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" )

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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?

Cook for America

I just read a great article by Tom Philpott filled with suggestions for how we might use some of the stimulus package dollars to fix some of our food-related problems. My favorite was the idea of a "Teach for America" style program, which would put new culinary school graduates to work in public school cafeterias. As the author points out, they may have trouble getting jobs in high-end restaurants in this economy anyway. Might as well put those skills - and that passion - to use preparing delicious and nutritious meals for students. Imagine...school lunches made from scratch...maybe even using local and seasonal ingredients. Quite a step up from chicken nuggets and Friday's ubiquitous cheese pizza. You can read the article here.

The End of Food

I'm currently slogging through Paul Roberts' book, The End of Food. It's actually very interesting, but I haven't had much spare time (if you can imagine that), and the book is dense with facts and figures. So, instead of recommending his book to you right off the bat (although I do recommend his book to you!), I invite you to spend a few minutes reading one of his op-ed pieces, this one from the LA Times. It is titled, "Your Friend, the Kitchen," and it is right up The Reverent Eater's food reverence alley. Basically, he says, "Cook, people!"

Goodbye to 2008!

Well, it's been an exciting year! The Reverent Eater started a family and was rather busy in that regard. Thus, the dirth of blog posts.

But it's time to get serious again. There's so much going on in the food world - so many important stories related to food policy and food security - that there's really no time to waste. And with a change of administrations, I am somewhat hopeful (although not entirely) that things will start looking up in 2009.

Before the year ends, I'd like to share with you an article last week's Dining In section of the New York Times. Kim Severson on Obama's potential as a food policy change agent. Already with the appointment of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, I have reason to doubt that Obama will be our food knight in shining armor. But we'll see...

The Big New Year's Resolution of 2008

Hello, New Year!

The Reverent Eater was terribly inactive during the latter half of 2007, but we - the royal "we" - have decided to return with a vengeance in 2008! There's so very much work to be done and so much food to be appreciated. Time to get started once again.

I've finally had a sort of mini "vacation" during this week between Christmas and New Year's, which has gifted me with an opportunity to ponder topics of passionate interest OTHER than parish ministry. It's been a lovely break, I must say. And I've used it to think a good deal about - you got it - food.

In particular, I've been researching food and farm policy and reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. This coming Sunday I'll be preaching on local food systems and sustainable food production...or something like that.

Last night, as I was watching poor ol' Dick Clark count down to 2008, I started to think about meaningful resolutions. Sure, naturally, I want to exercise more like so many of the rest of you. And as usual, I'd like to "eat better," ie., more local foods, more organic foods, fewer processed foods, etc. And I'd like to post more regularly on my blogs. But as I was on my way to bed, I decided on something a lot more concrete, and therefore a lot more challenging.

So here it is...the Big New Year's Resolution of 2008:

I, The Reverent Eater, am going to try very hard...I mean, commit...well, do my best...to not eat any meat products produced in CAFO's for an entire year.

For those of you not familiar with CAFO's...well, where have you been? CAFO's are Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are the gruesome "farm factories," where an overwhelming percentage of our beef, pork, and poultry is produced in the U.S. We're talking feedlots. Cattle, chickens, turkeys, and pigs - which, by the way, are among the most intelligent of mammals - confined to small areas in large numbers.

Here they are fed a mixture of corn - which ruminants in particular have no biological or evolutionary business consuming - and animal by-products. Yes, that means they eat the offal of other cattle, chickens, turkeys and pigs. Well, let me give you the basic list of what your average corn-fed steer eats as Michael Pollan describes it in The Omnivore's Dilemma:

corn flakes, made with GMO corn (genetically modified organism) and grown with petroleum based pesticides

liquified fat, which is often beef tallow

liquified vitamins

synthetic estrogen

antibiotics

some hay and silage for roughage

protein supplements, which may include molasses and urea, which is synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, feather meal and chicken litter (bedding, feces, bits of feed), chicken meal, fish meal, or pig meal

Appetizing, huh?

CAFO's are cruel to the animals, unhealthy for us people, and massively polluting for our environment.

So, for this year at least, I'm going to give up eating meat whose origins I don't know...which most likely means giving up 85 % of the meat I would regularly eat. No pork stir fries at the Chinese restaurant. No chicken dishes at the Thai or Mexican restaurant. No steak tips at the local Steak House. No burgers or Big Macs or Chicken Sandwiches. Nope. I've got to know the farmer or at least something about the farmer. Otherwise, it's hands off.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to my locally grown, organic chicken in my new cast iron dutch oven...

Happy New Year!

Food and Books and a Few Short Musings

I just finished reading another food book: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. It's a book I'd bought over a year ago and which I'd had trouble getting into. I thought this would be the perfect time to try again.

It's similar in many ways to The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, whom I find to be the more accessible writer of the two. Both get into the ills and evils of industrial food production, the craziness of our over-reliance on King Corn, the process and personal moral dilemmas of slaughtering fowl, and the many benefits of eating locally. Nabhan actually does take the reader through a year of his own local eating experiment, which is very interesting and informative. I just had a hard time relating because he lives in Arizona, which is a very different geography and foodshed than my own.

I'd like to write soon about meat-eating and vegetarianism. It's been on my mind a lot since reading Pollan's book and since beginning culinary school. There's a young woman in my class who doesn't seem to be a vegetarian, although she has shown remarkable reluctance to eat animals one might think of as "cute," like bunny and lamb. She also was fairly repulsed by having to clean fish a couple of weeks ago. I'm wondering how she's going to make it through the five weeks of Butchering Seminar that follow Sanitation. Anyway, it's all gotten me thinking...and thinking about writing about my thinking...but I can't do it today, so you'll have to wait a little while longer.

I may also write here more about the Locavore movement - the movement to eat foods grown and produced within 100- (or 150- or 200-) miles of one's home. That is, after all, what Nabhan's book is all about and it is what Pollan comes to see as the most sustainable way of eating. And it's where I'm coming down, too, in terms of my own food ethic. Pollan's book really helped me make more progress in sorting out my own dilemma of whether it's better to eat "organic" or "local." So, more on that, too, coming soon...

My Other Favorite (Food) Writer

Once again I find myself having great cause to say, "It's been too long." November 23rd was the date of my last post. I left you with a favorite essay from the prolific Wendell Berry on the ethics of eating.

My plan, as of yesterday, was to post some reflections on The Omnivore's Dilemma, written by this ball-capped guy to the left who's holding the piglet. Michael Pollan is his name and he is fast becoming my "other" favorite (food) writer, taking his well-deserved place alongside Wendell Berry. I finished reading TOD this afternoon, having started it only last weekend, and having managed to get through all 400 plus pages of it in only a week. Or, more to the point, I managed to put the book down long enough to actually get done the rest of the things I had to get done this week, which was truly the greater accomplishment, by far.

I've got quite a lot to say about the book and all that it contains, and I still hope to share some of my reflections on it here, since that kind of thing is exactly the sort of thing we do here at The Reverent Eater. But first, it seems appropriate to get back into blogging mode by sharing a quick summary of another more recent piece of Pollan's writing, which is actually reminiscent of the contents of my last post by Wendell Berry. This one is from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (January 28, 2007) - from an article called "Unhappy Meals," the sort of subtitle to which reads, "Thirty years of nutritional science has made Americans sicker, fatter and less well nourished. A plea for a return to plain old food."

I commend to you the whole article, which I'm sure can be found over at www.nytimes.com. The list that follows is my summary of Michael Pollan's summary of what one might call his own Wendell-Berry-like ethics of eating. So, here we go:

1. "Eat food." By which Pollan means "real food," not processed food products. Or as he explains it, "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Which is a lot.

2. "Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims." Those that claim to be healthy often are not. Instead, they are often highly processed. Don't let what, as Pollan calls it, "the silence of the yams" fool you. Fresh fruits and vegetables are your friends. Even though they don't have highly paid and highly vocal spokespeople.

3. "Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or that contain high fructose corn syrup." 'Nuff said. That's been one of my rules for years.

4. "Get out of the supermarket whenever possible." Or as he says elsewhere in his writings, try to buy food without barcodes.

5. "Pay more, eat less." Good food costs more, no doubt. But you get what you pay for. And even more importantly perhaps, so called "cheap food" carries with it an overwhelming number of hidden costs - oil for transportation, pollution, the devastation of local economies, etc. Besides, Americans used to pay close to 25% of our income on food. Nowadays we pay closer to 10%. Most of us can afford to pay more, and we should - not only for ourselves and our families, but for the welfare of the rest of the world. Oh, and eat less. Yes. We can afford that, too.

6. "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves." If you eat meat, you might be better off thinking of it as a side dish, suggests Pollan.

7. "Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks." As Pollan argues elsewhere, Americans have no consistent food culture of our own, and that gets us in trouble by making us more vulnerable to food fads. In fact, it may matter more HOW we eat than WHAT we eat, which is precisely what an intact food culture would tell us if we had one. "Let culture be your guide," writes Pollan, "not science." Makes good sense to me.

8. "Cook. And if you can, plant a garden." Doesn't this sound like Wendell Berry? In a sentence that this student of the culinary arts deeply appreciates, he writes, "The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism." All the eggs, butter, and cream notwithstanding, I think he's on to something.

9. "Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet." Here he is singing the praises of diversity. To paraphrase Pollan, the greater the variety of the foods we eat, the more likely we are to get all the many and varied nutrients we need.

So, there you have it: Michael Pollan's ethics of eating. Someday soon, I'll share some of my thoughts on The Omnivore's Dilemma. In the meantime, it's time to start reading a new book, which I think will be...Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. (And no, I haven't forgotten that I promised you a summary of Zen Master Dogen's Instructions to the Cook. I'll get to that...don't worry...all in good time...)

The Pleasures of Eating

About a year ago, when I debuted as "The Reverent Eater," I began with a quotation from the writings of Wendell Berry. Much to my own surprise, I never returned to him.

Now it is time. For verily, I say unto you, his writing is the fundamental source of my inspiration.

Almost two years ago now, when we moved from the ex-burbs to the city, and as I began to grieve the loss of my capacity to grow my own food - for we'd moved from a 1.11 acre plot to a .11 acre dot - I turned again to the following essay for solace and a sense of the possible. Perhaps you too will find in his words something meaningful and purposeful for your life:

"The Pleasures of Eating" by Wendell Berry

Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?"

"Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers." If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want—within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or "processed" or "precooked," how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals—just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry—as in any other industry—the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcut that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship.

What Can One Do?

Here is a list, probably not definitive:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?

6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.

7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

1989

"The Pleasures of Eating" from WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR? by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1990 by Wendell Berry.

Silly Goose Dog!

Well, here’s something a little different from the files of the Reverent Eater…

In honor of spring and Earth Day and the great outdoors, today we move from food preparation and food consumption back to where it all begins…food production. We return to the source…we return to the farm.

The town where we live now was once upon a time what one might reasonably call a “farm town.” But we’re talking a century ago. Today, there are no longer any working farms here. The playing field near our house was once a farm and is still named after that farm, but it’s only grass and dandelions, children and their dreams that grow there now.

However, there are still a couple of small farms in some of the towns nearby. One such farm has been in the same family for almost 100 years and is located just over our town line. It’s only probably a mile or two from our front porch to the front door of their farm stand, as the geese fly. And, in this time when farmland is so speedily giving way to development, it is a treasure. And we here at The Reverent Eater would very much like to support them in any way we can.

Speaking of geese, the farm owners and manager have been a little worried about the damage that the increasingly large flocks of Canadian Geese could do to their newly planted crops, like their lettuce seedlings, for instance. And so this past week they put out a call for goose patrols – that is, dogs and their owners who would be willing to walk through the fields occasionally and humanely chase away any geese they find snacking there.

This morning the younger of my two dogs and I answered that call. What follows is really a mama’s brag…

Of our two dogs, one is much more of an “eater,” and the other is more of a “chaser.” The chaser has always had a natural aptitude for chasing. In fact, a very important part of her morning routine has been to begin her day in “ready…set” mode at the back deck door and wait not-so-patiently for it to slide open so she can “GO!”

Her goal…her vocation…what she absolutely LIVES for…is to try to catch the squirrels that by that time of morning are already well ensconced in the birdfeeders in our back yard. And to that end, she TEARS out the back door and down the deck steps like a FLASH and ZOOMS across the yard to tree the thus far lucky little rodents. Though truthfully, between you and me, she’s never gonna get ‘em. But oh! How she dreams!

This morning at the farm, mama’s little “chaser” was spectacular! At first there were no geese. But she stayed near by as the farm manager gave us a tour, showing us what had been planted so far in the early days of the season. The peas are just beginning to come up. And when two geese did come honking by and flying in for a landing, it didn’t take much encouragement on mama’s part to get our little Goose Chaser on the job. She joyfully tore after them – they flew on a bit further – she kept after them – and they took off. And with a whistle, she was back at my side with absolute glee and delight reflecting in her eyes for some well-deserved praise and a taste of kibble. What a good dog! And what a wonderful way to start the day!

Hors d'oeuvres, anyone?

Geez, Louise! Has it really been a month since the Gourmand fell? Sorry to have been so out of touch! It's been really busy in these parts and I haven't been doing much cooking or, for that matter, much inspirational eating...except, of course, for a recent birthday fete with my beloved and a couple close friends...dinner out...and the cuisine...French and Cambodian. Delicious. But I don't have time to go there with you.

The thing that keeps me up at night these days - well, not really, but that sounds so...dramatic - is planning the food for the next birthday fete - that of my beloved. And I'm not saying which, but it is one of those "big" birthdays, so the royal "we" want it to be special. And, after consultation with our chef neighbor, the royal "we" have decided to handle the food our own royal selves.

I've only got a week now left to plan and shop and execute, and I've got a vague idea of where I'm going with this - we're planning heavy appetizers and, of course, a cake. So, if you're still out there reading this blog, maybe you could help me out...

When you go to a party where hors d'oeuvres are being served, which ones are your favorites?

C'mon, folks, help me out?

The Gourmand Falls

Last night I went to watch my goalie friend Aral play ice hockey. Aral did a great job and (finally) her team really helped out on defense. Still gotta work on offense and scoring. But this post isn't about hockey, it's about how the gourmand fell.

I was hungry when I got to the rink and I only had about 3 minutes before the puck was dropped at center ice. No time for food lines. I headed straight for the vending machines. Had a bag of cheetos. Loved it. Licked my fingers. Didn't even read the lengthy list of ingredients. Best $.75 I've spent in a while.

After the game I went back for a bag of Smartfood. It was okay. It was a little healthier. But I should have had a second bag of Cheetos. And a Barqs. Every once in a while, the gourmand just wants Cheetos and a Barqs. And last night, the fall was very satisfying.

The Souper Bowl

Hey Friends, I wish I had more time to do this post justice, but it's...like...Super Bowl Sunday, and there are chicken wings to bake for Doug and chili to make for a party I'm going to later.

So, this is going to be a quick one.

I've heard that 140 million people around the world watch the Super Bowl every year. A pretty stunning number! Well, there was a church youth group somewhere in South Carolina that got to thinking about that number and about the fact that so many people in the world are hungry or "food insecure." And they thought, "Hey, what if each one of those 140 million people gave just a dollar - that would be $140 million dollars! That would sure take a bite out of hunger!"

So they started this great thing - The Souper Bowl of Caring (www.souperbowl.org) - and every year church youth groups from all over the United States stand at the back of their churches on Super Bowl Sunday and collect a dollar here and a dollar there and forward the money on to the local hunger relief organization of their choice. I don't know if this is happening in your neck of the woods today or not, but if so, why not throw in a buck or two. If not, then maybe you'll want to take my Souper Bowl challenge...choose a local hunger relief organization and, once the Super Bowl is over and chicken wings are gone and the beer is imbibed, add up the total score of the game and send in a dollar for every point scored to help tackle hunger in your region. It's just a little thing, but if everyone did it...

Peugeot

To the left is the pepper mill I was blessed to receive for Christmas. We were desperate for a new pepper mill. I'd been cooking without one for, oh, let's say 4 months. It was trying. You may not be able to relate to this, but work with me, if you can. It was like trying to cook beef bourguignon without...a dutch oven...or, for the rest of you, like trying to flip a grilled cheese without a spatula...very difficult. Trust me.

So, I put "pepper mill" at the top of my Christmas list. And Chef Santa was good to me. This particular model is a Peugeot - yes, the same Peugeot people who manufacture cars. They actually have been making pepper mills longer than they've been making cars, since 1810. It all started when the Peugeot brothers transformed their family mill into a steel manufacturing outfit. Good job, brothers Peugeot!

This is pretty near the top of the line when it comes to pepper mills. I can adjust the size of the grind - 6 options: finest, finer, fine, course, courser, coursest. I might use finest in making a sauce, coursest for coating a ribeye steak before grilling.

Or a tuna steak. Tonight we had pan-seared yellow fin tuna au poivre. Pretty simple to whip up, really. Take a couple of nice, thick, fresh hunks of tuna; coat both top and bottom with a significant amount of coursely ground black pepper and sprinkle with salt. Sear in a little bit of olive oil on medium high for about 3.5 minutes on each side. Remove from heat and keep warm.

In the same pan I made a simple sauce of butter, onion, chicken stock and brandy, reduced, thickened, and flavorful, with just a little salt and pepper (finely ground) added at the end. We had our sauce over the tuna and over a blend of brown rice and quinoa, which adds a delicate nutty flavor (and some fiber) to the rice. Plain ol' steamed broccoli on the side. Delicioso!

It was so good that it all most makes up for the Bruins' loss last night and the increasingly tenuous lead that the Duke Blue Devils still maintain over the women from UNC. Go Duke!