-- Henry Beston
Meditation: by Rabbi Rami Shapiro (from Earth Prayers, p. 354)
My friends, let us give thanks for Wonder.
Let us give thanks for the Wonder of Life
that infuses all things now and forever.
Blessed is the Source of Life, the Fountain of Being,
the wellspring of goodness, compassion and kindness
from which we draw to make… justice and peace.
From the creative power of Life we derive food and harvest,
from the bounty of the earth and the yields of the heavens
we are sustained and are able to sustain others.
All Life is holy, sacred,
worthy of respect and dignity.
Let us give thanks for the power of heart
to sense the holy in the midst of the simple.
We eat not simply to satisfy our own appetites,
we eat to sustain ourselves in the task we have been given.
Each of us is unique,
coming into the world with a gift no other can offer: ourselves.
We eat to nourish the vehicle of giving,
We eat to sustain our task of world repair,
Our quest for harmony, peace and justice…
We give thanks to Life.
May we never lose touch with the simple joy and wonder
of sharing a meal.
Reading: from the Jewish and Christian book of Genesis 1:26-28, (King James Version)
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Reading: by Lorraine Anderson from Sisters of the Earth (p. 1)
Whenever I hear someone boast of having conquered a mountain by climbing it or a wild river by paddling it, I am struck by the foolishness of this attitude. It seems to me a pitiful bravado in the face of a great and powerful mystery, like whistling in the dark to give oneself courage. Worse, it arrogantly pits the ego against the matrix of being, conveying the harmful illusion that one creature can dominate the creation of which it is a part and on which it depends for its very life. How vastly healthier and more functional is the attitude [that…] we are kin with nature, not adversaries or dominators or conquerors, and our kinship is worthy of celebration.
Reading: by Safran Foer from Eating Animals (p. 257)
What kind of a world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? … Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or bus could begin to uproot racism. It would have sounded equally fantastic if you were told in the early 1970s, before Cesar Chavez’s workers’ rights campaigns, that refusing to eat grapes could begin to free farm workers from slave-like conditions. It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it’s hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world… Deciding what to eat is the founding act of production and consumption that shapes all others. Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. One of the greatest opportunities to live our values – or betray them – lies in the food we put on our plates.
Our Dominion of the Earth
A Sermon Delivered on April 21, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Now that spring is finally arriving, it is easy to believe in nature’s limitless abundance. It is easy to believe that life, in all its wonderful manifestations, is unstoppable: just look at the tiny leaves emerging from twigs and branches. Look at the blossoms on trees and bushes, bursting out on magnolia and forsythia and countless others. Listen to the birds of the air, filling the morning’s silence with their songs. The birds in my backyard are brightly feathered and melodious reminders of all the creatures of the earth, that are not within ear shot, or within my field of vision: the fish of the sea, the cattle, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
The world in spring is like a cornucopia of all things beautiful, all things growing, all things delicious and sweet. Spring makes the natural world seem indestructible… But, of course it can be destroyed.
Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is a holiday created, so that we might honor and celebrate the natural world, and be inspired to protect it. “The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all living creatures,” they said on the first Earth Day in 1970. (Senator Gaylord Nelson)
At the time there was no such things as an Environmental Protection Agency. Factories could spout clouds of toxic smoke into the sky, and dump tons of toxic waste into our rivers, and that was perfectly legal.
Earth Day challenged the harmful illusion that we humans can dominate, exploit, and thoughtlessly destroy the creation of which we are a part and on which we depend.
* * *
There are countless ways we affect our environment, and countless ways we can help protect it. When we choose to walk or ride a bike, rather than drive a car around town. When we purchase energy efficient light bulbs, or better insulate our homes, or reduce the amount of plastic we use and throw in the trash. When we join in prairie restoration efforts, or support local communities trying to protect their water resources. Each of us in our own way can make a difference.
But perhaps the most universal, and also the most intimate way we affect and are affected by our environment every day, is in the food we eat. We literally consume the earth, air and sunlight and rain, transformed into animal and plant life, every time we sit down for a meal. For most of us that’s three times every day, not counting the snacks we pop into our mouths as we pass through the kitchen or head out the door.
What we eat, is both one of the most immediate and one of most far-reaching ways we experience and interact with the world around us.
* * *
A few years ago, the journalist Michael Pollen wrote a well-received book entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma. When it was first published in 2006, The New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year.
In his book, Pollen links questions about protecting our environment, with the everyday choices we humans make every time we decide what we will eat. Unlike carnivores, who eat only meat, and unlike herbivores, who eat only certain plants, we humans can eat everything. But the fact that, by our very nature, we are able to eat everything doesn’t mean we ought to eat everything. Not everything tastes equally good to us. And not everything is equally healthy.
As Michael Pollan puts it, “When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you. This is the omnivore’s dilemma.” (p. 3)
The fact that we are omnivores is not a trivial aspect of our nature. It is an essential aspect of what it means to be human, both body and soul. Being omnivores designed to perpetually explore new sources of sustenance, we humans have developed prodigious powers of observation and memory, and cultivated a curious and experimental stance toward the world around us.
Being an omnivore is a blessing and a curse. Unlike, for instance, the koala bear, whose dietary choices are genetically hardwired, and are focused on nothing but the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, and thus who is destined to live and thrive only in those corners of the earth where eucalyptus trees grow in abundance – unlike the koala bear, we humans can inhabit virtually any of the earth’s environments. We find food in even the most improbable places: from the sandy deserts of the Sahara, to the icy wasteland of the Arctic, from the high peaks of the Himalayas, to the pancake flat prairies of the American Midwest. But with the freedom to make different decisions about where we live and what we eat comes the burden of indecision.
At this point in time in America, we are deeply confused about what is healthy and wholesome, and what is sickening and poisonous. Should we eat a high-protein carnivorous diet as proposed by Dr. Robert Atkins? Should we eat plenty of fat, but hold off on the carbs? Or should we eat veggies and spinach, and preferably everything raw? Should we cut back on cholesterol or simply watch the “bad cholesterol,” and indulge in the “good”? Butter and salt, sugar and cheese, which of these are guilty pleasures that ought to be avoided, and which of them are important parts of a well-balanced diet?
In America today, we are deeply confused about what is right and what is wrong, in terms of what we eat. And this is tied to ethical questions of right and wrong that go far beyond human nutrition.
As Pollan sees it, this country’s food industry figured out how to touch into our existential anxiety surrounding food, and has actually heightened it. “It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.” (p. 5) The average grocery store offers us thousands of different products from which to choose. They are not all good for us. And all the apparent variety rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation made up of a single crop: corn.
In recent years, corn has become the number one crop in the U.S.. We are the world’s top corn producers, with more acres devoted to it than any other crop. 60 percent of the corn we grow is used to feed livestock: cattle, pigs, and poultry. Most of the rest is transformed into corn syrup, or corn starch, corn oil, or ethanol. Just about every processed food you can find in a supermarket contains some corn product.
For the sake of profit and efficiency, we now raise crops and animals in vast mono-cultures. Ninety-nine percent of the meat we buy in grocery stores is produced in vast factory farms. As agricultural economist John Ikerd puts it,
“The biggest single problem with factory farming is that it shows no respect for the sanctity of life — either the life of farm animals or human life. Factory farming treats feedlots as biological assembly lines, where the animals are simply machines that produce meat, milk, or eggs for nameless, faceless consumers, with no respect for the people who work in them or live in the communities where they operate. This lack of respect for life undermines the ethical and moral fabric of society.”
* * *
The act of eating puts us in touch with all that we share with other animals. It links us intimately to the very elements of the earth. “What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating,” Michael Pollen writes, “is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that hardly could be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too.” (p. 10)
So much of the way today’s food industry is run, not only has a profoundly damaging effect on our environment, in terms of the production of toxic waste, in terms of inhumanity toward animal and farm worker alike. It also has a damaging effect on human society and the human soul, creating within us a toxic anxiety and ignorance.
In the final pages of his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes his attempt to prepare a meal completely from scratch, that is, with all ingredients being things he grew and harvested, or searched for and gathered, or hunted, killed and slaughtered. It was an elaborate and time-consuming undertaking that involved a fair number of misadventures, and ample evidence of his lack of experience and expertise in such things.
But in the end, with the help of some friends, he succeeded. And then he invited these very friends to join him in consuming this painstakingly prepared feast. It included fava bean bread and egg fettuccine, wild mushrooms and braised leg of wild pig, a very local garden salad, and cherries plucked from a neighbor’s tree.
While perhaps not the most successful meal from a gourmet chef’s point of view, for Pollan it was just right. As he served up the dishes, Pollan had the sense that this meal had become a kind of ritual, “a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was very often the theme. Such storied food can feed us both body and soul, the threads of narrative knitting us together as a group, and knitting the group into the larger fabric of the given world.”
Eating a meal in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth doing every once and a while, he says, “if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted… If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore’s Thanksgiving.” (p. 410)
* * *
“Deciding what to eat is the founding act of production and consumption that shapes all others. Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.” (Safran Foer)
So, what can we do? We can buy from companies that treat workers, animals and the environment with respect. We can remember that the average meal in America travels 1,500 miles from the farm to the supermarket, and that much would be gained if we bought food that was grown locally, or if we planted our own garden. We can remember that it takes five pounds of grain to create one pound of meat, and that if Americans ate just 10 percent less meat, we would free up enough grain to feed 60 million people.
* * *
What kind of a world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat? What if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? These are the good questions Safran Foer asks.
He writes,
“The debacle of the factory farm [and the food industry] is not, I’ve come to feel, just a problem about ignorance – it’s not as activists often say, a problem that arose because “people don’t know the facts.” Clearly that is one cause. …[But] responding to the factory farm calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information…” (p. 263)
Our capacity to care is an expression of compassion. And compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use. The regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty will change us.
* * *
Long ago our ancestors realized that humans have been granted an exceptional place within all creation. “Dominion” was a poor choice of words, when we translated the Hebrew scriptures into English. What the authors of that story were trying to say, long ago, was: all that God created is good, and our living requires a partnership that will sustain all of that creation. We are called to serve as stewards of the earth, sustaining, not conquering, God's creation. What the Hebrew scriptures actually said, is that humans have remarkable powers among all creatures, not over them.
May we take Earth Day tomorrow – and every day - as an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable powers we have been given among all creatures of the earth.
May we reflect with gratitude on the bounty of the earth’s abundance that sustains us.
And may we remember – every time we sit down to eat – that we are each called to do our part to repair the world.
Amen.
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