Today at church we celebrated Earth Day by hearing a wonderful sermon on the benefits of supporting local sustainable farming practices as opposed to eating food grown by large corporate agri-businesses that don't practice sustainable farming and the damage that they do both to our environment and to our health. We then followed the second service by having a pot-luck luncheon of foods grown entirely locally, and it was amazing what people were able to come up with in the way of delicious dishes. We also heard a lecture by Jeff Ingram of the Kent Natural Foods Co-Op and what services they offer and what their future plans are for expansion. There seems to be a growing movement toward supporting local farms and farmers, as in more and more cities, there are Farmer's Markets popping up every summer that feature the local foods produced on the local farms. I can remember summer nights in my childhood when we ate all locally grown produce from Kamburoff's and Seifert's and it was fresh and delicious. Sadly, both Kamburoff's and Seifert's are gone now, Kamburoff's under one of those egregious upscale housing developments, and Seifert's an empty field that has long had a For Sale sign on it and may eventually become part of a nearby industrial park. Even the nearby 200 year old Call Farm is gone, it also consumed by an upscale housing development. So many of our local farms have gone belly up, out of business, sold to developers, but hey, when you're a struggling farmer and some developer comes knocking at your door offering you untold millions of dollars for your land, are you going to refuse that kind of money that would give you a lifetime of security for you and your posterity? That seems to have been the problem with so many of the local family run farms lately - the farm subsidies for the big agri-businesses are driving the small family farm out of business. And with increasing fuel prices driving the prices of food up, food grown by agri-businesses is still going to be cheaper than the locally organically grown stuff, so it's tough to change the culture toward wanting to support the local farmer, but the tide is turning, slowly. People want to know where their food came from, who grew it and how it was grown. All of the chemical fertilizers that are used in our food are doubtless partially responsible for more and more cases of cancer whereas food grown with organic compost is better for you and in the end, more nutritious. And it tastes better, too.
During the sermon, our minister mentioned two books that inspired it, and those are "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle : A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver, and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. They both sound like such good books and I have wanted to read them for some time now, but the problem is always that of time and too many other books that I want to read, but during the luncheon, one of the members of our congregation mentioned that she'd like to get together a reading circle of people interested in reading and discussing these two books, so I decided to join as a way to motivate myself to read them and to give more thought to the connection between what I eat and where it comes from. I'm trying my best to eat healthier organic foods, but unfortunately, a lot of the so-called organic foods are also run by large agri-businesses but don't always
practice sustainable agriculture and are as bad as the large corporate agri-businesses, which is why we talked today in church about the idea of supporting the local farms and farmers who practice sustainable agriculture. There was a time when we mostly knew where our food came from and who grew it, but anymore, we don't know that and we don't know how the food we eat was grown and what was used to grow it. So it has greatly removed the connection between the earth and the food we eat. In fact, I remember hearing Barbara Kingsolver on a radio program aired on NPR on early Sunday mornings while driving to West Virginia last summer called "Speaking of Faith". She was talking about her book and how she and her family left their home in Arizona and moved to a farm in the mountains of Virginia and lived for a year on nothing but what they could grow on their own land, including meat, and what that experience meant to her and her family. It re-established a deep connection to food and land and drove home to her how important that connection is and how modern society has allowed that connection to disappear over time. And I've been aware of this myself as I have seen local farms folding up and being plowed under for housing developments, which means a great loss for the community of yet another farmer and yet more locally grown food, but I am reassured that with the resurgence of farmer's markets in towns all across the country, that we'll see a greater push toward more sustainable agricultural practices as well as more support for the local family farmer. I just hope that I am right and that we're moving back toward a more local mindset where our food is concerned. If we all made a greater effort to "Eat Local", it might encourage more people to take up farming and to practice sustainable agriculture. And that can only be a good thing for our planet and for our health.
Today at church we celebrated Earth Day by hearing a wonderful sermon on the benefits of supporting local sustainable farming practices as opposed to eating food grown by large corporate agri-businesses that don't practice sustainable farming and the damage that they do both to our environment and to our health. We then followed the second service by having a pot-luck luncheon of foods grown entirely locally, and it was amazing what people were able to come up with in the way of delicious dishes. We also heard a lecture by Jeff Ingram of the Kent Natural Foods Co-Op and what services they offer and what their future plans are for expansion. There seems to be a growing movement toward supporting local farms and farmers, as in more and more cities, there are Farmer's Markets popping up every summer that feature the local foods produced on the local farms. I can remember summer nights in my childhood when we ate all locally grown produce from Kamburoff's and Seifert's and it was fresh and delicious. Sadly, both Kamburoff's and Seifert's are gone now, Kamburoff's under one of those egregious upscale housing developments, and Seifert's an empty field that has long had a For Sale sign on it and may eventually become part of a nearby industrial park. Even the nearby 200 year old Call Farm is gone, it also consumed by an upscale housing development. So many of our local farms have gone belly up, out of business, sold to developers, but hey, when you're a struggling farmer and some developer comes knocking at your door offering you untold millions of dollars for your land, are you going to refuse that kind of money that would give you a lifetime of security for you and your posterity? That seems to have been the problem with so many of the local family run farms lately - the farm subsidies for the big agri-businesses are driving the small family farm out of business. And with increasing fuel prices driving the prices of food up, food grown by agri-businesses is still going to be cheaper than the locally organically grown stuff, so it's tough to change the culture toward wanting to support the local farmer, but the tide is turning, slowly. People want to know where their food came from, who grew it and how it was grown. All of the chemical fertilizers that are used in our food are doubtless partially responsible for more and more cases of cancer whereas food grown with organic compost is better for you and in the end, more nutritious. And it tastes better, too.
During the sermon, our minister mentioned two books that inspired it, and those are "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle : A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver, and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. They both sound like such good books and I have wanted to read them for some time now, but the problem is always that of time and too many other books that I want to read, but during the luncheon, one of the members of our congregation mentioned that she'd like to get together a reading circle of people interested in reading and discussing these two books, so I decided to join as a way to motivate myself to read them and to give more thought to the connection between what I eat and where it comes from. I'm trying my best to eat healthier organic foods, but unfortunately, a lot of the so-called organic foods are also run by large agri-businesses but don't always 
practice sustainable agriculture and are as bad as the large corporate agri-businesses, which is why we talked today in church about the idea of supporting the local farms and farmers who practice sustainable agriculture. There was a time when we mostly knew where our food came from and who grew it, but anymore, we don't know that and we don't know how the food we eat was grown and what was used to grow it. So it has greatly removed the connection between the earth and the food we eat. In fact, I remember hearing Barbara Kingsolver on a radio program aired on NPR on early Sunday mornings while driving to West Virginia last summer called "Speaking of Faith". She was talking about her book and how she and her family left their home in Arizona and moved to a farm in the mountains of Virginia and lived for a year on nothing but what they could grow on their own land, including meat, and what that experience meant to her and her family. It re-established a deep connection to food and land and drove home to her how important that connection is and how modern society has allowed that connection to disappear over time. And I've been aware of this myself as I have seen local farms folding up and being plowed under for housing developments, which means a great loss for the community of yet another farmer and yet more locally grown food, but I am reassured that with the resurgence of farmer's markets in towns all across the country, that we'll see a greater push toward more sustainable agricultural practices as well as more support for the local family farmer. I just hope that I am right and that we're moving back toward a more local mindset where our food is concerned. If we all made a greater effort to "Eat Local", it might encourage more people to take up farming and to practice sustainable agriculture. And that can only be a good thing for our planet and for our health. 
No comments:
Post a Comment