Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church – Unitarian Universalist

The Earth Is Our Mother

October 22, 2006

Earth

Nancy Hurrelbrinck

The earth gives us so much. We forget that everything we have, every shoe or bit of clothing, every house or chair or painting, no matter how artificial it may seem, originally came from the something natural, something that was just there. I suspect that we feel most connected to the earth when we think of it providing our food, so that’s what I’ll talk about today.

When my husband Scott and our daughters and I were traveling in Mexico last summer, we took a tortilla-making lesson from Consuela, a Mayan woman who has probably made thousands of them in her forty-odd years. As we crowded into her thatch-roofed hut of a kitchen, she showed us how to grind roasted corn, mashing it against an angled block of stone with a stone quasi-rolling pin. We weren’t terribly proficient, and she smiled at our awkwardness, but insisted we keep at it until the dough met her standards. Then we sat on low stools around a little table, forming the dough into balls and flattening them against pieces of plastic (banana leaves in the olden days), spinning the plastic with one hand as we shaped edges with the other. Scott’s tortillas came out the strangest, refusing to puff up when cooked, and Consuela, whose name means “consolation,” patted him and said they were “especial.”

Noticing an unopened bag of masa meal on a shelf, I pointed to it and asked, “Es para emergencia?” (Is that for emergencies?), and she replied, “Si, no nos gusta el sabor.” (We don’t like the taste.)

Consuela spends three hours three times a day preparing meals for her family of nine. Using that prepackaged masa might save her three or four hours a day. But the tradeoff isn’t worth it to her. She could be a champion of the Slow Food movement -- which was launched in Italy in 1986 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna – if she even knew what fast food is. Rural Mayans have not lost their epicurean tendencies – those tortillas, by the way, were the best we’d ever tasted – nor their reverence for the food they grow, process, and eat. The Maya consider corn a gift from the gods and cultivating it, a sacred duty. That sacredness is reflected in the fact that their farming methods have minimal impact on their environment – no pollutants released by pesticides and herbicides, no fossil fuels consumed by tractors or trucks, no carbon dioxide released by their operation. The water in their wells runs pure.

Alas, this can’t be said of American agriculture, where we have separated processes that once worked together so beautifully. In removing animals from farm to feedlot, we’ve created a pollution problem: the manure that used to fertilize fields now pollutes rivers and streams, and has been replaced by petroleum-based fertilizers. Their runoff, combined with that from the billion pounds of pesticides used annually in this country, has poisoned groundwater in 17 states and polluted 35,000 miles of American rivers, according to the Sierra Club. Pesticides pollute our bodies as well, increasing birth defects and cancer rates.

An obvious way to combat this mess is to eat organic food. Yes, it costs more. But that’s because, conventional agribusiness not only gets by without making reparations for the environmental damage it causes, but also is heavily subsidized by our government: 72% of our food comes from 7% of our farms. In 2002, the largest 10 percent of farms collected $14 billion, or 65 percent of federal subsidies; the bottom 50 percent of farms got 2 percent of these funds – a paltry $256 a year. Conventionally raised food costs so much less to purchase, because the true cost of its impact on our environment, our health, and our taxes, are not factored into its price. One way to get comfortable with spending more for organically grown food is to think of your purchase as a contribution to the kind of world you want to live in. You can’t deduct that contribution on your taxes, but you are likely to feel healthier, as well as savor this more flavorful food.

Sometimes, however, just buying organic isn’t enough. I’ll explain this by way of describing what used to be my favorite lunch: goat cheese from Satyrfield Farms, spread on sourdough spelt bread from O’Bread Bakery, accompanied by Earthbound Farms Organic Spring Mix.

The cheese is made by John Coles and Christine Solem, who sold their cheese at the Charlottesville Farmers’ Market from the mid-1980s until 2005, when the state Board of Agriculture ruled that they couldn’t sell their cheese unless they pasteurized it. Coles and Solem felt this would destroy both the taste and nutritional value of their product, so they opted to start giving it away. They reap enough in donations from devoted customers to cover their costs. I have known Coles for years, I trust him, I trust his cheese, and it makes me happy to support a local farmer. (By the way, I brought some of Satyrfield’s goat cheese for people to sample in the social hall after the service.)

O’Bread is a family-owned organic bakery located at Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont that makes bread according to traditional European techniques that involve slow sourdough fermentation, affording great taste and easy digestion. Shelburne Farms has been a non-profit environmental education center since 1972, offering thousands of school children the chance to milk a cow, watch a lamb be born, or learn how a wetland functions. My money could do worse. But how much transportation energy is used and how much CO2 is released into the air as my bread travels from Vermont to Virginia? Wouldn’t it be better to buy from a local bakery, or bake bread myself? Sure. But I still buy the stuff. And no, it’s not cheap.

Now the real villain: spring mix. This delicious product contains about a dozen varieties of crisp baby lettuce leaves and is available year-round. What’s not to like? Well, according to Michael Pollan’s excellent book about American food production, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a typical container of spring mix contains 80 calories of food energy. However, the energy required to keep it refrigerated as it’s washed, sorted, packed, and shipped, combined with the fuel costs to move it across the country, comes to 5,850 calories in electricity and fossil fuels. The environmental cost of this tasty product is exorbitant. It’s ridiculous. If we recognized that spring mix, like everything, is a gift from the gods, we’d see this energy-intensive handling as a sacrilege. Once I learned the facts, I lost my appetite for it. And I learned to grow a less varied, but fresher version in my back yard.

This is just one meal. Every time we shop for food, we’re faced with so many choices. A couple in Vancouver, British Columbia tackled the problem by vowing to eat nothing that wasn’t grown within 100 miles of their home for one year. Potatoes were the only local starch they could find, and they each lost fifteen pounds; after seven months, they found a local farmer growing wheat. Formerly vegetarians, they started eating eggs and chicken. They made strawberry jam with honey. And, of course, they created a web site to document the experience: 100milediet.org.

I’m not proposing that we try to repeat their experiment, but what if we started trying to include some local, organic ingredients in every meal. Or cooked one meal a week entirely from local foods? What if we saw every meal as a manifestation of our relationships with people, with the earth, with our culture, with our god? We might grow more and more inclined to follow the advice of a popular bumper sticker: Eat your view!