Holmsie!

Food List

B

Breakfast: apple cinnamon oatmeal, coffee, apple, peanut butter

Lunch: quinoa, gluten-free crackers, hummus, raw broccoli and carrots, unsweetened iced tea

Snacks: banana

Dinner: black beans/corn/tomato and rice, fruit salad, white zinfandel, apple crumb cake
Post-dinner: falafel from a great little place on Emory's campus and Odwalla Strawberry Smoothie

Where did it come from?

I’m in Atlanta for a job interview, and the congregation is providing most of my meals. That means that for this weekend, I don’t have control over where my food comes from; however, the church has been great about dealing with my no meat, no milk, (mostly) no gluten diet. Most of the food has come from Whole Foods, and their company values can be seen here: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/values/ It’s not local—and its mostly high-priced food (and who has access to expensive food?) but I’m appreciative of non-meat food!

On another note, in the heart of Coco-Cola’s city, I’ve managed to avoid drinking anything carbonated—frankly, no Coke product is actually food. Even in Atlanta, I wouldn’t consider Coke a local food.

Reflections

In his “Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World” (a chapter in Bormann and Kellert’s book Ecology, Economics and Ethics), Holmes Rolston III has this to say about humans and eating:

 Some ethicists will insist that at least in culture we can minimize animal pain, and that will constrain our diet. There is prediction in nature; humans evolved as omnivores. But humans, the only moral animals, should refuse to participate in the meat-eating phase of the ecology…

Humans do not look to the behavior of wild animals as an ethical guide in other mater (marriage, truth telling, promise keeping, justice, charity). Why should they justify their dietary habits by watching what animals?

But the difference between is that these other matters are affairs of culture; these are person-to-person events, not events at all in spontaneous nature. By contrast, eating is omnipresent in wild nature; humans eat because they are in nature, not because they are in culture. …

When eating [humans] ought to minimize animal suffering, but they have no duty to revise trophic pyramids whether in nature or culture. The boundary between animals and humans has not been rubbed out after all; only what was a boundary line has become a boundary zone.

I first became a vegetarian because I was a vain teenager who wanted to be skinny; this is only effective if one forgets that cake and cookies and candy are vegetarian. Over time, I came to understand the conditions of animals in factory farms (these conditions have been made popularly accessible in films like Food, Inc. and books like Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm) and this became a better reason to be a vegetarian.

It seems to me that we must seek to end the suffering of animals and also understand where we fit into the food web. Eating animals as part of our diet is part of our natural being; eating animals that have been unnecessarily harmed so that we can eat more food is unnatural to what it means to be people of faith who believe in a loving God. Loving creation means eating with integrity. I’m trying to do better—eating with hope and love.