My father became aware of being a diabetic when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He was on his way to boot camp when the MP’s stopped the bus and took him back to the testing facility to check again. Obviously, he never went overseas. He met and married my mother instead.
At that point in medical history there was no simple way for diabetics to test their own sugar levels. So a regulated diet was your best bet of maintaining a good balance and living a longer life. My mother kept our family menu reduced to its essential parts to help my father keep better track of what he was eating.
A typical meal would be:
Broiled chicken (legs and thighs)
Steamed Broccoli
Baked Potato
Homemade Canned Fruit with Extra Light Syrup
Seasoning: Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder
Dessert would come on festive occasions, or occasionally a pack of cookies or a quart of ice cream would be purchased which I regret to say my family could down in one or two sittings.
Looking back I can see some ways in which this has formed my eating habits as an adult.
I enjoy eating a wide variety of healthy foods. My parents believed in at least trying everything once so as an adult I have very few things I won’t eat. Vegetables and fruit were a daily part of my diet. My family always bought apples by the box. Old-fashioned peanut butter was a staple. (In high school my mother was literally buying it by the gallon to feed all the extra kids hanging around.)
I rarely skip a meal. I don’t remember ever skipping meals as a kid. Being late for a meal would cause my father’s blood sugars to drop and he would look and act as if drunk. My shy mother, in these instances, would be amazing. She’d bypass people waiting in line for food, order an orange juice, and somehow get it down my father’s throat.
I accept almost any sweet offered to me. Since sweets were infrequent I took them where I could get them. This realization has only come to me in the writing of this document. We all have our relationship to sweets, but mine I think is based a feasting and fasting mentality.
I’ve been looking into my past relationship with food because I want to look forward. I want a balanced spiritual view of what food is and how it should function in my life. I also want to look outward, examining how food affects my relationship with others and how it can become a missional part of my life.
We just received an inaugural copy of the new magazine GENERATE this past week. I must comment that it’s a great looking publication. The design is outstanding! The cover art for this edition will definitely draw your attention. It’s a photo of the inside of a fridge with just a jar of wasabi mayonnaise, a black plastic bag and nothing else. The photo comes from a collection by Mark Menjivar entitled YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.
“Menjivar began a slow process of travelling around the country and painstakinglymaking large-format color photographs of the insides of people’s kitchen refrigerators. He said, “I see these as portraits of people and families and have approached the project in that way.”" GENERATE, pg.15
Each photo is labeled with the person’s occupation, their location, how large their household is, and an interesting piece of information. What really got me excited was how Menjivar is using this installation to inspire communities around the country and inspire grassroots movements. He will be traveling to several cities including Seattle, where he will be hosted by Cairo gallery and hopes to partner with local grassroots hunger organizations.
March 9 last Spring our third child was born, a beautiful healthy boy. For the past eight months we’ve been in what I like to call “hamster-wheel-mode”, going from one thing to the next, never quite getting it all done, crashing completely spent in front of the TV, going to bed, then waking up too early to start it all over again. My husband, Eliacin, and I haven’t been too happy with this rhythm but we’ve been too tired to think of anything new.
For my birthday this past week Eliacin gave me a wonderful gift, the gift of time-off! We took a couple of days and went to a cabin up at Cama Beach State Park. The cabin had two full beds, a microwave, a fridge and a sink, (and heat) with a bath house a short walk from our cabin. (And for anyone living on a limited income these are really inexpensive off-season!) No stove. No TV. We took all our meals premade and just reheated. We went on 2-3 long walks a day, and played games with the kids at night. We watch a heron come every evening to fish right in front of our cabin. We stared at the water and the rain and trully started relaxing more than we’d been able to for a long time. Then we started talking.
What we realized pretty quickly was that once again we were off-track, saying and doing completely different things. Believing in a life-style of self-education, but spending most of our evenings in front of the TV. Believing it was our responsibility to give our kids a foundation for their spiritual journey, but taking little time to talk with them about it. So we came up with a few simple guidelines for ourselves that we are challenging ourselves to follow.
Have a morning and evening prayer time with our kids where we read scripture, talk through bible stories and just engage their thoughts and questions.
Turn off the TV Monday-Thursday and either read, listen to books or radio, or just go to sleep early if we need it.
Take a family walk everyday around the neighborhood.
Simple actions that we hope will help us move forward. It is so much easier for me to give up, to stop moving forward. But everytime that becomes my rhythm, my life looses its joy, its passion. I don’t want to live without passsion. Sometimes I think of my life as a spiral. It’s either one that starts with me and moves outward sharing and giving or it takes everything that surrounds me and draws it in to myself focusing more and more on my own family and interests. Right now I need to change the direction of my spiral and regain the passion and hope I think is so essential to living an abundant life.
A couple of weeks ago the Mustard Seed House and Mustard Seed Associates hosted a workshop/conversation called “Justice at the Table” about how to bring about changes in our personal food culture. This is a topic I have been interested in for years and it was exciting to be able to share so much with others and learn from them in turn. One of the goals I have for the resources I’ve already put together would be to make it available to others in an easily accessible format. I believe however, that projects done in community are much richer, so I have a request.
Do you have any reflections about things you’ve learned from your own personal food culture or experiences?
Do you have any good pictures of food, gardens, farmer’s markets, baking etc…. ?
Have you written any prayers or litanies on the topic of food justice?
Would you be willing to share these things things in a resource that would be available to others?
I’d love to hear back if you do. This will be an on-going project for me for a while.
I caught this through Green America and thought it worth sharing. Preserve, an innovative company that recycles yogurt containers into everything from razors and toothbrushes to picnic plates, has expaned it’s recycling to include other #5 plastics. Where I live in Seattle, these things are picked up curbside, but many other areas around the region however don’t have that capacity. So if you’re interested in recycling more take a look:
I was listening to NPR this week and heard of a program called “Lettuce Links” in the Seattle area that collects seeds and gives them to local low-income families so I looked it up. In their own words, here’s some of the things Lettuce Links does:
We encourage people to grow food for their families. To promote self-sufficiency, we distribute seeds, plant starts and gardening information to low-income gardeners all over the city.
We educate children about nutrition and sustainable food production. Also at Marra farm, we facilitate experiential learning programs so elementary students learn about healthy food and how to grow it.
We coordinate with over 30 P-Patch community gardens.We link P-Patch gardeners with food banks and meals programs. In 2006, over 30,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce was grown and given to over two dozen providers, feeding hundreds of people. To download various P-Patch signs to use in your garden, see “More Information” below.
We harvest fruit from neighborhood backyards. Lettuce Link’s Community Fruit Tree Harvest project engages volunteers to pick fruit from neighborhood trees and deliver hundreds of pounds of locally grown, unsprayed fruit to meals programs and food banks.
We garden and donate our organic produce to food banks. At Marra Farm, we cultivate 1/2-acre of historic, urban farmland and donate harvests to a food bank in South Seattle. Read more about our Giving Garden at Marra Farm.
I wrote a post a ways back called “Processing Apples and Neighborhood Stewardship” in which I talked about all the fruit in my neighborhood going to waste. It’s wonderful to see that there is an established organization that is dealing with this issue already. I’m looking around for other organizations like this one. Do you know of any? I’d love to hear about what’s out there.
I found this document in some of my research I’ve been doing and found it interesting. The USDA does a monthly report on how much families in the United States spend on food by four categories: Thrifty plan, Low-Cost Plan, Moderate Plan, and Liberal Plan. Take a look and see where you fall!
Envision your local church; the altar, pew, or whatever space in which you take communion. What does that look like for you? Now imagine your dinner table, coffee table, couch, where you eat dinner most frequently transported to that space.
What thoughts come to your mind?
Would your dinner plans change in reference to your new surrounding?
What would you eat?
Would the table look different?
Who would be sitting with you?
Who would cook and clean up?
Is it still your dinner table?
A lot of thoughts have been floating in and out of my mind as I’ve been preparing for a workshop I’m facilitating for The Revolution Starts at Home series entitled “Justice at the Table“. And from the beginning I’ve sensed that I’m missing something. Something essential, foundational but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
As so often happens in my life something I recently read started to pull it all together for me. I decided to pick up the book Take This Bread by Sara Miles. This book is very open look at the life of a amazing women who was dramatically transformed by partaking of the eucharist. And it dawned on me finally what I was missing in my whole view of food issues and my faith.
I was missing communion, I was missing the body of Christ. And not just the spiritualized view of the Lord’s Table but the actual down to earth translation of what that meant. What does it mean to BE Christ’s body for people? What does it mean to say that his body is offered freely? And how should that change me?
Christians are in no way unique in their desire to eat justly. There are many groups the world over that are working extremely hard to change the systems that marginalize others. But I feel we have an added mandate and it is directly related to Christ’s body. He not only called himself the Bread of Life but he shared bread with others many times in his ministry. He didn’t just talk, but literally became what he preached.
I’m at a crossroads right now. I feel that I can’t just buy fair traded coffee and locally grown produce and say that’s the epitome of food and justice for christian life. I need a way in which to become the bread, to become the body and I need to do it in a way that puts me in communion, in the truest sense of that word, with the rest of the body as well. I’m not sure where this will lead but I think I’m finally at a place where I’m ready to find out.
Come to our second “The Revolution Starts at Home” event, Justice at the Table! We will explore together the intricate connections between our faith and the food we eat. We will challenge ourselves and each other to bring our eating and buying practices more in line with our beliefs and draft a “Justice at the Table Plan” to help us implement the changes we hope to make.
* Where – Mustard Seed House, 510 NE 81st Street Seattle, WA 98115 (upper floor, back entrance)
* Time – 9am – 3pm
* Food – Coffee, Tea, and a vegetarian lunch is included. Please bring any snack with you that you wish to share.
* Children – Due to our limited space and small staff, we are unable to offer childcare at this event. You are welcome however to bring children 2 and under with you if you feel they’d do well in a room of chatting adults.
* Cost – $40 individual/$35 groups of 2 or more (if cost is prohibitive please contact mail@msainfo.org for scholarship information)
Hosted by Mustard Seed Associates and The Mustard Seed House
