By M a rilyn C h a ndler M c E ntyre
other deadly weapon. She was also, however, a white suburban woman raising children in the 1950s, a woman who watched Ed Sullivan and Ronald Reagan’s slick GE commercials and who bought Girl Scout cookies and Jello and made Rice Krispies treats. Returning to this country, she found herself riding the crest of a postwar wave of mass production made possible by abundant gasoline and unexamined miracle chemicals like DDT and accompanied by the final strains of the American anthem of manifest destiny echoing over the beat of Khrushchev’s shoe at the UN. We were world leaders, and our “rightful” domination was reflected not only in our weapons but also in our waste. Planned obsolescence, disposable packaging, and the emerging fast food industry collaborated in an ethic of convenience whose costs were masked by a language of blessing, abundance, and American privilege it has taken years to recognize as the worst kind of propaganda campaign — and possibly the most successful in history.
“Father, we thank thee for these and all thy blessings.” Thus began the many meals my father prayed over. His thankfulness, and my mother’s, were informed by years spent in India, working among the rural poor, caring for orphans in a mission school, traveling among villages where adequate food was never to be taken for granted. In the course of my childhood, their frequent reminders to be thankful even for steamed greens and boiled potatoes designed to stretch a sparse budget were never abstractions. Waste was an insult both to the memory of people they had known who valued the last grain of rice in the pot and to God’s good providence. I am grateful for their training in habits of gratitude and awareness. It helped my brother and me cultivate a bit of “global consciousness” before it became a buzz word. What appeared on our table was always, emphatically, to be appreciated in two ways: as a gift of God’s abundance and as a blessing that imparted responsibility to us as “rich Christians in an age of hunger.” Another version of grace before meals asked that the Lord “bless this food to our use and us to thy purpose,” clearly and simply connecting the dots between the ultimate source of nourishment and its ultimate aim, which went well beyond individual satisfaction to include the good of the whole world. A meal framed in that way could and did acquire a sacramental character. Sundays there was lamb or pot roast, or, in leaner months, stew. Grandma’s china and special Fostoria glasses were put on the dining table where a freshly ironed cloth had been spread. Every week this feast day restored a healthy balance between frugality and celebration and reasserted gratitude over a vague and fruitless guilt that was often a downside of our family’s earnest Calvinism.
A Prophetic Warning
Eisenhower’s oft-cited warning to that generation about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” has acquired over time the force of prophecy.1 We are witnessing the fruits of that dangerous collaboration between the military and industry: Not only our regular armed forces, but also increasing ranks of industry-supported “security forces,” protect by violence our privilege, including our overeating (we are now the fattest, as well as the wealthiest, nation). Monsanto has cut deals with the Indian government to prevent rural farmers from collecting their own seeds.2 Their patents on various forms of plant life give them “rights,” aggressively enforced, to shares in crops even inadvertently pollinated by “their” microorganisms. Coca-Cola has effectively sterilized farmlands in the vicinity of its factories in India by heedless chemical waste dumping that would be prohibited in the US. Its labor abuses in Columbia are legendary.3 MacDonald’s has been singly responsible for the destruction of millions of acres of rainforest in the interests of raising beef for North American consumers on cheaply purchased farmland. The farmers displaced in that process often end up in urban poverty.4 The list goes on: Wal-Mart’s low prices exact a high toll in human rights abuses;5 Tyson Foods raises animals in cruel and squalid captivity entirely out of keeping with any notion of good stewardship;6 Nestle and Kraft products pose specific dangers to public health, despite World Health Organization oversight and urgent recommendations.7 Exxon’s record of human rights violations is persuasive, even to reluctant critics, but the company remains a key player in the global food systems that have become unprecedentedly oil-dependent.8 All these corporations have come to depend on unsustainable
What ‘Enough’ Looks Like
I know my mother struggled with culture shock, returning to America in the postwar 1950s to find frozen foods, quick mixes, and a bewildering array of mass-marketed cereals in boxes that bore plastic “prizes” for small apprentice shoppers. I know she struggled with the excessive expectations purveyed on the few TV shows we were allowed and from a peer culture already steeped in suburban notions of plenty. She saved packaging until it became silly to make one more stack of margarine tubs. She meted out candy money only on special occasions. All leftovers reappeared in new guises. She made sure we knew what “enough” looked like—and the difference between “want” and “need.” And she did all this with a generosity of spirit that was fueled and sustained by an utterly practical understanding of spiritual economics: Poverty is not a virtue, but it makes us recognize our dependence; and wealth need not be a vice, but it is a dangerous instrument of good to be used with the same care one might exercise with any
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What if the grace we say before a meal translated into grace for those who harvested, transported, protected, and prepared it?
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terhouses, or acknowledge how E. coli contamination increases with the speed of production lines, or remind you that your hamburger may come from the flesh of a thousand cows, not all of which have been thoroughly inspected. No plastic popsicle wrapper is going to explain the possible side effects of synthetic chemical colors. “Let the buyer beware” may be a wise and practical maxim, but it hardly serves as a Christian ethic. Christian ethics require a long look at process. As I look back on 30 years of teaching, I think often that if there were one thing I would recommend as a foundation for education it would be “teach process.” Everything has a story. Everything we see comes from somewhere, cost someone time and/or energy and/or money, required tradeoffs, displaced something else, involved choices that may have done harm as well as good. I would love to see banners on the walls of every school emblazoned with questions like these: Where did it come from? Who planted it, farmed it, made it, marketed it, consumes it? Who reaps the benefits? Who pays the hidden costs? How did it get here? Who decided it should be here? What tradeoffs did that decision involve? Whose interests does it serve? Why should I want it? What will happen to it when I’m done with it? Is it part of a healthy production cycle or a one-way process? Will it end up as compost or landfill? What choices do I have to make about it? What informs those choices? How do I participate in and perpetuate these processes? Questions like these might equip young people to become more aware and more caring in their habits as consumers and citizens and, for those who are, as Christians. Those who claim their faith need to consider the urgencies of this world as a matter of personal responsibility and widen their moral scope to reflect on their own behaviors as participants in the systems they inhabit, whether they are beneficiaries or victims of those systems. I am distressed by the degree to which the focus of popular Christianity in this country tends toward personal, individual moral choices to the exclusion of policy questions or matters of corporate and public practice that affect the lives of others and stewardship of resources we all share. Bumper stickers that put a spin on the popular “What Would Jesus Do?” question by asking “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” represent one effort to open up the scope of Christian ethics for believers who inhabit this mass culture. A similar question bears similar conjecture: What would Jesus eat?
expropriation of the earth’s resources, over which we fight increasingly brutal wars. What we see on our dinner tables is, to a distressing extent, the spoils of war. Though not all corporations are equally guilty, many have collaborated to seduce a bewildered public into eating behaviors that also produce escalating levels of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer. The foregoing paragraphs are a short summary of information readily available to concerned consumers (some reliable sources are given at the end of this essay), though not generally through the mainstream media, themselves closely held by six mega-corporations with deeply vested interests in oil and war. I assume most readers are familiar with some of the particulars and concerned about them. But the facts bear reiteration, partly because they remain underreported and partly because Christian readers will have been subject to a particularly virulent kind of propaganda that spins greed into prosperity, ill-gotten wealth into blessing, and a food system “drenched in petroleum”9 and mired in waste into “abundance.” As long as we cling to a sentimental rhetoric that allows us to describe ourselves as a “Christian nation,” we will remain in confusion about the ways nationalism and corporate interests have overridden the most essential understanding of Jesus’ life, mission, and death: care for the poor, care for the earth, renunciation of worldly ambition, moderate practices of feasting and fasting that recognize all food as manna, and finally an economy of love that is self-giving, global, generous, and rooted in gratitude and grace.
Meri Adelman
GRACE COMES FIRST
A pastor I know starts every worship service with the reaffirmation that “grace comes first.” Grace comes before judgment; grace comes before justice; grace comes before nationalism; grace comes before family values; grace comes before every meal—every meal a visible occasion to reflect on source and process. God’s gracious provision, permission, and forgiveness precede everything else and are also the end of the story. Grace is the frame within which and the backdrop against which we work out our salvation. That’s the good news. In that large context, “grace” before meals connects us to a very large vision of what we are about when we come to the table, both the Lord’s supper and Friday evening leftovers. One of the purposes “saying grace” can serve is to call our attention to basic processes by which we are fed. The simple reminder that our food comes to us from somewhere and serves a purpose beyond immediate physical satisfaction or social pleasure is not, in fact, so simple any more. Mass marketing obscures process by focusing our attention on products as objects to be consumed, period. No MacDonald’s ad is going to describe the conditions in feed lots or slaugh-
Food As God’s Provision
All faith traditions involve food laws. The many injunctions in the Old Testament about how and what to slaughter, cook, and eat are modified in the New Testament, though not without serious attention to the matter of food as God’s provision.The stories of God’s people are threaded with very
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serve as an instrument of compassion and inclusion rather than as a litmus test for participation in religious community. Our own historical moment brings up new questions about the ethics and spiritual meaning of food consumption. How are our eating habits linked to a theology of grace? How are we to reckon, as Paul does, the effects of our eating practices on our brothers and sisters? Surely the decision whether to serve wine at a meal where someone is struggling with alcoholism offers one simple example of an ethical decision any of us might have to consider, or whether to serve meat as a main course when a person has made a considered decision to be a vegetarian, or how to steward the health of a family when one is chief cook and grocery manager. Beyond these personal decisions lie a range of decisions that take us beyond individualism into the wider waters of community life. It may be, for instance, applying Paul’s own logic, that though there is nothing inherently wrong with eating meat, there may be compelling reasons not to eat meat raised and slaughtered and marketed in ways that involve systematic cruelty to living beings, poor stewardship of soil, abuse of human labor, use of substances that threaten public health, and deceptive advertising that masks these problems. It may be that paying the extra dollar to support organic farming is a matter of public responsibility for those whose budgets allow that flexibility, since every dollar spent in that way supports responsible stewardship of the soil and constitutes a vote to end dependence on
specific references to the contexts of eating. How food is provided, gathered, prepared, consumed, and shared receives enough attention from biblical writers to make it clear that food matters on multiple levels—biological, social, political, and spiritual. Certainly the story of manna in the desert, with its emphasis on God’s daily provision and its prohibition against hoarding, occupies a central place among these teachings. Food is to be recognized and received as a gift; sharing is more important than storing; trusting God for our daily bread is a defining faith practice. The New Testament offers a number of explicit correctives to food laws that had become instruments of political exclusion and stumbling blocks for the scrupulous. From John the Baptist’s locusts and wild honey to the daily bread Jesus featured in the second line of the Lord’s Prayer, to the loaves and fishes to the bread and wine of the Last Supper, the gospels reset the emphasis on the divine provision, simplicity, and sacramentality of food. Paul’s food ethic reframes laws prohibiting eating food offered to idols as a matter of diplomacy and discretion rather than of legality. “To the pure all things are pure,” he writes (Titus 1:15, ESV), but he qualifies that permission with pastoral concern: “. . . if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Cor. 8:13, ESV). The matter of what to eat, and when, and how, must be reckoned within a context of grace and generous orthodoxy rather than legalism. Food use is to
D IG D EEPER
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2008)
The End of Food by Paul Roberts (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2007)
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (Harper Perennial, 2005)
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2008)
The Future of Food by Deborah Koons Garcia (DVD from Arts Alliance America, 2007)
Diet for a New America by John Robbins (HJ Kramer, 1998)
The Beautiful Truth by Steve Kroschel (DVD from Cinema Libre, 2008)
The Food Revolution by John Robbins (Conari Press, 2001)
King Corn by Aaron Woolf, Curt Ellis, and Ian Cheney (DVD from Mosaic Films, 2006) PRISM 2009
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pesticides and chemical fertilizers that do more harm than the public is generally allowed to imagine. What processes am I supporting when I buy Florida oranges in California? Or strawberries from the San Joaquin Valley? Or genetically modified corn? Or beef from a feed lot? Or Australian wine? Or French cheese? Or fresh tomatoes at the local farmers’ market? Every food decision moves us either toward health, consciousness, and compassion or toward insulation, denial, and often illness. We can no longer count on the integrity of food production in an industrial world where our relationship to the soil and each other is so thoroughly mediated that it has become difficult to track the practices and decisions that bring food to our tables. But it may be that an ethic of grace and love necessitates that we do the homework required to do so. To live graciously with our brothers and sisters who work in the fields is to care about their exposure to poisons and poor benefits and abusive labor policies. Love requires a long look at conditions in slaughterhouses where the injury rate of workers is three times what it is in other factory jobs and damage from prolonged physical stresses 35 times higher.10 And it requires an equally long look at the work of committed farmers and ranchers who have risked their livelihood to insist on good stewardship of animals, earth, and people: sustainable practices, responsible studies of nutrition and environmental risks, maintenance of local production, and full disclosure of processes.
some collective energies on just, sustainable earth care, including food practices. These are a few promising examples, but more of us need to connect the dots between our theology, our worship, our shopping, and our eating. A Christian imagination has a wide reach: We are called to bring the good news to “all people,” to go into “all the world,” and to think globally about our relationship to one another as creatures of the same creator and children of the same father. Surely the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, in addition to being a central sign of Christ’s sacrifice, implies the centrality of eating as an act that unites us profoundly in the source of all life and with life of this planet. As Walt Whitman so vividly put it, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”11 Our common life is rooted in the soil— the “humus”—that gives us our human bodies. Care for that soil and what it produces is care for each other. “Feed the hungry,” Jesus said.These days I take that to mean “Give real food—not fake, overpriced, denatured industrial products laced with pesticides and petroleum—to the hungry, including the overfed and undernourished. “Share a cup of cold water with those who thirst,” Jesus said. These days it would seem right to add “And take an interest in who is on the local water board, who is helping to keep water a safe public resource, and to resist privatization.” “Be sober, be watchful,” Peter warns in 1 Peter 5:8. The “roaring lion” he warns against can come in the form of mega-corporations whose drive for profit can subordinate and even obliterate the lives of those they purport to serve. And “be not afraid.” This word of encouragement that Jesus repeated so often and with such compassion may serve as a lifeline to those who feel a particular call to ministries of resistance, boycotts, lobbying efforts, support of local farming, and demands for corporate accountability. Gospel teaching calls us to courage. It also equips us for the complex problem-solving that life in this generation requires. That work, to which I believe we are all called, might begin with grace before meals—grace extended to those who dug our potatoes and picked our bananas, those who research ways of keeping our meals safe and sustainable, and those who invent new ways of reminding us that the bread we draw from the earth, like the bread we receive from heaven, is not primarily an industrial commodity but rather a gift to be stewarded and shared. n
How Churches Can Help
I would love to see churches more involved in the food conversation. Some are. Many run food banks and soup kitchens, blessing their communities with this quiet compensation for an economy gone awry in which the poor are so often without recourse. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has launched their Fair Food Campaign (pcusa.org/fairfood) as well as organizing specific letter-writing campaigns to food producers who need to improve poverty wages and working conditions. They have also undertaken the Presbyterian Coffee Project (pcusa.org/coffee), a simple initiative of serving Fair Trade coffee and other food products during the “coffee hour” after services. The United Church of Canada (UnitedChurch.ca/economic/food#3) has involved itself extensively in initiatives to study genetically modified foods, factory farming, and food security. The Christian-based group Earth Ministry (EarthMinistry.org) describes its purpose as “to inspire and mobilize the Christian community to play a leadership role in building a just and sustainable future” and has started a “Greening Congregations” program that publishes a guidebook for congregations who want to focus
(Editor’s note: due to space limitations, the endnotes for this article have been posted at esa-online.org/Endnotes.) Marilyn Chandler McEntyre is a Fellow at the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif.
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