Cheap, Healthy, Ethical

February 4, 2020
 
Beloved:
            Twice this week I’ve eaten toast for breakfast because I’m out of cold cereal and don’t want to make oatmeal.  I eat so many eggs for supper I don’t want them for breakfast too.  But mostly, because I don’t want to figure out a menu and go to the store.  Or, more accurately, I don’t want to figure out this $21 menu again.  That’s the lesson of this week:  a budget like this doesn’t allow the privilege of stopping on the way home from work to pick up something to make (or eat) for supper.  I think I have some vegetable soup in the freezer I can eat before deacons’ tonight and hopefully make the store in the morning.
            A food book I’ve finished and recommend is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  The book both complicates and reinforces my intentions to each cheaply, healthily and ethically.  Last week I bought loads of canned food at Walmart and made plentiful meals.  Two avocados, a pound of carrots and a bunch of spinach added fresh vegetables.  I also had frozen green beans from my garden.  A small Aldi’s package of chicken drumsticks was good for three meals, and I ate eggs for protein the rest of the suppers.  Save my green beans which were planted in chicken poopy dirt and transported on foot no more than fifty yards from the yard to the kitchen to the garage freezer, nothing else I ate could possibly have qualified as ethically produced.  All of it was government-subsidized, industrially-produced, trucked for miles and shelved by minimum wage workers so I could buy it for .69 a can.  The system is terrible for the farmers, the animals, and the planet.  It’s not great for our bodies given that we eat what our food eats, as Pollan says, so we eat the pesticides in vegetables and the antibiotics in meat produced industrially.  Its only beneficiaries, as best I can tell, are the five enormous agriculture companies running the system.  Companies are free to make a profit, of course.  I just wish people, especially poor people, were equally free to choose their diet.
            Here and there, things are changing.  Local food is becoming more available to more people, though not cheaply.  Non-profits like Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard are getting fresh healthy food to our neighbors who need it most.  Seems to me mission and ministry opportunities abound for a church that likes food as much as we do.  I welcome your ideas. 
~ peace and prayers this rainy day,
pastor annette