yearofplenty

Anticipating the Christmas Feast - My CNN Article

I have an article that posted today at CNN's Belief Blog that explores what we're learning as we follow the Orthodox Nativity fast. Go here to read it.

Here's my conclusion in the article:

At minimum, it’s time for American Christians to recognize what many of their nonreligious friends have discovered – that food practices are important for the journey of spiritual formation. They are a meaningful way to connect with the mystery that underlies all of creation.

Better yet, maybe it’s time for an Orthodox moment in American Christianity where Protestants and evangelicals rediscover the generative role of fasting and feasting on the journey of following Jesus. We’ll all be better off for it, both body and soul.

Merry Christmas.

"Year of Plenty" Christmas Present Offer

If you live in the Spokane area and are giving Year of Plenty as a Christmas gift I wanted to let you know I would be more than glad to sign it and write a personal note in the book to the recipient. Email me at craiggoodwin2 (at) gmail [dot] com if you are interested and we can set up a time to connect. 

That being said here's a Wendell Berry quote on Christmas presents that I posted a couple of years ago on the blog that gets quite a few hits this time of year:

People who love each other need to have something they can do for each other, and it will need to be something necessary, not something frivolous. You can't carry out a relationship on the basis of Christmas and anniversary and birthday presents. It won't work.

You have to be doing something that you need help with, and your wife needs to be doing something that she needs help with. You do needful, useful things for each other, and that seems to me to be the way that a union is made...You're being made a partner by your partner's needs and the things that you're required to do to help...Love is not just a feeling; it's a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not. If you have a relationship with anybody - a friend, a family member, a spouse - you have to understand the terms of that relationship to do things for those people, and you do them whether you feel like it or not. If you don't it's useless...

This is what you learn as soon as you become a farmer, for instance. Once you get into a relationship with even so much as a vegetable garden, you realize that you have to do the work whether you want to or not. You may have got into it because of love, but there are going to be days when you are sick and you're going to have to do your work anyway. With animals, the work is even more inescapable. There's no way out if you have a milk cow, no reprieve...She makes the milk and you've got to go get it.

 

Fun With Google Earth - Garden Labyrinth Looks Like Suburban Crop Circle

I thought this Google Earth view of our vegetable garden labyrinth was pretty cool. Our own little mysterious suburban crop-circle.

Go here to see the start of the labyrinth from awhile back. The end result of the first year's garden is featured on the cover of the book.

I was also stoked to see this view of the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden. It looks like an earthy patchwork quilt.

Go here to see the tranformation of an empty lot into the community garden.

The Spirit of Food - A Book Review

The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Cascade Books, 2010) is a wonderful collection of essays by an all-star cast of gifted writers on the connections between food and Christian faith. 

The book reminds me of one of those summer food festivals that feature samplings from all the best restaurants in town. I remember growing up with the annual Bite of Seattle. We would pay an entrance fee to get in and then tent by tent we would make our way around the festival stalls, gobbling up appetizer-sized portions of gourmet mu-shoo pork tacos and blackened salmon. In the same way The Spirit of Food invites the reader in to sample the gourmet writing of Lauren Winner, Wendell Berry, Ann Voskamp, Amy Frykholm, Alexander Schmemann, Robert Farrar Capon, and Leslie Leyland Fields who edited and coordinated this event/book. Interspersed among the more well-known authors are unique perspectives from dozens of others, all organized around the themes: On the Way to the Table, In the Kitchen, The Ways We Eat, Fasting, At the Table of the Lord, and Feasting. 

Given the nature of the book I'm going to approach this review like it's a conversation in the car with a friend driving home from one of those food festivals. Let's call it "Bite of the Kingdom." 

Friend: So how did you like The Spirit of Food/Bite of the Kingdom?

Me: I don't think I've ever read so many tasty morsels of food writing. (yes, the puns are irresistable) Just when I was savoring the offerings in one chapter I was drawn to the next. They did a really good job representing different perspectives on how food intersects with faith. I like that each author was given the freedom to engage the topic from their experience. I could tell that the authors really enjoyed writing on the subject and that came through in the reading of the book.

Friend: What was your favorite chapter?

Me: I'm a sucker for Berry, Schmemann, and Capon but I'm familiar with their work so their chapters were like comfort food that is flawlessly prepared, and tasty as usual, but its familiarity makes me look elsewhere for a favorite. I really enjoyed Amy Frykholm's treatment of Orthodox fasting rituals in which she writes about her experience as an exchange student in Russia where she "witnessed a fuller understanding of the body and soul in communion." I resonate with her desire for this kind communion. Suzanne Wolfe's description of her struggle with an eating disorder was wonderfully honest and served up just the right combination of the sweet hope of hunger satisfied and the sour despair of irreconcilable hungers. 

Friend: But which was your favorite.

Me: Okay, if you're going to make me choose I'd have to say Lauren Winner's reflection on her experience with Kosher food laws as a Jew and the ways her experience with kashrut, as she calls it, might inform her foodways as a Christian. I was intrigued by her statement, "While Christians are not bound by the particularities of Deuteronominic dietary laws, we still may want to pay attention to the basic principle that underlies kashrut: God cares about our dietary choices." In summing up the provocative potential of Kosher food laws for Christians she says, "At its most basic level, keeping kosher requires you to be present to your food." She cites the "logic of kashrut" as she sketches the contours of a food ethic that includes paying attention and seasonal eating. She writes, "Food is part of God's creation. A right relationship with food points us toward him."

Her chapter really got me thinking about what other practices in the Bible and the history of the church might inform Christian approaches to food. It seems like an under-explored area in many church circles.

Friend: Yeah I enjoyed her chapter too. It sure is hard to choose a favorite.

Me: The only downside to The Spirit of Food is that you only get a small portion at each stop on the journey. Many of the chapters left me wanting a leisurely 10-course meal of reading to follow-up on the tantalizing appetizer. 

Friend: But it's nice that the authors provide a recipe to accompany each chapter. I bet you could make a nice 10-course meal from the recipes in the book. My only complaint is that their wasn't a beer garden.

I think food may be the next big topic among American Christians and The Spirit of Food is the most accessible guide yet to the potential of food to shape Christian faith, and a convincing argument that it should. It would make a great Christmas present for your foodie friends. Buy it here. 

See Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians for more on this trend. 

Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians?

Rachel Wheeler, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University has written a paper published in three installments on the Religion in American History blog arguing that the locavore trend with its farmers' markets, CSA boxes, and school gardens has established a significant foothold in the imagination of American evangelicals, citing recent books on the subject:

There is an equally voluminous output by Christian publishers, though it has gone largely un-noticed by the mainstream media. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin recently published, Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, and Ragan Sutterfield, founder of a farm-school for disadvantaged youth, published a collection of essays entitled, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. Rod Dreher, a Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox, has written about conservatives who embrace what are usually seen as liberal issues in his book: Crunchy Cons: Or How Birkenstock Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party); and one of my favorites, Don Colbert’s, What Would Jesus Eat?

She calls both the religious and secular variety of food advocates "locavangelists" and argues that secular locavangelists like Michael Pollan and Colin Beavan "draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism." Wheeler cites the common ground of an emphasis on the "born-again" stories that dominate the genre, a common sense approach to life that echoes evangelical common-sense approaches to the Bible, and a focus on the conversion of individuals as key to ushering in the longed for kingdom of healthy food, communities, and land.

I find her arguments provocative and compelling but I'm not convinced yet of her diagnoses that recent events like 9/11, the commercialism of the 90s, and recent economic collapse are the perfect storm that has led to this embrace of food practices as a secular and spiritual discipline. I am inclined to look back further on the historical time line to the 1960s for the source of these recent trends but it's true that more recent events have served as catalysts for launching agrarian food perspectives into the mainstream. Her three historical markers are all subjects of the story I tell about our family's journey in Year of Plenty.

While I have some reservations about Wheeler's historical analysis, I completely agree with her philosophical observation that this secular and sacred trend is motivated by a desire to integrate belief and action. She writes:

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together....So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

Along with her historical assessment, Wheeler offers an observation about an American embrace of "practice." She writes in her introduction of the paper:

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s....I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

This paper raises some important questions: Could food practices be the next big thing in the spiritual disciplines and practices of American Christians, especially evangelical Christians? In a fragmented culture where people have a growing awareness of a disconnect between belief and action, could food lead the way to more authentic and integrated experiences of faith? Given the common ground between evangelicals and their secular foodie counterparts, could food practices be a productive place of dialogue and faith sharing for American Christians who are often lacking generative places of engagement with non-Christians? 

These are all questions that motivate me as our family launches the Tables of Plenty project. For a culture that is hungry for "food rules" I suspect the church has a rich history of practices to draw from and share. I also believe that evangelical Christians, who are especially prone to being trapped in the modern divide between spirit and material realities, have something to learn from secular and religious food practitioners about the journey of integrating faith and action in the world. I'm excited to dive into these issues in the coming year.

You can read Wheeler's paper in three installments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Picture: Polish priest blesses baskets of food on Holy Saturday before Easter.

Note: This is also cross-posted at the Tables of Plenty blog. In case you're wondering, I will be sharing some posts between this blog and Tables of Plenty but over time I'll share fewer and fewer posts between the two blogs.

Stuffed and Starved - Visualizing World Food Consumption

A friend passed along this interesting visualization of the world's calorie consumption. Below is a screen grab showing the U.S. leading the pack in calories consumed. It's interesting to see that the whole western world appears to be eating too many calories while much of Africa is getting too few calories. It reminds me of Raj Patel's appropriately titled book, Stuffed and Starved, which I've got on my reading list for next year. 

The veracity of a data on per capita calorie consumption of Americans may be overstated. While the infographic relies on UN data, the USDA has a more conservative estimate in the most recent Dietary Guidelines where they state:

On the basis of national survey data, the average calorie intake among women and men older than age 19 years are estimated to be 1,785 and 2,640 calories per day, respectively. While these estimates do not appear to be excessive, the numbers are difficult to interpret because survey respondents, especially individuals who are overweight or obese, often under report dietary intake. Well-controlled studies suggest that the actual number of calories consumed may be higher than these estimates.

Maybe the reality is somewhere in-between the UN estimate and the USDA survey results.

Introducing "Tables of Plenty": A Yearlong Exploration of Christian Food Practices

It's a new yearlong adventure for the Goodwin family and a new blog called "Tables of Plenty" to connect with others around the themes of food and faith. Go here to see the new blog.

Starting on November 28, 2011 with the Orthodox Nativity fast, our family is dedicating a year to explore the role of food in Christian spiritual formation, one month at a time. Our monthly excursions will include following kosher food laws and eating in the tradition of the early church. We'll plant community gardens with the Benedictines, go vegetarian with Seventh Day Adventists, and vegan with the Orthodox. We'll even explore the spiritual depths of potlucks and jello-salad with our own tribe, the White Bread Protestants. We'll be reading, reflecting, blogging, and eating our way through the year at the Tables of Plenty blog.

It was almost four years ago that I started blogging about our family's Year of Plenty in which we committed to consuming only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Here's the linkto the first blog post with pictures of our fated attempt to make a flamingo pinata. It has been four enriching years of learning and writing about food, agriculture, consumerism, the environment, and faith. Our YoP experience has led to wonderful friendships and conversations that have sparked our imaginations for more learning and more exploration, especially when it comes to the role of food in Christian faith practices and spiritual formation. 

In recent years I've been struck by the strong connection between faith formation in the Bible and food practices. I've developed what I call a foodie hermeneutic of the Bible, reading the Bible through the lens of food and food practices, and I've been amazed at how central food is to the unfolding story of God's people in the Bible. It starts with the words to Adam, "You are free to eat," and ends with the grand vision of a feast. From manna during the exodus to Jesus fasting in the wilderness to Peter's hunger-induced vision of unclean foods in the book of Acts, the path to following God's will is often negotiated at some point on food's journey from field to table.

In contrast to this prominent role of food in the Bible, I've been surprised by the relative absence of food as a means of spiritual formation in my experience as a Protestant, evangelical, North American Christian. I never thought much about it until our YoP experiment led us into conversations with locavores, slow food foodies, vegans, sustainable agriculture activists, and others who all seem to understand the powerful role of food choices in the formation of a person. In these communities we have found people fleshing out the meaning of life and embracing food as a central practice in that process. While most of these movements are considered "secular," they often have a sacred feel to them.  

For example Novella Carpenter writes in her book Farm City about her experience raising a pig named Harold:

Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death...But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

Michael Pollan writes at the conclusion of The Omnivore's Dilemma about a dinner with friends that he calls the "perfect meal":

The stories, like the food that fed them, cast lines of relation to all these places and the creatures living (and dying) in them, drawing them all together on this table, on these plates, in what to me began to feel a little like a ceremony. And there's a sense in which the meal had become just that, a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was often the theme. Such stories food can feed us both body and soul..."

Bestselling books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, preach the gospel of food as spiritual formation and the message is resonating.

Alexander Schmemann, a prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian sums up this situation well in his book, For the Life of the World:

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.

Just as our Year of Plenty experiment was launched out of a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into contemporary issues around consumerism, this Tables of Plenty project is motivated by a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into these contemporary conversations around food. With Michael Pollan and Novella Carpenter, we have a sense that there is something sacred about what we eat and we suspect that there is a rich Biblical and historical tradition in the Christian faith that has been mostly lost in current expressions of church. Like so many, we are hungry and thirsty for a sacramental life, so we're going to read, and explore, and eat our way through the year, hoping to reconnect with sacred food practices and maybe even help others do the same.

Each month we'll focus on one historic tradition and eat all of our food according to those rules. Here's the calendar so far:

December - Eastern Orthodox Nativity Fast

January - Getting Kosher with Jewish Food Laws

February - Eating With the Early Church

March - Fasting with the Desert Fathers, Ascetics, and Monastics

April - Celebrating the Eucharist and the Lord's Supper (Roman Catholic Tradition)

May - Seeking Social Justice with the Mennonites

June - Planting Community Gardens with the Benedictines

July - Eating Vegetables with the Seventh Day Adventists

August - Harvesting with the Hutterites (and Amish)

September - Soul Food with the African-American Church

October - Potlucking with White-Bread Protestants

Along with eating we'll be reading and reviewing books, sharing recipes, and hopefully making new friends to gather with around the table.

We also hope to crowd-source this endeavor. Please let us know if you have recipes, experiences, or insights into the role of food in Christian spiritual formation. Is there a unique tradition that we've left off our calendar that we should explore? Are there books that you would recommend?

As was the case with the Year of Plenty, it's hard to say at this early stage if we'll be successful in carrying this plan to the end. We may run into unexpected roadblocks that require adjustments along the way. Noel, Lily, and I have committed to taking on a larger role in the kitchen and I'm excited to expand my culinary skills. I'll continue blogging here at Year of Plenty and sharing some content between the two blogs.

You can follow Tables of Plenty on Facebook and Twitter. I'm still working on getting the RSS feed up and running.

 

Year of Plenty Book Update - More Lessons Learned as a First-Time Author

It's hard to believe that it was about a year ago that I was finishing up edits on the manuscript for Year of Plenty. I wrote a post at that time reflecting on lessons learned as a first-time author. Here are some more thoughts.

The journey since March, when the book came out, has been a great adventure. I've learned how to psych myself up for live radio interviews and how to sign books and hold a conversation at the same time. I've learned that Amazon bestseller rankings are the ultimate slippery slope of self-worth if you pay too much attention. I've learned the great joy of people reading the book and making changes in their lives. One of my favorites is, "Because of your book I started a vegetable garden," or "Because of your book I ordered a CSA with a local farmer."

I've learned that even with a great publisher and publicist, the author needs to be the chief-marketer. Before my book was released, an author friend told me that during the first year of a book's life you should think of the marketing of the book as a part-time job. I'm 8 months in, and that sounds about right. I also had some publishing friends tell me that no one really knows what works to sell books other than having someone on TV hold the book up and say, "Buy this book." It's been interesting, since then, to notice that when an author appears on TV, the host holds up a book for the camera and says, "Buy this book." Every time that happens I think a publicist gets her wings.

While most promotional efforts don't work nearly as well as you might think, I've learned that some things do work better than others. Doing speaking events is a great way to sell books. (By the way, did you notice that I'm available for speaking engagements.) Bookstore book signings are generally disappointing unless they are connected to a speaking event. 

People ask me how book sales are going. I usually respond by pointing out that the average book sells 500 copies and I've surpassed that threshold by a bunch. So, on one hand, sales are great. On the other hand, I still have a ways to go to sell enough copies to cover my advance from the publisher, so I'm still highly motivated to get the word out. By the way, Year of Plenty would make a great Christmas present. :)

Here is some other recent YoP related stuff:

Book review at Evangelical Enivronment Network.

Book review at UK-based Good Book Stall.

Book review at Blessed Earth.

Book review at Flourish Online Magazine.

Book review at Presbyterians for Earth Care.

World Trade Organization Tells U.S. Consumers They Aren't Allowed to Know Food's Country of Origin

A recent ruling from the World Trade Organization has got me feeling like I need to initiate an "Occupy Your Grocery Store" movement. The WTO has declared that current U.S. food country-of-origin labeling laws for meat and produce are "illegal." Bloomberg News reports:

Canada and Mexico said the provisions impose unfair costs on their exports, reducing their competitiveness. Judges agreed that the policies meant beef and pork from Canada and Mexico were treated less favorably than the same U.S. products.

The article goes on the share the perspectives of farmers and industry insiders who lament that the program is "costly and cumbersome," and that the costs "far outweigh any benefits."

This may seem like an obscure, niche debate but I think it goes to the heart of the current crisis in food systems around the world. Industrialists insist that food is nothing more than a commodity that can be reduced to a product with nutritional content, a hunk of chemicals and proteins with a profit margin. In their ideal world a food item is not connected to anything--no farmer, no land, no community, no country, no watershed, no carbon footprint, no pesticide, no herbicide, no low-wage farm worker, nothing. The industrial food system is most efficient when the journey from farm to table is an undiscernable mystery, and the champions of this industry will keep pushing for more efficiency, as if it hasn't already been pushed too far.

I'm reminded of the John Muir quote from My First Summer in the Sierra where he observes: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

The problem with the industrial vision of storyless food is that it defies the truth that it is, in fact, "hitched to everything else." It's hitched to the endangered thin-brown line of topsoil that covers the earth. It's often connected to lies and deception (See "Most honey you buy at the store isn't honey"). It's part of huge debates about water wars and environmental destruction (see California water wars). Beef often has a sordid web of connections to things like heavy metals, antibiotic residues, clandestine cloning, ammonia soaking, and even fatalities. 

Food is more "hitched" than most things which is why the move to further separate consumers from the origin of foods is so disturbing. 

Wendell Berry sums up the current conundrum of consumers when he writes about our troubling ignorance about the ways our consumer items are "hitched":

...the first thought may be a recognition of one’s ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

Berry concludes, and I tend to agree, that the best way to respond to this situation is to nurture "prosperous local economies." According to Berry, "Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice." In other words, buying from local farmers and producers is the best way to know the story of the items we buy. Instead of relying on a beauracracy of labeling rules, he says we need to take things into our own hands and develop relationships with people. If enough consumers start moving in this direction, demanding meaningful knowledge about the items we buy, then maybe industry representative will take note and respond.

Supporting local farmers like Rocky Ridge Ranch that was featured in the Spokesman Review this weekend is a great way to take a step in this direction. The Spokane Public Market and the Millwood Winter Farmers' Market, 3-6pm on Wednesdays at the Crossing Youth Center are other options worth considering. Consider making local farmers and producers a part of this year' Christmas shopping plans. 

Cruelty of McDonald's Egg Supplier Revealed in Video

This is a really graphic video but it shows, once again, how cruel industrial animal practices are. Consumers need to demand more humane treatment of the animals that provide us food, or better yet get your own chickens. Go here for an interesting article on the case for ethical consumption as a lever to bring change in the marketplace.