From Whence Comes Our Food ???

In his Christmas Sermon on Peace, delivered in 1967 Martin Luther King reflected on the inter-connected nature of life. He used his morning as an example of how dependent we as individuals are on half the world before we even step out the door to start our day ... our coffee, tea, bread, fruit, eggs, soap, sponge and so on are all gifted to us from people will will never meet ...

I've often cited this sermon as an example of "why" we need to support the Fair Trade of Coffee, Tea, Chocolate and other commodities, and I've used King as motivation to raise the issue of a fairer form of trade for our farming and rural families here in Canada. Do we dare imagine a economic system where wheat, barley, fish, meat, and even eggs are traded in a way that offers the producers more than a pittance for his/her effort???

Last night at supper the conversation around the table turned to the source of our food, and we talked about where various things come from.

One of our guests said - "I never like to consider that it was connected to an animal, I'm happy just knowing it comes from the store ..."

We then talked about how many people fail to realize that food originates on farms to begin with ... then I shared a concept from the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, that I found in his recent book "Anger: Wisdom for Cooling The Flames."

In his book, Hanh ponders if the rise of anger in our society is owed in part to the rise of mass production and factory farms as the means of producing our food.

He writes:
The Food we eat can play a very important role in our anger. Our food may contain anger. When we eat the flesh of an animal with mad cow disease, anger is there in the meat. But we must also look at the other kinds of food that we eat. When we eat an egg or a chicken, we know that the egg or the chicken can also contain a lot of anger. We are eating anger, therefore we express anger

Nowadays chickens are raised in large-scale modern farms where they cannot walk, run, or seek food in the soil. They are fed solely by humans. They are kept in small cages and cannot move at all. Day and night they have to stand. Imagine that you have no right to walk or to run. Imagine that you have to stay day and night in just one place.You would become mad. So the chickens become mad.

In order to produce more eggs, the farmers create artificial days and nights. They use indoor lighting to create a shorter day and a shorter night so that the chickens believe that twenty-four hours have passed and then they produce more eggs. There is alot of anger, a lot of frustration and a lot of suffering in the chickens. They express their anger and frustration by attacking the chickens next to them. They use their beaks to peck and wound each other. They cause each other to bleed, to suffer and to die. That is why farmers now cut the beaks off all the chickens, to prevent them from attacking each other out of frustration.

So when you eat the flesh or egg or such a chicken, you are eating anger and frustration. So be aware. Be careful what you eat. If you eat anger, you will become and express anger. If you eat despair, you will express despair. If you eat frustration you will express frustration.
We have to eat happy eggs from happy chickens. We have to drink milk that does not come from angry cows. ... We have to make an effort to support farmers to raise these animals in a more humane way. We also have to buy vegetables that are gown organically. It is more expensive, but, to compensate, we can eat less. We can learn to eat less ...

I'll muse about the "eating less" later ... but for now, Hanh's writings raise a good point ... Our food is about more than economic justice. This raises it to the level of spiritual peace ...

Our parents long told us - "you are what you eat," and this Buddhist Master reminds us that there is more to food than the food component ... If we want to attain spiritual peace and satiate the hunger that runs rampant in our society perhaps we need to take seriously where our food comes from, and how it is produced ... Even if we don't take Hanh seriously, his idea of organic, small scale producers, animals living naturally, and eating less are sound ...

The spiritual implication of living such values ... well, I'll leave that for you to reflect on for yourselves ... (Stay tuned ... I have more to reflect upon !!)