Café! Hot Topic- The Earth Issue

When you reach for a can of food from your kitchen cabinet, do you ever think about all of the hands and places it’s been through on its journey to your home? This is exactly what I found myself thinking about one night when I grabbed our last jar of home-canned, summer tomatoes. While admiring that jar of diced gems, I thought about Bonnie, our good friend who lovingly grew these tomatoes and much of the other food that helped sustain our family through the winter. On one of her many trips to stay with us, she brought an enormous quantity of tomatoes. I canned those red beauties two days later. During their entire existence, those tomatoes probably saw only our four hands.

As I held the jar, I also thought about Bonnie’s farm. I remembered my days and nights on her farm within a forest. I remembered waking to the sounds of woodpeckers and nuthatches and watching deer nibble grass in the evening hours. Flying squirrels, a run of salmon, owls, and myriad other creatures know her farm as home. Bonnie farms with all of these creatures in mind, so she never uses harmful synthetic chemicals. Her farming practices help to unveil and revitalize the gifts of the natural world (e.g., applying rich layers of compost, letting natural insect predators do their work) rather than degrade and deplete them. In my reflective moment, that jar of tomatoes symbolized the love that Bonnie has for her vocation as a farmer, for her vibrant farm, for the creatures that live on her farm, for her own family, and for friends like us.

In popping open that jar, I realized that this would be the last time, at least for a while, that we would have a deep sense of who raised our tomatoes or where they grew. A tinge of sadness came over me, then a flood of questions: When it comes time for me to actually buy my next cans of tomatoes, how can I be sure that the farmer who grew them felt good about the work that she or he was doing? How will I know that they valued the health of the larger ecosystem of which the farm was a part? Would they use toxic chemicals that could harm the natural world, farm workers, and possibly my own family? Bonnie and I deeply love God’s creation — how would I know that the other farmers did? Would they treat their employees in a Christ-like manner: with respect and dignity? Would the mass production of tomatoes for canning take the place of cultivating important food staples in other parts of the world? This cascade of questions made me wish that our pantry might be filled, once again, with colorful jars of Bonnie’s gifts.

This moment of reflection made me realize that a certain irony exists in the act of receiving “our daily bread.” On the one hand, eating is one of the most intimate acts we engage in, several times a day; on the other hand it can be one of the most disembodied and disengaged acts. When we eat, we take sunlight, water, other lives, and other people’s labor into our very bodies. These gifts become part of our tissue, bones, and being.

We are what we eat in a very real, physical sense. And with the eucharist being one of our faith’s most defining and emblematic experiences, we are what we eat in a very real, spiritual sense as well. Somehow through the act of eating, we come to know our Sustainer better. The psalmists urge us to “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Somehow, eating also can bring us into more intimate communion with fellow “eaters.” Food seems so central to our most important life experiences. Just think of a wedding, birthday, funeral, Christmas celebration, or gathering with family and friends without food. Farmer, poet, and author Wendell Berry aptly summed up the physical, spiritual, and communal significance of food when he said, “we are all living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we can’t comprehend.”

Let’s look now at “the other hand”: Eating can be one of our most disengaged activities. I say this with the knowledge that, on average, our food in the United States travels 1,300 miles from farm to table. In addition, it changes hands at least six times along the way. Our vast distance from the people and lands that provide us with our daily bread means that all sorts of injustices can occur along the way – without our ever knowing. We’re left with questions like those that occurred to me during my reflection over the jar of tomatoes.

Unlike the food that Bonnie grows for my family, most food production in our country is controlled by large corporations. For example, Philip Morris Companies Inc. (recently renamed “Altria Group Inc.”) is a powerful tobacco corporation that also owns Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods, Miller Brewing, and many other major food brands and production and retail services. It is the second most powerful food and beverage company in the world (source: Food Engineering, October 2000; Nestle is number one). Let’s look behind this powerful exterior.

The Multinational Monitor named Philip Morris one of the “10 Worst Corporations of 2001” because of its environmental, human rights (for example, Nabisco would not let female employees in Oxnard, California take bathroom breaks), health and safety, and other abuses. Other corporations are equally as powerful, and their practices are just as elusive to most consumers. Today, three corporate conglomerates — ConAgra/DuPont, Cargill/Monsanto, and Novartis/ADM — dominate virtually every link in the North American (and increasingly, the global) food chain (source: WorldWatch, September/October 2000). They own the vast majority of seed, farm machinery, and chemical producers; farmland; grain and livestock collection and processing; and even supermarkets. I find it very troubling that these conglomerates have so much power over the foods I take into my very body. And yet, they are strangers to me — strangers who benefit greatly from my food dollars and my ignorance as a consumer.

In contrast to small family farms, such corporations seldom care about the long-term health of the lands they use (lands in the United States and all over the world – especially valuable farmland in less-industrialized countries); the well-being of their farmers, farm-workers, animals, packers, processors, retailers, etc.; or the physical health of their consumers.

(They are most concerned about their “bottom lines”— how much money they can amass for the least input cost (e.g., worker compensation and safety, land stewardship). Most small farmers cannot compete with such cost-cutting giants and have had to play a game of “get big or get out” since the end of World War II. (Today, there are fewer full-time farmers than there are full-time prisoners.)

The vast majority of farmers who remain on the land work under strict contracts with the large corporations. These farmers typically receive less than 7 cents for each dollar we pay for the food they grow.

Furthermore, farm workers typically receive less than 4 cents of our food dollars, and the land itself typically sees nothing in the way of dollars spent on conservation.

This distance from the source of our daily bread — and all of the injustices that this distance perpetuates — is not inevitable. Lanza del Vasto, a Christian disciple of Gandhi, said that if we want to make our eating more just and sustainable, we needed to “find the shortest, simplest way between the earth, the hands, and the mouth.” We can rebuild healthy direct relationships between ourselves and the people and lands that feed us. And in doing so we help keep our remaining small farmers — who are most skilled at land stewardship — on their farms. Here are a few practical ways to rebuild these essential relationships and foster a more life-giving food system — please consider practicing one or more of them. (Note: All suggestions below have links in Internet Café. Visit that section of this issue to connect to the sites for more detailed information and ideas.)


	In addition to the individual actions presented here and the ones you may discuss as you talk about this topic with your friends, you may want to consider joining with others to voice your concerns about the people, lands, and creatures impacted by our current food system. The Union of Concerned Scientists provides updated, easy-to-use “action alerts” to help you voice support for ecologically, socially, and economical sound agriculture. Connect with the organization via their web link in Internet Café under the listing Concerned Scientists.

Try growing some of your own food, even if it’s a single tomato plant or a couple square feet of salad greens. This will reduce your reliance on our corporation-heavy food system. It will also give you an immediate sense of connection with the source of your food and a greater appreciation for anyone who raises food.

Consider joining a “Community Supported Agriculture” (CSA) farm. CSAs provide opportunities to build direct relationships with local farmers. CSA “subscribers” pay CSA farmers a lump sum (usually in advance of the growing season) for a “share” of that year’s produce. Farmers provide their subscribers with fresh portions of this share on a weekly basis. Subscribers experience food at its healthiest and gain an awareness of the joys and struggles that small, local farmers face.

Support your local farmers market. Farmers markets will also bring you into direct contact with local family farmers. As a shopper, you’ll be able to have a personal conversation with those who raised your food, and you’ll be able to determine whether their farming practices harmonize with your values.

Support specialized retailers who focus on local, organic, and creation-friendly products: co-ops, natural food stores, and produce stands. These businesses often have fewer ties to the agribusiness economy and maintain closer connections to consumers, farmers, and land. If you live some distance from a specialized retailer, consider stocking up or joining with friends or congregation members to alternate group shopping trips.

Most of us need to shop at larger supermarkets at least from time to time. But we can still shop in ways that help to remake essential food connections. For example, you can look for “Eco-labels” (e.g., “organic”) to help match your social and ecological standards with correlative farming practices. Eco-labels help give a “face” to the people and lands behind our foods.