The Politics of Food Sept. 20, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
NYT, Aug. 2, 2016, GENE BAUR
President and Co-founder Farm Sanctuary
What we eat is one of our
most important decisions every day. Our food can either promote health, or it
can make us sick. Agriculture can contribute to vibrant, healthy communities,
or it can undermine them. Farmers can use scarce natural resources responsibly,
or they can squander and deplete them.
Unfortunately, American farm
policies have enabled a harmful system to take root. It doesn’t have to be this
way. As consumers become more concerned about our broken food system, they are
voting with their dollars. There is growing demand for organic produce, and
farmers markets are spreading along with community gardens.
This is what
my breakfast plate often looks like. I love having fruit for breakfast and I
have a special fondness for melons and strawberries. I love it so much, that if
I don’t have it for breakfast, I am likely to have it for lunch or dinner. But
as common place as this may look to you and me, my grandparents would have
never seen a plate like this. In fact, they would have gone to their graves
believing that such a thing would not have been impossible. Do you know why?
Because strawberries grow in the early spring, and watermelon and
cantaloupe are picked in late summer. When I was young, local grocery stores
would advertise on billboards when blueberries were in, when peaches were ripe,
and when it was time for
the apple harvest. Now, if Starbucks didn’t try to put pumpkin in coffee every
October, a violation of nature, if you asked me, we wouldn’t have any sense of
growing seasons for anything.
My grandparents were farmers. My
parents grew, canned or froze most of the vegetables we ate year-round. I am
afraid that I have reduced my family’s agricultural heritage to a purely
symbolic backyard garden that produces only a fraction of the food that I eat
and, my fear is that even if she wanted to keep up the family heritage, my
daughter wouldn’t know which end of a tomato plant goes in the ground. While
the pandemic has reacquainted many of us with that tiled room in the house where
there are machines that make things hot and keeps other things cold, we have
become increasingly disconnected from where we get our food.
I have
several friends who have chickens and while they gleefully gather and share
eggs, none of them actually eat their chickens. They give them names and
eventually, they become the keepers of an old chickens’ retirement home because
they couldn’t imagine participating in the barbarism that makes wings and
tenders possible. And, I’ll add, I’m right there with them. I am not eager to
become a vegetarian but if the choice was between a forever salad bar or
actually butchering my own meat, then I’m afraid that I would have to stick to
rabbit food.
If I may tax
your memory and possibly our friendship, last month I gave a talk about the
five things that a large group of Danish scholars had published that needed to
be changed in a post covid world. One of them, that I told you I would be
returning to, is about agriculture, not so much creating a new form of
agriculture as going back to an older form of agriculture that was less taxing
on the earth, better for the environment globally, and a lot better for our
health generally.
The family
farms I grew up around, almost all had a combination of beef and dairy cattle,
chickens and pigs, and they grew corn, beans, potatoes, and the hay and alfalfa
fed to their livestock. Crop rotation and being able to feed the livestock the
excesses of the agriculture of the farm, kept anything from being driven very
far and continually refreshed the earth.
To put strawberries and watermelon on
the same plate and to do so very nearly 12 months out of the year means that I
am not only not buying my produce locally, I’m not even getting most of it off
of this continent. Fifty years ago, the only thing in our kitchens that had
come from a thousand miles away was our coffee and bananas, now, well, we don’t
all shop the same way in the same places, but I would hazard a guess that most
of us don’t have more than a fraction of our fresh food from Missouri and only
a small percentage from the United States.
My
nutritionist friends tell me that we should try to eat whole foods but if we
must eat packaged foods to make sure that we never eat anything with more than
five ingredients and none that you can’t pronounce. But the marriage of modern
farming to capitalist industries has given us even something as healthy
sounding as Sun Chips and Whole Wheat Bread with more than 20 ingredients in
them, many of which I cannot pronounce but one of the secret words, in almost
every case, translates into sugar.
Corporate farming has wiped out the diverse family farms in order to
produce single crops as far as the eye can see of soy beans, corn, wheat,
sorghum, rice, and potatoes which demands more chemical fertilizers,
pesticides, and gasoline to produce.
Again, even
this reimagined food pyramid would not be endorsed by most nutritionists who
want for us to eat many more green vegetables and almost no grains or dairy, and
much less of the high carbohydrate root vegetables. But even still, if we
should have only small servings of meat and dairy, why does most of our federal
agricultural subsidies go to meat and dairy? If we should largely avoid grains
and completely eschew sugars, why is most of the rest of the budget going to
those crops? If we are supposed to eat more fruits and green vegetables, why is
less than 1% of our government spending in agriculture devoted to what we are
supposed to eat the most?
It is a
complicated issue. You can’t blame farmers for growing the crops where they
stand to gain the most profit but you can blame a government that has allowed
lobbyists and special interests to grab hundreds of billions of dollars every
year to make the foods that will kill us the most affordable and easy foods
available to us.
Many of us have volunteered in our
local food pantries that serves the most food insecure families in our
communities for decades but I have to tell you, the more I have learned about
nutrition and processed foods, the more guilty I have felt about my involvement
in this ministry that gives the poor such a carbohydrate rich diet that while
we may be preventing hunger, we are certainly helping to cause cancer and type
2 diabetes. The poor eat the worst foods and because they eat what they can
afford, they have the worst health outcomes and highest medical bills. It is
literally insane.
This is a touchy topic for me as I am obviously terribly overweight. I
would remind our viewers that the camera notoriously adds 15 lbs. but I have to
confess that the other 85 extra pounds is pretty much on me. In fact, one
snarky comedian recently said that we should stop talking about type 1 and type
2 diabetes and just call them what they are, “pretty much not my fault
diabetes” and “yeah, pretty much my fault diabetes.”
This chart shows the growth of type 2 diabetes in our nation
over the past 60 years. We get richer, we have better health care, and the rate
of diabetes in adults has gone from half of one percent to almost 10% . . .
that’s not natural, in fact, it is specifically unnatural. It is a direct
product of bad food, and way too much of it!
Asia had almost no diabetes and no heart disease until the
last 30 years when we exported Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and McDonalds
to Asia. The British tried to kill them with opium, then it looked like we
would kill them with Philip Morris tobacco products, but it looks like the real
villains are Col. Sanders and Ronald McDonald.
Just as
capitalism has not been a friendly force in healthcare, it is possibly even
worse in determining what we eat. There is a very powerful influence of the
marketplace on our politics and both of them seem to exercise power over our
food supply.
I was
approached several years ago by one of the founding members of Jesus Seminar
who asked me to write a book with him about the politics of food in the New
Testament. The project never made it into print, but I spent years thinking
about the very odd New Testament story found in Mark and Matthew about a
birthday party for Herod. I can never decide if the gospel writers were
sufficiently sophisticated to intentionally use the metaphors in their stories
as literary devices or if they just immerged unintentionally out of their
unconscious, but this narrative is full of images of power and poverty.
There was a
lot of palace intrigue in the messed up family history of marriages in Herod’s
family, but his wife had a daughter from a previous marriage whom she had dance
at the party, the implication being that it was a very sexy dance that put the
drunken king off his guard and he offered to give her anything she wanted. Her
mother told her to ask for the head of the imprisoned prophet, John the
Baptist.
But, again, reading the text from Mark 6 very
closely, the girl’s mother tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist
but the girl goes before the king and very specifically says, “I want you to give me right now the
head of John the Baptist on a platter.”
They are at a party, what is brought out on a platter? Food, right?
Please forgive me for
being so very graphic but, while you may think of David presenting the head of
the Philistine warrior, Goliath, or the ancient practice of putting the heads
of criminals or national enemies on a spike in public, but a head on a platter –
that’s different and I can’t let go of the apparent metaphor that while the
young girl was being treated as an object of lust, even still, she was a member
of the royal family and she could treat the poor and vulnerable as if they were
a plate of French fries. Not literally, but certainly figuratively,
economically, politically, the rich have always eaten the poor.
In 1729,
during the great Potato Famine, in Ireland, Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical
piece called “A modest proposal,” which is the basis of the song that Sean is
going to sing in a moment. Swift suggested that the poor Irish sell their
children as food to the well-heeled English. His intent was to shame the moral
indifference of the English towards the Irish which, historically, didn’t seem
to actually work very well.
You could
wish that farmers could just decide that they are going to throw profits to the
wind and only grow healthy foods in an organic way but as much as farming may
be a cultural lifestyle, it isn’t a hobby for very many people. It has to be
profitable. The whole reason that we have a federal government with a tax
system and departments that hand out subsidies is to manage desirable outcomes.
The problem
is, with our system of government, Herod keeps lustily leaning towards Herodias’
bare bosom and telling her that she can have whatever she wants. And what she
always wants is the head of the poor on a platter.
We the
people, in order to form a more perfect union, need to give voice to what the
poor need to say before the axe is laid to their necks. We can’t do it all at
once without upsetting the economic apple cart, but we know where we need to go
and we can start making changes with every year’s budget, so that we shrink the
subsidies of meat, dairy, rice, corn, soy, sugar, potatoes, and wheat, and we
start subsidizing green vegetables, fruits, and other organically grown foods.
And, yes, that will make many foods more expensive, but it will lower our
medical bills by very much more and give us longer lives.
Our
politicians, because they owe their jobs to the donations from lobbyists,
cannot tear their eyes off of the enchanting Herodias. We need to help her to
put her shirt back on and go sit down. Our government must work for us and
right now they are poisoning us and that must stop. They will not do it on
their own. They will only do it if we insist on it, and we can do that in the
ballot box or we can do that in the streets but either way, allowing politics
and profit to set the table for us has us continually eating the poor and that,
my friends, really must stop.
