Eco-Congregation (2)

20.02.05 Sarah Genesis 1 Being an Eco-Congregation (2)
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What I am going to do this morning is to talk about some of the environmental issues around food. For me environmental awareness has always been inextricably bound up with faith. I believe the two are deeply connected and that the one is less without the other. Right at the beginning, in Genesis we read that "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it." Straight away we have this balance - the need to work for food set against the need to care for the land which feeds us.

As Ali explained the other week - we are called to believe and to live out a life of faith with this underlying awareness of our stewardship of creation. And I suppose I believe more and more strongly that deep and meaningful change can only happen through the simple moment by moment decisions of daily life. Often we feel helpless and lost in the face of what seem to be huge problems or issues. But with each little decision we have the opportunity each day to work for change. And what is more daily and necessary than food? How many times a day do we wonder what we shall buy or what we shall cook? It is right at the heart of our existence.

To start with I wonder whether we might close our eyes and think back to our last meal - maybe breakfast, maybe last night or for the grazers among us, maybe just some of the food that we ate over the last 24hrs. I’ll ask some questions and just let your mind wander through them :-

- what do you remember eating?
- could you say how far the different things had travelled - by lorry, or boat or plane - and how much oil do you think it took?
- do you know how they were grown or produced?
- who decided how much it would cost?
- if there were animal products, can you guess how much daylight that animal saw?
- what about the workers, do you think they were treated fairly?
- how long did your meal take to prepare and how long to eat?
- how much plastic went in the bin and how long do you think it will take to breakdown?

I expect different things came up for different people, with this mix of questions. Most of them just point to the fact that like it or not, we are deeply embedded in a global system of food production. And difficult as it is to admit, the production, transportation and consumption of our daily food is one of the major causes of environmental breakdown. And of course we find it completely discouraging and we shake our heads in despair at all the issues

For most of us, the buying of food is something that we do in a hurry, usually travelling by car to a large supermarket, heads down, trolley primed like a weapon, trying to get round as quickly as possible. There is barely any social contact except perhaps a quick word with the person on the till, then we rush home to unpack it all and to find something we feel inspired to cook and eat. And this is usually something which is at least partially processed as we endeavour to remove the labour from feeding ourselves. What else can we do? Life is just so busy.

Yet also we long to be able to do things differently. We know that our lives interconnect with the rest of the world and that as the planet’s wealthy elite, we have great responsibility. We are increasingly being made aware that we should not go about our business without noticing its cost to the earth. It is such a huge subject and I thought maybe we could find a focus by looking at bread together.

I want to pass round these bowls with wheat grains in them - take a few, hold them, look at them. This is a grain of wheat - this tiny seed on which we are completely dependent for our daily bread It was Thoreau - Henry David, one of my great heroes, who said I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect a miracle. This tiny seed can be planted to grow wheat - it is part of the great cycle of life - the seed grows into the plant which flowers to make more seed.

This little grain has three main parts :-

the bran - the outer protective layer 12%
the endosperm - the white starchy stuff which forms most of the grain and is the storehouse of food for when the seed starts to grow 85%
the germ - the wheat embryo, the point where new growth starts 3%

Have a bite into it and see if you can make any of this out. Unrefined like this, whole wheat is a rich source perfectly balanced nutrients. In terms of health a food can go one way or the other.

Typically what we do when we process a food stuff is to fragment things. Wheat is broken up into its constituent parts. Then the refined flour is separated from the goodness of the germ and the bran and then is processed further by mixing with other refined foods like sugars and fats to produce a huge range of baked goods, none of which offers any goodness or nutrition.

Yet you can also go in another direction, in terms of bringing the wheat grain to life, by sprouting it. When a grain or a seed is sprouted enzymes which have been dormant spring into action, breaking down all the stored food into simple nutrients which easily absorbed by the body. Astonishingly the nutrient levels escalate way beyond any levels in the dormant grain - vitamin contents can increase by 2000% as it sprouts. For this reason sprouts are the most nutritious foodstuff on the planet and you could live on sprouts alone!

As the wheat grains sprout they turn into little plants. See the ones I planted a week ago. Imagine how much energy is contained in that tiny grain to be able to shoot up like this, full of chlorophyll, full of life. Alive and whole, completely non-processed.

And of course the grains can be ground to make flour from which comes our daily bread. I expect we all have a rough idea of how wheat turns into bread, the age old method of ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, grinding of the grain and finally the baking.

Anne showed me a poem the other day by Lauris Edmond, a NZ poet. This is one called Epithalamion where she writes about the role of the woman in the careful tending of the quiet details of the home and there is a lovely line how she - woman -

“stayed mysteriously content with the ancient humilities a lit fire, a boiling kettle, the deep solace of bread”

I thought , what a wonderful way of describing bread as an ancient humility. Ancient - the way it connects us with the whole of humanity its simple, humble essence, how it can humble us. And the way it is a solace, a comfort, how it speaks on an emotional level to our hearts.

In the gospels, Jesus likens himself to bread in his words - I am the bread of life - he who comes to me shall not hunger. As well as giving us a sense of the deep sustaining power of God, this also indicates to me something of the strength of bread’s meaning in people’s lives in the past.

Do you know that bread consumption in the UK is the lowest of all Europe? Surely a testament to how tasteless and dull it has become? Do you know there are only eleven factory baking plants that produce more than 80% of all our bread and two giants own most of these, British bakeries and Allied bakeries. As little as 2% of bread in this country is made by independent bakers.

In the 19th century most bread was made at home but as industrialisation developed, large factory bakeries emerged. However things changed for ever in the 1960’s with the Chorleywood bread process. Instead of allowing the traditional lengthy period of fermentation, it was discovered that air and water could be incorporated into the dough with high speed mechanical mixers. This was a revolution in bread making because it allowed bread to be made much more quickly and with a lot more water in it so it was cheaper. And this is the method which as been used ever since.

Plenty of things have to be added to make it work, for instance twice as much yeast ( a good loaf uses as little yeast as possible). Oxidants are necessary to get the gas in; hydrogenated fat has to be added to give the loaf structure or it would collapse; emulsifiers to emulsify the fats; nutrients to replace those lost by processing ( would you rather have chalk or the original calcium?). Flour improvers, which are usually GM enzymes to help absorb extra water and make the bread softer. Flavour ? Mould inhibitors, that is, fungicides. And please note that these chemical improvers are all regarded as processing aids rather than additives so they do not have to be declared on the label.

But the main thing is it is incredibly quick and completely automated - a loaf can be mixed, baked, cooled, sliced and plastic wrapped in less than 3 hours. Just imagine your bakery plant with these computer-generated loaves passing along huge conveyor belts - more that 7000 can be produced in one hour.

But going back one stage more, before we have even got to the bakery stage, the ground in which this wheat is grown - this vital living soil on which our health depends - is degraded to the point of no return by chemicals. Farming is nearly always intensively scaled for maximum profit. Small scale biodiversity is reduced which results in dependence on more chemicals and from this, wheat is produced which is riddled systemically with pollutants - even government advisors acknowledge that persistent pollutants are a hazard of wheat production.

So we have a wheat grain like this one, it is first polluted, then fragmented and broken down, adulterated with additional chemicalsand finally mechanically processed. This bread is the result - a plastic wrapped caricature of bread, baked not with care in loving homes but factory processed for commercial gain.

I always find it deeply poignant in the liturgy when we express our thanks to God for the gift of bread,
“which God has given and human hands have made” when I think of the reality of our daily bread. And we wonder why our health deteriorates and that of the planet.

I feel it is so important , the sense of each single food component - in this case wheat - being God-given, the perfect design, the miracle of life, this living breathing precious thing, waiting patiently for its time. And why we allow something which is so perfect and whole, to be degraded for mercenary motives. Why do we not cry out for change?

YET WE SEE the impact of industrialisation - the necessity of making food happen fast to maximise profits - happening over and over and over again. For us in the west food is abundant, cheap and standardised.

But who is adding up the cost of the environmental degradation, the lost top soil which took 500 years of microbes and earthworms to build, the polluted water courses, the wasted oil, the global warming, the congestion on the roads, the long term public health issues, the blighted town centres caused by supermarkets stranglehold on the food market?

How can it be so cheap? How can a loaf of bread be sold for so little? No matter that the bread tastes of nothing. We have fallen in love with the idea of convenience food because we are just too busy to take food seriously.

AS A RESULT we are disconnected from the land. We no longer know how things grow, we are not in touch with the seasons. We buy strawberries from the other side of the globe in winter. In fact we eat food that has been seeded, fertilised, harvested, processed and packaged in such energy expensive ways and then transported for so many miles it might well have been cheese from the moon.

Gradually there is a sense of there being a change in the tide - increasing environmental awareness, endless health concerns over food like the recent SUDAN 1 fiasco, there is increasing demand for organic production methods, for authentic food, for fair trade products

In 1986 in Italy a Macdonalds was built right in the centre of Rome which caused a rumpus and local activists there launched the Slow Food Movement - which stands for everything that Macdonalds doesn’t - fresh local seasonal food, sustainable farming methods, artisan production, and especially leisurely dining with family and friends.

This is so important. The acceleration of life has led to the acceleration of eating. We eat on the move, while doing something else, in front of the TV. Coming together to eat is a minority event because communal dining is too slow for us. Prayer before meals is a rarity. Yet eating together is part of our shared humanity. The word “companion” is latin for “with bread”.

Just look at the Gospels - there is so much about eating and food. And the central act of our faith is the shared meal represented in communion. We need to remember that eating is not only a way of nourishing the body but also the soul. Our table should be the heart of the home where people meet on a daily basis for conversation, kinship, a place of comfort and renewal, where guests are welcomed.

We also need to remember that the preparation of food is part of life’s creativity. We have so much , too much that we can buy, yet it is the basic labour of doing, the making with our hands, which enlivens us and makes us human.

For instance the simple act of making bread- we are so food conscious, there are so many celebrity cookbooks and TV programmes, so many suggestions of what to cook. How about putting the horse before the cart and having a crack at making a decent loaf of bread? Look for some organic flour and enjoy being resourceful and economical in a culture awash with too much. Everywhere our fingers are reduced to pressing buttons and flicking switches. Yet here is the human touch, as flour, water, salt and yeast are transformed into the staff of life.

SO WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?

Who can live a perfect life in our complicated, troubled world? All of our lives are riddled with inconsistencies, but we do have responsibilities and we have great power relative to the destitute and needy of the world. To have choice at all is a phenomenal privilege when so many go hungry. We must recognise our greed, the evil which turns the world to destruction.

In Hosea there is a verse which says

The Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land. There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land … because of this the land mourns and all who live in it waste away, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.

YET the land is entrusted to us. We serve the earth and we are to do so justly. Of all the ways that we consume, food is a good place to start.

Can I suggest four things that can help us on our way?

Seasonal Local Organic Whole

If things are seasonal and local, then they do not have to travel far to reach our table and less resources have been used to grow them. If food is organic, then the land on which it grows will not have been given a toxic legacy, animal welfare laws will be tighter, there are usually wider farming practices which benefit the land and other inhabitants of it. And there is the issue of our health too. If food is whole, that is, as close to its natural state as possible, then less resources have been wasted in costly, unhealthy processing.

Seasonal Local Organic Whole

S - L- O- W

perhaps we could begin to seek out these things as we feed ourselves.

Wendell Berry, an American environmentalist, says

The real work of planet saving will be small, humble and also as it involves love, pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed, too small to make anyone rich or famous.

And further on

Grow your food, cook it lovingly, eat slowly, share your food with friends and guests, such food will bring you not only health, but happiness and salvation.

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