April
2007
How Many Miles On That Food? (and how many smiles): Bill McKibben Calls the Questions
Bill McKibben did something remarkable at the launch event for PCU’s new Eighth Day project: he brilliantly interwove dimensions of living we ordinarily think of as unrelated, and he set the whole eco-justice challenge in a spiritual context. In McKibben’s take, it’s all about hunger. It’s about our unfulfilled hunger for community in a hyperindividualized culture, and it’s about our literal hunger for the food we need to sustain ourselves.
Developing themes from his new book, Deep Economy, McKibben noted that the hyperindividualism of contemporary American society is almost unprecedented in human history: we have fewer close friends than people had as recently as 50 years ago, we know fewer people in our neighborhoods, we even plan our lives to avoid interaction with others. In significant ways, our atomistic lifestyles have been fueled by the availability of cheap carbon energy. But consuming ourselves to death–eating alone, so to speak–has turned out to be drastically undernourishing. “More” and “better” have diverged. We can feel it, and we are hungry for that missing element known as community.
This is where the question “How many miles on that food?” comes into play. The answer is that most of the food we consume in the U.S. comes from 1,500 miles away. Hardly any is grown locally; it’s uniform, it’s tasteless, and it’s grown and shipped at an unsustainable cost to our ecosystems and to our spiritual health.
McKibben described a “year of eating locally” experiment that his own family undertook in Vermont and how, as a consequence, they got to befriend their neighbors: the farmers who were supplying their food. He cited research showing that there is ten times as much social interaction for people who patronize farmers’ markets as there is for people who shop at conventional supermarkets. So eating locally means eating healthier in several senses. It means making friends and rebuilding the social networks that “cheap” energy and out-of-control hyperindividualism have shredded. It adds smiles, not miles, to the food we eat, making it karmically more nourishing.
Making friends and meeting neighbors: McKibben then turned his audience’s attention back to what are supposed to be the core principles of Christian faith and of every faith. God befriends us, and we are invited to befriend others–to be neighborly. McKibben observed how profoundly un-neighborly it is for U.S. farmers this year to be planting more than 90 million acres of prime farmland in corn in hopes of cashing in on the enthanol boom. Obviously, growing and burning massive amounts corn for fuel (with hardly any reduction in fossil fuel consumption, because of the huge “energy in” requirements for producing ethanol) represents a direct threat to the world’s hungry. It illustrates how not to love your neighbor as yourself.
Noting that those evangelical Christians who have called for a decisive response to climate change have taken a big risk paid a heavy price within their circles, McKibben concluded his Eighth Day keynote address by calling on liberal Christians to be equally courageous–to put something on the line that shows we feel the urgency of the issue. He remains hopeful that a new movement with something of the same passion as the modern civil rights movement will take root within Christian communities. If that happens–and we should pray that it does–we will look back and see Bill McKibben as one its indispensable provocateurs.
–Peter Laarman