented migrant agricultural workers, cell phone ownership among our clients has increased exponentially.  Affordable phones purchased from big box stores have allowed migrant workers, some of them thousands of miles from home, to keep in touch with their families, to enjoy some entertainment in the evenings listening to familiar music, and are now proving invaluable to aid them in asserting their rights.  Workers are using cameras on the phones to document their living and working conditions and then to contact advocates and attorneys when those conditions violate the law.  This has surely not gone unnoticed by employers and farm labor contractors.  In fact, many employers who employ temporary nonimmigrant guestworkers are adopting work rules (unfortunately approved by the United States Department of Labor) that make use of cell phones or electronic devises during work hours a firing offense.

Last summer guestworkers at a large tomato farm in East Tennessee used their cell phones to record what they believed to by the misuse of pesticides.  These workers contacted us here at Southern Migrant Legal Services complaining that tractors were spraying tomato plants just yards from their housing, on fields next to them when they were eating lunch, and directly on other workers who were in the fields.  While these potentially illegal activities were taking place miles from a town or other witnesses, our clients were able to capture some of the incidents on their cell phone video cameras – providing advocates with a rare look at working conditions for farmworkers and turning these otherwise isolated workers into whistleblowers.  For this, these workers were brutally fired, leading to the lawsuit they filed last week in federal court.

I applaud the bravery these farmworkers have shown in documenting their treatment and in standing up against the retaliation they faced by doing so.  I fear that laws intended to prevent animal rights activists from filming the inhumane treatment of animals will also take away from farmworkers one of the few ways they can fight against inhumane treatment they themselves suffer.

Carlitos, child of farmworkers, born with birth defects attributable to pesticides (PBP).
Source: Sarasota/Manatee Farmworker Supporters

We live in a beautiful world: let's CELEBRATE!

A colleague Roger Doiron and Kitchen Gardeners International produced this video about the beautiful food we can choose. Roger found it ironic that "one day after the government issues its strongest recommendation to date to eat less and better foods, the snack food industry lobby launches "National Snack Food Month" to get Americans to eat more and worse." So they launched 28ate.org . . . for fun, and to bring attention to the billions  of dollars spent on advertising unhealthy, processed foods.

Kitchen Gardeners International has launched this open-source campaign to encourage people to opt out of unhealthy, processed snack and junk foods for the #20ate days of February and opt in for real ones instead. Please see the oh-so-satisfying, meal-sized version (well-balanced, of course) for some ideas on how you can join the campaign and help our country's good food movement to grow.

And for those of you who know what this means, please use the #20ate hashtag and avatar/badge to show your support.

If all this is a little too "out there" for you, find a group of people in your congregation to do the Just Eating? Practicing Our Faith at the Table curriculum. You may be happily surprised at what sprouts from that! You can download or purchase the adult or middle school versions here (middle school version available in Spanish too).

Food and sustainability: finding solutions!

A whole issue devoted to FOOD and SUSTAINABILITY! Introducing you to Kids Can Make a Difference and their Finding Solutions Newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter on their home page. But without further ado...
1) About this issue...by Jane and Larry Levine and Christina Schiavoni
2) WhyHunger at 35: making connections, building the movement, sticking to its roots...by Alison Cohen
3) Bringing lasting change to school food: how we do it, and how you can, too...by Meredith Modzelewski
4) Just eat food ...by Joan Dye Gussow
5) Eat the sky: the food and climate connection...by Anna Lappé
6) Camel farming in Tanzania...by Donna Stokes

1) About this issue...by Jane and Larry Levine and Christina Schiavoni

This special issue of the newsletter marks only the second time in our long history that we have devoted the entire issue to one subject, Food & Sustainability. This important theme will be continued in future issues.
Download the article

2) WhyHunger at 35: making connections, building the movement, sticking to its roots...by Alison Cohen

For the past year I’ve been a part of a WhyHunger team working with community-based organizations to build a regional network to address issues of persistent lack of access to fresh and affordable food in Mississippi. After a day of travelling throughout the Delta down dusty roads through small towns stopping along the way to walk a farmer’s land or witness a makeshift food pantry in action, I wrote the following in my travel journal: My boots are muddy, feet frozen, face wind-chapped, head churning with images and ideas — another invigorating and inspiring day touring farms and meeting with community partners throughout the Delta in Mississippi. I’m overwhelmed by how much work there is to do and I’m full of hope.
Download the article

3) Bringing lasting change to school food: how we do it, and how you can, too...by Meredith Modzelewski

While it’s easy enough to say that children need healthy food – and the right amount of it – in order to succeed, far too many children come to school hungry. A hungry child can’t learn or play well, and school food may be her main meal of the day. In the U.S., more than 30 million children eat school food five days a week, 180 days a year – so it’s incredibly important that these meals are healthful.
Download the article

4) Just eat food...by Joan Dye Gussow

Many years ago, as I was beginning my formal study of nutrition, I spent a classroom break chatting with a new friend who was experienced in the field. I was in the process of learning more than I ever thought I wanted to know about vitamins and minerals, and told my friend that I had been thinking about nutrition education. I realized, I said, that it would take me about 20 minutes to teach ordinary people what they ought to eat if they wanted to be healthy: less meat, less fat, lots of grains and fruits and vegetables, some dairy. “The problem is that there are all those other things in the supermarket designed to confuse them.”
Download the article

5) Eat the sky: the food and climate connection...by Anna Lappé

The first half of 2010 will go down in history as the hottest January to July on record, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The top 11 warmest years all occurred in the last 13. But despite this historic heat and the growing evidence that skyrocketing manmade greenhouse gas emissions are fundamentally and permanently altering the climate as we know it, our elected leaders are dragging their feet on binding emissions limits—even backsliding on embracing climate science.

When the 112th Congress was sworn in on January 6th, dozens of its ranks were unabashed climate change deniers and Republican leadership was seriously talking about ending the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
Download the article

6) Camel farming in Tanzania...by Donna Stokes

Timothy Sheghere Mgonja is a father of six children, including his 7-year-old daughter Sifa, the youngest. He is the fun sort of dad who once chaperoned a group of kids on a field trip to the Meserani Snake Park and Maasai Museum in Arusha, a nearby city.

After watching the delighted children ride camels at the tourist park, the struggling farmer asked the park workers how much money camels make them on each ride. He was pleasantly surprised. When he learned of the other extraordinary benefits of camels, including milk production and their ability to haul water and firewood and even to pull a plow, he was completely sold.
Download the article

Cooperatives rock!

In Nepal, people are reviving traditional farming. Producer cooperatives help farmers retain more profits on traditional and local food crops, while also protecting biodiversity and the health of their families.

I was thinking how cooperatives are the wave of the future in farming, so plugged in that phrase and sure enough - Value-added cooperatives: Wave of the Future? was at the top of the list. Here in the United States, Organic Valley Cooperative is an example of a large, successful producer cooperative that continues to grow and diversify. Then of course, there is the worker-owned cooperative of Equal Exchange, our partner in the Presbyterian Coffee Project.

Co-ops rock.

The Earth is coming alive

"The Earth is coming alive," or as Dr. Ellen Davis phrases it:

The earth is a living creature, with its own integrity in the sight of its Creator.

Dr. Davis has been providing the Hunger Program, the Agrarian Road Trippers, and many in the United States who have read her work (such as The Manna Economy), a biblical basis for understanding the power dynamics and theological interpretation of the industrial food and farming system. This highly technified, energy-intensive system has all but replaced family-scale and organic farming, which of course had been the dominant food system not a century ago. In this new essay called, A Living Creature: A Biblical Perspective on Land Care and Use*, Dr. Davis says that when it comes to food,

...I have been surprised to find that even those who do not habitually read the Bible care what it says. Perhaps there is a kind of practical theism that informs the thinking of those who deal daily with the essential means of life. Especially they care when they realize (often with surprise) how much the Bible has to say about maintaining adequate food and water supplies, about protecting the fertile soil and at the same time the economic viability of farming communities – all matters of vulnerability, urgency and indeed danger in our current era of industrialized agriculture.

In A Living Creature, which you should download right now and savor, Davis reflects on the relationship between how we eat and the horrific oil disaster the planet just experienced. The modern food system, which hungers for and consumes 10% of our petroleum, is practically connected to this tragedy, but also theologically --

The wound in the ocean floor and our dominant food production practices are also connected ideologically, in that both reflect a profound misunderstanding of the created order and the human place in it. That misunderstanding is in the first instance not scientific but theological.

Without setting off the spoiler alert, here is one more image from the essay that sets the context for her insightful perspective:

Having watched it bleed for months, we are better able to see that the earth is not a machine, nor is it a convenient repository of useful goods. Journalist Naomi Klein comments: 'After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.'

Near the end, Davis asks this question:

Can we even begin to imagine a faithfulness so fully realized that the fertile earth invites the Divine Farmer to walk upon it – as God once walked in Eden – in the path marked out by ‘righteousness’ (sustainability)?

You can download a PDF of "A Living Creature" here

UPDATE: The New Internationalist magazine just came in and has an article on the oil spill called -  That petrol emotion: BP’s ‘cleanup’ of the Gulf of Mexico which highlights the rose-tinted media reporting. Even if you don't get this fabulous magazine, you can subscribe to their blog here. And did you know you can also get the RSS feed for Food and Faith. Just choose your reader here.

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And don't miss the radio interview with Ellen Davis on Speaking of Faith accompanied Wendell Berry's poetry.

* Originally published in The Bible in Transmission, Winter 2010 (Bible Society, UK), pp. 5-7, also available in the resources section of their website. We are grateful to the editor and to Ellen Davis for allowing us to republish this essay.

Your guide to the Week of Action on Food

Prepare Ye the Churches Week of Action on Food!

It is now time to gear up for the Churches Week of Action on Food from 10-17 October. During the Week you will be connected to thousands of people, churches and communities around the world in a movement calling for change in the way food is grown, sold, distributed and shared. It is a time to lift up the voices of small-scale food producers, particularly women, to have choices on what crops to grow and how they can grow these crops.

The Week in October goes from October 10-17, Sunday to Sunday and is a key time for action:

12 October is Indigenous Peoples' Day
15 October is International Day for Rural Women
16 October is World Food Day
17 October is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

Also, 11-16 October is Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Committee on Food Security (CFS) meeting, Rome, Italy and good time to advocate for FOOD for ALL! FOOD for LIFE!

The EAA, with help from PCUSA, has produced a Resource Guide for the Week of Action -- Download Food-week-guide2010. The guide offers action ideas, as well as worship resources, including a liturgy and a prayer card.

Hold a Sunday worship service (which is in Word, so you can download and modify it for your church) on food and gender on the Sunday at the beginning or end of the Week of Action or on both days. And you can also find many other resources here.

What can I do?

• Hold a worship service focused on food and gender on the Sunday at the beginning or end of the Week of Action or on both days.
• Use or adapt the liturgy found in the EAA resource guide.
• Encourage a national letter writing campaign calling national governments to safeguard communal land against land grabbing using the EAA Model Letter
• Adopt, adapt, collect signatures and send to the same people/institutions on the same day.
• Organize an Agape meal prepared with food produced by women or purchased from fair trade shops and invite guests (including local politicians, press, celebrities etc). Use the EAA prayer card before meals.
• Enter the EAA Food for Life competition by writing and submitting sermons on food and gender for promotion in 2011. Details of the competition will be available online during the Week of Action or you can write to [email protected]
• Let the media know about your events or write a letter to the editor to let more people know about the issues around food and gender.
• Tell us what you are doing! Inspire others and share your ideas by sending information on your events and actions to [email protected]

More action ideas are available in the Resource Guide! Download Food-week-guide2010

Like the Churches Food Week of Action facebook page and post what you are doing there!

August Farm Report - Northern California

It’s been a cool summer out here on the West Coast. We’re all remarking on it. This morning, (on the 10th day of August) I walked about the house thinking about turning on the heat and not for the first time this summer either. Our average high is usually above 80 degrees right now but today’s forecast, like the rest of the week, is looking to maybe clear 73 degrees.

Now if I were not trying to grow tomatoes for the fifth summer in a row, I’d probably be content with the coolness of my days. Wait long enough and the fog will clear and 73 is a pleasant temperature for most of life’s activities. Its better then a week of 90+ which is normal for this month and much much better then the endless weeks of high swelter everyone on the East Coast seems to be experiencing. But highs of only 73 degrees don’t do much for the tomatoes - and the nights are downright chilly. I can hear the tomatoes shivering out in the garden. I should be grabbing pounds of sweet, ripe tomatoes right now but instead it looks like late June, early July. Lots of promise out there but slow to ripen. What does turn red is not packing a lot of taste. The summer heat cooks up the sugars which are currently missing. 

The basil, another long anticipated summer feast food, are also dawdling in the ground. I should be pulling lots of leaves for pesto sauce but there is little to be had at the moment.