HOME
SUNDAY SCHEDULE
NEWSLETTER
CALENDAR
DIRECTIONS
LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMS
OUR BELIEFS
SERMONS
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
SOCIAL ACTION
ABOUT US
CONTACT US

What’s for dinner? My children ask me that more nights than not. Sometimes, I say: “sticks & stones & dragon bones.” And then they say: Daaad! And we go on like that for a round or two, until I eventually said: “I don’t know yet.”

The truth is people at our socioeconomic level have an incredible variety of choices about what’s for dinner. We don’t have it as easy as the koala bear. To the koala bear, if it is a eucalyptus leaf, it’s dinner. That’s all they eat, that’s how they’re born.

Humans can eat almost anything– even each other. Some thinkers say this demands an ethic about how we eat.

When I go to make dinner, it is very rare to not use the microwave. In fact, it sometimes seems as if dinner is eaten in shifts at my house in order to accommodate everyone’s supper predilections.

The ingredient list on what I stick in the microwave is longer than I’d like. And if you look at nutritional labels at the supermarket, you get more questions than answers.

Do we buy the "regular" supermarket apple? Or organic? Or a boutique version? If organic– local or imported? And how can you tell? Wild fish or farmed fish? Shall we choose butter or margarine? Low fat or low carb?

And what do all those phrases on the labels mean: "heart healthy," "no transfats," "cage-free," or "range-fed?" What is "natural grill flavor" or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all this stuff and where in the world did it come from? (5).

For me, winter is a season of food: from Thanksgiving side dishes through Christmas cookies and specialized drinks, it is one big cornucopia. The only thing screaming louder than new holiday recipes from magazine covers is new weight loss techniques. One thing sort of feeds the other, so to speak.

Author Michael Pollan decided to try and actually follow a food chain– from the earth to the plate, to see what he could find along the way. In his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his premise is “that like every other creature on earth, humans take part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or web, determines to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are.”

I saw a picture of the Unitarian Church of Rockville, MD choir, when my mom was the music director there in the 1970s. And something struck me right away about the picture, but it took a second to sink in: there was not one single overweight person in that choir of 25 or so people.

What happened? When the low carb craze hit in 2002, it was pretty dramatic. Almost overnight different “food authorities” were telling us different things.

“You know why America has grown so fat since 1977?,” said one source. “It’s because a government committee told us to eat more carbohydrates and less red meat. Guess what? They were wrong.”

A couple years ago, I went on the Atkins diet and lost a lot of weight. That was tough because previously I had been a vegetarian, and you can’t really do Atkins as a vegetarian.

But having learned bits about industrial food processing and how the chicken, salmon, beef, and pork get to the market, I am increasingly uncomfortable with continuing to go to Sam’s Club and buying the 6 pounds of chicken breast pack.

I’ve done this before because I can get 6 pounds of chicken breasts at a great “per pound” price, grill them all at once on the back deck, then freeze or refrigerate them for eventual eating. Same thing with hamburger.

But now, having been enlightened somewhat as to how food actually gets to my table, I am rethinking how I buy and prepare dinner.

Like many people, I have been divorced from how food actually gets to my table.

Pollan, in his book, articulates 3 principal food chains: “the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.” Most of us aren’t hunter-gatherers, so as ethical individuals, we are called on by our own principles to examine the consequences of our actions– including deciding what’s for dinner.

You might not think that dinner has many ethical implications beyond keeping one’s blood pressure down while listening to a child whine about their food.

You might think a carrot is a carrot. But it turns out Michigan carrots have more nutrients than Florida carrots do, and this is not a thing the Florida carrot growers particularly want you to know. The US Department of Agriculture and industrial farming want you to believe that a carrot is a carrot, a chicken from one place is interchangeable with a chicken from another. And of course, that isn’t true.

Industrialized farming would not have been possible without a certain chain of events. After WW II, the government looked for ways to convert factories that had been producing nitrates for bombs into something else. They came up with the idea of converting them to factories that would produce synthetic fertilizer. This would increase crop yields. And indeed it did.

In 1920, the American family farm produced 20 bushels of corn per acre– about the same yield as Native Americans had produced for centuries. After WW II, in 1950, the yield went up to 80 bushels per acre. And with GMO, or genetically modified organisms, and more “advances” in pesticide and fertilizer products, in the year 2000, industrial farmers can get 200 bushels per acre. (37). That’s 10 times what they got 80 years ago.

The irony is that as corn yield has increased, the price has dropped. The traditional laws of supply and demand don’t work quite the same way for food, especially corn, as it does with other commodities. People won’t eat more just because food costs less.

Why the emphasis on corn? Corn production in this country has gone from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. The supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand. Corn is a unique plant, it produces a lot of calories, and can be manipulated in many ways.

Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the Tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are re-engineering to tolerate corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines eating corn. (18).

Of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket, fully 1/4 of them now contain corn. Everything from toothpaste to diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries– they all contain corn. (20).

Pollan writes:

Iowa State University estimates it cost roughly $2.50 to grow a bushel of Iowa corn; in October 2005 Iowa grain elevators were paying $1.45, so the typical Iowa farmer is selling corn for a dollar less than it costs him to grow it. Yet the corn keeps coming, more of it every year.

Farms need a certain amount of cash flow to survive. If the price of corn falls, the only way to survive is to grow more corn. (53).

To make up the difference, part of our tax money goes to pay farmers the difference between what it costs to grow corn and what it actually sells for. This encourages farmers to keep growing corn, which exacerbates the problem.

Industrial farming means we lose diversity in order to get an economy of scale. We cage animals into tiny pens and hook them to machines, feeding tubes, and give them medicines to boost their growth rate, thereby creating giant problems which didn’t previously exist– all for an increased production we don’t really need.

In the olden days, animal manure could be used to help crops grow. Some of those crops would feed the animals that we could eat. A nice closed loop.

But with factory farming, we now have the problem of what to do with all that toxic manure, and the problem of synthetic fertilizer run off which poisons our water supply.

In the olden days, say 1920, a typical Iowa farm would have “horses, cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries. Many farms also grew: wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. This diversity allowed the farm to feed itself– not only the farmers but also the soil and the livestock– which helped it withstand a collapse in the market for any one of those products.”

But corn and soybeans sold the most, so about 50 years ago, cheap corn meant it could be more profitable to feed

cattle on feedlots instead of on grass, and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than in farmyards. Iowa livestock farmers couldn't compete with the factory-farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm, and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. In their place the farmers planted more of the one crop they could grow more of than anything else: corn. And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expenses and stay even. By the 1980s the diversified family farm was history in Iowa, and corn was king." (39).

So, all this surplus food must mean there aren’t any hungry people, right? But It’s estimated that there are 786 million hungry people in the world. How can that still be?

In a paper entitled “Do We Need New Technology to End Hunger?” the executive director of Food First (foodfirst.org), Retrieved from http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/4-greenrev.html on December 14, 2006. Peter Rosset writes:

In the 1960s,

In test plots in northwest Mexico, improved varieties of wheat dramatically increased yields. Much of the reason why these "modern varieties" produced more than traditional varieties was that they were more responsive to controlled irrigation and to petrochemical fertilizers, allowing for much more efficient conversion of industrial inputs into food.

That’s interesting. They have to spend more on fertilizer and pesticide, but the “new” crops give a higher yield. So, third world farmers just grow themselves out of poverty, right?

Well, that’s not how it’s worked out. According to Business Week,

"even though Indian granaries are overflowing now, 5,000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, "the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to public markets."

Industrialized farming isn’t sustainable:

Years of using high-yield seeds that require heavy irrigation and chemical fertilizers have taken their toll on much of India’s farmland. [Already], 6% of agricultural land has been rendered useless.

From 1970 to 1990 (if you leave out China), the number of hungry people in the world increased by more than 11% while food supplies rose almost 8%.

(What’s different about China is the number of hungry dropped from 406 to 189 million– a drop of half. The Chinese gave more farmers access to more land)/

The big winners in industrial farming are companies that manufacture the seeds and pesticides. All over the world farmers are growing more and spending more on pesticides & fertilizer even as they sell more crops but get less money for them. They are getting pinched from both ends, and it is more like mining the land than farming it.

What's the answer? It looks like productive small farm agriculture solves a lot of problems: it more nearly mimics nature in diversity, and it is more sustainable. In fact it can produce more calories than it consumes and it either doesn’t need fertilizer or pesticides at all, or in very modest amounts.

When the U.S. put Cuba on a trade embargo, Cuba– which had moved to industrial farming– faced the worst food crisis in its history “with consumption of calories and protein dropping by perhaps as much as 30%.” But in less than 10 years, they were eating almost as well as they did before 1989, “yet little food and agro-chemicals were being imported.”

Cuba turned toward a more self-reliant agriculture based on higher crop prices to farmers, smaller production and urban agriculture.

But that’s just Cuba, right? There is a model farm in Virginia, Polyface Farms that puts the whole thing together. There they raise “chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries on one hundred acres of pasture patch-worked into another 450 [acres] of forest.”

The whole farm acts as a sustainable system. They rotate crops and animals. One set of animals cleans up or prepares for another, the whole thing operates in a sort of dance.

But you and I don’t live in Virginia, and Polyface Farms doesn’t deliver. What to do?

I’m not sure, exactly. I will tell you what I plan on doing. For one thing, I’m going to try and cook more. Just last week, I bought organic carrots and peeled them myself instead of buying “regular” baby cut carrots. Whoopee!

I plan on cooking more, since most of the time, a little planning and some practice means it takes about the same amount of time to make dinner anyway. And since I can’t buy xanthan gum or TBHQ, and my copy of Joy of Cooking doesn’t mention those ingredients, I’m sure I’ll get better food that way too.

Someone asked me how today’s topic was at all “spiritual”? It’s a fair question. For many of us, food– dinner– is our only regular interaction with the natural world. If our relationship with the natural world is out of whack, surely that is a religious issue.

If the McNugget we eat doesn't seems to taste much like chicken, and if we are slowly poisoning ourselves and our world in the name of cheap McNuggets, that’s a religious issue.

I’m reminded of Native hunters who would say a prayer for the spirit of the animal they hoped to kill and bring back to the village to eat. There is something about saying a prayer like that– it acknowledges that we are but one cog in a great chain of being. It acknowledges that everything we eat was at one time part of something alive.

So, I think we’ll start saying a little prayer at dinner time, to help remember this. I am reminded of a meditation by Peter Raible, the interim minister here before Bonnie and I arrived. He writes:

"We build on foundations, we did not lay. We warm ourselves at fires, we did not light. We sit in the shade of trees, we did not plant. We drink from wells, we did not dig. We profit from persons, we did not know. We are ever bound in community."

Let us rise & sing: For the Beauty of the Earth, #21.