Slow Food, Real People

It rained over the weekend, or I would have attempted to get some veggies into the dirt in my backyard. I've been procrastinating -- even Michelle Obama beat me to it this year! I finally got a chance to watch the 60 minutes piece from last week featuring Alice Waters and the Slow Food Movement. While I'm sure Waters deserves all the credit she gets for moving sustainable food from the fringes to at least the mainstream media, a slow burn was growing in me as I watched the piece.

What irks me is the mindless association of fresh, local, sustainable food with the notion of being elitist. Yes, I want to cheer when I hear Waters say: "I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist." Absolutely. Amen and amen.

But then she goes on to purchase grapes for $4 a pound and cook Stahl a lovely breakfast that no one that has to get children to school or themselves to work could afford to labor over for so long (not to mention the gazillion-dollar kitchen in which it was cooked). And like a compliant dope, Stahl asks "probing" questions about whether schools can afford to teach kids to grow and cook their own food. As opposed to training them to take multiple-choice tests till the cows come home? As opposed to feeding them fast food and candy bars in the cafeteria? But the whole exercise demonstrates nothing better than the inability of the major media outlets to hold an intelligent converstation. If Stahl had been doing her job, she might have left Waters in her dream world and asked some of the other folks shopping at the Farmer's Market how they balance their food budgets and juggle dinner prep. Here's a clue -- look for the women with kids grabbing samples off the tables.

What the sustainable food movement needs is not a gourmet chef explaining how to roast an egg over an open fire, but a real Mom explaining how fresh and local can be affordable, and how real food can make its way to the table via a few simple techniques before the kids melt down. Thanks, Alice Waters for launching the food revolution. But please, go back to your kitchen, and let some regular folks take it from here.

16 Decisions for Kingdom Living

Well, maybe not 16. As promised, I'm posting some thoughts I have about some key commitments that might help us resist the lure of affluence and materialism in favor of Kingdom values. I'm taking off the Grameen Bank's list of 16 Decisions, which guide their members -- mostly poor women -- in lifting themselves out of poverty . For the most part they are simple and concrete, memorable and measurable.

So here are some ideas -- feel free to suggest additions or deletions.

1. We will attempt to follow the great commandments: to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
2. We will work together to help each other become better stewards of the resources we have -- breaking the power of consumerism by sharing together and talking about how we spend money.
3. We will be better stewards of the environment: waste less, buy local, grow our own food, carpool, etc. [Maybe some of these need to be spelled out separately?]
   
4. We will include the poor, marginalized and those not like us in our lives through acts of friendship, hospitality and service.
5. We will give time and money to help empower people in need in our community and around the world.
6. We will nurture one another's love for God through worship, prayer and other spiritual disciplines practiced together.
7. We will maintain an attitude of repentance regarding our own failures to swim against the current of our culture and grace towards one another.
   
8. We will enjoy God's creation, regularly spend time outdoors and teach our children to appreciate and protect natural environments.

Well, that's a start. Have at it -- debate, discuss, add, subtract.

Lenten Journey: Broken

I'm following along with Christine Sine's Lenten Guide this season. See her blog for a list of others writing on the topic.

I have to say I'm having a tough time getting into Lent. Ash Wednesday was the one day last week I could hang out with my parents before they flew back to Boston, so I went ashless. Since I've been worshiping with my Episcopal friends on Sunday mornings, I had really been looking forward to starting Lent right, but so much for my plans...

I haven't decided to give up anything specific for Lent, but I've done enough of the self-improvement sort of fasting from chocolate or coffee that I still feel a bit uncomfortable reaching for dessert or a glass of wine. I almost gave up caffeine by accident, but decided that sleep walking through Lent might not be the best plan, either.

So here I am again, with all my efforts at spiritual disciplines falling to dust around me. Really, should I be surprised at this point?

I walked the beach again today. I found myself wrestling with a question I'd read in Gerald May's book on the Dark Night of the Soul: In the midst of the dislocation of the dark night, would you really want to go back to the way things used to be? It was one of John of the Cross's diagnostic questions for recognizing a "dark night" or season when God was working in hidden ways in the soul. For me the question came out, would I want to go back to 1995? That's another story altogether, but whenever I bump into the fact that all is not as I would like it to be in my life with God, I find myself looking back to that particular season. I don't know whether I was sadder at the idea of giving up that idealized -- idolized? -- picture of the spiritual life and its consolations or at the realization that I was so deeply attached to that particular set of experiences.

So I think I've figured out what I'm supposed to give up for Lent: control, expectations. Sounds simple enough, let me make my list of ten things I'm going -- oh ... yeah.