Fast: Food, Talk, World

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

March 2, 2003

Alice Waters:

Nothing I ate prepared me for the food of France.  There, for the first time, I learned that good food could be a serious pleasure and that its pursuit was worthy of the utmost concentration and discrimination.  In France people not only gave deep thought to their next meal they surrendered themselves utterly to its enjoyment.

It was a year of a thousand epiphanies: the bread fresh from the wood burning oven of my neighborhood bakery, the cheese so unimaginably and ripely various, the staggering bounty of the sea, the long meals with my new French friends whose passion for food was so grown up in its refinement and so childlike in its exuberance.

The slow and mindful preparation of food reflects the “love you feel for those you cook for, your openness to the evidence of your senses, and the reverence you feel the bounty of creation.” Founde rChez Panisse, Berkeley, 1971.  The Restaurant serves foods prepared with local produce, with organic foods and with love and creativity. 

Frances Moore Lappe

To me democracy is an exciting, living practice, what we do every day.  To most democracy is  doesn’t relate to our daily lives and it sure isn’t much fun.  I now see that to engage in democracy, to jump into this living practice we all need something tangible to act on.  And we saw that people discovering remarkably different entry points for meaningful action.

Despite differences of focus, resources, climate, cultures – almost everything they are doing what the dominant worldview says can’t be done – they are liberating themselves, they are making the path as they walk. When we open ourselves to an entry point for the first time something happens: we face fear.  And since fear doesn’t feel good it may be our struggle to aavoid it that traps us.  It takes a strong motivation to face fear, I know.  And to find it we must start with our own hearts.  We must listen to ourselves.  When we do, I believe, we begin to uncover our own unrequited yearnings; our unfulfilled need for community and for effectiveness – our desire to be the problem-solvers we have all evolved to be.  

Because food is our most primal need and our common bond to the earth and to each other, it can ground us as we stretch ourselves to draw in all the interlaced threads – so we can weave a whole meaningful picture for ourselves.

With food as a starting point, we can choose to meet people and to encounter events so powerful that they can jar us out of our ordinary ways of seeing the world, and open us to new uplifting possibilities.  They call us to travel “hope’s edge”

Sermon

Hello, my name is Hilary and I am powerless to go without food.  Let me check for my own research: please raise your hand if you eat food one or more times per day?

Food is so close to home – it is intimate, sacred, scary, and so it’s best if I speak of my own experience.  From the formula I had as an infant to the tortilla I grab from Taco Bell, I have a lifetime of experience with food – as do every one of you.  Make no mistake this is rich stuff – if you find your mind wandering through memory it’ll be -- well -- natural.

In 1974, I took a semester job at a MacDonald’s in Brockport, New York.  The crew was, like me, college-aged or younger.  I sliced onions, grilled burgers, boxed fried pies, stood on my feet for hours, and went home smelling like soggy fries.  All this and 1.60 an hour.  Really, what else could I do?  When I opened the want ads, running my finger down the column marked: wanted undergraduate philosophy majors – this was all I could find.  Actually – it turned out to be a rather rigorous exploration of reality as the company began a major advertising push.  One night we went by bus to a meeting hall in Buffalo for a pep rally.  There was a movie about good service, a Broadway-quality musical review, and cheers.  I mean some of the stores had cheering squads and competed with one another for a Team Spirit Award.  I was fascinated.  This was a secret society – a culture within culture.  We returned to our store the next day ready:

To serve you food that is hot

To serve you within sixty seconds

To give you a receipt for your meal

To say thank you  Or your money back – Guaranteed

We got tags that said that we were “guaranteed”.  Like a washing machine or a toaster.  I was face to face with the world.  The message was FAST and the medium was food.  The medium was the message – and today almost thirty years later the message is everywhere.

My time at MacDonald’s was baptism by deep fryer – full-body immersion in a way of thought that’s become common, so accepted it’s hardly questioned.  Monolithic, it seems as untouchable as a God clothed in myth and dogma.

But it all began rather quietly some fifty-five years ago when America was pie-eyed with progress and a few men with a vision created a way for people to go out to eat in their cars.  On the West Coast, these men began to re-sculpt the American landscape to fit the needs of cars and of a people whose lives would be moved by cars.  It was going to be a big beautiful tomorrow…

In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser describes standing with Carl Karcher – one of Fast Food’s moguls, looking out the window of Karcher’s office.  When Karcher arrived in the 40’s, Anaheim, California was a town of citrus groves and little else.  Today, they look out at standardized strip malls and drive through spots – any town USA.  Schlosser asks if Karcher misses the way it was.  Surprised, Karcher says – “No! I believe in Progress.”  Well, I believe in progress, too.  The first fast food joints paid no wages – it was tips only.  Almost makes 1.60 seem good – almost.

Have any of you been to Disneyland or Disney World?  In Tomorrowland, there’s a show where you sit and watch technology grow from scene to scene on a rotating set called the Carousel of Progress.  The housewife in a modern kitchen is liberated by progress, the child in a streamlined TV school is liberated by progress, the man’s job is made easier by faster machines.

A friend of mine told me about traveling with her family as a child and singing the song they play in that pavilion – because it was also used at the World’ Fair.

"There's a great big beautiful tomorrow
Shinin' at the end of ev'ry day
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow
And tomorrow's just a dream away

We sit in Tomorrowland, as the carousel turns and the Animatronic homemaker sings that there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow.  We watch progress move forward while we relax – but wait – how do you move forward on a carousel?  Maybe it can only go faster: round and round.  The exhibit rolls back to the start, you quiet the worry that there’s no way off this hamster wheel, the lights come on, and you’re ushered out of the General Electric Horizons Exhibit.

Faster and faster the wheel turns.  The faster it goes the more we need faster food.  The faster production has to go to produce it.  We then go even faster to get what we want.  A new MacDonald’s operation opens somewhere in the world every five hours.  Guaranteed. 

We believed in progress – I did – and still have my weakness for it – as you know if you have ever watched me wrestle with my palm pilot.  With all that speed where are we going?  I meet with colleagues, with friends, with you -- and I see the lines of fear and the traces of despair in all our faces.  We are suffering and all our speed is only carrying us faster toward … more of the same or worse.  Of the 800 million people who go hungry in the world, 31 million are in the United States, according to Oxfam.  At the same time, 300,000 people die every year here from problems connected with overweight.  Nutrition experts like Miss Piggy have warned “Never eat anything you can’t lift.” Yet, the average American eats and is malnourished at the same time.  Who has time to eat well?  We get almost fifty percent of our diet in fat and sugar.  The numbers have risen since I flipped my first burger – because the number of people eating fast food has risen, too.  Our children eat school meals contracted by Pizza Hut, MacDonald’s and others and they learn brand loyalty along with their ABC’s. 

            Our food has to be re-enriched, prepared, and served on assembly line as though we’re like our cars – needing only the input of energy to keep moving and moving.  It seems almost as if we’re in a hurry to escape from something.  Or as if we’re being hurried along so we’ll be breathless and helpless -- so we won’t notice.

In one area of the Punjab, farmers had no need of pesticides because their organic farms were healthy enough to withstand pests.  Then – in the mid nineties a fungus attacked their crops.  The government offered free pesticide -- that would kill the fungus.  The next year the farmer’s yields were back up – but they needed the pesticides to kill the insects which had finally broken through the plant’s resistance.  This time they had to pay for the pesticide.  The cost of keeping their yields high was so great that the farmers sank more deeply into debt and were dispossessed of land.  More than 300 farmers in the region committed suicide with their own pesticides, rather than face the poverty and debt into which they were sinking.  How could we make a difference?

            Perhaps we are being hurried.  We’ve had a relatively easy time taking the gospel of MacDonald’s to the world – I recall one in London back in 1975.  On one side of the earth we’re so rushed we grab food – in other places the land and people are so depleted that they starve. 

1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day -- live on it.  Bill Gates, philanthropist, has joined with Proctor & Gamble to the tune of $50 million to fight malnutrition by fortifying food and selling it to so-called developing nations.  Does he know that women who’ve struggled to begin small dairies would be driven out of business to starve?  He’s worth more than 40 billion dollars – couldn’t he just hand out money to the poorest people?  Well, I’m almost kidding.

            It’s not just Bill Gates – we’re all connected by food in our shrinking world. It’s the web of life.  The apparently cheap eats we grab on the run really cost thousands of dollars – in lost farmland, low worker income, diminished health, death by pesticides, increased use of fossil fuel, and disappearing ways of life.  The food we tug here shortens the food chain there.  Each of you has some ideas of the web into which we have been woven.  From wonder bread to malls, from baby formulas to lost recipes, from wild rice to sterile seeds we’re part of a mega-network of agribusiness.  This may be controversial to say here, where the best intentioned of people want to solve the world’s problems with technology – and some of it will, in fact, help.  But also people are working hard in Lafayette to break free of franchised foods and find our own nutritional roots – in some of the richest soil in the world. 

Many people are having many other ideas.  Muhammad Yunu, beginning with the money in his own wallet, made small loans to the poorest of people in Bangladesh and transformed lives – with a goat or a sewing machine and eventually jobs in a growing network of banks for the poor.  But, back to the root: food.  Around the world, there are fresh ideas with real power – ideas that are transforming the world from parking lots in West Lafayette to towns in the Italian Hills from Nederlands to growing fields in Guatemala.  There are radical solutions – like José Bové the French farmer and Roquefort cheese maker sent to jail for demolishing a half-built MacDonald’s in his hometown of Millau.  However, there are also responses in a more moderate spirit – like the growing Slow Food movement that was also a reaction to a MacDonald’s opening in Rome.  65,000 people are card-carrying members of the Movement -- and it’s beginning to mushroom.  The goals of Slow Food are to catalogue and safeguard plant and animal varieties, protect biodiversity, agricultural methods in danger of extinction, and to promote food and taste education.  The Movement’s Manifesto declares – “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.”  One food at a time they are saving the world.  It began as a joke really – but its effectiveness has transformed it.  Today there are more than thirty slow cities in Italy – with shorter work days, farmers supported locally, who’ve taken themselves out of the reach of the homogenization and MacDonaldization of the world.  With the snail as their symbol, they’re people who love life so deeply that they want it to endure and be savored --history preserved in food traditions.  How can Slow Food make a difference?  How did Fast food make a difference?  Slow food works because people find a more satisfying way of life.  But there’s so much more, because food is so much more.  It is the seed and root of life.

At the public school near Chez Panisse, Alice Water’s developed the Edible schoolyard.  It’s a living garden that takes kids off the dole, so to speak, from Pizza Hut and gets their hands in the soil at the same time.  They grow, prepare, and eat this food for lunch.  It’s happening now in schools all over the US.  The result is happier, better fed kids who are learning something city kids hardly ever learn – that they’re part of a cycle of life.  A changing, growing cycle.

            The decision to eat out less and eat slow more supports projects like Community Supported Agriculture which we have in the Greater Lafayette Area.  While many farmers are losing their lands and lands are losing vitality, the EarthCraft allows a group of people – quite a few here -- to support a farmer, retrieve a farm, eat more healthy food, and slow the pace of life.  Did you know that every dollar spent on locally grown food keeps at least three dollars in the local economy?

            Across the Bay from Chez Panisse, Catherine Sneed’s Garden Project transformed the lives of prisoners, police, and a high-risk neighborhood.  A study of 300 inmates found that those involved in gardening were less than half as likely to return to prison.  Amidst emotional and moral victories, and racial justice, there’s a savings to the state of thousands per year per prisoner.  This is growing in community.  One day, 12 of the gardeners walked into the local police station to tell the officers about the project nearby -- the police were wary.  Then the men brought desserts.  Eventually, they tended the yard around the station.  The station’s relationship with the neighborhood changed.  Children hung around to enjoy growing things, families grew to trust police, and weave a tighter community.  More crimes were reported and crime diminished in the area twice as fast as in the rest of the city.  That’s the power of one woman and a garden.

In America, we cherished a vision of ourselves as bigger and more powerful than the rest of the world.  What is that power?  Why do people seem to feel so helpless and hopeless – so unable to get off the carousel and make a difference.  Yet, I’m finding that we are powerful -- perhaps that scares us even more.  Perhaps we fear that we, too, might, in our power, grab the nearest tractor and plow over a MacDonald’s – but we can be more effective than that.

In Kenya, Green Belt Movement women are reclaiming the desert one tree at a time and they’ve planted 20 million.  Now they’re creating organic kitchen gardens, growing fruits and vegetables that provide just the nutrients Gates' wants to import.  When Frances Moore Lappe visited them three years ago the women were joyful – in spite of hardship.  Dancing and singing together, they had created a community, a sense of power and had really planted 20 million trees.  They danced  beyond their pain, toward the power that lives in the hands of the people – living democracy, Lappe calls it.  I first encountered her in 1979 when, a friend gave me her book – Diet for a Small Planet.  I read it on the bus to my father’s house and it changed my life.  I remember the conversation --  “We’ve got a great meal at home.”  “Dad” I said, “I’m a vegetarian.”  “When did this happen?”  “Just now, on the bus!”  I asked: Did you know that it takes so many pounds of grain to make a pound of meat?  He answered – yes.  I was stunned.  You knew?  I’m not arguing that we should all become vegetarians.  When Mark flew back from his cousin’s in Portland with live Maine lobsters I hopped up the food chain – as far as a lobster can take you.  There are farmers who graze cattle and provide healthy meat with lower costs.  What I am saying is that every bite we take connects us with the world.  Every bite is a choice and a vote in a living democracy.

            Here at church if you buy Fair Trade coffee you make a difference.  Instead of growers working for pennies, they earn a much larger percentage and they move to organic farming – which improves their health.  Thousands of people die every year from pesticide poisoning.  As the growers build cooperatives, they use their living wages – to build schools, health care facilities, and improve their communities.  When I make my own coffee I have an impact – small but real.  Even Starbucks has had to stock Fair Trade Coffees.  With every bite and sip, we change the world – beginning in our bodies and families.  Not trickling down – but radiating out with great waves of power.

How many here eat one or more meals per day?  The women of the Green Belt movement have a slogan “as for me I have made a choice.”  We do shape the future.  If every bite required less fossil fuel – and contributed to our neighbors, and reminded us of history and of the peoples who dreamed and baked before us…. If we allowed every bite to be a choice that we make with respect to the interdependent web of all life of which we are a part – not a vague spiritual concept but the grounded truth – if each bite were a vote that we took to shift power back to our lives we would be anything but powerless.  We would be using our most fundamental hunger to reshape the world from the ground up, together.

In the slow food movement, a chapter or group is called a convivium.  Sounds warm as a potluck, bright as sunny picnic, fair as democracy.  Frances Moore Lappé said: Democracy is more than just elections.  Living Democracy is true freedom of all life forms to exist on this earth.  It is respect for life, in equitable sharing of the earth's resources with all those who live on the planet. It is the strong and continual practice of democracy in everyday life and activity.”

It is the practice of living democracy to which I call us now.  In a world of fast food, fast talk, and fast anger there’s no fast fix.  As the world is poised to see whether war will erupt, the same struggles beset humanity – poverty, starvation, powerlessness.  We can change that – at least three times a day.  Or more – if we choose to fast sometimes…

Beyond fast food, fast talk, and speed there is a power that awaits us – we can magnify it together, and expand it if we choose to.  Living Democracy is rich as our darkest soil and stretches far as our boldest move.  There is power within us and among us.  Power for life and for good.  It can bring us back laughing carrying sheaves, and joyfully feeling our connection to all life.  It is living in the ground around us and in our hearts and minds.  Guaranteed.