This week’s blog comes in two sections.
May 12 2013-2
EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS.
That’s how Michael Pollan starts his book An Eater’s Manifesto. This past week I was seeding beets and carrots, drilling holes in the soft soil for potatoes and planting onion sets galore. While doing that it went through my mind what a blessed work this is: burying life to create life. What a privilege to have a parcel of land that every year is further enriched with compost.
My wife and I have been vegetarians for the last 35 years. If you hear about food poisoning, it usually involves meat. Also cows are an enormous source of methane pollution, a major contributor to Climate Change. Pollan adds: “eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it is better approached as a side dish than a main. “ His advice is to eat plants and avoid food stuff that is made in plants. He relates how political pressures from cattle-rich states have prevented governments to enact dietary measures limiting the consumption of red meat which causes both heart attacks and cancers. We’ve heard it often: to live longer, eat little or no meat and consume a lot of fruit and vegetables, and if you can grow your own produce: more power to you.
Jesus taught us to pray for our food. Praying for a meal today is needed more than ever, because much of what is offered in the stores is not prepared for health but for taste, catering to our cravings for salt, sugar and fat. I once took a group of high-school students on a week-long canoe trip where all food was health-food. Midweek our portage was close to a convenience store and sugar-deprived teenagers loaded up on the sweet stuff.
This past week I employed myself as a manual labourer in my own garden. Last year I bought an electric rototiller, powered by my solar panels. I now have all my power tools converted to electricity so that I can use my solar power for them: mower, chainsaw, trimmer: even an electric snow blower. Even if you don’t have solar power, and are in need of a new mower, please go electric: the gas-fired machines are highly polluting and noisy.
Working the vegetable garden is a spiritual act
Before I had my rototiller I double dug my entire garden, digging trenches, filling them with compost and so going through my entire 2000 square feet vegetable patch, creating 8 -50 feet long raised beds with a small path between them. The electric tool is a concession to my age. I now spread the compost on the surface and cover it with the soil of the trenches between the beds which I still dig by hand.
I see my entire garden exercise as an act of holiness: it is to me equivalent to going to church – which I also do; this is more a private act of worship. Creating home grown stuff is a triple pleasure: the pleasure of preparing the soil and planting the seeds, the pleasure of eating a healthier product, and, of course, our climate benefits with no transportation and packing expense.
We, in the 21st Century, have it a lot easier than the primitive people, those who lived before agriculture became established and fire was discovered. The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers who never knew exactly where their next food might be coming from. In fact, their “meals” were probably eaten on the run as they stalked enough prey to furnish sufficient food, but it is unlikely that their meals were regular or even eaten daily. Given the conditions under which they secured food, it was impossible for them to take any of it for granted. Every morsel was hard-won and therefore, exceedingly precious. I am sure they prayed to their gods for guidance and safety, just as Abel and Cain sacrificed of their fruits to Yahweh. We now have become so dependent on commercial foods carried over thousands of miles that, in case of an energy breakdown or a computer failure, within a week millions would starve. Certainly the so-called poor in Africa and Asia would then be much better off.
Whether living in a small agricultural village along the Nile River in ancient times or growing food in one’s backyard garden in the twenty-first century, small-scale agriculture is labour-intensive, and appreciation for food is in direct proportion to the energy expended in growing it. Slowly there is an awareness that we must eat closer to home. Perhaps not the 100 feet diet I try to implement, but at least a 100 mile diet. I am thrilled to see that one grandson, just graduated with a liberal arts degree from Trent, let his regular well-paying summer landscaping job go in order to work on an organic market gardening outfit, at a highly reduced wage, to learn earth-friendly ways to grow food, using horses as well. Another grandson is going to a carbon neutral small college to study agriculture somewhere in Western Minnesota.
Ora et Labora – pray and work
Jesus taught us to pray for food. I too pray for the fruit of the soil, for the apple trees on our property- I have bought another apple tree, this time an Empire, in addition to the three different kind I have: a Northern spy, which gave me exactly three apples last year, an early soft apple which makes delicious applesauce, and a Spartan. In a good year these trees supply us with sufficient fruit for the year. There are also lots of wild apple trees in our vicinity: I know exactly where the best apples are that nobody goes after, except the deer and the bears. But I can reach higher.
Throughout human history, particularly in indigenous cultures, food has been perceived as sacred. All food is sacred in the sense that the life of a plant or animal has been sacrificed to feed another being. The word ‘sacrifice’ means ‘made holy.’ Our lives are sacred because Jesus sacrificed himself for our sake, for all of humanity, and for the entire cosmos, sanctifying everything.
The more energy expended, the less food sacredness
With ever greater numbers moving from the land to cities, food has lost its sacred status. It has become an industrial product. It is no longer holy, replaced as it is with artificial, synthetic, and technologically-produced forms of food. All sorts of chemicals are added to make produce look fresh and green and keep meat from spoiling. No wonder even newborn babies have scores of harmful chemicals in their tender bodies. It now takes an average of ten energy calories to obtain one single food calorie: the sacredness of food is decreased in proportion to the energy expended to obtain it.
We must recover the holiness in all of life and the easiest way to do that is to start with food. Grow it wherever possible or make meals from scratch where this cannot be done. Eat simple. When we see eating as a form of spirituality, see it as an attempt to be in harmony with the unseen order of things, then our perspective on life changes as well. I believe Jesus saw it that way when he gave thanks for meals, something still a practice in our extended family.
Eating less prolongs life. My wife and I have two sit-down formal meals: breakfast – mostly oat porridge on which I use our own maple syrup and add wild blueberries, lecithin and ground-up flaxseed. Our morning meal start with the reading of a Psalm or a portion thereof- Psalm 119 with 176 verses we split up in segments of about 10 verses – and a prayer. Our ‘warm’ meal is mostly home grown and always made from scratch. Two or three 3 times per week we have just a big salad with field greens, onion, garlic, beets, carrots, tomatoes with lemon juice and olive oil, together with feta cheese, an egg and beans. Three times a week potatoes with a meal from the freezer: green beans, apple sauce, kale, red cabbage, broccoli, sauerkraut. In the evening we have next to nothing: a slice of home-made bread or a bowl of yogurt.
What is the Kingdom?
All my life I have been greatly influenced by a Dutch book which I translated a few months ago. The final product I sent to Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. a 100 year old publisher, which has published one of my previous books. Just last week Eerdmans sent me a sizeable advance. The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming has some wonderful passages in it. Here is one, referring to the Kingdom to Come, the New Creation, on the threshold of unfolding:
“In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
“This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dissonant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly trajectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”
With J. H. Bavinck, the original author, I believe that all of life is a unity. Through a return to sustainable agriculture and in the very act of growing our own food, some aspect of our human existence pays homage to the earth, holds it sacred, and praises God in gratitude for and resonance with the elements of the soil from which we originate. An important part of being a Christian is to display a renewed reverence for the earth, a heightened appreciation for nutrition and the health benefits of organic food. Often this will also deepen our connection with our (church) families and larger communities as we share and exchange produce.
Sacred versus profane
Life is a unity. The opposite of the sacred, of course, is the profane. Much of the food we see in stores is mindlessly-manufactured and technologically-tortured. No wonder so many people display unhealthy bodies, grossly misshaped due to faulty nutrition. Not they, but the system is to blame, because these so-called foods constitute satanic substances which are unfit to be ingested in human bodies. The more deeply immersed we are in the sanctity of food and its origins, the more we are likely to be repelled by processed, genetically modified, and chemically-laden foods that have been produced by way of massive resource and ecological destruction, and which deliver more of the same to our minds and bodies. The ancient saying Mens Sana in Corpore Sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body- also makes the opposite true: a poisoned body breeds an insane mind
When I worked in my garden these past weeks, and as I keep busy in the coming months weeding and watering and harvesting, my heart overflows with gratitude that so far each year the Lord has granted me the physical stamina and the willingness to be engaged in this spiritual exercise. Not often enough do we share our blessings with others. Part of the sanctity of eating is enjoying food with family and friends by cooking and eating meals together.
In many ways we are what we eat. The entire commercial world is conspiring to detract us from the sacred through television, through the way cities are built, and by destroying what is the sacred in life. We need a lot of prayer, a lot of grace, a lot of insight to escape this. Start simple: terminate television, refuse to be cowed by the corporations who control the food supply. Go back to basics and ‘live’.
Next week a new look at energy and debt. To view previous columns, click on ‘home’.