yearofplenty

Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Echoes of Christian Food Ethics

The most interesting section in Theology on the Menu, thus far, is the review of early U.S. history where Christian leaders were on the forefront of the healthy food movements. The authors highlight the religious justifications for 19th century justifications for vegetarianism, whole foods diets, and healthy eating.

For example Dr Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian minister who spoke out against the delitorious effects of white bread and advocated for breads made from whole grains. He came up with his own healthy flour mix made with whole-wheat flour, bran, and wheat germ from which he developed the well known cracker that bears his name. Along with being healthy he claimed that the dryness of Graham Crackers curbed sexual urges, both of which modern civilization has counteracted by adding chocolate and marshmallows to make S'mores.

In another example of the strong historic connection between early health food movements and Christian faith the book highlights the development of corn flakes. John Harvey Kellogg was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitortium, health center and headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventists who were strong advocates of vegeterianism. This close relationship gave birth to Kellog's breakfast cereals and the iconic corn flakes. Once again, modern America has taken this historic holy urge for health and added lots of sugar to transform them into Frosted Flakes. 

These are just two examples of many that point to the strong religious roots of modern food movements, but that really shouldn't be a surprise. Many secular food passions have an implicit, if not explicit, spiritual vibe. From vegans to raw foodites, to localists and bacon evangelists, there is something more going on than just calorie counts and fat content. These dietary regimens point to a way of life and possess hints of the meaning of it all.

My Huckleberry Cleanse or What I Learned from a Week of Wild Foraging (Pt. 2)

 

Tulip heads are cleaned off the plants at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

As I prepared for a week of eating only wild-foraged foods there was a lot of chatter online about the recent popularity of cleanses, where people go for a period of time only drinking juice, or following some other regimen of limited foods that supposedly cleans out impurities from the body. Much of the conversation in recent weeks has been driven by an article by Judith Shulevitz at the New Republic, "Jesus and Moses Went on Cleanses, That doesn't mean you should." The more accurate description of the article is visible in the web URL that titles the piece, "The idiotic-cleanse-craze-and-modern-theology-juice-fasts." 

What caught my attention is not just the controversy about the merits of calorie-depriving cleanses, but the strong religious streak to the movement. Shulevitz notes how similar they are to religious fasts and argues that this is really what drives the movement:

...people don’t afflict themselves for their health, or not only for that. I won’t be the first to point out that cleanses look a lot like religious fasts or that people crave the transcendence that comes from self-deprivation. 

According to Shulevitz it's an existential acting out in response to a world envisioned as poisoned. In the laymans terms, the world is full of $#@$ and therefore we are a full of $%@#, and cleanses are a way to clean out the you know what. It's original sin reduced to terms that even a middle schooler could understand and some would argue that the movement has the sophistication of junior high boys when it comes to the digestive system. The books apparently spend a lot of time on the topic of defecation.

Most mainstream doctors and scientists are highly critical of the cleanse movement as Shulevitz notes. As a pastor who sat at the bedside of a dead parishioner who chose homeophathic cleanses and diets to cure her cancer instead of chemotherapy I join with those doctors and scientists in their criticism. It is dangerous and irresponsible to make unproven claims about the health benefits and curative powers of diet and herbal remedies. When I see such assertions arise in the organic/slow food/real food conversation it drives me crazy. 

But I'm more interested in the spiritual/religious aspects of the movement. Should pastors and theologians be just as skeptical of these pseudo-scientific detox regimens as the doctors and scientists? I don't think so.

Shulevitz is right to identify the movement as primarily an expression of spiritual longing and we in the church ought to take note. Just as we have abandoned fasting as a spiritual practice the void has been filled by pseudo-religious movements that take seriously the real connection between body, mind, and spirit. This is the part the cleansers get right and the church, these days, mostly gets wrong.

I just finished a week of eating wild-foraged foods. Here in the Inland Northwest that means I spent a week eating mostly huckleberries, call it my Huckleberry Cleanse. I didn't go into it with visions of dirty toxins in my intestines. It was a personal challenge and I did have in mind the experience of Israel in the wilderness foraging for manna every day for 40 years.

I have to admit I come away from the experience feeling some affinity for the "Cleaners."

It did reset my body and mind and awaken my spirit in new ways. It did clear my body of the high-salt and high-fat diet I gravitate toward. I did lose 10 pounds and here on the morning after I'm not nearly as hungry as I was a week ago before my foraging began. It's easier for me to concentrate and I feel psychologically in a better place. The first coulple days were a hassle but after that there was a strange peace and quiet that settled on me as I experienced freedom from the tyranny of hungers that clutter my mind. In a sense I feel clean.

I've had a similar awakening every time I've fasted. Last year when I followed the dietary regimen of Ramadan, going daylight hours without food or drink, I felt empowered and peaceful. When our family joined with our local Greek Orthodox congregation for their Advent and Lenten fasts last year we experienced spiritual renewal and a strengthening of family and communal bonds. When we followed the Kosher food laws for a month we experienced renewal in our family life. In my experience, intentional fasting has the potential for spiritual growth and renewal.

It's been an important practice for most of the history of God's people in the Bible and in the Christian church, but in the modern west it has fallen victim to the spirit/body divide imposed on the church by the Enlightenment and modernity. (That's my assessment that I'll flesh out more later.) Not even Catholics do fish Fridays anymore and Protestants are mostly left to our own whims when it comes to Lent. We're missing out.

Shulevitz is wrong. "Jesus and Moses Went on Cleanses," and we should to.

The church in the west would do well to listen to the spiritual longings expressed by those who are turning to colonics and cleanses for help in this crazy fragmented world we live in. They are looking to put the pieces together, body, mind, and spirit. What does the church have to offer them? We have a treasure trove of resources if we dig a little into our history, and it's not based on scatologically obsessed pseudo-science, it's based on the Bible, on the life of Jesus, and on the experience of the early church.

And contrary to the Cleanse movement these practices lead us to embrace the body as good and holy, as sacred space. 

(This post is part of an ongoing inquiry into food practices in the church supported by a grant from the Louisville Institute. Find out more about the Tables of Plenty Project here.)

Beware Visions of a Vegetarian Dystopia

Roger Ebert's Journal pointed me to a forboding article at the Guardian by John Vidal that warns that the coming worldwide water shortage will force all of us into a meat-lovers apocalypse of vegetarianism.

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists....

Adopting a vegetarian diet is one option to increase the amount of water available to grow more food in an increasingly climate-erratic world, the scientists said. Animal protein-rich food consumes five to 10 times more water than a vegetarian diet. One third of the world's arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals. Other options to feed people include eliminating waste and increasing trade between countries in food surplus and those in deficit.

This news also comes on the heals of the recent warning of a worldwide bacon shortage, otherwise known as the Baconpocalypse. 

None of these warnings are all that upsetting to me. Our family has gradually migrated toward a more vegetarian diet. We still eat meat but much less than we used to. Our foray into food and faith traditions has accelerated this shift. The Orthodox fasts are vegetarian, our kosher month was mostly vegetarian because of concerns about mixing meat and dairy, and now I'm experimenting with the Seventh-Day Advent regimen which is strictly vegetarian. (I haven't worked my way up to no caffiene yet but I'll get there.) These traditions affirm that vegetarianism is good for the body and the soul, and it sounds like scientists agree that it is good for the earth as well.

I'm not ready to give up bacon yet, but I don't live in fear of being a vegetarian, and I don't see why any of us should. It could be worse, we could be talking about a future without coffee and chocolate. Oh, wait a minute. Some scientists are warning that climate change could bring an end to coffee an chocolate as well. Now that's a future worthy of apocalyptic angst.

Decline of the Carnivore: American consumers are losing their appetite for meat

Almost everyone that's not selling meat agrees that it would be a good thing for Americans to eat less meat. Nutritionists tell us it would be good for our health. Environmentalists tell us it would be good for the environment and one of the most helpful ways to combat global warming. Animal welfare advocates tell us that reducing meat consumption is one of the most helpful ways we can address the horrors of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As we're learning in our Tables of Plenty journey, most religious traditions teach that constraining the consumption of meat through fasting is helpful on the journey of spiritual formation. 

Apparently the message is starting to sink in because, as Mark Bittman reported earlier in the week, American consumers are putting less meat in their shopping carts and that trend is likely to continue into the future. (See chart taken from this Daily Livestock Report)

The rising price of meat is probably the single biggest contributor to these trends but Bittman attributes part of the decline to a shift in consumer conscience:

Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

The livestock industry in their report on the trend attributes the change to growing exports which reduced the amount of available meat in the market, higher costs due to the growth of the ethanol industry that diverts corn to the production of fuel and increases the costs of those inputs for animal feed, and finally they attribute the decline to "the fruition of 30-40 years of government policy." 

Bittman, along with many others, have expressed shock at the dubious nature of this last statement. One feature of the American food scene over the last 40 years are the generous farm subisidies that have fueled the industrialization of meat production. Instead of dealing with the reality that consumers are choosing to eat less meat, they are stuck on the idea of a government conspiracy against them. 

I guess I'm not surprised that the livestock industry doesn't mention changing consumer values but, as I've written in the past, the industry ignores this reality at their peril.

Hostess declares bankruptcy - Is this the end of the Twinkie food culture?

Hostess Brands, the makers of Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and the iconic Twinkie, has gone belly up and filed for bankruptcy protection. It seems they are dealing with the usual challenges of a legacy company limping along with large pension and benefits obligations but this could also be a signal that the American food culture is kicking the junk food habit. 

Jonathan Berr at MSN Money attributes it to a rising awareness of the obesity problem:

Hostess wasn't able to change with the times. Its whole-grain bread, Nature's Pride, was a flop, and its other products are being hurt by the growing awareness of the obesity epidemic sweeping the country, especially among children. That trend is particularly evident with respect to Hostess' signature product, Twinkies.

Twinkie inventor James Dewar swore by the cream-filled cake he invented in 1930 and ate at least two packets of them a week before he died in 1985 at age 88.

"Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things," the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying. These days, many consumers don't share Dewar's heartfelt dedication to what were once dubbed "the cream puff of the proletariat."

I'd like to see some data on trends in the consumption of junk food but it's probably true that not too many kids go to school with a Twinkie in their lunch box these days. I grew up in a non-Twinkie household but I was an active participant in the black market of Hostess Ding Dongs and Ho Hos during school lunches. That being said I can't remember the last time I ate a Hostess fruit pie and it's hard to wrap my brain around who is eating Twinkies these days. I will admit to an occasional weakness for Lemon Zingers.

Is anyone out there still eating Hostess products? Would anyone protest a world without Twinkies and Suzie Q's?

 

Stuffed and Starved - Visualizing World Food Consumption

A friend passed along this interesting visualization of the world's calorie consumption. Below is a screen grab showing the U.S. leading the pack in calories consumed. It's interesting to see that the whole western world appears to be eating too many calories while much of Africa is getting too few calories. It reminds me of Raj Patel's appropriately titled book, Stuffed and Starved, which I've got on my reading list for next year. 

The veracity of a data on per capita calorie consumption of Americans may be overstated. While the infographic relies on UN data, the USDA has a more conservative estimate in the most recent Dietary Guidelines where they state:

On the basis of national survey data, the average calorie intake among women and men older than age 19 years are estimated to be 1,785 and 2,640 calories per day, respectively. While these estimates do not appear to be excessive, the numbers are difficult to interpret because survey respondents, especially individuals who are overweight or obese, often under report dietary intake. Well-controlled studies suggest that the actual number of calories consumed may be higher than these estimates.

Maybe the reality is somewhere in-between the UN estimate and the USDA survey results.

Congress Rejects Healthier School Lunches - Insists Pizza is a Vegetable

This from the Associated Press:

Congress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fighting back against an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year, which included limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line and delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains....

Food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn't be telling children what to eat.

I guess the problem with that logic is that the government currently is telling children what to eat based on what they subsidize in the school lunch program. The most jaw-dropping portion of the food bill is that it maintains the current categorization of pizza as a vegetable because of the thin smear of tomato sauce that covers the doughy concoction.

While Congress does the bidding of the tater-tot lobby a new study out of Harvard indicates that potatoes are the biggest culprit in weight gain:

On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary components, 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (−0.22 lb), whole grains (−0.37 lb), fruits (−0.49 lb), nuts (−0.57 lb), and yogurt (−0.82 lb).

Maybe it's going to be up to innovative school districts like the one in Chicago to change the direction of school lunch programs. They just instituted an antibiotic-free chicken policy:

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) today began serving local chicken raised without antibiotics to students in 473 schools. This development comes on the heels of a fresh chicken purchase direct from the USDA earlier this fall. The district's new scratch-cooked chicken program includes about 1.2 million pounds from Amish farms that do not use antibiotics, for a total of about two million pounds of fresh chicken in the 2011-12 school year. Students will be offered bone-in chicken two to three times each month.

CPS' enormous purchase of chicken grown without antibiotics, made through food service provider Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, is the first of its kind. No other district in the nation is serving this kind of poultry regularly at such a scale.

Go here for previous posts on the ongoing debates around school lunch programs.

Is the local food movement bad for the poor?

I have an op-ed that will appear in tomorrow's Seattle Times titled, How the local food movement is helping solve the problem of world hunger. It was intended to be provocative so I expect/hope it will provoke some passionate responses from a variety of people in the food conversation. The gist of my argument is that it's inaccurate to say the local food movement is harming the world's vulnerable and hungry. (This seems to be the critique du jour of the locavore trend.) In fact, I argue, it is helping and holds great potential to address the issue of world hunger. 

It was hard to say all I wanted to say on the issue in 650 words or less so consider the following post as an extended-cut version of the op-ed, with more focus on the unfairness of the emerging critique of all things locavore. It is an edited (less sarcastic) version of what I posted earlier in the week.

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The local & sustainable food movement has been THE food phenomenon of recent years so it's not surprising that it has provoked a sizable backlash in defense of industrial food. What is surprising is the recent consensus among some that the local food movement is bad for poor people.

Charles Kenny got the ball rolling in last month's Foreign Policy Magazine. He calls the local and organic food movements "misguided, parochial Luddism" and is aghast that federal funds go to support farmers' markets. He writes:

...these First-World food fetishes are positively terrible for the world's poorest people. If you want to do the right thing, give up on locavorism and organics über alles and become a globally conscious grocery buyer. This should be the age of the "cosmovore" -- cosmopolitan consumers of the world's food.

The best way to help poor people eat well is to make healthy food cost less. But the more agricultural land we divert into lower-efficiency organic production, the higher the price of all food will climb. 

Judith Warner at Time followed suit last week with an article titled, The Locavore’s Illusions: As charming as it sounds, growing kale in your backyard won't solve the nation's food ills. She pushes back against the counter-cultural impulse in the movement that is suspicious of "the Man." She quotes a Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who tries to pull back the reigns on those trouble-making community gardeners that just want everyone to give chard a chance:

Sometimes thinking small and local — without an eye to the systemic and political — paves the way toward rollbacks of progressive policies that really work. Sometimes “The Man” can do a great deal of good, for example,when funding programs that add incentive dollars to SNAP benefits at farmers markets.

Josh Ozersky at Time joined the fray a couple days ago with an article titled, "In Defense of Industrial Food." Josh writes:

There are now 300 million Americans or so, and less space. If the barons of agriculture hadn’t engineered the monstrous phalanxes of corn that everyone is so aghast at, food would be more expensive, and a lot of poor people would be dying from starvation instead of courting diabetes.

Instead of actually engaging legitimate questions about the sustainability and health of the current industrial system, the new tactic is akin to picketing the local food co-op with signs that read: "CSA Subscribers Are Hurting Poor People."

The big picture here is that it's time for Congress to write the next Farm Bill and many people are concerned with the way that local and sustainable food activists are going to shape the debate. Kenny acknowledges that the current Farm Bill only designates 0.00025 percent of its funds for farmers' markets, but he is obviously concerned that they will have a greater influence on the next version. 

These latest criticisms are an evolution of the core argument in defense of industrial food over the last fifty years: There are billions of people in the world, and we can't feed them without intensive industrial agriculture. So the industrialists have for years promoted themselves as heroes of the poor, and given that logic, it's not surprising that those who oppose or question them are being characterized as enemies of the poor. 

The truth of food, agriculture, and world poverty is more complicated than any of us probably want to admit. The champions of organic and sustainable agriculture are loathe to acknowledge that Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution have actually been instrumental in saving lives and feeding millions of hungry and vulnerable people around the world. And the industrial food complex is hesitant to acknowledge that its subsidies and intensive farming methods have destroyed land and markets, and as a result have trapped millions of people in poverty and made them dependent on handouts. For example, it may look like we are the models of compassion for shipping food aid to places like Haiti, but our cheap, heavily subsidized grains undercut local farmers' efforts to grow crops and sell them. 

To his credit Ozersky hints at this complicated picture:

I’m not saying that our industrial system is ideal, nor even sane, but to conflate industrial with bad is to suggest that we should all just go back to the land. Which, of course, can never happen.

OK, I'll agree to not conflate industrial with bad if you'll agree not to suggest those that aspire toward an alternative are enemies of the poor. 

Photo: Volunteers make preparations for our monthly Millwood food distribution with Second Harvest of the Inland Northwest.

The Rise of Foodie Class Warfare

I am working with another publication to publish an article with a similar theme so I'm pulling the plug on this post until that one is published. Sorry about that. Stay tuned

Fun with USDA Food Atlas: Mapping Food Deserts, Food Insecurity, Local Food Access, and More

The Food Desert mapping tool at the USDA has received a lot of attention lately, but I'm more impressed with the USDA Food Atlas that offers a whole variety of ways to map America's food landscape.

Here are some screen grabs of my favorites. (Note that the maps have keys indicating precise numbers but the gist of the color scheme is that the darker the color the higher the number or the greater the concentration.)

Fast Food Expenditures Per Capita: Dark Red = $700 to $1,043

Pounds of Beef & Poultry Consumed at Home Per/Capita/Year: (Dark blue indicates 81-120 lbs/year)

 

Gross Direct Farm Sales Per Capita 2007 (dark blue indicates more than $50/capita in 2007. Maybe more significantly the lightest color indicates less than $5 per capita)

 

Percent of High Schoolers physically active (dark red indicates 47-49%, lightest color indicates less than 38%)