Our Full Plate

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

June 14 , 2009

SERMON

In March Debbie and I flew to Wisconsin to visit our granddaughter, Eliza, at around the time of her first birthday. As at each time we see her, we marveled at how she had changed and grown. She was crawling around like a house afire and even at times pulling up to standing. But one of the most remarkable changes we noticed was at mealtimes. When we’d seen Eliza at Christmas, her parents were trying to coax her to eat solid food – a little rice cereal, or some mashed prunes – but she had little interest. This time that was no problem.

As we each took our turns before the high chair spooning in all varieties of pureed fruits and vegetables and even some meat, this once-reluctant eater tucked into that food with a will – eyes locked in on the approaching spoon, her mouth opening wide like a baby bird popping up from the nest, and then clamping down tight with a smile of satisfaction.

We couldn’t help smiling in response. For we recognized that smile, that signal of visceral pleasure that comes with being fed, with taking into one’s body that which will feed our hunger. Oh, hunger: no one needs to explain the sensation to us. It is elemental, part of what it means to be alive. Indeed, one of the key signs of illness and often of approaching death is when hunger abates. Across cultures it is considered the most fundamental of a host’s duties to offer to slake a guest’s thirst or satisfy his or her hunger.

In Eliza’s case, Debbie and I were given a window into that moment, which we experienced with our children decades ago, when our granddaughter discovered that her hunger could be satisfied from another source than her mother’s breast, one of the most important and bittersweet moments of separation that growing up requires. Though she will continue to nurse for some time yet, she is now beginning to make the choices and develop the tastes and habits that will shape a lifetime of eating.

What she chooses will be shaped in important ways: most directly by what her parents put on her plate, but also what she is served at friends’ houses, at school or church potlucks, and by the culture of the town she lives in. Will it be cheese curds and bratwurst in Wisconsin, or, say, grits and greens down South?

But as she grows up, she’ll discover how many things impinge on the choices she’ll make and that the decisions before her are not always easy.  Sweet, sugary things may be yummy, but they’ll devastate her teeth. Deep-fried food satisfies the taste buds, but the fat can clog her arteries. And how will she come to terms with the slaughter of animals to feed us. Will she be omnivore? Vegetarian? Vegan?

And this is just the beginning. More than half a century ago the so-called Green Revolution transformed America’s eating habits. New fertilizers, pesticides and intensive farming practices resulted in an explosion of basic agricultural commodities – corn, wheat, soybeans, and so on. Food was suddenly cheaper than it had ever been before.

Industries arose to make creative use of these commodities in everything from breakfast cereals to cookies and cakes and soda pop. Cheap grain was fed to livestock that were brought in from pastures and fenced into feedlots, again, a huge increase in efficiency. While people in Third World nations still struggled and starved, America was awash in an abundant food supply. Americans came to expect an endless ratcheting up in agricultural productivity resulting in a food supply that was cheap and abundant. As a result, our diet both expanded and shrank. It expanded in volume – in the number of calories we take in, the average size of portions, the number of meals and snacks we eat – but it shrank in variety – fewer greens, fewer varieties of agricultural crops, less nutrition overall.

Until fairly recently the explosion of agriculture in the US was viewed as a complete success. What has caused a reassessment of that conclusion is a growing laundry list of unforeseen consequences of the “green revolution.”

Those pesticides and fertilizers that boosted crop production have infiltrated ground water and rivers, poisoning birds, fish and beneficial insects and tainting water supplies across the country. Intensive farming has degraded the soil and reduced biological diversity – everything from soil biota to songbirds to amphibians.

Corn fed to cattle has sickened them, since their digestive systems weren’t adapted for it, so they were pumped with hormones and antibiotics to keep them well with good appetites. The hormones and antibiotics have now appeared in our diets, where they don’t appear to be doing us any good. Meanwhile, the feedlots and industrial-size pig and poultry farms with their lakes of waste have become massive sources of pollution.

Some of the problems associated with livestock are now appearing in fish farms, where fish, too, are fed grain and kept in confined pens. Their wild cousins, though, are doing no better. Industrial seines have swept the oceans so thoroughly that most commercially caught fish species are endangered.

At the same time, Americans have paid for a diet centered on refined grains with declining health, including increased obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and a variety of metabolic diseases and syndromes. An increased incidence of heart disease, a leading cause of death, is linked directly to diet. And, what’s more, all this excessive eating doesn’t guarantee sufficient nutritional intake. The author Michael Pollan wrote that in Oakland, California, doctors reported seeing overweight children suffering from vitamin-deficiency diseases, such as rickets.

We live at a time when our food choices have direct consequences for our own health as well as the health of others and even of the planet, a time when our diet is more than a private decision, when each choice links us to technologies and processes and practices that help shape what our future will look like.

That said, how might we, as individuals and as a covenanted community dedicated to nurturing each precious one of us in harmony with this green earth in the search for truth and meaning, working to advance freedom, justice and love, be agents of change, of health, wholeness and healing? Where do we begin?

While it’s true that our decisions shape larger processes, our individual power is small, and the system of food production in this country is vast and so deeply interlinked that it is hard to sort out where our actions might have any impact. The media are full of health claims that we don’t know how to evaluate. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands.

It is in part to counteract that feeling of hopelessness that members of our church have joined together to study and to begin figuring out how to live a better way. You’ll hear more about what they have been doing later in the service, but their initiative follows from a Study/Action issue on Ethical Eating that was endorsed last year by our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. The point, the organizers say, is not to propose a dietary code or insist that people adopt a certain set of rituals surrounding mealtime, but to explore ways that we can link our ethical values to how we decide what to put on our plates.

Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food argues for what he calls “an eater’s manifesto” to address the confusion and helplessness that many people feel around the idea of “ethical eating.” Its principles, Pollan says, are simple but profound: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

OK . . . eat food. What else would I eat? Well, actually much of what we find on supermarket shelves today bears little resemblance to anything that was ever previously understood as food. They are super-processed, food-like substances that often pack a high-calorie punch, yet contain few meaningful nutrients. They’ll give you a good jolt of sugar, fat, or salt, but not much else. These are the “inert, anonymous substances” that Wendell Berry complained about. Pollan’s rough guideline is that we shop the edges of the supermarket, where you’ll find vegetables, meat and milk, and spend as little time as possible with the highly processed food in the center.

Even better, he says, spend less time in the supermarket and more in farmer’s markets. In farmer’s markets you have the benefit of getting food that’s not only fresher but also hasn’t been carted across the country, if not the world. When you pick up a farmer’s head of lettuce, instead of grabbing a cellophane box of lettuce leaves in the store you have a much stronger sense of eating as an agricultural act.

Perhaps the hardest of Pollan’s principles to apply is the second one. Our culture sometimes seems doomed to overdose on food. As Americans we grow up with the expectation of always sitting down to a full plate, loaded with food and finishing every morsel. Food is our comfort, our consolation. And yet, when we sit down to eat we clear off our plates as quickly as we can, so quickly we hardly taste our food, so quickly that our digestive system doesn’t have time to register “Enough!” and so we keep on loading it on.

This approach to food has important consequences for our health. But it is more than a health issue; it’s a spiritual issue, too. Our frenetic consumption of high-calorie food shuts us down, disconnects us from our own bodies, from each other and the world around us. Some of you, I expect, have experienced an exercise described by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in which you are invited to eat a tangerine meditatively: beginning by touching, smelling, examining the rind and then slowly peeling it and spending time tasting each section.

The exercise is intended to engender a sense of mindfulness, of being in the present moment. But it could also serve as a way of reintroducing us to food. How would it be if we ate every meal so carefully, if we took time to appreciate all that had been put on our plate, relishing the taste and eating slowly and deliberately? With all that attention we might give more thought to the preparation of our food and be less inclined to pile on super-refined food substitutes. And, of course, giving more attention to our food would require that we give the preparation and eating of it more time, so that mealtime was not a pit stop and food was not something you tossed into the microwave before plopping down in front of the TV.

There is a reason why some of the oldest rituals of humankind surround the sharing of food. It is, as I said earlier, an elemental act. That which we consume becomes a part of us. Food connects us directly to the Web of life.

Part of what makes Anne Scott’s story of the Buddhist cook so affecting is that the chef’s reverent presentation is so at odds with most of our meals. It is a reminder of the sensual pleasure that eating can be for those who take time to appreciate it, and even more than that, a spiritually enriching occasion. As Anne Scott says, in our meals we learn how to nourish others and be nourished by them. Cooking for another can be an act of great love and appreciation. Sitting down to a table with others builds human bonds and helps teach one of the many ways, both tangible and not, that we can truly feed each other.

Anne Scott’s meal, of course, was vegetarian, and that leads to Michael Pollan’s third bit of advice about eating: mostly plants. There are many practical reasons to make plants a major part of our diets. As Pollan notes, plants, with the exception of seeds, are less energy-dense than other things and so in eating them we consume fewer calories. And people who eat diets high in fruits and vegetables have lower rates of the big killers – heart disease and cancer.

So, what does this say about meat? We come here to a divide between those who resolutely insist that the killing of any animal for our consumption is an unethical act and those who insist that killing other beings for our consumption is simply part of what goes on in the world and that there are respectful ways of raising and dispatching the creatures we consume.

I am not going to argue today for either position, except to confess in the spirit of full disclosure that my own diet, while largely centered in plants, does fairly regularly include meat. Just as we in this church embrace a broad range of theological positions I believe it is also possible for us to embrace a broad range of arguably ethical eating practices. I should add, though, that for the sake of our health there is a strong argument for cutting way back on the amount of meat that we eat. It is better to regard meat as a side dish, even a condiment, than as the center of our meals.

And, if we’re concerned about ethical eating, it is incumbent on us meat eaters to educate ourselves about the practices under which the animals we consume are raised and slaughtered, and support with our purchases those practices that give those animals the greatest respect.

In addition, it should be said, this applies to fruits and vegetables as well. The health of our planet depends on our reducing the use of chemicals in the production of food that persist in the environment and disturb many key links in the Web of life.

It will be July before Debbie and I see our granddaughter again. We hear she is very close to walking independently, and we’ll find out what kind of an eater she is. We trust our daughter and son-in-law to lead her in making good, ethical decisions about what she ingests. But we also know that the options before us don’t always offer us the choices we wish we had. There are compromises and accommodations we must make.

I am hoping, though, that the efforts that we and many others make to raise people’s consciousnesses and to change our eating and food production practices will result in the end in much healthier, more nutritious food options than we enjoy today. And even more, I hope that we are each able to bring the way that we sustain ourselves more closely into alignment with our larger values, that we end the disconnect that mealtime has become, that we come to regard it not as an opportunity to load up until our stomachs are full to bursting, but as a welcome, even sacred moment to nourish and be nourished, to bring into our bodies with appreciation and respect that which truly feeds us. May it be so.