Giving thanks for our food

Editorial for the Parish Magazine (Parish of Solihull – October 2009)

October is the month when we celebrate the harvest. We give thanks to God for the crops that have grown and been collected in. We give thanks to God for the food which we shall eat over the coming year.
The Victorians developed the annual harvest thanksgiving into full blown Harvest Festivals. Harvest hymns started to appear. “Come ye thankful people come” was written in 1844. “We plough the fields and scatter” was translated from the German in 1861. Churches were decorated with harvest produce. Harvest gifts were collected and shared with the poor. Church bells were rung and liturgical celebrations spilt over into Harvest Suppers and Harvest Shows.
In recent decades there have been some interesting developments as harvest festivals come to reflect the changing times. Away from rural areas, harvest gifts now tend to reflect what we eat rather than what we grow or harvest. Tinned and packaged foods have become the norm, and actually they make for much more practical harvest gifts! In some places the emphasis has moved away from harvest towards a celebration of the different ways in which we earn our daily bread. I have seen manufactured goods proudly displayed in church alongside sheaths of corn. As the manufacturing sector gives way to the services sector perhaps we should expect to see displays of consultancy brochures or software CDs in our church displays!
These changes make us realise the extraordinarily complicated and sophisticated ways in which we get our food. For most of us, the way we earn our money has nothing to do with producing food. We use that money to buy food that is often imported, sometimes over vast distances. Much of our food is mass produced. In the supermarkets most food is available all year round.
There are many benefits to this. An extraordinary variety of food is available to us all the time. It is more affordable and convenient than ever before and the quality is extremely consistent. The importing of food from all around the world makes us more aware of the interconnectedness of all humanity and the “Global Village” effect.
But despite all these benefits, the changes do raise several concerns. There are ethical concerns about intensive farming, GM crops and the terms of trade with the third world. There are concerns about the greenhouse gases generated by transporting food, and the intensive farming of cattle. Food security becomes more of a concern as we realise that our food supply is so heavily dependent on world trade and financial institutions. Then there is the very real problem of rising food prices, caused by agricultural land being switched from food production to bio-fuel production. This switching threatens to cause food prices to rise to levels beyond what can be afforded in many of the world’s poorest nations. Finally there is the sense in which we are diminished as human beings by our lack of connectedness with where our food comes from. We cease to understand our relationship with the soil and the weather. Our consciousness of seasonal foods and of local specialities disappears. Our distinctive role in food production is reduced to that of consumer.
It could be easy to become depressed about these problems, but our Christian faith teaches us always to live in hope. It also provides us with extraordinary resources that ultimately have the power to address the problems. For example, on 4th October we commemorate St Francis of Assisi in our liturgy. St Francis lived a life of radical simplicity and poverty, which was extremely challenging to the economic assumptions of his time, and which remains both challenging and inspirational to us today.
What would Francis suggest to us about our food today? I suspect that in his simplicity he would suggest growing more of our food locally and growing it less intensively. He would encourage us to grow some of our own food in our own gardens. He would encourage a more interdependent community, working together on food production. He would encourage a freer sharing of the food produced. Our involvement with growing food and our connectedness with nature would increase. Of course such proposals might involve real economic costs and a reduction in financial wealth, but with his love of “Lady Poverty” Francis would rejoice in that too!
Now, we are not all called to be Franciscans. There are other spiritualities within the Church and other legitimate perspectives on food production. However, it seems to me that as the complexities and instabilities of food production increases so the Franciscan perspective will become harder to ignore. In the meantime we must give thanks for the food that God gives us, without worrying, and remembering the advice that Jesus gave to those who worried about their food. He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you (Matt 6: 33).