Food & Justice

Justice. Economic Justice. Social Justice. Food Justice. Sustainability. "Justice by health."

I've been thinking about the way life has happened, how without knowing it I've been led (as Wendell Berry said)-- and the journey continues. There is so much to learn, and whole systems of lifestyle and thought that have been wrong and need to change, and those processes will take time. Time is something I'm not good at appreciating, slow, steady, consistent change lacks the luster and appeal of dramatic radical revolution.

I feel like my life is that game where you draw all the dots on the page, then start drawing in lines one at a time, till eventually you're connecting boxes. At the end you fill your initial into the box and it's completed. It's wonderful when those lines of connection are drawn, when the shape begins to emerge. In my life however, most of the lines are still floating waiting for life and time to draw out the way they go together.

The most recent etching is local food, sustainability, and the way it plays into justice. "400 gallons of oil a year per citizen" are used in the agriculture industry, second only to the use of energy in vehicles-- and the ecological processes are often overlooked as well. We've master corn and soy (or have they mastered us?), we now produce such an excess of them that we feed it to our food, use it in meat & other products, ship it out in US AID, we dump it in foreign markets making it impossible for small-scale farmers (especially in the developing world) to compete with corporate prices. If Americans replaced one meal a day with local grown foods, oil consumption would be cut by 1.1 Million barrels of oil a week. It takes 2,460 gallons of water to produce 1 lb. of beef. If you went beef-free just one day each week you would save 34,000 gallons of water a year.

And the food we eat is hurting us. This is the first generation to be predicted to have a shorter life span than our parents. The highest amount of child diabetes and obesity, and most diseases in the US are preventable with a healthy diet/exercise. "We're overfed and under-nourished." Re-imaging how we eat. There's so many books (that I haven't read yet)-- so much to learn. But I'm excited about beginning this- and the nearby lines it connects to of justice, community, simplicity, peace, health, freedom, sustainability. And, of course... "once we move away from toxic foods we rediscover our taste buds."

"It's actually our farmers who grow our medicine." - Beth Ingram

Everything can feel like a fight, like things we don't want to do. "Gardening can be a way of resisting/divesting from the dominant destructive system. It's a constructive, positive approach toward making change." - Tom Beniveto.

The subversiveness of eating local, eating healthy... revolution by planting... it makes you have to smile.