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:

Preserve Gimme 5 Program

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.

(“Lettuce Links” is part of a larger organization  called Solid Ground-”building community to end poverty” which I’m excited to explore a bit more.)

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!

USDA Food Plans:  Cost of Food at Four Cost Levels

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.

Registration is required. Register online.
Event Details:

* Date – February 7th, 2009

* 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

I’ve been researching lots of different issues regarding food and justice and found this video on fair trade to be balanced and informative.

Have you ever noticed that the oddest things in life conspire to transform you on the deepest level? They don’t all happen at once either. They can occur over long periods in small trivial ways until one day you say, “Hey I need to pay attention and take action.” I’ve been enveloped in the church and its culture all my life. I’ve known from the earliest age that Jesus cared for all peoples and had a special place for the poor and disenfranchised in his plan. But beyond giving to missions or supporting a child in a foreign country nothing changed how I lived. Until…

One Thanksgiving, when I was in college, I went to my aunt’s house for our big family meal. She had a book on the coffee table called Material World: A Global Family Portrait and I think I spent most of the day staring at the pictures and reading the stories there. It was a book of photos from all over the world of what the middle class looked like in various countries. Describing their valuables, showing what they ate, even pictures of what the bathrooms looked like. It was fascinating! I think it showed me in a way words never could the inequities that exist, especially when I came to a picture of middle class Americans surrounded by more stuff than most of the African countries combined proudly holding up the family Bible.

When I married, my husband, knowing I was trying to come up with new ideas for cooking, gave me a cookbook entitled, More-With-Less Cookbook (World Community Cookbook)
. I’ve never read a cookbook before but I definitely sat down with that one several nights in a row. I read about how our food choices affect others and how living more simply can free us to do even more in the fight against the inequities that exist. This cookbook led me to read several different books on the issue of simple living including Richard Foster’s book, Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World
.

It hit me finally that I either needed to start making major changes in my daily life or consciously decide to ignore all I was learning. Living for Christ and his values needed to affect everything that touched who I was, from what I ate, what clothes I wore, and how my husband and I raised our daughter. There are so many things I could share here, but I’ve chosen a few simple areas that have had far reaching consequences.

I’m from Seattle and I think by blood a coffee drinker. My Puerto Rican husband has been drinking café con leche at breakfast since the age of three. So when I say we enjoy good coffee I think you can understand what I mean. I can’t remember when the issue of Fair Trade coffee caught my attention, but this quote sums up some of what I read about back then:

“We in Latin America have a task before us which is staggering to the imagination- illiteracy to be eliminated, disease to be wiped out, good health to be restored, a sound program of nutrition to be worked out for millions of people. The key to all of this…is an equitable price for coffee. If they could secure a fair price they could work a “miracle” similar to the thriving United States. If coffee cannot receive an equitable price, then you cast these millions of persons loose to drift in a perilous sea of poverty and privation, subject to every chilling wind, every subversive blast.”

-Andres Uribe (former chairman of the Pan American Coffee Bureau)

This posed a problem for me. We needed coffee didn’t we? We were living on a limited income weren’t we? I couldn’t afford to buy specialty coffees from an on-line source and stick to our food budget. After getting frustrated and ranting and raving for a time I came to the realization that coffee was a luxury and I couldn’t justify taking food out of people’s mouths for my convenience. So while in Puerto Rico my husband and I bought locally grown coffee and since we’ve moved back to the States have stuck with Fair Trade certified coffee.

The second food related item that was brought to my attention while reading More-With-Less Cookbook (World Community Cookbook), was bananas. Think bananas aren’t that big of a consideration? According the website www.fairtradetoronto.com, “Very few bananas are grown in North America, yet North Americans are major consumers of bananas. In fact, bananas are amongst the top five most important food commodities in world trade.” How does this affect the workers?

“The banana market is controlled by five large corporations – Chiquita (25%), Dole (25%), Del Monte (15%), Noboa (11%) and Fyffes (8%). Most bananas are grown on huge plantations, controlled by these corporate giants. …the current legal minimum price paid to a producer for a box of bananas in Ecuador is $2.90. That same box can then sell in a British supermarket for about $25.00, with the supermarket taking more than a 40% share of the final price. Banana producers are constantly pressured to produce at even lower prices, pushing down wage levels and working conditions in plantations in an attempt to remain ‘competitive’.”

Whereas fair trade coffee is fairly easy to find (at least in the Northwest) at the local supermarket or coffee shop, fair trade bananas are much more difficult. They have only been certified through TransFair USA (a fair trade labeling organization in the US) since 2004 and aren’t regularly available in major supermarkets. What we’ve decided on this issue is to simply not buy bananas. There may be other ways but for us this seems to be the right choice. (It really made my husband appreciate the local bananas when he was home visiting his family!)

You wouldn’t think camping would bring up another food and justice issue would you? But there I was just this August standing at Whole Foods Market staring at the hot chocolate section for about 15 minutes debating. Fair trade? Conventional? It was the end of the month and we were short on funds, just enough to go camping for our first family vacation ever. Would I spend the extra money to buy a fair trade brand or go the cheaper route? I ended up buying the fair trade hot chocolate from Equal Exchange and we really enjoyed it. It was a much better quality chocolate and in researching this article I accessed their website for some great background information.

I’ve shared with you a small portion of my family’s journey and some of the actions we’ve felt compelled to take because of what we believe. Does this move you to action? Or is a step in the process? If you feel compelled to take some steps toward a more just way of shopping and eating I have a few tips for you:

• Take a good look at what you really believe about the poor and what Jesus has to say about them. See if your actions match up to his teachings.

• Read, read, read!  Once you start researching a bit you won’t believe how much information there is out there.

• Pick one or two areas to start with. Don’t let yourself get frustrated. (If you’re doing it right you’ll be dealing with these issues for the rest of your life.)

You may think food is not all that spiritual of a topic, but along with clothing and shelter it’s an elemental need we share with every other person on the planet. These areas of our life directly or indirectly take more time out of our schedule than all other things combined. If we can’t find spiritual meaning here then God is but scarcely among us. Making changes in how we deal with issues of food is essential to our Christian faith. It is included in the great commandment of Jesus when he told us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

One of the ideas I sincerely believe in is that our lives are not meant to be fragmented but whole.  Instead of pinning labels to myself: mom, wife, homemaker, home education parent, non-profit worker, pregnant woman; I want my life to be integrated, with one role or responsibility flowing into the next.  Please understand, this is my ideal, not what I’ve been able to achieve.  And recently finding the balance that makes it all possible has been extremely difficult.  So I apologize for my absence and hope to be blogging more regularly in the future.