oatmeal and suffering

Food List

Breakfast: vegan bacon, fresh fruit, oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar, coffee, gluten-free toast with peanut butter

Lunch: vegetable soup with soy crumbles, salad (the stronghold special!), gluten-free/vegan chocolate chip cookie

Dinner: vegan chicken patty, salad (the stronghold special!), gluten-free/vegan peanut butter cookie, green tea

Origin of a food

Oatmeal for me is sort of like rice is for Erika (this whole post steals from Erika!) I grew up eating it, my parents eat it almost every day, and I still like to eat it as a comfort food for breakfast. It’s naturally vegan-friendly, and it’s my favorite cookie ingredient. It instantly makes fruit, bread, cookies and pie better (and maybe comics too).

Its common in Scotland (just like Presbyterians) and this is what Wikipedia has to say about that:

Oatmeal has a long history in Scottish culinary tradition because oats are better suited than wheat to Scotland's short, wet growing season. Oats became the staple grain of that country. The Ancient universities of Scotland had a holiday called Meal Monday to permit students to return to their farms and collect more oats for food.
Samuel Johnson referred, disparagingly, to this in his dictionary definition for oats: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."

I’m at camp this weekend, so my guess is that my particular bowl of oatmeal came from a big box bought in bulk. Not so very locally grown.

Theological reflections

Yesterday, Erika briefly posted about violence and eating (read it here). I’ve been a little fascinated with violence and suffering and food since I read Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil last fall. Southgate seeks to understand how we can believe in a God who is loving and powerful, even though there is evil and suffering in the world. Southgate describesa  need for evil and suffering by explaining the process of evolution that cause parts of creation to suffer, but other parts to flourish; part of the normal process of survival in nature means that some creatures will suffer so that others will survive. Simply, the basic laws of food chains require that some parts of creation will suffer so that other will survive. Zebras will suffer so that lions can live. This is necessary suffering, and we can begin to wrap our minds around how this kind of suffering can be compatible with a loving and powerful God.

Our place in the food chain means that there will be violence and pain inflicted on other parts of the chain. Even when we eat the most locally grown plants, we alter the ecosystem; we impose our need to eat over their right to live. 

In response to the suffering of creation, we must seek to end the suffering that we can, in ways that honor creation’s inherent value. This requires acknowledging and confessing the ways in which humanity has contributed to the suffering of creation: overconsumption of resources, a variety of pollution, factory farming, over-hunting and over-fishing, wasteful use of energy, and others. It requires naming the suffering of creation and doing everything possible to make what can be better, better. It requires acknowledging the parts of creation which naturally cause pain and suffering (as in the food chain) and affirming the inherent value of that part of creation, finding ways to be in solidarity with all of creation which groans.