Category: choices (Page 7 of 8)

Bottomless Pit

August 17, 2014 / Michele Minehart

I love to eat. I enjoy healthy food and junk food, salads and McNuggets (though I certainly have tried to curb the latter). I even accepted Indian food into my life again earlier this summer after avoiding it for 8 years following my trip there. (Turns out it I didn’t dislike the food – it was the aroma of dog and feces which invaded my experience that turned me off.) I snack frequently and look forward to social interactions because they likely include food.

Should I be so surprised that my kids also enjoy it? I’m thrilled about this. So far, they eat with a broad palate. We make lunches of sliced bell peppers, cucumbers and hummus or soups. A bean and rice bowl is met by willing mouths. And, like their parents, my kids enjoy dessert. I try very hard to approach all food – even those made of dairy or including gluten, which we avoid – as gifts so we don’t have “bad food” and “good food”. It’s all good. Some of it makes us feel crummy later – specifically H boy and mama.

This evening Lady C tried to convince me that we didn’t eat lunch. Which is completely false because today was McCommunion. Then we went to a picnic with church family for dinner. I reviewed with her our gluttonous menu plan, reiterating we ate 3 full meals plus snacks and daddy generously gave her one of Grandma’s Monster Cookies before bed. Yet the girl insisted that we missed a meal. (Come on. As if her Mama could ever do that.)

As I repeated our 3-meal-2-snack life, I couldn’t help but remember the many kids (and adults!) in places near and far who ate a quarter of such food. I’m guessing that research could provide evidence that we ate more today than most people in the rest of the world. (I tried a basic google search to find a statistic which would catch the eye of you numbers-driven people. However, I got dizzy and a little depressed after my first search result from the World Hunger Education Service).

We walk a fine line with our kids when it comes to waste and abundance. We want them to know they will never be in need – their family will take care of them. That’s not a worry for them to take on themselves. However, we also want to instill in them a sense of responsibility that comes with our privileged place in society.

“Starving kids in China” didn’t really work much for our generation – I wanted to send my mom’s roast over as an offering of my concern – but I don’t want my kids to leave the house thinking that food is a limitless supply. In our circumstance, yes, we can always buy more. But not everyone can. And when we do that – when we toss it in our garbage instead of our mouths, we are removing it from the shelves and changing the economics involved to get needed resources to the people who need them most.

In general, if a full meal is presented yet not consumed by one of our children, it waits on the table for snack time as a second chance and no snack will be served until most (a word defined only by mom and dad) is eaten. I simply can’t bear to throw away one bowl of food only to refill it immediately with another. Is it so bad to allow my children to feel hunger once in a while? They’re much easier to deal with when well fed, and I’m not advocating a 40-day fast in any sense, but is our easy access to nutritious food standing in the way of naturally learning the virtue of self-control and perhaps even generosity?

The Report said that nearly a third of the world population is living on a diet equivalent to $1.25 each day. Now that Wendy’s jacked up their Value Menu, you can’t even get a single sandwich for that, let alone 3 squares and 2 snacks. And we’re not talking about produce. That budget will get you a bag of organic apples for the entire week and nothing else. Can you imagine your week’s groceries consisting of a bag of apples for each person?

A friend of mine pastors a church that spends the end of the Lenten season in a Week of Solidarity to gain an understanding of life for the poor around the world. They use the season of fasting to eat only what $1.25 will purchase and spend time praying for those in need and giving their remaining grocery and food budget to organizations devoted to feeding the hungry. After this evening’s brief discussion, I’m wondering how I might differentiate that for the children so they can begin to understand that the joy of food doesn’t come just in cookie form.

How do we begin to make a lifestyle of acknowledging that our satiation isn’t a reality for all people without heaping guilt upon them every time we sit at the table? I feel a healthy tension is required, one that doesn’t result in worried souls but rather compassionate and aware little humans. I want them to keep their healthy appreciation of food and eat so their little bodies grow strong. It’s not the food that is the enemy: it’s our casual indifference to the waste of it.

Cracked Pots

July 10, 2014 / Michele Minehart

[box] “My understanding is not that there’s a devil outside, prowling Pali Park or the Parkade. But that there’s something inside that’s always bored, that beckons us, knowing what it is we each want most desperately. And adolescents have fewer defenses.”
“Do you think that we’re wired this way? With the devil inside?”
“Yeah, in the same way we’re wired for God. But not to the same extent. I think it’s tiny, and insidious. Like hairline cracks that let in the water that shatters the rock.” (From Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott) [/box]

There is a man, an acquaintance, someone who shared a small (but yet significant) space in our lives for a brief time. After a tough season in his marriage and consequent divorce, perhaps some work concerns and definitely some personal issues, he stood on shaky ground with his immediate family. Rather than hearing he has climbed his way out of a dark place, he seems to instead be burrowing deeper. Most recently his mother died of a terminal illness; while sitting at her bedside he used the opportunity take his sick mother’s phone and send hurtful texts about his ex-wife.

My heart became overwhelmed with one question: How does a person get to that place? One consumed with competition, anger, control, so much that he would miss out on pivotal and significant moments in life in exchange for the brief and fleeting feeling of victory over others (or whatever the drug of choice may be for a particular person).

In our family’s past we’ve dealt with another person, one who seemed to carry a leaking darkness with him through the world. My soul became conflicted on how to feel about the person: on the one hand, he is a child of God, created in His image. On the other hand, my inner spirit could feel something dripping from him that was not of God. I couldn’t put a finger on it, the intangible quality went deeper than the drugs or poor life decisions.

Yet we encounter those other people. The ones you meet at a random gathering and you want to sit at their feet and let their goodness seep into your clothes, hoping to carry home its scent the way Grandma’s soft fragrance of candy and Skin So Soft might stay with you if you hugged her long enough. Our world is equally full of people permeating our atmosphere with the good, the holy, the yes-that’s-it!-ness of life. Let us not be quick to forget that.

I can’t believe that God would make some people, for lack of better words, more virtuous and others, not so much. Something in me wants to believe we all get some semblance of a fair shot. Not equal – many overcome more obstacles in their path – but dark and light can’t be pre-determined in people.

Anne Lamott writes in Imperfect Birds about the devil not being “out there” in the world, an issue for humanity as a whole to overcome, but rather hairline cracks that let in the water that shatters the rock. Is that how it happened with those fellas? As the darkness, the hate, the ugh! of this world slipped in, it created bigger holes. Eventually, often, comes a shattering point.

Perhaps our fragile, imperfect and cracked condition makes it hard to stand up to the darkness. But what if. What IF! What if we filled that vessel of our lives with something else, something good, something stronger than ourselves. The Light on the inside stands up to the pressures of the outside, rejecting the parts and pieces we would rather leave behind.

[box] For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. (2 Corinthians 4:6-9)[/box]

I wonder if every decision we make is a matter of choosing good or evil, light or darkness. When we succumb to the pull of our selfish nature, it widens the cracks. Conversely, when we choose to live by light, it pushes the pressure outward and seals up those cracks and makes it harder for the waters of darkness to flood inward where we might drown.

No one wakes up in the morning determined to live by cruelty and anger. He or she gets there one decision at a time until our vessel shatters.

Get thee to thine Farmers Market. (It’s for the Children.)

June 28, 2014 / Michele Minehart

When we moved here nearly 3 years ago, the first thing we did on the first morning in our new town was visit the Farmers Market. I fell instantly in love. Great veggies (we moved in late July, so the everyone had a great spread), the Leaf & Vine had a “Champagne Brunch” which I instantly imagined our life in 10 years and JJ and I actually getting to go, childless. I came to a tent with the Stone’s Throw Market banner and they had Snowville Creamery milk, a farm from the greater Athens-ish area. Swoon. By winter we joined the co-op and came to depend on their organic dry goods, fresh butter, grass-fed meats and free range eggs.

Today I made a quick trip to pick up my 700 pizza crusts I ordered from Mosquito Creek Farm and was saddened not to see that same white tent filled with jams, granola, milk and eggs. The co-op dissolved this past May because the membership didn’t put forth the energy required to move into a new store and grow. While member numbers were high, shopping numbers were low. We were a group of people who believed in local economy and farmers market foods, we just weren’t a group who used our money to show it on a regular basis.

When we don’t buy directly from a farmer, we likely instead purchase from the same group of products. For instance (note this source is from June, 2009. This has likely grown):

Source

This chart is specific to if you tend to enjoy organic “health” foods. If you’re a mainstream shopper, there are a few more.

Source

Even when you buy organic, it seems that our dollars go to support the same major players of our food supply. Even worse, many of the food we see on the lists above get their raw ingredients from sources that utilize one major player of our food system – crops grown from seed via Monsanto. (So, while Monsanto doesn’t “own” these companies, there is a significant interest in the food economy).

Why do we care? Well, some don’t, and that’s fine. But it seems that this major distributor of goods that goes into nearly all of our food doesn’t want to tell us exactly what’s happening at the seed-level. In order to keep things covered, the company is willing to sue the state of Vermont because it’s about to impose a labeling law to give consumers full disclosure about not only what is in their food, but what has been done to their food before it was put in the package.

Apparently Monsanto has more money than the State of Vermont as it seems to be going this battle alone. Previously, Monsanto won a battle over labeling in California in 2012. That time it partnered with some of the above companies for campaign funds – “The “Vote No” campaign’s biggest supporter was Monsanto, who threw more than $8 million themselves into efforts to defeat the measure. Dupont, Pepsico, Bayer, Dow and Syngenta were also big funders of the opposition, each contributing at least $2 million apiece.” (Source)

The amount the grassroots believers had to to use to get the word out? A total of $8 million, against the $45 mil the big companies put forth.

All of this to say, there is a lot of money in food. A lot. I know in our budget we give more to groceries than our mortgage (though, admittedly, we have a below-average amount owed on our home). But when we decide to spend our money at the grocery rather than the independent baker, farmer or butcher we are giving money to the same people over and over and over. If I believed in their general goodwill and concern for the health of my children and yours, this would not be a problem. However, I tend to believe that the topic of conversation in the boardrooms and laboratories always goes to the bottom line with out much question of “is this proven safe?”

I’m currently buying goat milk for Sir M from a family farm. We facebook each week about when I’ll be picking it up. They give me fresh baked bread and a free dozen eggs, collected that morning, when they have some around. But more than that, when I started giving it to the baby they would message me to ask how the little guy was doing, if he was adjusting well and offered some tips. There is an intrinsic, unprice-able benefit to knowing the person who is feeding and raising your goats.

Buying food directly from growers – specifically ones committed to non-GMO farming practices – is my best attempt to rectify a broken food system. There is too much money and power at play for me to believe that I can simply believe that my interests are being considered.

If you want to hear this from the voice of an analyst, then perhaps consider this:

Category: choices (Page 7 of 8)

Cracked Pots

Get thee to thine Farmers Market. (It’s for the Children.)

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