"People, Planet and Profits"
A Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
February 13, 2011
READINGS: ANCIENT & MODERN
Our ancient reading is from the Christian scriptures, the Book
of James:
What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith
but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister
is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go
in peace. Keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not
supply their bodily needs, what is the god of that?
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. Show me your faith
apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
The Modern reading is from, A Food Manifesto for the Future,
by Mark Bittman, Food columnist for the New York Times and author
of "Food Matters," which explored the crucial connections
among food, health and the environment. He wrote:
For decades, Americans believed that we had the world's healthiest
and safest diet. We worried little about this diet's effect on the
environment or on the lives of the animals (or even the workers)
it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure…
That didn't mean all was well. And we've come to recognize that
our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers
labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are
produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more
wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system… the essential message
is this: food and everything surrounding it is a crucial matter
of personal and public health, of national and global security.
At stake is not only the health of humans but that of the earth.
SERMON
Introduction:
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that the purpose of worship is to
raise up the issues of our day so that we might view them through
the lenses of our religious sensibilities and values. We might add
that we do so in order that we might be better prepared to relate
to those issues in intentional and religious ways. Welcome to the
second week of our February Focus Month on the theme of, Ethical
Eating. Today we look at our relationships to people, the planet
and profits, as they relate to that theme.
Last week we spoke about the soulful work of creating intentional
relationships of integrity with our food, with the people who are
a part of the chain that grow, process and provide that food for
us, and with the earth - the womb from which our food comes forth.
We continue that discussion today.
We might recognize that, similarly to our gathering here, from
the beginnings of human awareness the people have gathered around
a communal fire to tell and share stories that might provide a way
for finding and making meaning in their/our lives. One of our strong
needs as human beings is to draw meaning. Today we tell stories…
Chapter I. People:
I want to help us all to appreciate something about the people who
are involved in where our food comes from. Trying to see a thing
through the eyes of a child often helps to provide clarity. Many
of us in this room have children, or we had children, or at least
we know children. Children rely on adults to lead them in ways of
truth. I'd like to share with you from the stories of three children
who might lead us in ways of knowing something about truth. Though
we may not know these three children personally, I'd like you to
think of them as your own. These, your children, have something
to tell us about their lives as migrant workers. At the time they
wrote the essays that we'll now hear excerpts from, they were attending
a high school in Washington state.
Ezequil's story:
I was born in Mexico, Tamaulipas Rio Bravo on Thanksgiving Day,
November 26, 1980… On April 12, 1989 I came to the United States
of America, it was a lot different from the place that I came from.
In Mexico… there is a lot of dirt so when it was windy dirt
blew around the whole city. Basically there's nothing much to do
in Mexico... All I did was play in the dirt, get muddy, barefoot
all day playing in the sun.
What a shock when I started working in the fields at 8 years old.
I did not work as hard as they did, but I did help my father, my
brothers and sister with their rows so they could finish fast. They
wanted to finish early … and go home and rest and come back
the next day to work again in the sun and the fields. After that
year my father decided to keep coming back to Washington because
we earned money. Within two years I was working as hard as they
did… it was still a lot of work for me being just 10 years
old.
During the mornings…I worked for only one and a half hours
each day before school. Monday through Friday I went to school and
studied. My father says we should go to school to learn more things,
so we won't have to work in the fields like him, or make my family
work in the fields when I get married and have children. He says
he did not get the opportunity of going to school. That's why he
is living his life like this. He feels that even though he cannot
give his family all that they need, he always gives them his support,
and the most important thing, he gives them his love.
So I began going to school full time. But sometimes I wasn't lucky
enough; some days I had to work after school because my family wasn't
finished working so I had to help them... On weekends I woke up
at 4:30 a.m. to work all day in the sun, so I did not get much [sleep].
I never get the opportunity to wake up late like some other kids
do during the weekends.
I have been a migrant worker for 7 years. It has not been easy
to move from school to school. In a way it's fun because you make
new friends and see other new places, but is not easy leaving your
best friends in Texas. I do enjoy being a migrant, but most of the
time it's a lot of bother.
Cynthia wrote:
I am sixteen years old. I have two sisters and one brother in my
family. Ever since I was a baby, my parents have migrated to Pasco,
Washington. My father has been bringing people to work in the asparagus
[fields] as a crew leader.
I, as a migrant, help my dad work in the fields on weekends. I
don't work as hard as other people work in the fields. I think working
in the fields is very hard because you need to work in the sun all
day. When I grow up I want to become a teacher. I believe that being
a teacher is not as hard as working in the fields.
When I work, I don't get to keep all the money I make in the fields.
My parents get to keep most of the money I earn - so they can pay
the bills they owe, or pay other things they need to pay. My parents
give me some amount of money, so that I can buy clothes for the
following year of school.
Iselda's story:
I have been coming to the state of Washington ever since I was a
newborn baby. I have two brothers and I am the only girl. My parents
had to come in order for them to start a new life. They wanted to
raise enough money to build a house. I don't think I'll be coming
over here anymore because my parents are really tired of having
to migrate every year. They say they don't want this kind of life
for us anymore… I have always dreamed of becoming a lawyer
but the way things are going it's going to be a little hard…
Working in the fields is the worst part of being a migrant student.
You have to go to work every day, work in the hot sun, then come
to school for the rest of the day. You don't even get to keep all
of the money you make. It all has to go to your parents. You also
have to wake up at four in the morning to go to work.
I don't plan to be a migrant worker when I grow up. I don't want
my children to grow up having to move back and forth. I want for
them to get educated and be something in life. I don't want my children
to teach their children to work in fields. I don't want to give
them the life I am going through right now… Being a migrant
worker is very hard. You are always having to face very hard things.
(Written by Cynthia, Iselda, Ezequiel and Albert in Ricki Peto's
Washington State History class in 1996, lightly edited. http://users.owt.com/rpeto/migrant/migrant.html)
These are stories about the lives of some of our children. There
are so many, many stories about the lives of people that are bounded
by the ethics we keep. My colleague Rev. Peggy Clark of Mount Kisco,
used to live in Florida near the tomato capital of the US. She reports
that, "Pickers stand in line on the street waiting for the
buses in the dark of the morning. This makes sense to me, not because
tomatoes need to be picked at 5am, but because most citizens don't
want to see the faces of [those] who work these fields."
We need to go into this with our eyes open wide. What I hope we
come to realize is that the kinds of choices we make about the food
we eat has an impact, an enormous impact on people - on children
and adults who are a part of a food chain that delivers up the meals
and the snacks that we eat. How are we in relationship with those
people? How do we want to be in relationship with them?
Chapter II. The Planet:
Once upon a time there was a ball floating through space. It was
made up of gases and solids and liquids that seemed to get along
just fine. One day a crack of lightning in the sky resulted in a
certain verve. The next thing you know, that planet was teeming
with life. Billions more years pass; a human baby looks to its mother
and grunts that it's time to eat. Millions more years pass, the
mother looks to the father and says, "Yeah, what's to eat?"
Agriculture, the deliberate raising of plants and animals to enhance
and secure food production, evolved in the Near East a mere 10,000
years ago. The transition from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture
created civilization as we know it and led to a rapid increase in
the human population from about five to six million at that time
to six billion in 2000. Although the term agriculture literally
means field cultivation, in a broader context it implies the conversion
of natural to managed ecosystems in order to produce adequate and
continuous food supply.
Demands for an increase in food production were initially met by
expanding the land area being cultivated. For a very long time,
that wasn't a problem, and then quickly it became one. The area
of cropland just prior to the Industrial Revolution in 1700 increased
by nearly 600% by 1980, less than three centuries. Quickly, scarcity
of new land for crop production necessitated increasing crop production
per acre. For a while that was accomplished through the use of manures,
crop rotations, field burnings, fallow periods and other more organic
measures.
The use of supplemental nutrients to increase crop yield started
as trial and error in the form of wood ashes, ground bones, salt
peter, and gypsum. That grew into experimentation and then dependence
on chemical fertilizers in improving and maintaining soil fertility.
The truth is, the application of synthetic fertilizers was the basis
of the global increase in agricultural production after World War
II. Global use of chemical fertilizer used in 1959 and 1960 increased
500% in the forty-year period ending in 2000. The projected fertilizer
demand for the year 2020 will see still another doubling in that
amount.
As the world population increases and cropland becomes more valuable,
total cropland acreage has begun to diminish significantly, increasing
the reliance on fertilizer even more. With it there has been a rapid
increase in global use of pesticides for the same reasons. The greater
the world population, the greater is our use of synthetic agents
that our eco-systems can not sustain. It's not a pretty picture;
and it's not unrelated to the expanding health issues that are faced
by each new generation.
Over an enormous amount of time we have moved from a primordial
mist, to be swimmers and then crawlers, and then agriculturalists.
We have shifted from widely diverse agricultural production to precarious
monocultures. Almost overnight we have gone from having unbounded
access to arable lands to poisoning our limited farmlands and flushing
the precious nutrients of their top soils down our clogging waterways.
We have expelled ourselves from the garden path of inexhaustible
cornucopia; we have placed ourselves, instead, on a road that is
not sustainable.
There are numerous, diverse, and increasing demands on agriculture
in the Twenty-First Century. In addition to meeting the demands
for the economic production of food, feed, fiber, and fuel, agriculture
today must also address environmental concerns, especially in regard
to water quality and the accelerated greenhouse effect…. There
is no quick fix to the ailments we have wreaked upon our earth.
And yet, if we fail to pay attention, if we fail to bring things
into balance, we have little reason for hope that balance can be
achieved.
We need to go into this with our eyes open wide. What I hope we
come to realize is that the kinds of choices we make about the food
we eat have an impact, an enormous impact on our planet. How are
we in relationship with our planet, this source of our being? How
do we want to be in relationship with it? (Much of the preceding
information can be found in Advameg, Inc: http://www.pollutionissues.com/A-Bo/Agriculture.html#ixzz1DaQ3RcDX)
Chapter III. Profits:
If you ask most urban and suburban children where milk comes from,
they are likely to tell you, "It comes from the store."
Sadly I'm afraid, that would be true for many adults as well. The
distressing fact is that, for the most part, our society does not
know where its food comes from; nor do we know the true cost of
that food.
In his book, The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered
America's Food Supply, (St Martin's Griffin, 2004) Ken Midkiff informs
us about the role of profits in food processing.
Today ... there are only three commercial breeds of hogs, one of
broiler chickens, one of dairy cattle, one of salmon, and two of
beef. Genetic similarity makes these mono-breeds extremely susceptible
to disease… Diversity is always to be desired, whether stock
investments or livestock are at issue. The more baskets we can put
our eggs in, the better off we are. Yet the livestock industries
have been moving in the opposite direction. Livestock production
has not only been concentrated in larger and larger operations,
but these facilities also are located in small areas of the country.
Circle Four, so called because it was originally developed by four
agribusiness corporations and located near Milford, Utah, raises
over a million hogs inside a few square miles. The Central Valley
of California is glutted with gigantic dairies. Greeley, Colorado,
has enclosures housing millions of beef steers in a feedlot connected
to a slaughterhouse… Millions of commercially raised Atlantic
salmon are now contained in pens in the Georgia Strait of British
Columbia.
... We have placed our trust in industries run by people who own
and manage the feed mills, the fish nurseries, the finishing houses,
the laying houses, and the slaughterhouses but who live nowhere
near what they raise. Their products are not sold locally; they
are shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles for value-added
processing. While the products may eventually end up back in the
small-town supermarket or at the local McDonald's, the journey,
however long it has been, has transformed the meat, milk, and eggs
into yet more units of production.
Although modern livestock facilities are clearly based on an industrial
model, in the eyes of state and federal agencies they fit the legal
description of "farm." This suits the owners and managers
of these operations just fine, because it allows them generous tax
breaks and exemptions from a number of environmental laws…
This is not culture and it is not agriculture; it is not even the
business of farming. It is agribusiness. Managers and corporate
CEOs are not farmers. These executives care about the profit margin,
not about the health and safety of the meat, milk, and eggs. American
Gothic has become Gothic Horror.
We do need to go into this with our eyes open wide. We need to
realize that the kinds of choices we make about the food we eat
have been impacted by those whose profit margins are guided by immediate
gains. It is challenging; it is daunting, but we do not have to
allow control over this basic means of survival to rest in the hands
of those who are unmotivated and unwilling to consider the survival
of our children, grandchildren and our great-grandchildren.
How are we in relationship with the money and the costs of the
food we eat? Are we willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of
our ethics and for the sake of those who may follow us, if indeed
we make the kinds of choices that will allow for millions more years
of humanity on this planet?
What can we do? Though it may sometimes feel like it, we are not
trapped. We can buy our food from smaller, sustainable farms, by
joining CSA's (Community Supported Agriculture groups) or by shopping
at the farmers market. When we buy local fruits, vegetables, and
meats, we support our local economy. More of what we spend goes
directly to farmers themselves, and less goes to transportation
and middlemen. Buying locally also means burning less fossil fuel
to get food from the farm to the table, which benefits the environment.
It's important to emphasize that the more we buy locally, the more
we increase local production so that more people will have access
to local products. The reason this is so important is because it
really is an issue of privilege that allows most of us here to have
the kinds of choices that we enjoy. There are many people of lesser
means who do not have the access we have and by choosing more ethically
we do open the door for greater access by greater numbers of people.
The truth is - we are not trapped. We can choose, by default or
otherwise, to either accept the cultural myth that tells us all
is fine and we need only do our part in this age of consumerism
by consuming what's put in front of us, or we can pay attention
and promote integrity in our relationships with what we eat, where
it comes from and with those involved in the process.
We cannot afford ourselves the alibi that we just don't have the
information we need or that it's too hard. There are local resources
and a world of information on the Internet. It's not information
we lack; it's the will to be in right relationship.
Rev. A. Powel Davies proclaimed that, "Life is just a chance
to grow a soul." Soul is what connects us to that which makes
us of this earth, to the people and places and experiences that
make us human, and to that which nourishes us through our lives.
It is our soul that is grown or dwarfed by the quality of those
same relationships. When we choose to eat ethically, we choose to
be in right relationship with our food, and we honor the connections
that give value to our lives and to all Life. The ethic remains
ours to determine.
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