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ecofaith, uniting church
mid north coast NSW








FAITH. ON EARTH (2010) . Connecting faith and ecology through our heart, mind, soul and stomach

Shana's food quote collection.

Wendell Berry’s starting list on HOW to EAT RESPONSIBLY:
1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.
4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to the food that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions?
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
More from our farming food activist friend Wendell Berry:

“We can not live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness and condemn others to want.”
         
“Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines to a considerable extent how the world is used. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact this complex relationship.”

“The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.”

“I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”
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“When we understand that food is not a metaphor for spiritual nourishment but is itself spiritual, then we eat food with a spiritual attitude and taste and are nourished by the Divine directly.”

“We need to see farmers as entering the sanctuary of the soil and engaging the mysterious forces of creation in order to bless and nourish the inner and outer life of the community they serve as priests and prophets.”
--Miriam Therese MacGillis (co-founder of Genesis Farm, an Earthy Literacy Centre)

 "Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.  And he said:
      Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
      But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
           When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
      "By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
      For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
      Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven."
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
      "Your seeds shall live in my body,
      And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
      And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons." – Kahlil Gibran
 

Bless our hearts to hear in the breaking of bread the song of the universe.          -Father John Giuliani