by Paul Kent Oakley, Student Minister
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship
February 13, 2011
Do you eat to live or live to eat? Not too many years ago one would hear this question fairly often. The answer was supposed to say something about a person’s attitude to life. I used to think I was in the live to eat camp. As a child at family dinners, I ate whipped cream from a bowl. Surely I lived to eat! But then several years later, a friend asked me what the best meal I’d ever had was. When I answered his question, I described the restaurant terrace, the water of the bay, the silver moonrise over the water, and being there with my partner Walter. “But what did you eat?” my friend asked. And I couldn’t answer. Somewhere along the way, eating had become more complex than what I ate. It was about to get more important too.
Comfort food. Soul food. Ethnic cuisines. Kosher. Hallal. Vegetarian. Vegan. Organic. Diabetic diet. Reducing diet. Gluten-free diet. No Carbs. Low-fat. Fast food. Slow food.
Those represent a small portion of the bewildering food possibilities that are available to 21st-century Americans. But what do they represent? Comfort food refers to a psychological dimension of eating. Soul food is identity based, drawing sustenance from traditions that grew in the face of a history of slavery and racial oppression. Kosher and Hallal point to religious and spiritual dimensions of eating. Vegetarian, vegan, and organic are term that fit into an array of concerns – ecological, animal cruelty, animal rights, and health concerns. Diabetic, reducing, gluten-free, no-carbs, and low-fat diets relate to diseases, allergies, general health, and even cosmetic concerns. And the conflict between fast food and slow food is largely cultural. How is one human in 21st-century America? What makes us who we are?
Before the rise of global markets, food choices were set by the norms of the culture we lived in. The French sometimes ate things the Germans usually avoided, like frogs and snails and artichokes; south Indians tended toward a spicy vegetarian diet, Jews didn’t eat shellfish or mix dairy and meat in the same meal, and Japanese ate rice and fermented beans. The person who ate outside hir cultural norms was an oddity. Now that globalism is here, though, what used to be a cultural norm becomes a market choice. And our choices have a global reach that has increased in it impact continuously since the era of European colonial expansion. On the one hand, our food choices affect how we define ourselves in our global marketplace. As residents and citizens in a powerful nation, many people like to go to restaurants to eat the food of peoples who have benefited less from the history of colonialism than mainstream America, peoples with less power than Americans have. American food choices frequently affect land use, ecology, labor issues, the use of resources around the globe. Choices here weaken or strengthen life everywhere.
Now, let’s back up just a little bit here. I started eating whipped cream as my self-gratifying dessert of choice as a child at family dinners. And all of a sudden, what I put in my mouth is an expression of privilege? My favorite food is part of a system of inequity among the peoples of the earth? What I eat affects some else’s well being? Whoa! Let’s go back to the basic reality of eating. All living things chemically transform energy from outside themselves into the building blocks of their own bodies. Plants photosynthesize, transforming energy from the sun into new forms of energy to build their plant bodies. Animals consume plants or other animals to build their own bodies from the already transformed sun energy of their food sources. That is basic. What could be farther from the realm of ethical consideration? It’s food, right? Not war or consumer goods. We need it, right? Except that human consciousness, once removed from immediate need, requires individuals and societies to make choices. And every choice we make has consequences both for ourselves and for others, indeed, for the world as a whole.
The Seventh Principle that this congregation has covenanted to affirm and promote, together with other Unitarian Universalist congregations is: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. It often seems like this is our best loved principle. And used certain ways, it has a certain feel-good aspect. We know that, when we walk through the woods like our Transcendentalist forebears, we are one with nature. The web of life that has expanded through genetic mutations to fill the globe is part of our cosmic story of belonging and hope. The dust of the stars is recycled in our bodies, and we feel connected to the creative power of the Big Bang. We learn from the peoples of India to say Namaste, recognizing the divine in all. But the Seventh Principle means something more. It means that our choices and our actions affect more than just us – often in ways we can hardly imagine.
Let’s illustrate with just one example. America’s taste buds have a love affair with beef. The global nature of our food network means that the beef that meat eaters consume here was quite possibly raised in Brazil. Brazil’s increasing productive capacity depends on increased shifts in land use in that country. Since 1970, a quarter-million square miles of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed.[1] The majority of this deforestation has been for the purpose of raising cattle for the global market. And while the rate of deforestation has mostly decreased each year since 2004 [2], the process continues. We’ve probably all heard political conservatives or reactionaries who respond to these losses with a sarcastic “Boo hoo!” Why indeed does it matter that a world away forest is being lost in order to put beef on American tables? How does this fit in an ethic based on the value of respecting interconnected life?
We know that 137 species of plants, animals and insects are lost each day to the effects of rainforest deforestation.[3] Biologist and religious naturalist Ursula Goodenough suggests our system of ethics must find its grounding in the continuation of life. This is also implied in our attachment to and reliance on the interconnected web of existence. If we accept that as the ground of our ethical commitments, then each year there are upwards of 50,000 significant, permanent ways in which our society’s collective food choices violate our ethics. 50,000 species lost from the web each year. Add to that the fact that food choices that favor foods produced through rainforest destruction also have the potential to hinder the progress of medicine’s fight against disease. And every cow raised in Brazil for consumption in Carbondale has to be transported thousands of miles, consuming precious fossil fuels that add to global warming. In addition, Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest is sometimes called the "Lungs of our Planet" because it continuously recycles carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.[4] Without purposeful intervention, the rainforest will disappear, just as the primordial forests of Ireland and India were stripped away as human population and human appetites grew. Earth’s human population has doubled in my lifetime, and even though the trend is in the process of stabilizing, population is not expected to return to early 20th-century levels. And a continuing high population continues to need and want and take. Everything about food choices that favor the continuation of this production system works in direct contravention of a food ethic based in the continuation and prospering of life on this planet.
And yet, this system of production does not appear in a vacuum. It is part of the complex global economy that encourages various negative behaviors as hedges against the real threats to individual and national economic health. The exchange rate of Brazilian currency against the dollar increased the price of beef produced in Brazil for the American market. This gave ranchers an enormous incentive to expand cattle production at the expense of the rainforest. Improved disease control in Brazilian cattle further increased the demand for Brazilian beef. Improved infrastructure in Brazil has made it easier to transport the beef produced in remote areas. High inflation in Brazil gives an incentive to clear rainforest as a speculation, a protection of resources against lost value of savings. And, because of land ownership laws that make it possible to claim title simply by clearing forest and making it productive, raising cattle on former rainforest lands makes land ownership and financial independence possible for those who otherwise have fewer options.[5]
So what do we do? THIS IS IMPORTANT! How can we make ethical decisions about something like the source of our beef, if we have decided to eat meat, for example? Buying Brazilian beef destroys species, permanently erasing genomes and future productive potential while increasing global warming. We know that. It is pretty convincing. And we should find ourselves quite moved by this reality. On the other hand, what is the effect on the well-being of Brazilians if our ethical food choice removes their possibility of protecting themselves against the uncertainties of their economy? Their economy is, after all, a component part of the global economy, of which the United States is a prime beneficiary. So what is our responsibility to the economic wellbeing of a certain Brazilian population whose economic situation is part of the same system that gives us Americans relative ease and prosperity? And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, how can we wrestle with how to balance these two things: our ethical obligations to populations who provide economic benefits to us versus our ethical obligations to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. An ethic that values life cannot help but be an ethic that is conflicted about how to preserve and promote life. And it is nearly impossible to solve on our own. That we must learn. And beef production provides only a sampling of other similarly complex systems of food production and distribution.
In recent years, there has been greater awareness of the social justice issues surrounding certain non-essential items coming from the developing world. We can now find certified fair-trade coffee and chocolate without working too hard. But if our food ethic is about facing the realities of how our food choices impact life on this blue planet, then we must also recognize that we cannot afford to structure ethical actions in ways that the majority cannot afford. If I can afford fair trade coffee but you can’t, it cannot work as a primary solution to global inequities. If you can afford fair trade chocolate, but I can only afford a Hershey’s bar, then what we would like to think of as a solution won’t do the work of justice without other help. If the realities of the global market mean that a person in, say, south Chicago has to commute to another neighborhood to locate fair-trade coffee that will then cost hir more than the alternative, then the success of the noble aims of fair-trade certification are severely undermined. Even for more basic fare, large areas of our cities, areas where minorities and the economically challenged live are food deserts. Not a grocery store to be found. Only more expensive convenience stores. Our ethical aims will never be achieved if ethical action is affordable by some of us but not by all of us.
There is some improvement in the information available to us. Society, generally, is becoming more aware of the emotionally devastating reality of the cruelty to animals raised for food in the factory model of food production. Information is widely available about the staggering increase in natural resources that are required to produce the same food value in the form of animal products as opposed to plant products. There are increased efforts to eat local and organic, but we need to pay close attention to whether these too are currently luxuries that allow a certain class to feel good about their choices rather than options everyone can choose. We read that many agricultural methods are not sustainable for the long term. We may benefit from genetically modified crops, but intellectual property rights could be the undoing of subsistence farming and developing-world crop production. Each point is filled with as many complications and contradictory messages as beef production in Brazil, which is why none of us can make our choices or decide on an action plan completely alone. We need each other.
With something so personal as what we put in our bodies, we necessarily make individual choices based on preferences and our limited understanding of consequences to what matters to us. But we know that what we eat has consequences positive or negative for economic justice, ecological justice, and health. We are part of the interconnected web of all existence.
In fact, the issues are bigger than a project for just one congregation, which is why the Unitarian Universalist Association is involved with the issue. At General Assembly 2008 in Ft. Lauderdale Ethical Eating: Food and Environmental Justice was selected as the Congregational Study/ Action Issue (or CSAI) for 2008-2012. The UUA has provided many resources on their website to guide congregations through their study process. Each year of the four-year process there are workshops on Ethical Eating offered at General Assembly. Late last year, that Commission on Social Witness made public a Draft Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating that will be the basis of a Statement of Conscience to put to a vote at General Assembly this June in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Ethical Eating, though, is not an issue that will be finished when the Association’s process is finished. In many ways it will still be beginning. Instead, this is an issue that will call on us to continue to educate ourselves and find new ways to work for economic and ecological justice while eating healthful food that transmits the culture of justice that we want to build.
I encourage you, if you haven’t done so, to check out the resources on the Social Justice portion of the Association website. And study the Draft Statement of Conscience. The Statement of Conscience does not tell us what to do but, rather, contextualizes the issue and then presents calls to action for individuals and congregations. It is only three-and-a-half pages long and very readable. The calls to action require study and use of various resources to flesh out but are an outline for action. The saying goes that there is no free lunch. These calls to action require us together to study how we can best put them into practice. And they require commitment.
We carry both our experiences and our values with us in the effort. I still love a big bowl of whipped cream for dessert, but now I must evaluate whether the impact of my choice is good for the worker, for the environment, for the animals, and my health. I have to weigh and balance, not just between my taste buds and the price but between my appetite and the full range of costs. Am I perpetuating oppression? Because there is no free lunch. Building up a shared tool chest of information and practices to support ethical eating can help us to evaluate the true cost so that we may pay for what we eat rather than passing the cost on to other segments of this interconnected web of existence.
May we learn to see the world’s complexities without fear and to respond with ethical determination, looking beyond expediencies to the continuation of life – human and non-human – on this beautiful, frightening, awe-inspiring planet in an amazing cosmos. Standing on the threshold of a dream of no more hunger, no more injustice, may we learn to work together to understand what we can do to build a culture of eating that holds and transmits our values of justice.
Amen and Blessed Be.
__________
[1] Butler, Rhett A. “Deforestation in the Amazon.” http://www.mongabay.com/brazil.html.
[2] World Wildlife Federation. “Update: Falling Amazon deforestation rates create opportunity for other damaged forests.” http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/press/2009/WWFPresitem14352.html.
[3] Raintree Nutrition, Inc. “Rain Forest Facts” http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm.
[4] Raintree Nutrition, Inc. “Rainforest Facts.” http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm.
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