Of course, Jesus isn’t around to do this, but maybe someone else could?
I imagine Jesus going to the Supreme Court building and setting up a long table between the two sides of demonstrators and laying out a really nice picnic. He invites everyone to sit down and eat. That’s the rule: you have to sit down. No takeaway. And it’s food that you eat with a knife and fork – or chopsticks – so you have to set down your sign to eat. All the food is in big dishes, no individual servings, which forces conversations with people on the other side of the table. ‘Could you pass the casserole, please?’ At first, not too many people sit down, but the food smells so good and we are so hungry from our demonstrating that it doesn’t take long for more and more and more people to sit down. Just when some of us are shifting in our seats, thinking about getting back to our signs and our deeply held convictions, Jesus serves another course or passes around another basket of fresh rolls and another bottle of wine. When the meal finally ends, everyone is too relaxed to pick up the signs, and anyway they look a bit garish now, so we all wander off home or back to our hotels. It’s only as we are drifting off to sleep that we realise we shared communion with the enemy.
27 March 2013
tags: creativity,
food,
giving,
humans,
jesus
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Re: Enjoy your Big Mac
Just to be clear. The problem with fast food is not the people doing the jobs on the ground, either in the feedlot or in the supermarkets and restaurants – my soon-to-be daughter-in-law works at McDonald’s, and I’m proud of her strong work ethic and the good job she does. The problem is the system. And the system is viable because we consumers all buy into it. At which point someone says, then what’s the point in me changing? What I do doesn’t actually make a difference. I reply with a little boy, starfish and ideas about reclaiming your soul.
2 February 2012
tags: food,
hope
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Enjoy your Big Mac
The billions of fast food hamburgers that Americans now eat every year come from places like Greeley [Colorado]. The industrialization of cattle-raising and meatpacking over the past two decades has completely altered how beef is produced – and the towns that produce it. Responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains, the meatpacking giants have cut costs by cutting wages. They have turned one of the nation’s best-paying manufacturing jobs into one of the lowest-paying, created a migrant industrial workforce of poor immigrants, tolerated high injury rates, and spawned rural ghettos in the American heartland. Crime, poverty, drug abuse and homelessness have lately taken root in towns where you’d least expect to find them. The effects of this new meatpacking regime have become as inescapable as the odors that drift from its feedlots, rendering plants, and pools of slaughterhouse waste.
The ConAgra Beef Company runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex just a few miles north of Downtown Greeley… ConAgra is the largest private employer in Weld County [where Greeley is located], running a beef slaughterhouse and a sheep slaughterhouse, as well as rendering and processing facilities.
To supply the beef slaughterhouse, ConAgra operates a pair of enormous feedlots. Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand head of cattle. At times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white that goes on for acres. These cattle don’t eat blue grama and buffalo grass off the prairie. During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. A typical steer will consume more than three thousand pounds of grain during its stay at a feedlot, just to gain four hundred pounds in weight. The process involves a fair amount of waste. Each steer deposits about fifty pounds of urine and manure every day. Unlike human waste, the manure is not sent to a treatment plant. It is dumped into pits, huge pools of excrement that the industry calls ‘lagoons’. The amount of waste left by the cattle that pass through Weld County is staggering. The two Montfort feedlots outside Greeley produce more excrement than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta and St. Louis – combined.
An extract from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2002, p.149-50, London: Penguin).
2 February 2012
tags: food
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Matthew 6:25
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Absolutely, yes! But if your food and clothes aren’t sorted out properly, it’s hard to get on to the ‘more than’.
13 May 2011
tags: food,
jesus
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Thinking in difficult directions
The thing about thinking about things like God being in control (see The Mustang 3) is that you can go in directions that you don’t necessarily want to go.
Like… what if you started pondering the two trees in the Garden of Eden. If God didn’t want Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and did want them eating from the Tree of Life, does that have implications for the way we live? Does that mean that God does not want us to relate to the world in terms of Good and Evil? But isn’t that the way God and the universe is ordered? But wasn’t it different in the Garden? But…
See what I mean?
For several years before I became a vegetarian I actively refused to hear or think about animal welfare in food production. I had an inkling that it would take me in a direction that I didn’t want to go – away from meat. I was right, and eventually it did. But I’m much happier now that I have followed the direction of that thought than I was when I was resisting.
Are you resisting any directions of thinking because you have an inkling those thoughts will require you to change? I challenge you to grab your bible, be brave and go think the difficult thoughts you have been avoiding.
28 August 2008
tags: food,
humans,
kingdom of god
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How I succeed at barbecues
Yesterday, the Gill family was at the first i61 barbecue of 2008. i61 barbecues are famous for immense quantities of fun and food. Friends who accept the invitation to come usually find that before too long they are part of us and inviting their friends to barbecues.
People often ask me two questions at i61 barbecues. The first is: Did you make these chocolate chip cookies yourself? I reply, Yes, with an appropriate amount of honesty. The second question is: Can I have the recipe? Today, for the first time ever, the answer is, with a complete lack of modesty, Yes, you can have what is probably the best chocolate chip recipe in the world.
The ingredients are listed in a mix of American and British measurements, so you might need to use this.
Get a big bowl, and put this stuff in it:
- 300 g butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup dark brown sugar
- 2 eggs
Mix them all up. Don’t taste it yet; it’s too slimy and gloopy.
Now add this stuff:
- 1 1/2 cups plain white flour
- 1 1/2 cups wholemeal flour. This is important.
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- a bit of salt
Mix again. Tasting is good to do now.
Chop up 300 g of really good chocolate, 2/3 milk chocolate and 1/3 70% cocoa plain chocolate. If you are living in North America and you are tempted to use chocolate chips or anything that has Hershey’s written on the label, resist. Put the chocolate in the bowl and mix one last time.
Grab some dough, make a ball and put it on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat about 35 times. Bake all those little balls for about 9 minutes at 190°C.
Eat all that you can within a couple hours. Store the leftovers in an airtight container.
Your results may vary.
You’re welcome.
5 May 2008
tags: church,
community,
food
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