March 22, 2008 @ 2:56 pm | Category: food, global issues, social justice
I’m in shock over the price of food. This week I paid over $7 for a gallon of organic milk. The increase in food prices is a global crisis, which I am afraid will outlast the mortgage crisis. See this article about a recent UN report. High food prices aren’t due to our inability to produce enough food. It’s because good land is being turned from growing wheat, barley, and hay to corn for the production of innocent sounding biofuel. We are burning our land in our cars! Global markets are addicted to fuel and the price is more hunger.This strikes me as a problem of food justice, and I consider it immoral to use good productive land for fuel.
When I was a child, my parents would pray before they went to the grocery store so God would stretch their food dollar to last all week. I was never hungry. Yet, I was left with an awareness when I go to the grocery store that not everybody can afford that $12 roast. Higher food prices mean that for the first time many of us will take the bread multiplication miracles of Jesus seriously. Where might we see the need for such a miracle and what is our part in it?
1 Comment
November 27, 2007 @ 11:50 am | Category: food, global issues, social justice
I have been thinking about how to best comment on the wild spending spree our society goes into at this time of year. I could point out the cultural belief that we can shop our way to happiness, the loss of meaning in the Christmas season, or how a green consumer is an oxymoron. In some way all these observations sound too familiar. Today, I got my Heifer International shopping catalog. Instead of selling me something to impress a friend, it challenges me to give a cow to a woman, a child, or a displaced man. It’s a simple idea. Provide people in underdeveloped parts of the world the chance to make a living and feed their families through a gift of livestock. What really brought it over the top for me was this:
“In most of the developing world, it is women who have the primary responsibility for feeding their families. The task of harvesting and preparing food, finding water, cooking and even tending to family farms are primarily the obligations of women…in fact, it is estimated that in Africa, women are responsible for 80-90 percent of the total food production. Yet women own just one percent of the world’s land.”
Additionally, I’m a believer in localism. That’s the idea that what works best is what is closest to the people. For us living off big-box stores, livestock is the furtherest thing from our minds. To many people in the world a cow, a sheep, or even a hive of bees can mean the difference between starvation or abundance. Think about giving the gift of God’s abundance. It’s a great way to support micro-enterprise and acknowledge God’s greatest gift.
Add Comment
October 26, 2007 @ 6:28 pm | Category: food, global issues
Here is an interview at Salon.com with Alice Waters, food advocate and chef. Waters advocates organic, locally grown, slow food as a way to better health, earth care, and stronger communities. In my early years, my mother would take me to the farmer’s market in Buenos Aires. She went often, and would take hours every day to cook meals completely from scratch. This was the slowest food possible for an urban dweller. While I agree with Waters that how we eat matters more than just for maintaining health, I also believe that the structures of our cities discourage eating the way she suggest. Never mind how we work. My farmer’s market in Dallas is ten miles away, requiring a car trip plus difficult parking. Besides I don’t know how local these vegetable stands are. Some of the “farmers” looked like they have never pulled a weed.
In order to eat locally, we need multiple farmer’s markets in neighborhoods. If not, they function more like tourist spots. The most promising trend is grocery stores who have begun carrying locally grown seasonal items. That’s the only way large number of people will change the way they eat. Otherwise, locally grown fresh food remains the luxury of the urban elite.
1 Comment
October 7, 2007 @ 5:16 pm | Category: food, global issues, media
Remember the Coke commercial twenty years ago with the song ” I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing?” Well, I just saw it recently and what seemed like a wonderful idea now appears dreadful. The commercial was prophetic. The whole world is drinking Coke, eating McDonald’s and KFC. That means that they are losing their own cultural foodways and getting fat just like us. As an immigrant, I understand the deep connection between food and cultural identity. Diversity and globalization are code words for the homogenization of all cultures into one that is distinctively American. We wonder why some people are resisting this in the most violent way possible. Something to think about.
Add Comment
July 28, 2007 @ 12:35 pm | Category: community, food
As always, the media is talking about the obesity epidemic. According to this story you are more likely to gain weight if your friends do. This is a continuation on studies in recent years that all eating disorders have a social contagion element. Bulimia can spread like wildfire in dorms. It’s not surprising that our eating issues, and we all have them, are related to our relationships. Food is highly symbolic evoking feelings of love, acceptance, or control. That is why diets that focus on the individual are not very successful. The whole culture, or at least our immediate community, is implicated in the way we eat and how we feel about food.
This brings to mind all those notoriously fattening church pot-lucks or the Sunday morning donuts in the fellowship hall. Maybe this is connected to a theology that doesn’t take our bodies seriously or considers the powerful influence a community can have on its members. It’s easier to attributed it to “personal” sin.
Add Comment
July 13, 2006 @ 3:25 pm | Category: food
The day has arrived when my mother is no longer able to prepare the foods I grew up with. What I have left is an old Dona Petrona cookbook in Spanish and some scribbled note cards. This weekend I ventured to prepared my mother’s pasta flora. It’s a quince pastry that I love. First, I had to venture into one of the latin markets, trying to see if I could find the quince paste critical to preparing it. Then, I had to allow enough time for the the unknowns in preparing this time-consuming indulgence. The cookbook is vintage 1940’s Argentina with metric measurements (when it bothers to give you a measurement at all). Instructions such as ” place in a moderate oven for 40 minutes, more or less” or ” add a little cup of water” are the rule.
Frustration and a little panic set in as I tried to decipher the cookbook and realized that losing these foods would be to lose a significant part of my life. After all, food is life and many of our most significant memories are wrapped in the smell of those foods that made our childhoods memorable. For me, it’s empanadas on my birthday, bunelos on rainy days and flan for comfort. They have become an edible record of my life. I better get busy lest I never taste them again.
1 Comment
