Friday, June 22, 2012

This week I've been following the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly in Phoenix, Arizona, from afar. This is only the second GA I've missed in 17 years, but it was just not meant to be. I've grateful for the opportunity to follow many of the events via Livestream and to participate as a off-site delegate.

I'm particularly sad to have been absent this year because this is a first-of-a-kind "Justice GA," focused on advocacy and public witness on issues related to immigration. I just finished listening to the Rev. Barbara Prose preach a moving sermon on immigration and what it means to be an American.  The reading that preceded the sermon was this poem by Alice Walker, titled "Patriot:"


If you
Want to show
Your love
For America
Love
Americans
Smile
When you see
One
Flowerlike
His
Turban
Rosepink.
Rejoice
At the
Eagle feather
In a grandfather's
Braid.
If a sister
Bus rider's hair
Is
Especially
Nappy
A miracle
In itself
Praise it.
How can there be
Homeless
In a land
So crammed
With houses
&
Young children
Sold
As sex snacks
Causing our thoughts
To flinch &
Snag?
Love your country
By loving
Americans.
Love Americans.
Salute the soul
& the body
Of who we
Spectacularly &
Sometimes
Pitifully are.
Love us. We are
The flag.

(from her 2003 poetry collection, "Absolute Faith in the Goodness of the Earth" )

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Let's Occupy Our UU Tradition

I haven't been blogging for a while, but I've been thinking a lot. I've been thinking about the Occupy movement that's now 2+ months old and which has spread like wildfire to cities and towns around the world.

And I've been thinking about the role of the Liberal Church in our times. And I've been thinking about Chris Hedges' writings about the death of the liberal class, which includes the Liberal Church.

I've been glad that many Unitarian Universalists have stepped up and stood up in support of and in solidarity with the Occupy movement. But nevertheless, I've been reflecting on ways in which over the last 30 years or more we've gotten distracted from our mission...or caved to the culture of consumerism...or something...or all of the above.

Decades ago, James Luther Adams wrote about two kinds of liberalism: "progressive liberalism" and "laissez faire liberalism," which is "closely bound up with the narrow interests of the middle class, and also with its dogma of political nonintervention in the economic sphere.”

Yikes. I'm afraid the latter is the path we took, even though he warned us against it. I'm afraid we forsook the progressive liberalism, the path more true to our heritage, which was concerned with "liberation from tyranny” and “demanded a more responsible society – a political intervention on behalf of the disinherited.”

In Adams' words:

“[Progressive] liberalism…has been the chief critic of the idolatries of creedalism, of church and political authoritarianism, of nationalistic, racial, or sexual chauvinism; but [laissez faire liberalism]…has generated a new idolatry, the idolatry of ‘possessive individualism.’ This possessive individualism has served as a smokescreen, an ideology, concealing or protecting a new authoritarianism of corporate economic power. This idolatry in the name of individualism and the ‘free market’ eschews responsibility for the social consequences of economic power – it has become virtually unaccountable to the general public. Accordingly, it rejects responsibility of the character of a society that requires, or at least comfortably tolerates, the built-in poverty of almost one-third of the populace (not to speak of the poverty of the underdeveloped countries.)”


We cannot get around it, my liberal religious friends. This drastic inequality between the rich and the poor, the concentration of immense wealth in the hands of a very few, this rise of the corporate state...they happened on our watch. Even though prophetic voices within our tradition warned us against them.  We did not pay attention. We fell asleep at the switch.

It's time to wake up.

It's time to occupy our UU tradition once again.
It's time to remember and to heed these words of Frederick May Eliot, who once said,

“Liberty always requires stouthearted, vigilant defenders. Tyranny is forever alert, watching for new devices by which to steal into the central citadels of freedom and capture them, not by external assault but by reliance upon the indifference and forgetfulness of their defenders."

It is time - well past time - to resume the defense of liberty.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Environmentalism and Religion

Now that the sun is coming out and spring is just around the corner, I'm doing some spring cleaning of old e-mails and links and articles that I meant to post months ago.

Here is an article about Environmentalism and Religion from Time magazine, featuring the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner (2004), and her work planting trees on behalf of the environment.

Another Gleaner!

Here is a link I intended to post months about a  food rescue organization in the Boston area called Lovin' Spoonfuls.  An inspiring story.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

On Gleaning: The Idea as the Seed of Action

It has taken me quite a while to get around to this, but below is the text of a sermon that I preached last November, just after Thanksgiving, about the problem of food waste and about gleaning. 

This sermon really inspired a few people in the congregation to spread the word and to take action. I'm extraordinarily thrilled to report that the vision I propose near the end of the sermon is already coming to fruition thanks to a team of highly motivated, caring, capable, and dedicated lay-leaders.  (Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!)

I will share more details of their successes soon, but for now, here is the sermon that started us on our way...

“A Hidden Abundance”

© 2009 Rev. Wendy L. Bell
Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church
Harvard, Massachusetts
November 29, 2009

Readings:

Leviticus 19:9-10

And when you reap your land’s harvest, you shall not finish off the edge of your field, nor pick up the gleanings of your harvest. And your vineyard you shall not pluck bare, nor pick up the fallen fruit of your vineyard. For the poor and for the sojourner you shall leave them. I am the Lord your God.

Tosephta Pe’ah 1:6 (rabbinic material supplemental to the mishnah)

Rabbi Simeon said: There are four reasons why the Torah said that pe’ah should be at the end of the field: so that he will not rob the poor, keep the poor waiting, give the wrong impression, cause deception. How (can he) rob the poor? By waiting until no one is around and then telling his relative, “come and take this pe’ah.” Cause the poor to wait? The poor might sit and keep watch on his field all day, thinking, “Now he will set aside pe’ah, now he will set aside pe’ah;” however, if he sets aside the end of his field, the poor man does his work all day and at its end (comes) and takes it. Give the wrong impression? People may pass by his field and say, “See this person has harvested his field and has left no edge for the poor despite the Torah’s injunction, ‘Do not destroy the edge of your field.’” Cause deception? So that they (the field owners) should not say “we have already given” or they will not leave the (part whose crop is) good but only the bad.

Rabbi Moses Alshekh (16th century commentary to Leviticus 19:9)

When we leave part of our fields and vineyards unharvested so that the poor can come and take what they need, we must not feel that we are giving them a gift from our own property. Our harvest is ours only through the grace of God, who expects us to act as His agents to see to it that the poor get what they need. The laws of pe’ah, leket, ‘olelot, and peret are intended to help the poor keep their self-respect. It is far less embarrassing for a poor man to enter an orchard, a field, or a vineyard and take from it without having to ask the owner’s permission than it would be for him to receive grain, fruit, or vegetables from our hands as a gift of charity. We must always remember that whatever we possess is not really ours but God’s.

Sermon:

We who are here today have survived another Thanksgiving. We have managed to eat our fill – or perhaps, more than our fill – of turkey or tofurkey, of potatoes and yams, of squash and stuffing and green bean casserole, with a dab of cranberry sauce on the side, and a slice or two of pie. And I’m sure I’m leaving something out.

For most of us here, Thanksgiving is a holiday of abundance. The food may not be fancy, but it is filling. Each of us, no doubt, has our favorite foods, our traditional dishes, family recipes that have been handed down from previous generations. And on that particular night, around whatever table we find ourselves, most of us have eaten far more than we’ve needed to eat.

Harvest festivals are like that.

Here we are at the end of a 6-month growing season in New England, where the first legendary Thanksgiving meal is said to have taken place, and there is all of this food, picked from the fields, that needs to be dealt with. As is the case with other harvest festivals in other places around the world, part of this bounty must be ‘put away’ – pickled or otherwise preserved and stored to provide nourishment during the upcoming season of scarcity. But a goodly portion of it is prepared and eaten as part of a celebration of abundance and gratitude. Thank God – or thank goodness - this year, we have enough!

I had never before fully experienced this sense of the wild abundance of the harvest until Cathy and I bought a CSA share a few years ago through a local farm. Oh, I’ve been fortunate to always have more than enough food in my life. But what I’d never experienced is the madness – the rush to preserve or consume so much bounty before it goes to waste.

When we started I would come home each week of the summer with bags upon bags of produce, much of which was utterly unfamiliar to me, and all of which probably could have fed us for the entire week had we been willing to eat only vegetables and fruits. But we were not. And so I had to learn about blanching and freezing and saucing and a little bit about fermenting. And I’ve more yet still to learn about canning and pickling and drying.

By the end of the second summer, I felt like I was tentatively beginning to find my rhythm in the midst of all of this abundance. And then came the first winter share pick-up. That just about did me in. It consisted of a couple of large waxed boxes of all manner of tubers and roots and winter squash and greens, and it was intended to last us for at least a month, which it more than did.

We just picked such a mother lode up not two weeks ago…carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabagas, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, bokchoy, collards, swiss chard, fennel, lettuce, spinach, arugula, tatsoi, napa cabbage, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, onions, shallots… That is more or less the inventory.

After two years of this sort of madness, we’ve begun to figure out where the coolest and driest place for storing onions and sweet potatoes and where the darkest, coolest and most humid place is for storing white potatoes, and how to fit 17 bags of produce in the refrigerator in such a way that we can still access milk and yogurt and Dijon mustard.

But ask anyone in my family, and you’ll find that such abundance turns me into a bit of a crazy person, who continuously blathers on about how no one best buy any more food and how all the salad greens must be eaten, even if you can’t pronounce them, and what are we going to do with 20 lbs of carrots anyway, and oh, by the way, this must all be gone by next Saturday when we have to pick up our next batch.

But despite my grandest efforts, some of this bounty inevitably goes to waste. Fortunately, the produce from the farm can be composted when it turns ugly. But other things must sometimes be thrown out.

We are – most of us – among the very lucky when it comes to food. We are among those who can afford to waste it sometimes. And it seems like abundance and waste go hand-in-hand, to some degree. We who have a lot can lose a little here and there without missing it. And you and I are not alone.

I recently read that Americans waste between 40-50% of the food that we have available to consume. One organization puts this at approximately 96 billions lbs. of food.

But here is the paradox. Amidst all of this abundance – so great that we feel we can afford to let some of it go to waste – there are people who go to bed hungry at night.

According to Bread for the World, just over a billion people globally are hungry. That’s approximately one in almost every seven people. Each day, 16,000 children die due to hunger-related causes, which is the equivalent of one child’s life every 5 seconds. In our country alone, over 35 million people live in households that experience hunger or the threat of hunger – more than one in every ten households. That includes over half a million people right here in Massachusetts.

And yet, there is enough food produced globally to provide 4.3 lbs. of food per person each day. And here in this country, the food that we waste would more than feed the almost 40 million individuals who are confronted by hunger. More than enough for all! A true abundance!

Why then do so many people in our world experience a scarcity of food?

The answer to that question is complex and multi-faceted, but part of it has to do with this issue of food waste. When we talk about food waste, we are talking, yes, about that food that individuals and families toss when we clean out our refrigerators and our pantries every couple of weeks. But even more so, we are talking about food that we never even see because it is removed from the food stream before we can get our hands on it.

Some if it is left in fields to rot, or it is plowed under, or it is shipped by the truckloads to landfills due to imperfections. These are the potatoes, the salad greens, and the fruits, for example, which don’t conform to the standards to which most of us are accustomed. They are irregular. They are slightly bruised or blemished. They are misshapen. They are too large or too small. At a single potato farm in France, featured in a documentary called The Gleaners and I, workers harvested 4500 tons of potatoes on a single day and then, of that, dumped 25 tons.

And then there is the produce, which is culled once it makes it to the point of sale. One gentleman named Jonathan Bloom who is working on a book about food waste, once took a job in a supermarket produce department to learn what he could learn. He was told to cull not only the food that had just reached its sell-by date, which is safe to eat for another 7 days, but also any food that he would not buy as a consumer, based simply on appearance. On his very first morning, he threw out 24 pounds of perfectly edible cut fruit. With new food coming in every day, the food on the shelves is rotated off even if it is saleable. Often, it goes right into the dumpster.

So, what of this wasting of food? What are the implications? The way I see it, they are environmental, they are theological, and they are moral.

There is a heavy environmental cost to all this waste. Wendell Berry has said that “how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” It follows then that if we waste 50% of our food, it is akin to wasting our world. Certainly it amounts to wasting the world’s resources. Think of the energy, water, and land resources that are used to produce, process, package, and transport food. All of that is wasted, too, when we waste food.

And there is the disposal of that waste. If I don’t eat my arugula in time, it will go into my compost pile and become nutritious food for my soil. But what of the food that is thrown away? Decomposing food waste is the single greatest producer of methane in landfills, and methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than CO2. And some have said that if we all stop wasting food that could be eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road. Furthermore, one author suggests a hypothetical scenario in which, if we planted trees on the deforested land currently used to grow food that is wasted, we could theoretically offset between 50-100% of our greenhouse gas emissions.

And then there are the theological implications. Our readings this morning, the passage from Leviticus and the rabbinical commentaries, make clear that in Jewish tradition, the edges of the fields are to be set aside for the poor. They do not belong to the landowner or the farmer. They belong to God who has given them to the hungry. Accordingly, when we throw out food that could be eaten, we are, in effect, stealing from God and from the poor.

There is also the perspective of the 13th century Zen master Dogen, who had the insight, 800 years ago, that the manner in which we treat our food and the manner in which we treat one another are related.

“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions. Maintain an attitude that tries to build great temples from ordinary greens…A person who is influenced by the quality of a thing, or who changes his speech or manner according to the appearance or position of the people he meets, is not a man working in the Way.”

In our modern society, it is not only imperfect, bruised, damaged, aged food that we cast off. In our modern pursuit of perfection, we also tend, as a whole, to cast of people who are aged, bruised, or damaged in some way, emotionally, mentally, or physically. How we choose to treat our food is to some degree a reflection of how we treat other people.

And this relates back to the problem of hunger in a world of plenty, to the paradox of abundance and scarcity with which we began, which is clearly a moral issue. We simply ought to do a better job with the abundance that is ours to take care of our brothers and sisters on this planet.

There are organizations that are tackling that issue head on. One is The Society of St. Andrew, which brings together volunteers to practice modern day gleaning, organizing them to go out into the fields after harvest to gather the imperfect produce and to deliver it to food pantries and programs that feed the hungry.

And there are organizations involved in what is known as food rescue or food recovery, which approach corporations and grocery stores to “glean” the products and produce that they would otherwise throw out, and likewise deliver them to hunger relief agencies.

The Federal Government is on board with these efforts as is the UN, which has backed a call for global food waste to be cut in half by 2025.

As an individual with a refrigerator full of produce and another CSA pick-up next week, what can I do? I can simply be more mindful of where my food comes from and where it goes if don’t eat it. Then I can head home after church and make some so-called “garbage soup” to use up those carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and greens and invite you all over to help me eat it! I can keep trying my best to buy less and to put away more. We can all take those steps.

But what can we do together? What could we do as a community?

Imagine…

What if we were to call 2 or 3…or 10…local farms and see if they might we willing to let us glean in their fields after their harvest?

What if we were to be in touch with some of the local farm stores and a grocery store or two about gleaning their culled produce and products?

What if we were to form our own Harvard UU Glean Team with a simple email notification system – a team that could be activated on short notice to go out into the fields for a few hours – or to pick up some boxes from a store and deliver them to Loaves and Fishes or to WHEAT?

We’ve done something like this before. A few years ago, the Willards gave permission to our Sr. High Youth Group to glean pumpkins, which were turned into delicious pumpkin soup by one of our members and sold to raise money for hunger relief. The Congregational Church is famous for its apple pies. What if we became famous for our Pumpkin Soup and our clear mission to eliminate hunger in our region?

Imagine what a difference that could make…to us as a church and to each of us as individuals…to the clients at Loaves and Fishes and the guests at Community Table…to our children and our families and co-workers and neighbors who would witness our commitment to justice and mercy…our commitment to the poor and to the environment…our commitment to our Universalist values that teach us that no one is to be cast off…not the damaged, not the bruised, not the aged, not the imperfect…not the laborers, or the farmers, or the rural or urban poor, or least of all the hungry of our world.

Such a vision begins with recognizing the hidden abundance that surrounds us – in our fields, in our markets, in our kitchens, in our hearts, in our lives - and with helping others to see it too. It begins with an understanding that all that we see is not actually ours, that it belongs not to us alone, but to all of our sisters and brothers and all of the creatures that inhabit this small planet. It begins with knowing what is enough and taking only our share and no more. It begins with mindfulness, with attention, and with compassion. It begins with us.

So may it be. Amen. And Blessed Be.

Friday, December 04, 2009

Unitarian Universalists and Hunger

It’s interesting to me. We say we want to grow as a movement. We know we have a message that is salvific. That is, we believe that our core message – the worth and dignity of each and the interconnectedness of all – can save lives. Yet among the social justice issues that we’ve chosen as priorities for our advocacy, one that effects 49 million people in this country – food insecurity and hunger – is nowhere to be found.

I am personally and professionally grateful that the UUA Stands on the Side of Love when it comes to the concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. I wouldn’t want that to change. We are the only mainstream (more or less) denomination that is doing that work so boldly and so publicly.

But it does seem to me that if we truly want to grow, then we need to make sure that our actions and advocacy are relevant to a larger pool of people. Okay, yes, immigration is another great issue with which to be concerned. In fact, there’s not an issue that I’d want to remove from our list of priorities.

Still, these are tough economic times. As of 2008, according to the USDA, 49.1 million people in this country were living in food insecure households. This was up from 36.2 million just a year earlier, in 2007. And we can bet the number is even more staggering now. As of 2008, twenty-two and a half percent of all children were living in food insecure homes, and over a quarter of Black and Hispanic households experienced food insecurity.

I hope that one of the outcomes of our current Congregational Study/Action Issue, Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice, will be that hunger gets onto our list of advocacy priorities. But I’m dreaming of something even bigger. I’m wondering why the UUA doesn’t have a program or an office dedicated to hunger-relief and other issues related to food and faith.

The Presbyterians do. The Episcopalians do. The United Methodists do. And then there is Mazon, a Jewish Response to Hunger.

So, why don’t we?

I know, I know. Someone’s going to say, “Hey, other groups are already doing that work. We want to do something that sets us apart.” To which I would reply, “Hey, you know what? You and I both know it's really not about marketing. It’s really about people - in this case, people, including children, who go to bed hungry at night and don't know from where their next meal will come." And, by the way, some of them are already Unitarian Universalists.

Monday, November 30, 2009

"Do-Nothing Farming"

Recently, someone at church gave me a copy of The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. I've only begun to read it, but what a treat so far!


Fukuoka lived in Japan and was the son of a farmer. As a young man, he experienced a sort of enlightenment moment that led him to understand that human intelligence was fallible and that nature actually knew how to grow plants better than humans did. That sounds rather obvious, perhaps, but it truly is an utterly unconventional way of thinking.

Fukuoka believed that agricultural techniques developed by humans only seemed necessary because humans had thrown the natural processes out of balance through previous interventions. As a result, the land and its plants had become, to a great extent, dependent on them. Most agricultural practices, he concluded, were really unneccessary.

"Human beings with their tampering do something wrong, leave the damage unrepaired, and when the adverse results accumulate, work with all their might to correct them. When the corrective actions appear to be successful, they come to view these measures as splendid accomplishments. People do this over and over again. It is as if a fool were to stomp on and break the tiles of his roof. Then when it starts to rain and the ceiling begins to rot away, he hastily climbs up to mend the damage, rejoicing in the end that he has accomplished a miraculous solution."

Fukuoka developed a farming system - and a philosophy - which he called "Natural Farming" or "Do-Nothing Farming," which, although he hasn't used the term in the book so far, reminds me of the Taoist principle of wu wei or "non-doing." After reading his chapter on "Do-Nothing Farming," I think finally understand better the 29th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, which I've read translated by Peter Merel as:

Those who wish to change the world
According to their desire
Cannot succeed.

The world is shaped by the Way.
It cannot be shaped by self.
Trying to change it, you damage it;
Trying to possess it, you lose it.

My favorite translator of the Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, has interpreted the same passage to read:

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

His interpretation of the chapter continues:

The Master sees things as they are
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way.
And resides at the center of the circle.

Ironically, despite my interest in farming and the natural world, in the past, I've always understood this portion of the Tao as a reference to the world's social problems. I've usually interpreted it to mean, rather pessimistically, that we ought not bother trying to change those things that are troublesome about the world, such as the poverty, the racism, the human rights violations, and even climate change. As such, I've really wrestled with this passage.

But perhaps when Lao Tse said "the world," he really did mean "the earth" - "the natural world," rather than the society that humans have created, complete with all of its problems. What is climate change, after all, but the world thrown out of balance by human intervention? To not address it, Fukuoka would say, would be abandonment. He might recall the time when, as a young man, he was handed charge of his father's orchards and, eager to put his new way of thinking into action, he too suddenly allowed the trees to take care of themselves without first doing what he could to ease them back into a place of natural balance with their surroundings. As a result of his inaction, the trees withered and failed to produce fruit. There is an immense difference between "Do-Nothing Farming" and neglect, he learned, just as there is a difference between wu wei (non-doing), and not doing anything at all.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Great Post-Thanksgiving Clean-Out

I'm racing like a mad woman to eat all of the vegetables that came in the waxed-box from the Community Farm where we have our CSA share. The next (and final for the season) pick-up will be December 5th, and we still have quite an inventory from the last pick-up, including...carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabega, collards, bokchoy, leeks, brussel sprouts, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, napa cabbage, and mixed greens. Oh, and the potatoes in the basement and the onions, shallots, sweet potatoes and squash in the attic. How am I going to pull this off?