Eating Our Way through the Interdependent Web

An Ethic of Food for Unitarian Universalists

 

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

November 7, 2004

Rev. Charlotte Shivvers

 

The Schweitzer Sermon for UU General Assembly, June 27, 2004

Awarded by Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (UFETA)

 

 

Call to Gather:  We gather in this place,

Reassured of its existence

Reassured of our own existence

In this tempestuous time. 

 

The week has brought a vote

A vote in the largest and oldest democracy

A vote perhaps carried by “moral values,” moral values different from ours

Moral values that do not seem to affirm the worth and dignity of each person

Moral values that cannot claim respect for the interdependent web of all existence

Moral values that do not bode well for a world community with peace, justice and liberty for all.

 

This week has brought a vote

Our minister wrote that the sun will continue to rise in the morning and set in the evening,

And indeed it has.

We can be thankful that the vote was decisive

We can be thankful the vote was clear in saying we are needed; we have work to do.

May we “gather in hope, compassion and strength”

To absorb the courage and the comfort our own moral values require.

 

Chalice Lighting: 

      Leader:  This we know.  The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.

      People:  This we know.  All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.

      Leader:  All things are connected …

      People:  We did not weave the web of life; we are merely one strand in it.

      All:  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

 

 Introduction to Meditation:  Here’s a story of another vote that may be especially welcome this morning.  The Rev. James Ford tells the story this way:  “In the muggy heat of Columbus, Ohio, at the 1984 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, a crowd of rationalists, [humanists], atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans and miscellaneous others …” were gathered to approve a new statement of Principles.  After years of amending, negotiating, and wrangling we were ready for the final vote when the holy spirit moved among us in the form of one more motion.  The Reverend Paul L’Herrou offered an amendment that gave these new words to our seventh principle: “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

 

That Seventh Principle passed without further discussion.  The Reverend David Bumbaugh has called it “the heart of a faith for the twenty-first century.”

 

Now may we rationalists, humanists, atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans and miscellaneous others share a time without words, a time for thought, meditation, reflection, or prayer.  As we breathe together the Web breathes through us.  May we share silence …

 

Peace.  Shalom.  Amen.

 

Readings: Rev. Melitta Haslund wrote from her home in an avocado orchard,

 

“Helicopters, planes and huge land sprayers douse the orchards with pesticides at least twice a year.  They sprayed last week.  As I sat at my desk, I saw plumes of pesticide dissipate into the air.  Farm laborers have long suffered serious illness as a result of frequent exposure to the pesticides.  In fact, the entire valley is affected:  local doctors report numerous complaints of headaches, nausea and sore throats.  It does not end in this valley either.  Our food, vegetables, fruits and produce are covered with pesticides.”

 

“…. why have only 10% of the 35,000 pesticides, introduced since 1945, been tested for health effects?  I believe part of the problem has to do with our collective denial that these are deadly to our interdependent web of existence.”

 

“We can demand organically grown produce.  We have already seen changes on the shelves at the markets.  Recycled paper products, biodegradable detergents, are slowly becoming the norm.  These changes reflect our growing consciousness of our interconnections.”[1]

 

Second Reading:  A revision of words from Pastor Martin Niemoller:

                       

First they milled the flour, threw away the germ … and added a few vitamin extracts.

And I didn’t speak up because I eat whole grains….

 

Then they laced the beef with hormones and antibiotics.

And I didn’t speak up, because I don’t eat beef.

 

Then they fed chickens artificial pellets and kept them from sunlight.

And I didn’t speak up, because I don’t eat chickens or eggs. …

 

Then they marketed fish contaminated with mercury, dioxin, and PCBs.

And I didn’t speak up, because I don’t eat fish.

 

Then they grew the vegetables with commercial fertilizer and sprayed them with pesticides.

And I didn’t speak up, because I eat only organic vegetables.

 

Then they spliced the genes of the vegetables with toxic viruses, and the pollen from the vegetables blew into the organic gardens and contaminated the organic vegetables.

 

And I spoke up because there was nothing left for me to eat.[2]

 

 

Responsive Reading

(Response words are from the Ute Indians - Hymnbook #551)

 

 It requires the equivalent of 3 or 4 tons of TNT per acre for modern American farming.[3]

Earth teach me stillness as the grasses are stilled with night.

 

One pound of steak from steers raised in a feedlot costs five pounds of grain, 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.[4]

Earth teach me caring as parents who secure their young.

 

The place we call home, the Midwest, the Breadbasket, … the Heartland is an ecological sacrifice area.[5]

Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring.

 

The  seventh principle calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous world of our everyday experience.[6]

Earth teach me to remember kindness as dry fields weep with rain.

 

Our goal should be sustainability – a balance between the human impact on the natural world and the world’s ability to support life indefinitely.[7]

Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone.

 

Consumer demand for food from sustainable farms must be built, and the best place to start is with people who are concerned about the environment, but haven’t made the connection between their grocery list and the endangered species list yet.[8]

 

ALL:  Earth teach us courage.

 

[For information and encouragement as you try to link your grocery list to the Seventh Principle: 

www.eatwild.org,                                                                  www.saynotogmos.org

www.cropchoice.org,                                                                         www.kansascityfoodcircle.org

www.cfra.org Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, NE                   www.practicalfarmers.org,

www.landinstitute.org Wes Jackson, Salina, KS                   www.organicconsumers.org

www.worldwatch.org                                                                      www.uuaspp.org

www.uua.org/ufeta

www.sierraclub.org/environment (go to factory farming and look at their “Meatrix!”)]

 

                                                                 

Eating Our Way through the Interdependent Web

An Ethic of Food for Unitarian Universalists

Rev. Charlotte Shivvers

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines – November 7, 2004

 

I thank Mark, our minister, and the Religious Services Committee here for inviting me to speak, to share with you the sermon which did win the Schweitzer Award for this year’s General Assembly.  It’s a pretty heavy sermon – especially for this week.  But you are brave, strong people. 

 

Let me begin with the long story of how this sermon started.  I’m part of a ministers’ study group and this was the year it was my turn to produce an essay – a studied research into some aspect of our religion.  I had wondered and worried all last year about a theme. 

 

Then early last December I had an epiphany.  It came after meeting with the man who is farming some of our land organically. 

 

Now even though organic products are being “in” in our grocery stores, organic is still a radical word down near Knoxville where Bob, my husband, live in the 1890’s farm home where I grew up.  There, my parents gave my sisters and me a religion of the land that echoes Chief Seattle:  “We do not own the land; we are here to take care of it.”

 

I can remember early summer mornings on that farm when Daddy might come to the side door and call out to any of us lucky enough to be awake, “Come, see the flax!”  We would pile into the pickup and drive to whichever field was covered with the wet, blue blooms of flax.   Watching this farm through the past 50 years has not been all joyful.  Flaxseed, oats, wheat, barley, sorghum, corn, brome, alfalfa, clover, sheep, hogs, cattle, horses, chickens – the rich diversity is gone.  For all our loving management, our farm is like most of the Corn Belt, a monoculture of corn and soybeans with occasional hay.   We spend far more money on fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide than on seed.  We operate in the black only because of the subsidies you all are paying.

 

Last year we were finally able to reach toward a better way and found a brave, creative farmer who was eager to attempt the rigors of “certified organic” on 160 acres of our land. 

 

Because I’m the managing partner for my sisters right now, I had the December meeting last year with our farmer and his son, an ag major at Iowa State University.    The year had gone well and we were in a celebration mode as we ate Bob’s cookies and reviewed the year.  As they were leaving, the son pulled forth two books saying, “My mother thought you would enjoy these.”

 

Enjoy wasn’t the right word.  Epiphany is better.  One book was the size you display on a coffee table – with a picture of a monotonous row crop being sprayed with chemicals – named Fatal Harvest:  The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture.  The other was cheerier; a Brueghel painting was background to the title, The Ethics of Food. 

 

I suddenly had my essay topic:  not just the ethics of food, but something directed to that huge gap I had felt in my religion between our Unitarian Universalist reverence for an interdependent web on the one hand and our general silence about the environmental catastrophe which produces our food, on the other. 

 

Eight brave colleagues listened through my essay and urged me on.  Later I wrote the first version of this sermon and presented it as a guest minister at All Souls UU in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

Where is our ethic of food in our reverence for the interdependent web?  How is food sacred in this religion?  We know that all our food comes from earth, and whether we read from Genesis or the Bhagavad-Gita, we know that earth is sacred.  What happens to the Web between the earth and our table?  

 

Let’s begin with the animals; like me you probably want to forget their story when you’re looking at a menu or the meat counter.  But I remember our family’s pet pig Lilly Belle and how she used to love to have her tummy scratched, how she slept under the snowball bush, curled up with our dog Doc.  Now, most pork pigs like her seldom see the light of day but live crowded into pens called Confinement Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO).  In the CAFO your eyes burn with the stench of the waste products from thousands of animals.  It’s almost as bad for the neighbors as it is for the hogs.  The lobbying efforts of industrial agriculture are so powerful that the hogs, the workers, our neighborhoods, our land, our water supply, our fish, our earth are all at risk from toxic air and toxic runoff that can escape these hog factories.

 

The chicken’s fate today is similar.  Same with turkey – they have been so carefully bred for the white meat the consumer demands that some 270 million turkeys produced in these factories last year were all appropriately named “Broad Breasted White.”  These ill-proportioned birds are unable to walk or have sex.  But artificial insemination, hormones, antibiotics, and other drugs take care of everything – except perhaps the weeping of the Web.  

 

The beef story is a little happier, but deceptive.  You can still see herds of cattle grazing placidly in Iowa meadows – as if well-placed propaganda to tell us all is well.  But all is not well, as the calves mature they go to factory feed lots. There, hormone implants, antibiotics, and other drugs short-circuit cows’ wondrous natural digestive system, and we get fast fattening for fast food and fatter people.    

 

If we knew the full story of the meat and seafood most commonly sold to us – the damage to them and the damage to earth – we would probably all be vegetarian for at least a day.  Factory farming demands that we confront our moral selves in a new way when we eat meat. 

 

Lily Belle was my good friend, but my best animal friend was my pet sheep, Patty.  It was Patty that I once promised to invent a meat substitute when I grew up.  I broke my promise to her, and I would have to tell her as I tell you that I’m all right with animals being raised for meat and killed for meat – humanely.  But each time I re-visit the way in which they are now raised for meat I draw closer to becoming a total vegetarian.  It is unconscionable that an animal be trapped in a confined life of torture to provide humans with haute cuisine.

 

The animal story may be the most viscerally painful but the land story is a more serious threat:  what we do to animals – except for species loss – could be healed in a generation or two.  What our food production has done to the land will take eons to repair.

 

We spend 26 billion a year for farm support programs, encouraging commodity producers to buy fossil fertilizers which increase our dependence on oil. The subsidies go largely for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton and have created monocultures of these crops, thereby destroying plant diversity as well as the soil.  But the subsidies do more.  Our Iowa Senator, just re-elected, Chuck Grassley, the Republican Head of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to me last May, “Under current law, farm payments are effectively unlimited for anyone with a good lawyer, allowing the nations’s largest farms to drive their neighbors out of business by bidding land away from them.”[9] 

 

The most subsidy dollars do not go into the conservation programs to support those who care for the land; the most dollars go as bonus to those who farm – or rape – the most land.  The subsidies undercut the agricultural economies of developing countries because they allow the United States to sell grains for less than the cost of production.  And this “cost of production” does not include any recompense for the topsoil loss, lack of a living wage for workers, loss of species, toxic chemical damage, death for millions of fish, nor the human damage in our body’s response to the chemicals.  There is also no recompense for the cruel way we raise the animals we eat – nor for what that does to us.

 

The horror of it has me ready to fantasize with the New Yorker cartoon which pictured a chicken laid back in pleasure, sunning herself on a tropical beach.  The caption read, “Yes, I heard I was free-range and I just took off.” 

 

But we can’t take off.  This is the only earth we’ve got, and this industrial agriculture has stormed over it within the last sixty years.  How can we intervene?  How can we respect the interdependent web of all existence when this is the story of our food production?   Yet that is what we have called ourselves to do: “The seventh principle calls us to reverence before the world … of our everyday experience.” 

 

This radical theological position is so demanding that we may want simply to bury ourselves in the earth so our bodies can enrich the soil and we do no more harm by eating.  But that is neither a positive nor a long-term solution. 

 

What to do?  I find the most encouragement in a recent book co-edited by Unitarian Universalists Laura Jackson and Dana L. Jackson, The Farm As Natural Habitat:  Reconnecting Food Systems with Ecosystems.  Laura is faculty at University of Northern Iowa and a member of our Cedar Falls Church.  Dana, her mother, is a UU in Minnesota.  Laura’s father is a land hero to many of us, Wes Jackson, founder of Kansas’ Land Institute.  There’s hope for me here because –

 

• First of all they have named at least one elephant in the living room: agricultural land in this country has been sacrificed as an ecological disaster area. 

 

• Second, they are encouraging because they begin with that small, devoted group of farmers who are making it work economically and ecologically. 

 

• Third, The Farm as Natural Habitat shows that we, all varieties of environmentalists, can restore beauty and health to our farm ecosystems.  It is a choice for the Web.      

 

At Starr King divinity school where I studied many years ago, there was a small kitchen, popular for snacks and conversation.  It had a way of filling with dirty dishes – until one bold artist posted a sign over the kitchen sink:  You are responsible for your own theology – and your own dishes.  Well, folks it turns out we’re responsible not only for our own theology and our own dishes, but our own food choices.  Our food choices are like a vote between that chemical monoculture on the cover of Fatal Harvest and the field of blooming flax that is my symbol for farmland ecology.

 

Here, we place votes through food choices; it’s a constituency that moves beyond party lines; grocery stores and restaurants become our polling places.  We could begin by moving toward a vegetarian or vegan diet.  That would help the Web immensely.  “If Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by only 10 percent for one year, it would free 12 million tons of grain for human consumption – or enough to feed 60 million people.” [10] Patty and Lilly Bell would appreciate that, too.

 

Eating less meat – or insisting on “free-range” meat – not only respects animals as part of the Web, but weakens the market for the livestock who drive the grain machine that so damages our land.  The Reverend Ken Jones of our Tacoma church says he chooses an organic, vegan diet as a spiritual practice and sustainability as lifestyle.   As to challenges, he said “It’s an odd thing, because I don’t know how to handle the pot lucks yet.”!!

 

If only pot lucks were our worst challenges!  Our radical theology is even more demanding in the grocery store or restaurant.  But we have immense power as consumers.  One cattle man said, “I’d love to give up hormones … If the consumer said, We don’t want hormones, we’d stop in a second.  The cattle could get along better without them.  But the market signal’s not there …”[11]

  

As the consumers who drive the market, we lovers of the Web need to move on toward buying “certified organic.” Though far from perfect, organic standards allow us to protect ourselves, farm workers, and earth – by avoiding pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, genetically altered crops.

 

I personally promote organic especially as an attempt to boycott what I find the most threatening of all:  genetically altered, genetically engineered, genetically modified, or biotech food.  It’s all the same.  I’ll call it GMO for genetically modified organisms.  It’s a way of creating new plant varieties by splicing genes from one organism into a different one, to give this “genetically engineered” plant a new characteristic – longer shelf life, resistance to a particular herbicide, or more color, for instance.

 

GMO represents a major scientific achievement, as was splitting the atom.  But both achievements have been treated very carelessly.  GMO products have been handled as if people didn’t know that pollen blows over fences and grain warehouses make mistakes.  All this permanently contaminates other crops, other seeds.  Our whole fragile ecological web is at risk.

 

I am angriest at GMO for its claim that we need it to feed the world.  That is not true[12], but a myth generated out of greed.  The New York Times summarized well in a heading, “Will the latest genetically modified food save the world?  Or just the biotech industry?”[13] When we buy organic we are refusing support to GMO producers.  I find it hopeful that Mendocino County, California, recently voted to outlaw GMO production.

 

We can vote for earth by eating less meat and by choosing organic; we can eat like the “Eat Your Values” lunch that the Green Congregation group at one of our churches offers.  We can vote with the direction of our morning’s Forum on fair trade coffee.  But, best of all, we can buy local.

 

My turkey expert wrote, “The key word … is ‘traceability.’  If the person behind the counter where you buy your turkey can name the farm or farmer who raised it, you are taking a step in the right direction.  You’ll help give turkeys a better life.  You’ll be kinder to the environment.  And you might even wind up with a turkey that tastes, well, like a turkey.”[14]

 

 On local food, the great news is that you live in an ideal place for it – and come to an ideal church:  talk for instance with our members Teva Dawson, Terry Lilly, or Angela Tedesco about local gardens, farmers markets, or that ultimate in local food, community supported agriculture (CSA) – that system in which you buy into a local produce farm and receive your fresh foods every week.  Practical Farmers of Iowa with Drake University sponsors a Buy Fresh – Buy Local program to help you connect to local food, organic food, free range food.  Angela Tedesco is featured in the most recent catalog of Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) a family farm alternative marketing project.  Sure, local food is a challenge year round but most of us can buy a whole more local food than we do now.  Remember, it’s a way to select food with a clear conscience – and drool over the fresh, healthy taste. 

 

Our vote as consumers is strong as we choose more vegetarian, more organic, and more local.  But there is one thing more:  We are political animals, too, and we need to find strength in our own numbers.  We need to speak up before “there is nothing left for me to eat.” We can add our voice to the growing chorus demanding reverence for our food system.  You can use that www web or the telephone to find many different groups; look at the web sites in this order of service.  A single e-mail or phone call to your legislator could be a strong vote for the Web.

 

We can speak up to witness that these “farm bills” affect the heart of our Web.  Over half of United States land is farmed or ranched, and the care of that land will improve dramatically as legislators learn that urban people know and care.  We must complain as effectively about tax-supported, petroleum-based, row-crop monocultures as we have about the Alaska Wilderness being drilled for oil, as much about food animals being fed in confinement torture chambers as we have about the dolphin being caught in tuna nets.

 

When I met with our organic farmer this spring, I gave him a copy of this sermon – which he had helped inspire.  I was proud to explain to him that in Unitarian Universalism we don’t care so much what people believe, as what they do.  Well folks, this is our chance to do.

 

No choice is perfect, but our food choices need to be a vote for earth, a spiritual practice that connects us to the Web each time we eat.  All food is sacrament if we raise it and transport it and serve it in a way that sustains this earth.  “The seventh principle calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous world of our everyday experience.”

 

 

Closing Words: May we go forth in hope, compassion, and strength to vote with our food choices, to vote with our lives, for the moral values which have drawn us together.