Photo Credit: Antkriz, Flickr
Recently, I was listening to an interview of Majora Carter, an environmental justice advocate, radio host and over all woman extraordinaire. She said when she first started working for sustainability, she didn’t really think her work was a moral issue, because we already knew that people shouldn’t live in poverty or that the environment should be used responsibly. For her the issue wasn’t moral, the issue was economics and that was her approach. But over time as she began to learn the philosophies of folks the Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Sojourner Truth and others, she realized that their quest for justice was ultimately a spiritual quest. She said “For them, they understood that oppression is as bad for the oppressor as it is for the oppressed.”
What I found curious in her statement was that despite the fact that we, as a society, knew that these issues were moral issues, we still allowed them to happen. While in school I learned a bit about social change theory and one axiom that stuck in my mind was, “When there is a gap between our intention and our impact, this is a leverage point for change.” I’ve become obsessed with this idea. Why do our deepest ideals and intentions seem so at odds with the reality before us?
There are lots of reasons for this, but one that I’ll discuss right now is our ability to see ourselves interrelated with every being, both sentient and not, in the universe. Majora Carter mentioned this with the idea that oppression damages the oppressor as much as the oppressed. Our freedom and well-being is tied up with those all over the world. This is interrelatedness. Why it is that we don’t see this, again there are a long list of reasons, but culturally one reason is that we identify as autonomous beings, independent and individuated from every one and every thing. Our entire way of being as a culture, the structure of our society, is built on this assumption. Catholic mystic Thomas Berry expresses this very well here (stop video at 1:44):
Culturally we put the human at the center, as the pinnacle of creation. From this point of view, we prevent ourselves from seeing our interrelatedness to the planet. There are cultures in which this is not the case. Bolivia is set to pass a new law to give Mother Earth equal rights with humans. I think it isn’t a coincidence that such a law would come to pass under the leadership of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Culturally, he brings with him a different way of seeing the world and our place in it.
So what does this have to do with food? I tell you! In my post the GOLDEN RULE of FOOD, I presented the idea that the boundary between ourselves and food is not so clear. What is beautiful about the food, especially at this time in history and in this country, is it’s ability to open our eyes to the truth of interrelatedness. Food is hard to avoid, we experience it everyday, several times a day. If we give ourselves a moment to pay attention to it, to remember how many lives, both human and nonhuman, this potato or this spaghetti or these macaroons touched, we might have a chance to remember our interrelatedness.
To be perfectly honest, when I am thrust up against the reality that my destiny does not stand alone, waving like a flag planted on top of a mountain, it scares the crap out of me. There is a good reason we enjoy this feeling of autonomy. There is something intensely vulnerable about relinquishing it, in a world that is full of dysfunction and suffering. Yet still we long for connection, we long to go through life in the company of others. In between these two feelings, the desire to be autonomous and the desire to be connected, there is a tension that usually deflates us into ambivalence. Which is why, despite the fact that we know that people shouldn’t be in poverty and the earth should be used responsibly, we hold back, allowing our ideals to live within us but not without.
The paradox of getting over this ambivalence is doing precisely the thing that frightens us most. For me this means allowing myself to be surprised when I hear about Indian farmers who’ve committed suicide by drinking insecticide because of the debt their GMO crops have caused them. Somehow I think I’m being wiser and more worldly by expecting such things to happen, but in reality I am just protecting myself from feeling the empathetic pain that rises up when confronted with such an atrocity. I’m allowing myself to feel for a moment the feeling of powerlessness that usually follows such pain, like a crest of the wave follows the white foam that crashes into the surf. But soon, I remember that there is power in that pain, because it means I am not dead to the suffering of others and my passion grows to work for their freedom and therefore my own.
References
Johnson, W. (2008). Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World. United States and Canada: Bantam.
Food and faith: Justice, joy and the daily bread(2002). In Schut M., Ackerman D. (Eds.), . Denver, CO: Living the Good News.
Smith, K. K., & Berg, D. N. (1997). Paradoxes of group life: understanding conflict, paralysis, and movement in group dynamics. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.
Stewart, E. C., & Bennett, M. J. (1991). American cultural patterns: a cross-cultural perspective (Rev. ed.). Yarmouth, Me., USA: Intercultural Press.
the SALVATION of FOOD 