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St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, April 22, 2007

Earth Sunday

Our Daily Bread – Rev. David Mundy

Acts 9:10-19 John 21:1-19

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You won your dream vacation and you find yourself sitting in a café on one of the islands of Hawaii. The sun is shining, you are out on the patio, and across the road there is a field of sugar cane. You realize that the sugar you are shaking out of the packet and into your coffee may have grown in the field which is your view. You marvel at how fortunate you are.

What you may not know is that when the sugar cane is harvested it will be put on a ship and transported to California so that it can be processed. Then it is trucked to New York state, not far from where you live, for packaging. Then some of those packages are trucked and shipped back to Hawaii, a total journey of perhaps ten thousand kilometres. If you had known all this, it might have spoiled the moment!

How much do we need to know about where our food comes from? This year Earth Day, and the Earth Sunday many churches observe, coincide on April 22^nd and we are encouraged this year to ask the essential question “where does our food come from?” The official theme is Our Daily Bread: Gardeners of Hope and Harvesters of Eden, which is somewhat long-winded! Most of us will be aware that those first three words “our daily bread” are words of Jesus in the prayer he taught his disciples when they asked him one day about what they should pray. He begins with Our Father in heaven and then goes on to acknowledge the importance of having enough food to nourish us.

In the gospels we are reminded both at the beginning and the end of Jesus’ ministry he needed sustenance. He was hungry during his forty days in the wilderness and he was thirsty while hanging on the cross.

In between those events we learn that although Christians are sometimes accused of being too heavenly minded, we actually have a rather earthy faith. Jesus had an address, Nazareth, a town in the midst of an agricultural area. He told parables about workers in the fields and seeds being sown because this was the reality of the people to whom he was speaking. One of the miracle stories is about how Jesus fed a big crowd that gathered to listen to him one day by the sea of Galilee. The religious authorities got a little testy with Jesus when his disciples gathered grain on the Sabbath one time.

Because Jesus was a peasant and those around him were simple people who did their best to make ends meet from day to day they worked and gathered their food close at hand, including those who were his followers.

Our gospel lesson today is the story in which the disciples return to their familiar work of fishing, probably because it is what they know how to do best, and how Jesus makes a simple shore picnic for them of bread and fish. It is the act of sharing a meal which opens their eyes to the reality ongoing meaning of the resurrection.

Fishing, farming, raising livestock, growing crops, tending orchards were all a part of Jesus’ world, not as metaphors but as the means of making a living and getting fed. Food and drink are essentials of human existence. It’s unlikely that many of us have visited a farm in the last year, yet we depend on their produce for our daily bread and so much more.

Where does our food come from? The glib answer is“the grocery store,” but we all know that there are no fields of grain or grazing animals somewhere out back. Our grocery stores provide for us whatever our hearts and stomachs desire, and in a highly competitive market. So our food is procured from the cheapest possible sources, even if they are far away. Do you know that in 1950, about 21% of household budgets went to food, or about one out of every five dollars? By the year 2000 that percentage had dropped dramatically to nine, or less than one in ten dollars in income. Not only has the relative amount we spend on food dropped, we have become accustomed to huge variety and availability in any season of the year.

One of the principal reasons is that so much of our food is grown or produced at a great distance, thanks to the availability of inexpensive labour and cheap fuel. A couple of years ago our family spent time in Costa Rica, a Central American country which is four and a half hours away by airplane. As we were travelling with a guide one day, I asked about workers who were bending low in the fields. It turned out that they were harvesting cantaloup in an area that was once covered by sugarcane. The favourable climate allows for three crops of the melons each year with a much higher value. Those melons are flown to North American markets and even farther away, thanks to workers who may never be able to afford to fly anywhere on a plane. I read this week that increasingly, fish caught off the British Isles is flash frozen, then transported to China for processing before being shipped back to Britain.

But what if all of this changes, out of necessity? As fuel costs rise and workers elsewhere demand a higher standard of living and concern for the environment increases we may find that what we have taken for granted is no longer available to us. The simple prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” could change dramatically for all of us.

There is a phrase which all of us should get to know. It is “food miles” and it refers to the distance our food travels from field to fork. It is estimated that the ingredients for the average North American meal travel 2400 kilometres before they get to our table. To give you a perspective, that’s the distance from here to the tip of Cape Breton Island

When I was in Britain last August I noticed that this issue of food transportation is much higher on the agenda than it is here in Canada. Some grocery stores actually post the food miles for products beneath the bins from which they are chosen so customers can be better informed. We will leave less of an environmental footprint if we reduce the amount of our food which is transported over great distances. Obviously there are many elements of our diet which won’t be grown in this province, but we can be mindful of what we choose, and ask the produce managers of our grocery stores to do the same.

How can we reduce our food miles or food kilometres?

Some of the solutions are so simple that any of us can participate in them. Whenever possible we can make a point of buying locally raised food products, whether it is the corn and tomatoes at a roadside stand, or apples from the orchards around our community, or lamb and beef.

We can ask the produce managers in grocery stores whether they make an effort to “source” fruits and vegetables close at hand. Durham Region has the greatest amount of farmland of any municipality in the GTA and generates two hundred million dollars worth of farm receipts every year. With all the development, there are still more than 1700 farms in Durham.

Of course, when we buy locally, we are supporting members of an “endangered species, ” the family farmer. Three years ago on Earth Sunday, when I also addressed the subject of food production, choir member Jim Coombes reminded me that he is the last person in this congregation to have a family farm, and we all have the opportunity to visit the farm after worship today. Before long that farm will be developed as part of the expansion of Bowmanville.

We should also appreciate that the nutritional value of the food we purchase locally is nearly always higher because it is fresh. Recent studies have shown that locally grown food can actually be better for us than food labelled organic because it is fresh. And there is less likelihood of bacterial contamination of the kind we have seen in the past few months, which may have occurred when produce such as spinach is processed in huge, centralized plants.

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that the tomato you pick from the vine in your backyard in August is a thousand times better tasting than the one you bought in the supermarket in January.

This is one of those sermons where there are lots of facts and figures, which can be rather overwhelming, but as Christians we can learn, if we want to. One thing is certain. Every person here will eat a meal once this service is over and again tomorrow and the next day and the next day.

Wendell Berry is a Christian, a novelist a professor and farmer. He has developed rules for the healthy functioning of sustainable local communities. The underlying principles could be described as the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities. Here are four of them: