"A Sermon for Earth Sunday"

READING

If you don't ever want to think about how your food gets to the supermarket - and you may not want to - then don't read Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The book is a penetrating exploration of the many sources of our food: from industrial farming to hunting. Pollan argues that the pleasures of eating "are deepened by knowing" about our food. But so is our ethical responsibility. Here he makes his case:

"[T]here exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, at least as it is presently organized. Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono- cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system - a patch of soil, a human body - and the health of one is connected - literally - to the health of the other. Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about.

"I don't mean to suggest that human food chains have only recently come into conflict with the logic of biology; early agriculture and, long before that, human hunting proved enormously destructive. Indeed, we might never have needed agriculture had earlier generations of hunters not eliminated the species they depended upon. Folly in the getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of a different order. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.

". . . [T]he way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna. Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species - plants, animals, and fungi - with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined. Many of these species have evolved expressly to gratify our desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us and them to prosper together as we could never have prospered apart. But our relationships with the wild species we eat - from the mushrooms we pick in the forest to the yeasts that leaven our bread - are no less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.

"What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

"'Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it."

SERMON

When it comes to food, I speak as someone who isn't much of a cook and hates to shop for groceries. I love to eat and wish I always had a well-stocked cupboard and planned ahead for dinner. Instead I tend to go from day to day, buying what we need, cooking simple, mostly vegetarian meals at home.

My one scruple about food has been to avoid imposing my preferences on other people. When I am a guest in someone else's home, I eat and enjoy whatever my host serves. Except for broccoli.

I am a meagerly informed consumer - aware of the spinach scare and the Atkins Diet - but couldn't tell you what to buy at this week's Farmer's Market. Yet I devoured the information in Michael Pollan's "natural history of four meals," "The Omnivore's Dilemma". "To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden," Pollan writes, "but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction."[i]

I came away from reading this book convinced that how we shop, cook, and eat are important choices that need to be informed by knowledge and exposed to moral reasoning. Not just because it makes the experience of eating more healthy or pleasurable. But because it expresses our primary relationship to nature.

We cannot separate who we are as human beings from who we are as part of the earth. Farmers, naturalists and spiritual teachers all tell us that. "By this earth's life," writes Wendell Berry, "I have its greed and innocence, its violence, its peace."[ii] Wendell Berry made the decision many years ago to settle on a piece of land and become a farmer. His writings relate every aspect of his life - not just his food, but his marriage, his work, and his creativity - to this foundation.

Michael Pollan, after exploring every way to grow and make a meal, concludes, "what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it."[iii] Our role as consumers has a moral dimension. If we ignore the responsibilities of our role, we imperil the earth, not just ourselves.

And Chief Noah Sealth reminds us that the relationship is mutual. "All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth."[iv]

The challenge is especially compelling for us. We live in a part of the world where we can find anything we want. I can still remember when I moved here from Boston, how delighted I was to find ripe avocados in the market down the street from my home.

Not only do we have fresh produce year round, but we have the marketplace for wealthy, discerning consumers. Take Whole Foods Market, just up the street from us on Wilshire Boulevard. Michael Pollan has some fun with them. "I enjoy shopping at Whole Foods," he writes, "nearly as much as I enjoy browsing a good bookstore, which, come to think of it, is probably no accident. Shopping [there] is a literary experience, too." Whole Foods is an emporium of "storied" food, with labels vouching for its pastoral provenance.

Pollan fills his basket "with eggs 'from cage-free vegetarian hens,' [and] milk from cows that live 'free from unnecessary fear and distress'" . . . even an organic broiling chicken named "Rosie."[v] How many of us are so reassured by such "evocative prose" that we are willing to pay the higher prices for it? I have done so, many times.

It is good food. It's just that I don't really know why. All I know is that I feel more confident purchasing something that declares its pleasant origins. And has ingredients I can understand, not a list of preservatives with synthetic-sounding names. And in that small but expensive way, I feel I am doing something good.

"So much about life in a global economy," Michael Pollan writes, "feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control - what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. This might not sound like a big deal, but it could be the beginnings of one. Already the desire on the part of consumers to put something different in their bodies has created an $11 billion market in organic food. That marketplace was built by consumers and farmers working informally together outside the system, with exactly no help from the government."[vi]

At that point in reading the book I went over to the Co-op Market on Broadway and became a member. I'd gone there for years, buying lunch on the fly or looking for a good apple. But I realized that supporting such a place - a market owned by the consumers - was a first step in taking responsibility for what I eat.

Once you think about it, the decisions grow and so do their implications. Michael Pollan investigates industrial farming - high volume "monoculture." Rather than growing diverse products the way a small farm must do simply to survive - grass, cows, hens, eggs, and so on - industrial farming streamlines - and confines - production for profit. As Michael Pollan notes, such an approach to farming may make sense to the "logic of human industry," but it goes against the "logic of nature."[vii]

Industrial farming has become a way of life for us, and for many farmers, who have no choice but to work this way to stay in business. We have been able to produce large quantities of food this way - and it has kept many from starving. Yet its critics ascribe all kinds of environmental consequences. The earth pays a high price for us to enjoy out of season vegetables. And everything eats corn - not just animals that should be ruminating grass, but even farm-raised salmon, and most of our processed food is made from it. What happens to us? One biologist told Michael Pollan, "we North Americans look like corn chips with legs."[viii]

There is the equally important question of what happens to the animals. Their brief, confined lives seem miserable by any measure. Whether knowing this makes you a vegetarian or not, Pollan argues that you do need to know.

The most troubling bit of information I picked up from "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is how much our not knowing is part of the equation of industrial farming. "Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent," Pollan warns us, "we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. . . . Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve."[ix]

Becoming conscious about what we eat involves more than just taking what is healthy for ourselves. It means taking into account everything that goes into making the food what it is. To do so we need to close the distance between ourselves and our food, enough so that our ethical sensibilities can play a part. It is an individual choice, what to eat or not eat, but each choice has an impact all the way down the food chain, right back to earth itself. There may be many questions about what it is right to do: but being unconscious about it is not the answer to any of them.

In the story we heard earlier, the Red Hen asks her animals friends to help her plant a seed. They all refuse. But as the seed grows from a sprout to a seedling and finally into a tree, it becomes something the other animals want to enjoy. The Red Hen remembers how little help she got - and it's her turn to refuse. But her baby chick changes her mind and all the animals play in the shade of the "great green whispery tree."[x] Now that they understand how they all benefited from the Red Hen's labor, they each go home with a seed of their own.

We may not end up planting our own vegetables if we become more conscious about food. But to know how our consumer choices affect other lives and the earth itself is the least we can do to reciprocate. For as Michael Pollan concludes, "we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."[xi]

[i] Michael Pollan, "The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a natural history of four meals" (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 11.
[ii] Wendell Berry, "History," from "Clearing" (New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 5.
[iii] Pollan, p. 11.
[iv] Words attributed to Chief Noah Sealth, #550 in "Singing the Living Tradition" (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
[v] Pollan, pp. 134-135.
[vi] Pollan, p. 257
[vii] Pollan, p. 9
[viii] Pollan, p. 23.
[ix] Pollan, p. 333.
[x] Tina Matthews, "Out of the Egg" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
[xi] Pollan, p. 411.