Eating Your Values

They didn't quite know what they were getting into when they started their project - but this particular family of four knew they were in for something. They lived in Tucson, Arizona when the story began - and by the end they were firmly ensconced on their family farm in Virginia - determined to live for an entire year on food that they grew themselves or got from their local neighbors.

They worried, of course, about what they would have to give up for this year - their youngest daughter, Lily, wondered if she could make it that long without gummi worms - while the rest of the family anticipated the loss of bananas and made an exception for organic, fair-trade coffee. But even with their worries - the family went forward. Committed, together, to eat as much as possible from their local foodshed for one year.

The term foodshed comes from scientists and environmental activists - and it refers to the foods that are grown and produced within a certain distance from any particular place. Concord grapes and New York apples would be part of our local foodshed, for instance, while bananas and wild salmon would not. Milk from the Pittsford Dairy would be part of our foodshed - but organic milk shipped in from Wisconsin would be too far out of range.

Driven by a desire to decrease their environmental footprint and minimize the damage that their individual family contributes to overall environmental degradation - Barbara Kingsolver's family began their journey - chronicled in the book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - not really knowing how it would all turn out. "We only knew, somewhat abstractly," they say, that "we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both "love your neighbor" and "try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here."[1] They were setting out to do spiritual work - looking, as Kingsolver says to find a certain path home, to find a way back to a practice as old as time and on the way, as she says - beginning "the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain."[2] They were setting out to literally eat their values with every meal, and in order to do that, they needed to acquaint themselves with the problem at hand - and a few of the solutions.

The problem, unfortunately, was not far from their front door. Living in Tucson, Arizona with her family - Kingsolver says she began to realize that her city operated a lot like a space station - with every single bite of food and sip of water shipped in from somewhere else. And our desert cities are not alone in this. On average, each item of food in our grocery stores has traveled 1500 miles to get there - further than most American families go on their annual vacations. Our food travels enormous distances before it reaches our door - and those travels have consequences for both our environment and our taste buds. Anyone whose ever had a tomato in January knows that it doesn't taste nearly as good as a tomato from the garden in August - but not very many of us know that our food is so processed and packaged - and travels so far to get to us - that by the time it reaches our table ten times as much energy has been expended in getting it there as we will receive by eating it. Somehow - over the course of just a few generations - what used to be an extravagance or a parlor trick - things like oranges in January in Illinois - has become an expectation of modern life and the wealthiest among us, worldwide, are consuming the most highly processed food - delighting in spending less on food than the poorest among us - eating mealy, tasteless tomatoes in February and calling it progress.

The truth is that our dependence on food grown so far away from our own homes is not only destroying our environment, but it is also wreaking havoc on our communities and on our security. Imagine, the author and activist Wendell Berry writes, that "you've got 300 million people, most of whom produce nothing for themselves or for the community and to whom everything has to be brought from somewhere else, then there's no way you're going to have limited government, or limited anything. All organizations feed upon the helplessness and ignorance and passivity of the people."[3] And what, I wonder, could make us more helpless than not knowing where our food is coming from or how it got there - what could make us more helpless and vulnerable to outside attack or inside catastrophe than literally, not being able to feed ourselves.

When fossil fuels run out, as they surely will, or when the price of fuel goes so far through the roof - as it is doing now, that it affects the price and availability of everything else - the time will come when we simply won't be able to afford the extravagance of food shipped 1500 miles to reach our doors. Sooner or later we will have to start looking closer to home to feed ourselves and for many of us, if we keep going down the path we are on, we simply won't have any idea how to do it.

So I turn back to Barbara Kingsolver and her family - who took to the road and moved all the way from Tucson, Arizona to their family farm in Appalachia where they tried - as Kingsolver says, to wring "most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them."[5]

Together, Kingsolver and her family did what might seem impossible to many of us. They made bread, planted crops, canned tomatoes, trolled for mushrooms, raised and harvested turkeys, separated curds from whey and formed them into cheese. They bought and raised chickens, sold and traded eggs, froze blueberries and rhubarb, visited the local farmer's markets so often that they befriended their food sources, discovered the curious way that peanuts grow, planted flowers and climbed trees to get to those cherries too high to knock off with a stick. And they did all of this in their spare time - before and after eight plus hour work days and in between family vacations and visits to sick relatives and school projects - they did it with all of the rhythms of life sounding around them.

Working together, they achieved their goal - living for a year on food they grew themselves or purchased from people they knew - and in the end they calculated that it cost them about 50 cents per person per meal to put locally grown, organic food on the table - less, Kingsolver says, than she spent during the years she qualified for food stamps. Everyone in the family altered their routines - and pretty soon - this adventure that began in trepidation morphed into an exercise in gratitude. Instead of beginning meal preparations with the question - what do we want - dinner began with the questions: what do we have, what do we have plenty of - and gratitude for all that that was there followed. When the year ended, no one in the family headed for the candy aisle or the exotic fruits - but rather in the main, she says, "our banana-free life was now just our life." "The best I can do is recall a moment [at the end of that year] when I understood I had kept some promise to myself," she says, something "having to do with learning to see the world differently."[5]

Keeping those promises to our selves - and to our world - in the end, that was so much of what her family's journey was about. But it was about a journey home, too. A journey into the soil and the sun and the people of the particular place where their family lived. A journey back to ways of doing things that have sustained people for all of time, back to the ways of grandparents and great-grandparents, back to the ways that our worldwide neighbors never lost.

And for some of you - these ways were never lost. Some of you remember the not too distant past when you went out to the garden to find out what was for dinner - when during World War I and II our government urged us all to plant Victory Gardens - vegetable gardens in our front and back yards that could reduce the pressure on the public food supply and help folks to save money during those lean times. I can't help but think that as this generation faces its own lean times and war times that it is no coincidence that eating local is gaining in popularity and squash plants are blossoming all over the city once more.

Turning to our local food supply for more and more of our meals simply makes sense- whether we look at it in economic, environmental, patriotic, or spiritual terms. But first, we've got to acknowledge the elephant that has surely sauntered into the room this morning. I can only imagine that some of you sitting out there are thinking the same thing I thought when I first picked up this particular book.

"Right. Sure, you go ahead and do that. Move all the way across the country with your family to a farm and try to live off the land. That's great for you - millionaire author - but I have a job to do, a family to take care of, and not a lot of money or time to spare. I simply don't have the luxury to do what you are doing."

But I kept reading anyway - drawn in by the images of bread made by Kingsolver's husband, homemade pizza on Friday nights, and family efforts to disappear bushels of zucchini and can hundreds of pounds of tomatoes. As I read on, I began to see the irony of my own thoughts. Is it really a luxury to do what people all over the world have been doing for generations - to do what most people on this planet are still doing - living off of the food they produce themselves or barter for with their neighbors? Is it really a luxury in this time of war and economic decline to stop pouring oil from the Middle East into a refrigerated truck in the U.S. to bring me produce from California in the dead of winter? Is it really a luxury to let our animals roam freely and eat grass and mate with one another unassisted by modern technology? And is it really so hard to even think about making changes in my eating that I will close my eyes and refuse to face the complex problems sitting at my own kitchen table?

These are tough questions to ponder - and they are all mixed up - not only with the logistics of change - but with the wrongheaded morality that our culture has placed on food. U.S. culture has fallen into "the language of sin," Kingsolver says, when it comes to discussing changed eating habits. We steel ourselves to replace what is bad for us with what is good for us; we grit our teeth and enter the realm of sacrifice and penance.[6] How many times have you heard someone say that they're going to be good tonight and skip dessert? And how many times have you heard people talk about bread, cheese, wine, carbohydrates, cholesterol, cake, and red meat as if they were the devil? We get lost in this culture - forgetting that the real moral issues are the conditions our food is grown under, the pay of the laborers that bring it to harvest, the distance it has traveled to our table.

The real moral issues at hand when it comes to food are incredibly complex and complicated - and just as it is in all arenas of spiritual living - there is no perfection to be achieved, but rather a constant engagement - a commitment to stick with the task and the joy of living awake and aware lives - making the best choices we are able in the moment - sometimes inching and sometimes leaping forward - always striving to do our best to align our actions with our values. This takes attention, of course, and time too. But the good news, as Barbara Kingsolver discovered, is that "Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure."[7]

So what can we do? What can we do as busy, conscious, concerned people to line up our actions with our values when it comes to eating - and maybe even groan with pleasure while we're doing it?

For some of us - the idea of growing more of our own food sounds fantastic - even exciting. For others - not so much - so let's not even start there. What if we start by getting over the hurdle of believing we have to be perfect if we're going to do anything at all? What if we start by getting rid of the idea that the small choices we make don't matter and instead take a look at the facts? Because the facts are good.

"If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal)," Kingsolver says, "composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels...Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast."[8]

What if we began to think of our eating as an expression of our values - seeing those three meals a day as a time of communion with the soil, the air, the water - the farmer, the worker, the driver. What if we approached our food with reverence - communing in those moments of eating with the natural world - the interdependent web of which we are a part - rather than with the ecologically disastrous industrial food system that strips not only flavor from our food but power from our hands?

What if we, like the poet, Wendell Berry, joined with those of ancient faith, praying not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. Remembering, what we need is here. What we need is here.

As we wake up and allow ourselves to become aware of all that goes into the food that makes its way to our table - the choices we face become increasingly complex - and the questions abound. Should we go vegan or vegetarian or focus our efforts on eating more of what is produced locally? Should we do a little of each? Where should we buy our food, and should we sacrifice time in front of the tv or a good book, time at our daughter's soccer game, to make a trip to the local dairy when the convenience store was right there on the way home? There is no one right answer for all of us in each of these moments - but if we let the information in, and if we do our best to let our values guide the way, we will soon find that joining Barbara Kingsolver and Sue Morgan and Lois Baum and so many others on this journey of aligning our actions with our values when it comes to eating isn't nearly as hard as we imagined, and it may even make us groan with pleasure along the way.

May we open our minds and our hearts to the journey, letting our longing lead the way to that old path home where we too, might know the joy that comes with a promise kept to ourselves and to our world.

May it be so, and Amen.

Jen Crow, Associate Minister
July 27, 2008

1. Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Harper Perennial: New York, 2007), p. 23.
2. Ibid., p. 6.
3. Wendell Berry, interviewed in The Sun Magazine, July 2008. p. 8.
4. Kingsolver, Barbara, op. cit., p. 10.
5. Ibid., p. 336.
6. From an interview with Krista Tippet on National Public Radio's, Speaking of Faith. http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/ethicsofeating/.
7. Ibid..
8. Kingsolver, Barbara. op. cit., p. 5.