Taking the Time to Make a Difference

Food is different. I don’t know how you were raised, but in my family, food was always different than money or toys or whatever else people valued. No one ever said it quite this way, but I believe that my parents were telling us that food was sacred. I remember a childhood Christmas present, a wind-up toy that included two small cars on a roller coaster track. After it was wound up, there wasn’t anything to do with it but to watch it work. So I took it apart. And then it didn’t work. A Christmas toy could be disabled and abandoned. Whatever my parents thought about what I had done with that thing, they never scolded or complained to me. A toy, even one selected especially for me, was nothing compared to the food we shared at the table. Food is different. Food could never be wasted. Food is vital, essential, holy, sacred.

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Our family values came back into my thoughts as I enjoyed a recent celebration at Seton Harvest, a community supported agriculture project sponsored by the Daughters of Charity in Evansville. People in more than a hundred homes in our community support this project. We pay a share of the expenses up front, and receive a share of what can be grown. Each week there are fresh vegetables, radishes and lettuce in the spring, root crops in the fall, and dozens of other things to eat in between. While researchers tell us that food at the supermarket travels an average of 1,500 miles before it is eaten, our small acreage at Seton Harvest is just a few miles away. And truth to tell, it reminds me of home, and of the values from a time when food was not just another commodity. And it reminds me of the central truth of our faith tradition, that the work of human hands and the fruit of the vine, shared at the family table, have forever become the body and blood of our Lord and Savior.

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According to a coalition of religious, social justice, rural and environmental groups, more than three billion people around the world subsist on less than two dollars a day; half of what they have goes to pay for food; but food costs have doubled and tripled in recent times – because of speculators in commodities futures. I used to wonder how dealers in arms and munitions could sleep at night, knowing that their products they sold for money brought sudden death to someone’s brothers and sisters. I do not know how a commodities trader can sleep at night, or even eat breakfast, knowing that the pennies earned per pound of food will bring about the slow death of starvation to another child.

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Recent studies by a Cornell University researcher, David Pimentel, were reported by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. Among other statistics, Pimental pointed out that 19 percent of the total fossil fuel used in this country goes into the food system – about the same as we use to fuel cars. We use 45 million tons of plant protein to produce 7.5 million tons of animal protein. A head of iceberg lettuce provides 110 calories, while irrigating the California field takes 750 calories of fossil energy for it, and 4,000 more calories of energy to ship it across the country.

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Do you want to make a difference? Help provide short-term relief to those in need. Work to change U.S. agricultural policies. Increase support for alternate sources of fuel that are not food based. Promote access to food and sustainable agricultural practices. Eat more locally grown food. Contact Catholic Relief Services , www.crs.org/globalpoverty, or the Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, www.usccb.org/globalpoverty, or the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, www.ncrlc.com.

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