Thursday, April 13, 2006

Sojourners Magazine's special issue: food and how we get it

Sojourners, the much-admired progressive Christian news magazine, devotes its May issue to "food and how we get it" (in better newstands, but not yet online).

Cathleen Hockman-Wert, author of Simply in Season, discusses how she made the transition from frugal low-cost food shopping -- in the tradition of the Mennonite More-with-Less Cookbook -- to a new willingness to pay more for food that meets her principles.
I still value frugality.... But price is no longer my first consideration. I want my food to have good stories. A priceless benefit of going local is that I can know those stories: I can ask my farmer.
Bethany Spicher Schonberg writes about the changing retail scene in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington (where our family lived until moving to Boston in 2003). At the end of our block on Holmead Place, where there once was a community garden in a lot that had been empty for decades, there is now a brand new Super Giant mega-food-store.
And what makes you guilty anyway? "Shopping at giant," I said suddenly. "I feel guilty about shopping at Giant."
Cathy C. Campbell meditates on the line from the Lord's Prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread."
The more ease and confidence we have in acquiring food, the easier it is to miss the radical edge that cuts through this prayer. As we appreciate this edge, our eyes open to the power of God's economy of grace to feed the world with the food that genuinely delights and satisfies.
Tom Philpott, a journalist and farmer who we quote frequently in this weblog, writes about a neighborhood farm in Brooklyn. Bryan Beiler writes "The Tao of Dumpster Diving."
"What is this -- some kind of school project? You guys aren't homeless, are you?" asked the clean-cut young policeman with well-gelled hair. His confusion was understandable. Actually, the first thing he said was, "You're eating out of the garbage? That's disgusting."
And much more.

Interesting links in sidebars and advertisements include: Slow Food U.S.A., the Foods Resource Bank, FoodRoutes, the Community Food Security Coalition (already in our sidebar), the Presbyterian Hunger Program, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and Bread for the World.