Reverend Darriel Harris presents a Christian perspective on food. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About Reverend Darriel Harris

Darriel Harris, MA, is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Health Behavior and Society. His research interests are in faith-based health communications, neighborhood related health factors, social determinants of health, and community-based participatory research. Darriel worked for the Center for a Livable Future as project coordinator for the Baltimore Food and Faith Project before matriculating as a PhD student. He also created a faith-based curriculum for healthy eating that has been used in more than 25 Baltimore churches. Darriel has worked as a health missionary in South Sudan, where he created a Bible-based curriculum to address a range of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Darriel holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Morgan State University, an MA in Organizational Management from The George Washington University, and a Masters of Divinity degree from Duke University. He is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church and currently serves as senior pastor of Newborn Community of Faith Church in Baltimore, Md. Debra Roter, DrPH is his doctoral adviser.

Transcript

My name is Reverend Darriel Harris, and I am student at Johns Hopkins and also a founding member of the Black Church Food Security Network, and a pastor at church in Baltimore called the Newborn Community of Faith Church.

So I love Baltimore. I was born there. My love for Baltimore is kind of forged, not of the soil but out of joyous memories. And it’s such that I can’t escape it. I spent some time away from Baltimore. I was here in Durham for divinity school. Then I was in Africa, living there, meeting my wife and then I came back to Baltimore and I just wanted to love the city and really I wanted the city to love me.

So I took a job at Johns Hopkins Center for Livable Future. I was managing a project called the Baltimore Food and Faith Project. One of the things that the Center for Livable Future does is they map food environments. Here you see three maps. Here you see the food environment map. That map has the deep red speckles on the kind of like the elbows of the city. That’s we call these area, at the time it was the term food deserts. So CLF made this map and that map was it told us all the areas in the city that where healthy food was not available. And these, when we say healthy food not available, we mean blatantly unavailable, right? There’s other places in the city where healthy food is a challenge, But in these areas, it was beyond a challenge, it was unreasonable to expect that anyone who lives in these areas were to ever eat healthy food, regularly at least.

And then I found another map. The one you see in the middle, which is a race map. The dark spaces are the spaces that where black people have the highest concentration. So when the darkest of the spaces black people make up 95% or more of the residents and then in the lighter spaces is close to zero, right? When I look at the food environment map and then I look at the race map then I see the overlay where the places that are the blackest are also the places where there’s inadequate healthy food supply. I’m going to overlay that on top of the life expectancy map, and then I see the places that have the least availability of healthy food, which are also the black places, are also the places where people are dying the youngest, and so in the race map, the places that are the deepest red, you’re dying the youngest. And if it’s the places that are the brightest green you’re living the longest.

I pastor a church that’s in one of those deep red spaces. In that space, the average life expectancy at birth is 20 years younger than the places that are in deep green. This is in the same city. We’re drinking the same water. We have the same Mayor, same City Council, but very different results, very different experiences in terms of the life course. My dear friend, Reverend Dr. Heber Brown, he likes to say as we are talking about food deserts. “That’s not just a food desert over there, man. It’s also an employment desert. It’s a power desert. It’s a life desert.” And that is probably the most right description.

The term food desert is kind of like an antiquated term. No one uses that term anymore, especially not in Baltimore, or anywhere anybody’s working on this food system. Now we use a term called food apartheid, because it most aptly demonstrates the political nature of what is happening and that it falls upon along racial lines. And the fact that it is in fact a created environment. It didn’t happen organically, right?

People have thought these things through. For example, if you live in the dark red area in Baltimore, like the area where my church is, the liquor stored density is twice the city average. It’s almost twice the average of the bar district within the city. The tobacco outlet density is well above the city average. The rat infestation, the calls people are making to 311, the City Council, asking them to come help with rat problems, almost five times a city average, right? The list goes on and on and on. You’re more than twice as more likely to be a victim of a crime if you live in that neighborhood. There’s so many statistics, but the general point is that you’re having a hard life if you live in one of these deep red neighborhoods. And if you live in one of these bright green neighborhoods, life can be dandy. So what did we do about it?

My church, the Newborn Community of Faith Church, under the direction of the previous pastor, Elder CW Harris, created a farm, and it’s called the Strength to Love 2 Farm. And as our problems within our neighborhoods and in our city are manifold, it’s impossible to just focus on one thing, right? So whenever we tackle an issue, it’s always trying to tackle multiple layers. And so we have Strength to Love 2 Farm. And that farm is of course growing food. It’s right in the middle of a very blighted area of Baltimore. The area’s not all bad. There’s some great things happening in the area. But this area has been made famous by the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. So this is the neighborhood that Freddie Gray is from.

So back to the 1.5 acre farm. It intentionally hires citizens returning from incarceration or other people would have a hard time finding employment. We do job training, really we allow people to have a job that is dignifying. That pays them and where they are respected and they can contribute back to their neighborhood. We grow this food, we sell it to high end retailers and we also make a portion of the food available to people in the neighborhood so they can eat it and enjoy it and benefit from that.

And then next we have the Black Church Food Security Network. So the Black Church Food Security Network is a project that was really a brainchild of a Reverend Dr. Heber Brown. He came to myself and a lady farmer named Alia Fraser. And we sat down and we talked it over and we said, okay let’s create this network where we’re going to bring produce grown primarily from African American farmers and sell them within African American churches. And this was our first church soil to sanctuary farm stand. It’s happening inside a church that’s on North Avenue, which is one of the infamous streets in Baltimore City during one of their regular gathering times. Alia Fraser is the one that’s pictured there. She’s selling the produce that she grew on her farm that is, at the time it was, she was growing this food on Harriet Tubman’s ancestral land on the Eastern shore of Maryland. This was highly significant for us. And for us, we named this network the Black Church Food Security Network and it had to be the Black Church Food Security Network because the people who are most affected by the problem are black people, frankly. And there’s a lot of black churches in that space.

One of the things that we wanted to see is we wanted the imagination of people who are living in depressed areas to see that they can solve some of their own issues. It doesn’t take a outsider to come in and rescue them. We wanted to broaden that imagination. So we named it the Black Church Food Security Network. We worked intentionally with black farmers and it was led by black pastors. And then we have non non-black allies who partner with us who are willing to get behind the vision and to support the work, and we welcome and are grateful for that.

All right, so the solutions is now love of neighbor. Of course, within Christianity, love of neighbor is the central tenant. And so I’m naming the solution love of neighbor because the two should be hand in hand, right? We have to stop imagining solutions that are not loving. The solutions have to be loving. So the first solution I like to say is the de-clustering of poverty. Most of the people who live in high-density poverty areas did not choose to live there. They were kind of assigned there. And that assignment of people to housing – the housing doesn’t have to be in places where there’s already large amounts of stress. If someone wants to build a low income housing in your neighborhood or adjacent to your neighborhood, don’t fight them. Let them build that complex so that all the problems of the city are not clustered in these areas that are pretty much primarily for black people, right? We just should spread it around.

Okay, and then the second thing you want to do is support local black farmers and food efforts, right? There’s a lot of people in the city that are working on this in cities all across America. Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, Milwaukee, all over the place. There are people who are doing these efforts and we really need to support them, give them the funding, give them the moral support that they need so they can be successful.

And then the last thing that I like to raise up is that we have to address food affordability. So right now to buy, you can buy 10 chicken nuggets from burger king for $1, or I can buy a pound of lettuce for $5-6. The chicken nuggets seem a lot more attractive, right? But the reason why that’s cheap is because of subsidies. And so either we need to tamp down some of the subsidies for meat suppliers or we need to ramp up the subsidies for vegetable growers so that there can be some type of price equity and people can kind of lean towards the thing that is actually beneficial towards them and not lean towards the thing that is destructive. All right, thank you.

Reverend Canon Robert Two Bulls discusses food, faith, food sovereignty and economic development. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About Reverend Canon Robert Two Bulls

Reverend Canon Robert W. Two Bulls is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (aka, Oglala Sioux), who reside on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, in what is left of our original homeland. In 1986, Robert moved to Washington, DC, to live in intentional community and to renovate town houses in the Shaw Street Neighborhood of Inner-City DC with Manna, Inc. He attended the University of Maryland and earned a degree in American history. He also developed his creative side, still very much part of his vocation as a priest, and worked as a sign writer, calligrapher, and logo designer. He explores the connection that exists between art and spirituality. His vocation and ministry is working with the Native Peoples of this land as an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. He attended seminary in NYC and was ordained to the priesthood in 2001 in Los Angeles, CA. He currently works in the inner city, urban and reservation settings.

Summary

It’s an honor to be up here to be able to speak to you all. My name is Robert Two Bulls. It’s actually the Reverent Canon Robert Two Bulls. I’m an episcopal priest, and we’re quite fond of titles and stuff in the episcopal church. So, I carry a number of them.

I come from the Oglala Lakota Oyate. I’m an enrolled member there of Pine Ridge Reservation in South Western Dakota. I’m also a son of a priest. My dad’s a retired episcopal priest as well, so. I come from that line of individuals who always worked with their own people. So, that’s how I grow up.

I think one thing I learned in my work this last 30 years of living in the place that I have lived is that for ghost people is that when you see us on the street, you don’t see us. He walked passed us, it doesn’t register. That individual might be native, that individual might be from a particular tribe. So, it’s a term that came about by some of these writers up in Canada for its nation’s people who talk about that and a majority of our folks, native people live in the cities and urban areas. So, when people think about native people, they think about the reservation. They don’t think about the urban native folks which I’ll argue that its own identity, depending on where you’re at, Minneapolis, St. Paul. It’s different than Los Angeles, where I spent time at working with the urban population there. I lived in DC, which is a whole different group of people. They’re what we call professional native folks or highly educated workers in the government and whatnot.

So, doing this food ministry, you know, we started “First Nations Kitchen” exactly 10 years ago. We spent the first two-years raising the funds, getting people on board and whatnot, and meeting, and putting together a group of individuals who then we started batting around ideas. My first idea was that will just be your record soup kitchen because that’s what I did a lot of work in places I’ve been, whether it was in LA, or New York City, or DC. You know, these getting people through, feed as many people as you possibly can in a short period of time. So, we decided that what we would do is have people come in, sit down, and we would serve them. And we have various faith communities that come in. And we tell them that, “You know, when you serve food, and if you have nothing to do, sit down, and break bread with these individuals, and start listening to their stories, and you tell them your stories and then through the connection a community is made.” And that’s all about respecting the dignity of every human being.

You know, when I talk to our guests, that’s what we call them. We refer them as our guests. When I talked to them, some of these individuals say, “This is the best meal I have all week.” Because we serve indigenous organic food. That means we don’t serve cow, pig, or chicken. It’s all indigenous, meaning it’s buffalo. We get wildlife from the Red Lake Nation, we get wild rice from the wider Leech Lake folks up in Northern Minnesota. We’re starting to work now with some of the tribes that raise buffalo to start using from them. They’re what they raise. We’ve been serving a lot of turkey lately which is not pumped with all that stuff. So, it’s all good, healthy meals that we try to serve. And of course, organic. We procure that from the local Co-op food partners who supplies the groceries around the Twin Cities. And we give it all away. Whatever’s left-over, we give it all the way to the folks that show up. So, we try to do this every Sunday. We’ve been doing it for the last 10 years.

We just celebrated our 10th anniversary last two weeks ago. And so you know, we continue to do this ministry, and I think what’s really interesting for me is that we’ve been working with some of the local folks and trying to help them out economically. We have this woman who makes pies in our kitchen, and she’s trying to start her own business doing that and so she makes really great pies. And then she sell him for like 25 bucks a pie, and she gets all these orders. And so her next step is hopefully she’ll find her own space to really start our business. And we charge her only what she could afford. And I tell her “Well, you know if you could afford this much, that’s great. If not, it’s fine.” We’re not here to make money, or a church, or a building. Let’s utilize the space.

Back in 2000, this building was renovated top to bottom, and it was… Let’s hope that they would start this meal program, but it never got off the ground. Primarily because of money. So, when I interviewed for that’s position, that’s what really grabbed me right away is that they already have the kitchen. It’s already commercial grade, and that’s the major hurdle right there. It gets by all the local laws and whatnot. And so when we started this, the next step is to use this kitchen every day, rather than just on a Sunday. So, that’s where we’re at now.

We just hired a young Ojibwa woman who’s going to do more with connecting more with the local native organizations as well as other reservation in Minnesota. And then we’ll start making more connections with the tribes that are either have their own garden projects, or raising buffalo, or canning salmon, or whatever. That’s what we’re trying to do at this point.

When I studied history, I think about this whole idea of ghost people. I think about how you can have your ghost scared away. I think it back to when you hear the things being shared, and heard, and things I’ve been reading. My wife’s Scott Irish descent. She’s from Georgia, and her mother is from the Appalachian region. And they have all these books that they have inherited. So, one time I was looking through, and it’s a history of Raven County, Georgia. I’m looking at the first chapter in it, it says, “Well, there used to be these Indians live in here, but they’re no longer here, but there’s all this land. It’s the forests already cleared, and fields already to be growing crops, and harvest, and all these. It’s all there.” But it doesn’t say, “Well, who cleared those forests? Who planted those gardens? Who did that?” That was probably the creek. And you hear those kinds of stories. And then when you get to Minnesota, it’s about the Dawes Act of 1887, where land is open up. It’s basically free land, we just got to go and work it, and it could be yours, free. And what I tell people, I said, “You know, that’s one way to look at that is one of America’s first formula action programs involved, where you could farm this land, and you could step up on an economic level.” And when you start talking to people, they talk about their great grandfather’s, grandmother’s who worked this land, and then they moved to the towns, their parents moved to towns, and then they eventually get to go to the cities to go to the university and get their professional education. And so they have this nice story about connection to the land without thinking about what about the ghosts that were there before?

So, this picture here, we don’t take pictures of our guests. That’s one thing we don’t do. We try to respect them. They just come to bake bread, and eat, and enjoy a good meal, and take home food. It will carry them through part of the week. So, this individual here he comes in. He’s studying to be a lawyer. He’s from the Oneida tribe up in Wisconsin, and he’s been coming in now for the last two years. He’ll finish law school soon, so. He talks about when he was growing up and work in the kitchens, where he in on his reservation, serving meals in the morning. And this is our work that was done by a local LA artists who came in and he laid it all out for us, and so, you know, we had people come in and paint, fill in the spaces, make it nice, and it’s really for the community.

So, when people come by, they can really check it out, and they will talk about the kitchen in our gardens, and you know, our relationships with other organizations we have in a community. So, we really trying to make those inroads with with these businesses. There’s one in particular. It’s called “Gandhi Mahal” restaurant, and we’ve teamed up with them on a garden project a few years ago, and they do a lot of outreach and local community as well. And this picture is just one of our young parishioners, and he comes in, and you know, we have little kids help out sometimes. They’ll help serve and you know, interact with our guests. That’s pretty cool.

And then this last picture is summer volunteers that come through. We have various cooks and chefs who come in, and we’ll cook a meal on a Sunday. In this particular community, the Monk community, we have an Episcopal Church that is all monks. And they’ll come in four-times a year, they’ll bring their cooks, they’ll prepare their meals. The learning curve for them was that they had to cook with buffalo or turkey. So, I was like you know, a ship for them you know, to learn a little bit more about local foods and whatnot. Tthe thing with the traditional foods nowadays is that, you know, a lot of our folks can’t afford it. Traditional food is expensive. So a lot of times that’d become ceremonial food. It is used during ceremonies now, whereas our ancestors ate it every day. That is what we are trying to get back to. Because our traditional diet was healthy. It was good for us, whereas reservation era foods, which was what we would call commodities, it is all the stuff that’s bad. That is why we have diabetes, obesity, heart conditions. All this bad stuff connected with food. So, to get back to our traditional diet, that would be the huge big step for us. Thank you.

A’dae Romero-Briones provides a First Nation’s perspective on food, and was part of a larger discussion on Food & Faith. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About A’dae Romero-Briones

A’dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa) works as Director of Programs-Native food and agricultural Initiative for First Nations Development Institute. She is formerly the Director of Community Development for Pulama Lana’i. She is also the co-founder and former Executive Director of a non-profit in Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. Romero-Briones worked for the University of Arkansas’ Indigenous Food and Agricultural Initiative while a student there. She wrote extensively about Food Safety, the Produce Safety rule and tribes, and the protection of tribal traditional foods. A U.S. Fulbright Scholar, Romero-Briones received her Bachelor of Arts in public policy from Princeton University, a Law Doctorate from Arizona State University, and LLM in food and agricultural law from the University of Arkansas. Her thesis was on the Food Safety Modernization Act as it applied to the Federal Tribal relationship. She was recognized as a White House Champion of Change in Agriculture and sits on the National Organic Standards Board and the Sustainable Ag and Food Systems Funders Policy Committee.

Summary

So imagine walking into this room with all the people you see today but then nobody says a word; and you’re still tasked with improving our food environment for everybody in the room. Then imagine that someone walks up to you and offers you their hand. Do you take that hand? Now imagine the same room as our global food environment, and that the person offering you that hand is an indigenous person who has lived in this space for hundreds and thousands of years. Do you take that hand? And I ask you this because this is often what it feels like to be an indigenous person. Imagine the room filled with not only humans but animals, and plants, and water, and land, and we are tasked, as a people, to improve that food environment.

I work for First Nations Development Institute and we work with community-based food projects in indigenous communities across the country, Alaska and Hawaii. My name is A’dae Romero Briones, as it was said before. I come from the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and the Cochiti Pueblo of New Mexico. Originally I was going to tell you a little bit about the food traditions of the Kiowa Tribe who are a Buffalo people, but we have my brother here, Mr. Reverend Robert Two Bulls, who probably can explain Buffalo people better than I can. So I will leave that part up to him and I will focus more on Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico because I am from a Pueblo community, which is a small Indian community located in Northern New Mexico.

There are about a thousand Cochiti people in this world and 800 of them live in our small village along the Rio Grande. Cochiti people have been farmers since time immemorial. In 1979, in my village, despite the protests from my community, the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam that flooded 50% of our agricultural homelands. Within five years, because of faulty construction, that same dam flooded the remaining 50%. So, within 10 years, my community went from being farmers for thousands of years to having literally no land to farm. I grew up in this time. My grandfather was one of the tribal councilmen. I remember going to meetings with him that lasted hours into the night. I remember falling asleep on his lap, but I most remember his hands. His hands were rough and they were soft, and they had these veins on the back of his hands that popped up like rivers. He used to tell me that those were the maps of our homelands and that the only way that you could get those hands was to put your hands in the water and the dirt and the earth will mold those maps on the back of your hands.

For my community, it was a very hard time. It was a time of reflection and critical questioning. The question we were asking is who would we be as people if we could not farm? Similar to the questions that we see the global food community asking today. The answers for my community were that we could not exist without access to our homelands and the foods that made us Cochiti people. Despite the threats and the intimidation, my community took the United States to court. Took on the largest military branch to court. We won.

Eventually the US Government decided to offer my community compensation for the agricultural lands lost, but my community said, “No, we don’t want money, we want the restorations of our agricultural homelands.” In 2001, my community finally had a place where we could farm again. So we started off on the long journey of trying to reconnect our older generations of farmers, who hadn’t farmed for 30 years, to our younger generation of Cochiti people, who are now avid workers in a cash economy, in towns 50 to 60 miles away. And really that’s how I entered into this food space.

I eventually married a man who was Pomo Coast Miwok and Native Hawaiian from California, and we moved to his homelands in Lodi, California. California is one of the most progressive and environmentally-conscious states in the Union. I know I have my California sister here, but it has one of the harshest and most brutal histories, indigenous histories in this country. So I live in the California Delta which is home to the Yokuts, the Miwoks, the Tummukans, but these are names that are not federally or state recognized. California says there are no tribes within the California food basket, which is the central valley of California, or along the coast that are quintessentially California.

I’m going to tell you the story about the salmon because people in California are from the Salmon Nation. We have the Buffalo Nation. I come from the Corn Nation. We have the Salmon Nation people. The story of the salmon is a pretty important one because we learn from the salmon. And I’m telling you this story because my husband and I just took our children out to go fishing on the river of the Sacramento. We told our children the story of the salmon, and the salmon is the chief of the fish. They marry both the ocean and the land, and they basically gather at the mouth of the bay. Back in the day, they say they used to gather in the millions, that there would be so many salmon that you could hear the songs ring and echo throughout the bay. It was like a rattling sound, and they called it the Song of the Salmon, The salmon gathered, and they go up the current, and they push past the sea lines, and they push past the osprey, and they push past the eagles, they push past the fishermen until they make it to the rivers, to the waterfalls. In those waterfalls, they jump and they fall, they jump and they fall, and they jump and they fall, until finally they make it over the waterfalls. And then finally they’re pushing up against the current, and finally they make it to the base of the mountain where they pump in these eggs into the land. And then they die, and then their bodies float down that river, and eventually they feed all the creatures that they’ve once passed. And eventually they become part of the land and they feed the plants that eventually feed the people. And California is literally built upon thousands and thousands of years of the Salmon Nation.

When we think about this story, and we tell my kids this story, we take them out and we go fishing, and those fish that my children catch, eventually we eat. And then our existence is then connected with the existence of the salmon. That salmon journey then becomes the journey of my children – but that’s not the end, because those salmon eggs will eventually hatch and those small baby salmon will float with the current back to the ocean until it’s their time to return to their place of creation. And in that story we learned that the older generation of salmon creates the memory that these younger generation of salmon will eventually have to call upon. So we learned from the salmon, and when my daughter goes to that river and she watches the salmon, she’s learning the language without words. She’s learning when the salmon don’t return in their regular numbers. She is learning when fewer bodies float down that river. She is learning when the salmon are smaller, and it’s a conversation and a language that has lasted for generations. And it’s a language that she will eventually have to teach to her children so that regardless of whether state or federal, federal law allows her to do that. She is responsible for learning that language. And I am responsible for teaching her that language. We do this, not because we have to just nourish our bodies, but we do this because eventually we hope that the salmon will again gather in the numbers that we can all hear that salmon crossed the bay again. Thank you.

lauren ornelas discusses her advocacy and activist work with the Food Empowerment Project. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About lauren ornelas

lauren Ornelas is the founder/director of Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.), a vegan food justice nonprofit seeking to create a more just world by helping consumers recognize the power of their food choices. F.E.P. works in solidarity with farm workers, advocates for chocolate not sourced from the worst forms of child labor, and focuses on access to healthy foods in communities of color and low-income communities. lauren has been active in the animal rights movement for more than 30 years. She is the former executive director of Viva!USA, a national nonprofit vegan advocacy organization that Viva!UK asked her to start in 1999 and for which she investigated factory farms and ran consumer campaigns. In cooperation with activists across the country, she persuaded Trader Joe’s to stop selling all duck meat and achieved corporate changes within Whole Foods Market, Pier 1 Imports, and others. Watch her TEDx talk on “The Power of Our Food Choices.”

Summary

I’m Lauren Ornelas, and I’m the founder and executive director of a non-profit called Food Empowerment Project. I want to thank you all for having me here. I kind of feel like I’m coming from a different place from many people as I don’t, although I’m originally from Texas and now I live in California, I don’t have much relationship with even food or land. I don’t even like to eat that much. But I have always seen food as is a tool for social change. That comes from being a very proud Mexican and being raised with a great boycott. As well as being involved in the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. And from seeing food more as something to help create positive change in the world and trying to encourage people to eat their ethics.

So my organization is a vegan food justice organization and we promote veganism for the animals. We also create tools to help educate consumers and our goal is try to connect the issues. So as a vegan organization, we are encouraging people to eat more plants, and therefore we feel we have a responsibility to talk about farm workers and how farm workers are treated in the food supply. A big part of our work is also farm worker justice issues where we work on policy changes.

We just got a policy that had been in the state of California that was impacting the educations of children of farm workers for decades – we finally got that changed. We also do things like school supply drives for the children of farm workers, and we don’t see that as an act of charity. We see that as instead as a way to help right an injustice that’s taking place against farm workers across the country.

We also work on trying to get people not to buy chocolate from slavery and child labor. So we create tools to help people know where their chocolate comes from, to know if they want to eat their ethics, to not be buying chocolate sourced from those areas. We’re just trying to connect all these various forms of oppression and to show how they’re all connected and sometimes the same root of oppression comes from the same place.

Our last area is working on lack of access to healthy foods in communities of color and low-income communities, and as Rev. Joyner mentioned, I mean it’s not just lack of access. So in our work, we do assessments. We also go out and do focus groups, so we started this work because where I lived in San Jose, which ironically is known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, is where Cesar Chavez got his organizing start. I lived in an area where I had two liquor stores across the street where I worked and I lived downtown. I gathered up our volunteers and we did an assessment on the community, and we compared high-income and low-income areas, and knew what we’d find. But we knew we needed data and statistics in order to prove what we already knew, Because we knew people were only going to listen to that. Then we followed up and we did focus groups. We follow environmental justice principles. We don’t go into somebody else’s community unless they want us there. For example, I went to an event and met later with one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party, David Hilliard, and told him about our work, and he was like: “Will you please come to my community in Vallejo, California and tell me what you see are the issues here.” So that’s where we’ve been doing our work for several years now. And what we found in all of these focus groups is that one of the biggest contributing factors is living wages. As an organization that is looking at farm workers justice as well as lack of access to healthy foods, we really don’t want food to become any cheaper. Because people are already not being paid what they should be paid for the work that they’re doing. So this is why we say to everybody who wants to help change the system is we have to fight for living wages, whether it be fast food, Walmart workers, city, state, whatever, we have to increase living wages. And again, in the communities as most of us are working in, tend to be time poor and cash poor, this is one way – when people are working multiple jobs, that we can have them working less jobs and spending more time with their families if they can make more money.

We also found in our work that corporations have been one of the problems for people experiencing access to healthy foods. This becomes a touchy situation when you deal with churches and even groups that work with people who experience homelessness, work with some of these corporations to get food. In the community that we’re working in currently, Safeway, which was located in a community of color, left that location and relocated miles away. And when they left their former property, they placed a restrictive deed preventing any other grocery store from moving in for 15 years. And we found this to be a problem across the country. We have a national campaign against Safeway right now. It hasn’t garnered the support that we’d hoped because a lot of food organizations also get money from corporations, and it’s not just Safeway. It’s Walmart doing this. And so there’s a lot of food justice groups unfortunately who will not sign on with us and oppose Safeway from doing this. But we have a national day of action on December 10th which is International Human Rights Day where we’re saying human access to healthy foods should be a right and not a privilege. That is what’s it’s turned into in this country and around the world when it comes to people of color and Indigenous communities.

In talking about food and what happens in terms of charity, we have such backwards things happening, at least in our community we’re located in. We’re an international organization with a staff of three based in Sonoma County, where you have winery workers who pick and do the harvesting who are actually homeless. Who live just outdoors in cardboard boxes and pickup trucks. And you have the wineries organizing galas to raise money to give to the farm workers instead of paying them living wages. I mean, this is the backwards society I guess so that people can dress up and feel really good about themselves and pat themselves on the back instead of doing simply what needs to be done, and that’s paying people what they deserve to make.

So in terms of faith stuff, we’ve worked a little bit with the faith-based community. They have opened their doors to us for conducting our focus groups. One of the things that we found as one of the solutions in the problem, are worker-owned cooperatives. Because otherwise, as people of color, we’re going to continue to be dependent on others instead of dependent on ourselves. And finding mostly Black farmers in our community to supply foods for the worker-owned cooperatives. We did six focus groups in the community we’re in and only one person had ever heard of a worker-owned cooperative, so we’re trying to change that narrative. We want the wisdom to come from the community. We pay them for their time in the focus groups. But we wanted to bring this idea up and really explain what it means to be your own owner, where you make the decisions, you make the profits, you make the decisions on where your profits go. That’s actually the big thing that we’re working on right now is trying to start a worker-owned cooperative in the community.

I say we because the woman who’s spearheading it is a Black woman who’s got lots of children and jobs and health problems. So we’re going to try and use our volunteers to help do the hard out where she applies for the grants, where we do all this. And it’s going to be something we all do together, and we are very lucky that we did three community groups to inform people about what worker-owned cooperatives are. Because we have a consumer-based cooperative trying to start up as well, and they’re very different things, and their missions are actually very different, but the faith-based communities are ones who welcomed us to their spaces for free so that we could do all of this. What we would like faith-based leaders to continue to do is speak out about these issues, but also to speak out against racism. To spend more time talking about living wage efforts, and acknowledge that access to healthy food is a justice issue and is part of an oppressive system. The challenging question that I leave with is that given amount of power that we all have at the local level. I don’t know about you but for a long time, I haven’t had much faith in the power of where we’re at federally, and that’s because I see so much of the power that we have is local. Whether it be by people growing their own foods or looking to change policymakers from allowing corporations such as Safeway and Walmart to do these restrictive deeds. How we can join together and work more on the local level and join our voices together to harness the power to create change, community by community. Thank you.

Amirah AbuLughod discusses the way racism affects the food system. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About Amirah AbuLughod

Amirah AbuLughod is a farmer at Stony Point Center Conference and Retreat Center, home to a small-scale farm in the Hudson River Valley of New York. She is also a resident of Stony Point Center’s (SPC) multi-faith intentional community, the Community of Living Traditions. Amirah’s formal educational background is in environmental geography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her hands-on education began as a child in her backyard garden and continued with two years as a farm apprentice. She now serves as a food grower and educator at SPG Farm. Both sides of Amirah’s family have a rich history of farming tradition; a long line of dairy, beef, and crop farmers near the Mississippi in Wisconsin and orange growers beside the Mediterranean in Palestine. Even with the family background, the real seed of her love for working with the earth sprouted when she was a little kid working in the backyard garden with her mom. That seed has continued to grow and flourish as Amirah’s Muslim faith informs her farming experience and as her farming experience deepens her faith.

Transcript

In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. Peace be upon you all. My name is Amirah AbuLughod, and I am a farmer at Stony Point Center, Stony Point Conference and Retreat Center.

One of a number of nontraditional things about the Center is its being home to the Community of Living Traditions. A multi-faith intentional community of Muslims, Jews, and Christians who work and live at the Center, engaging in the practice and study of hospitality, nonviolence, and justice through the lens of our faith traditions. It is also home to a small-scale farm where we grow food as a form of hospitality, to feed and nourish our guests and a space to engage the people and land where the food is grown.

So we’ve been asked in these flash talks to present to you a problem or a challenge as it relates to food and faith and race. And in this short amount of time, I won’t even be able to scratch the surface of this topic, but I want to bring to you the challenge of the land itself, and Stony Point Center is in the Lower Hudson Valley, and is owned by the Presbyterian Church. What’s missing from that description of place and is often missing from our description of place is that Stony Point is actually just the northernmost part area of land originally belonging to the Ramapough Lenape Nation, the original inhabitants and original stewards before being dispossessed of their land through the establishment of the United States of America. We as the Community of Living Traditions are attempting to face the challenge of offering hospitality and growing food on stolen land, land that has been and continues to be violently and systematically taken from the people indigenous to it.

So now, before I elaborate on the tangible work of addressing this challenge, I first want to emphasize that our engagement with the Ramapough Lenape Nation has been built on years of individuals having relationships with tribal members and our multi-faith community cultivating genuine relationships with the tribe. Building trust and genuine relationships between individuals in this work I believe is what can make institutional change possible.

So now onto the work of addressing the problem. As you might imagine, similar to most Indigenous communities, their access to land, especially their own, is very limited if at all. And it’s the true for the Ramapough as well as they continue to battle to keep their ceremonial grant. So when we were approached by the Ramapough with the ask of opening up garden space at Stony Point Center in order to grow fruits and vegetables for their own community, we said yes and entered into an intersectional partnership with showing up for racial justice in New Jersey, and the Ramapough Lenape, and have completed one season of this partnership. Sharing land in this way is symbolic but by no means institutionally permanent. While it is a stretch to call this reparations, our organizational efforts to model sharing land with local Indigenous community has the potential to influence the practices of Presbyterian and other land-owning faith communities worldwide, nationwide, I should say. Due largely in part to this partnership, the first of these efforts is actually in the works as we speak. The Stony Point Presbyterian Church just down the road from the conference center has recently had to close its doors as a church. A proposal is in the making that returns or gifts the land and building to the Ramapough Lenape Nation. The Regional Presbyterian Governing Body will be voting on this proposal early next year. The Ramapough have a beautiful vision of turning the space into a cultural center and the gathering space for Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere.

So now that I’ve given you a very quick glimpse into a piece of the challenge that we’ve been engaging as a community, I want to leave you with this question. Do you know whose land you live on? Who were the original stewards of the land that you call home before white settlers arrived, and what’s happening in that community now? Thank you.

Reverend Dr. Jennifer Ayres discusses the issues of racial inequity in our food system, and the role of faith communities in addressing healthy living. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About Reverend Dr. Jennifer Ayres

Jennifer Ayres is Associate Professor of Religious Education at Candler School of Theology and Emory University. She also directs the Doctor of Ministry Program there. Her research seeks to answer this orienting question: “How are people of faith formed through and for the work of tending human relationships, communities, and the earth?” She is the author of Good Food: Grounded Practical Theology (Baylor University Press, 2013). Last year, she was the President’s Humanities Fellow at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, where she developed her current manuscript proposing an ecological approach to religious education for inhabitance (forthcoming, 2019.) She is also a Presbyterian minister, a marginally-successful gardener, and a child of North Carolina.

Transcript

My name is Jennifer Ayres and I’m a practical theologian as opposed to impractical, I guess, working at the intersection of theology and education and ethics. I teach religious education at Candler School of Theology where every year, I encounter more students who are passionate and committed to addressing the situation of food justice. They come at it from economic and ecological, political and social lenses. And they’re pushing me constantly to rethink my own work and questions.

So Darriel Harris already sort of addressed the point I wanted to make, which is just one. And that is that it is probably time, and for many of you, long since past time, to retire some language that we’ve been using in the food justice movement. And that is the language of food desert. We can retire it because we can honor its contributions and also now confess its limitations. And I will start with my myself.

So in 2013, I published a book called “Good Food” and, oh, I have a little cartoon of food desert, cartoon is Shirley Cannon. I’m grateful for her very powerful image there. In my book “Good Food,” I had a chapter on moving from food security to food sovereignty and looking at how religious communities were doing this work in so-called food deserts. That term, in 2006, got some traction in the US when Marie Gallagher and her team of researchers started using it. It had some good descriptive power and helped us understand how this access to food was exacerbated by histories of systemic and structural racism. But I like Darriel’s term of food apartheid and I’m grateful for the challenge of that because it helps us to understand that it relies on a history. not just of sort of unfortunate circumstance, but actually exploitation, legal codes, legal codes like redlining that have changed how people access food. I’m grateful for this term that implies the agency there.

But in the book, I still used the term food desert. And I did all kinds of things to try to couch the term. So I would put it in scare quotes or I’d italicize it or I’d have like a footnote that says, “Well, I’m still using this term because it has descriptive power. But here are all the problems with it,” or other phrases or other ways of doing it, tying myself in knots to try to explain why it’s problematic but still was a good shorthand for talking about what we know about food access.

You know the critiques of food desert. One is that a desert, despite the fact that this misrepresents desert ecosystems, is a place where things do not grow. It is a way of focusing on what a community lacks rather than a community’s assets. It often focuses on urban environments to the exclusion of rural environments, which also struggle mightily with access to fresh and healthy food.

So as a white scholar, I recognize that food desert undermines local food sovereignty. Using that language, continuing to use it, has the potential to undermine local food sovereignty. It reinforces racialized and economic modes of paternalism. And here’s why. Even as the language of food desert is starting to slip out of public discourse, in many places it’s not, it’s still pretty powerful, a pretty powerful image. The underlying thought pattern still persists. And it assumes that some objective knowledge using tools like maps or economic data or census data is the best way and most trustworthy way of knowing what’s going on in a particular community. It’s an objectivist epistemology. It’s a way of holding the thing we want to know at such a distance that we think we know all that there is to know about something without actually knowing the community. This sometimes, it ignores local wisdom and it fails to do what Donna Haraway calls “a situated way of knowing” by being inside a community, by understanding the people and building relationships of affection with people. It tends to yield calculated solutions that are sort of one size fits all.

And so we have, even from the highest office in the land, initiatives toward bringing grocery store chains to communities, and that’s not a bad thing, but it can’t be the only response. So these calculated solutions are often imposed from outside, involves corporate grocery chains, so still drawing on consumer capitalism to solve these problems. It also draws on work of non-profit organizations whose leadership sometimes exclude people from the very communities that they profess to be in partnership with. It perpetuates problematic modes of charity, disrupts self-reliance, self-governance, and sovereignty.

So a desert is also a fallacy. And in so many of these communities, people have been working to build local food systems for a long time, since before 2006, since before anybody was talking about a food desert. I love this billboard, “By any greens necessary,” and I think it’s a wonderful model. One of the people I worked with when I was in Chicago was Veronica Kyle at Faith in Place. And she said, “Who told you you live in a food desert? Who decided that? When people tell you you’re lacking something, you might believe it.” And so I had another picture of the Lincoln Memorial Congregational UCC Church community garden, where Veronica Kyle and Yolanda Harris are standing in this verdant, blooming, overflowing garden with a bunch of adolescents and they are the leaders with partners who are supporting their work and leadership, their knowledge and expertise is needed, and when I look around this room, I see people from Chicago and Kenita, Baltimore, who, for a long time have, been doing this work toward food sovereignty.

And so my question or challenge is, is it not time for white people of faith and conscience to get out of the business of diagnosing and prescribing solutions from an objective distance and to get behind and alongside the leaders who are doing this work? What if every white scholar and activist who cares about food justice joins a local food movement toward food sovereignty, following the lead of local, knowledgeable, wise experts. Thank you.

Nati Passow describes his work at the Jewish Farm School. This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work..

About Nati Passow

Nati Passow is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Jewish Farm School. He has been a leader in the Jewish environmental movement for over 15 years. Nati is passionate about connecting Jews to the agricultural roots of our traditions and using that as a foundation for engagement in contemporary food and social justice issues. Nati was raised in a traditional Jewish home, attended Jewish schools throughout his youth, and believes that justice work is more impactful, meaningful, and sustainable when it is grounded in ancestral wisdom and practices. He lives in West Philadelphia with his partner Rachel, their two boys, Zamir and Niso, and an ever-changing array of housemates.

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. This is quite an honor. I’m Nati Passow. I’m the co-founder and executive director of the Jewish Farm School based in Philadelphia. Jewish Farm School equips and mobilizes Jews to be part of building a more just equitable food system. We do that in three primary ways. We build the capacity of the Jewish community to live more sustainably. We support the work of urban farms and food justice organizations in Philadelphia. Then we ground these efforts in Jewish traditions and values and the cycles of the Hebrew calendar.

So, a question that I get a lot running an organization called the Jewish Farm School, aside from, “Huh?” is “What is Jewish farming?” Adrienne Krone did a great job earlier of highlighting some of, kind of the core practices. But, I kind of want to back up a little bit and share kind of my theological understanding of what Jewish farming is. To start, we start in the beginning. We start in the garden of Eden. Where God places, the Adam, the human, formed from the Adama, the earth, in the garden to work it and to protect it. And God says, “There is so much abundance in this garden for you. All I ask is that you show the tiniest bit of restraint.” We’re in the garden for like 20 minutes, and there goes the restraint.

The first time we kind of encounter farming or agriculture as a real practice. Different than say, tending a garden is in the repercussions of this act, right? “Cursed is the ground for your sake. In suffering, shall you eat of it all the days of your life. By the sweat of your brow, shall you eat bread.” That’s not the most sympathetic view of farming.   I started asking, “What does that mean? What does that mean for the ground to be cursed? What does this mean for farming to be some sort of either punishment or not part of the original design?” We know that when humans started farming, there were vast implications for what it meant to be human and the human experience. That we could outsource grown food to a small percentage of the population so that we could all be sitting around in this room right now. None of this would be possible if it were not for agriculture. There are obviously a lot of benefits to it. We also know that agriculture has some real challenges. And that historically, agriculture has been one of the most oppressive industries in human history.

I wanted to share kind of one way that I see agriculture manifesting as a curse, or what this struggle is referring to. It’s really rooted in the idea that agriculture allows us to grow a surplus. Which on the on the surface seems great. But, the question is who controls that surplus? How the people who control the surplus have enormous power over other people. This is highlighted in the story of Joseph who advises the Pharaoh. He interprets his dreams and says, “There is going to be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. And during the years of plenty, hoard all the surplus, bring it all in to the palace.” Then the seven years of famine hit, not even the seven years, the first year of the famine hits and all the people of the region come to the Pharaoh and they say, “Please give us some food. Take all of our money, take all of our animals.” In year two, they say, “Take all of our land, take our bodies because we are hungry. We are starving. We need this help.”   we see how quickly the consolidation of power can happen when you control the surplus. I see that as a little bit of a warning to the Israelite nation and the Jewish people and really the world as a whole. So the story continues and the Israelites are part of that. They go down to live in Egypt and eventually they become enslaved. After 200 years, they are freed. They wander the desert for 40 years, interestingly, reverting to a gathering way of life. Living off of the manna from Heaven.  they are about to enter into the land of Canaan. Land of Ancient Israel, and for the first time as a people they are going to become farmers. We’re told that the land that we are about to enter is not like Egypt. The land is different. Because in Egypt, because of the Nile, we could just water our gardens all year round. But, in this land, we’re going to be dependent on rain. We are also going to farm in a different way. We’re going to leave the corners of our field unharvested for the landless. We’re going to leave the gleanings and the forgotten sheaths of wheat. We’re going to center the needs of the most vulnerable members of our community; the poor, the orphan, the widow and the stranger. Why? Because we were strangers in the land of Egypt, and that becomes the foundation really of the entire Jewish moral code. And, in particular, the agricultural code.

There is another reason, because we do not actually own the land. We do not own its resources. We are here in a human design system and that system needs to meet the needs of all members of our community. The beautiful thing is that we have a way of knowing whether it’s working, and that’s the rain. When the rain comes in its proper time, we know that we are doing our job. The reign becomes an indicator of our collective moral wellbeing. And as a powerful tool, and one that having grown up in an Orthodox Jewish home and going to Jewish day schools in synagogue, was never really explained to me in that way, right? Because we were not farmers anymore. So the question – when we look at this blueprint again, what we see is that our tradition.

I try to distill out what are the underlying values that animate these practices in the first place? Then, how do we bring these values and these practices from a very different time and place in history into, in our case, a contemporary, culturally diverse urban context. We can expand that to just say: “How do we bring this into a contemporary context?” Where some of the issues are the same and where some are very different.   we’ve started to answer that question. What we found is by working side by side and in solidarity with people in our community, who are experiencing the most dire impacts of our food system, that is one way that we can channel the values that I draw from our tradition into our work in a contemporary context.

But, the question that I want to invite us all to think about, is how do we do that more broadly? I am blessed to live in a very, to be part of a very progressive Jewish community in West Philadelphia. It’s very different than most of the Jewish communities in the United States. I imagine there are similar in other communities of faith. So how do we work with our communities of faith, especially those who hold up these stories, hold up these traditions, these texts. How do we invite them to see these values and these practices as really central parts of our religious identity? Thank you.

Rev. Nurya Love Parish talks about Plainsong Farm and the Christian Food Movement. Rev. Parish’s talk was part of a series focused on Food, Faith, Land and Sustainable Agriculture.

This talk was part of a Food & Faith Convening event held in November 2018 at Duke University. The event was developed through a partnership between Duke Divinity School and the Rural Church Program Area of The Duke Endowment, the Duke World Food Policy Center (WFPC).  Convening discussions identified several themes that drive the work of faith communities: moving from charity to justice, food sovereignty, and equitable food-oriented development; moving from charity to justice for the land & environment; the need for bridging and relationship building between practitioners, funders, and the academy; and the need for bridging between faith communities and policy. Additionally, several academic themes for future research were identified focused on cross-faith comparative analysis and the broad impact of faith community-based food systems work.

About Nurya Love Parish

Nurya Love Parish is an Episcopal priest and co-founder and Executive Director of Plainsong Farm, a new farm and ministry outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. She created a small guide to the Christian food movement in 2015, which became a website in 2017 and now serves as the primary resource for Christians seeking the intersection between discipleship and sustainable and regenerative agriculture (according to Christianity Today). The guide includes an ecumenical directory of projects and resources, shares news items, and provides a space for cross-pollination for blog writers and thinkers. She co-created the first “FaithLands” gathering in 2018, bringing together land access and transition professionals serving small and beginning farmers and faith-based leaders with stewardship responsibilities for religiously-held land. In addition, she is the part-time priest-in-charge with Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Belmont Michigan. Her first book, Resurrection Matters: Church Renewal for Creation’s Sake, was published in May 2018.

Transcript

So I was asked to give a flash talk about the FaithLands Network. I’m Nurya Love Parish. I’m an Episcopal priest. I co-founded a farm ministry in greater Grand Rapids, Michigan. But even though you’re going to see a picture of that farm-based ministry in a minute, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about this broader work that is underway that has barely begun, and that is still very much beginning.

The FaithLands Network is an interfaith network that came into existence of March of 2018. It came into existence in March of this year through one meeting that everybody thought was just going to be one meeting. At the end of that meeting, everybody thought, oh, we have to keep doing this. At that meeting, we said that this is a new interfaith and secular alliance and learning community seeking to connect religious traditions, agriculture and ecological stewardship, inspiring a spiritual and ethical revolution in our relationship to each other and to the land. It was a gathering of people who didn’t know each other before they were all in the same room. Land access professionals, land trust leaders, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Indigenous, and yet, also, it was a gathering of people that were trying to figure out why they were there, and what they could do together. When it was over, we realized that there was something here that wasn’t finished yet. I got invited by Wake Forest to put together a gathering that was just last month and co-led it with Darriel Harris. That talk was focused on the Christian side of this intersection. But there is no budget at present for any future convenings. Hopefully someone here will feel moved to help with that, because the harvest is great and the laborers are few.

So, this is a screen grab of the Episcopal church’s asset map, which is a new tool my denomination is using. It’s pretty simple. It’s an online map of the church’s ministries, and it’s independently updated by all of the local communities that are represented there. Now, I’m a priest in the Episcopal church, as well as a farm ministry founder. So when I look at that map, I see things that you might not see. I see our church’s average age, which is about 60 years old. That’s one of the first things I see when I look at that map and I say to myself, “How many of the ministries that are currently on that map will be there in 10 to 20 years?”

Then, I also see decisions being made about land stewardship by people who do not yet understand what is possible when it comes to land stewardship. Because they come to it from a position of: “I just go to church. I don’t understand food and land decisions.” But I see something else. I see strategies for climate change mitigation through carbon drawdown into soil, which even though no words were written about it in the Christian scripture, and the church still has not grasped this. I see demonstration projects for what is possible in rural communities happening in church-owned land influencing farmers because farmers have been taught to trust the church. I see land, once again, being tended by Indigenous peoples or being made available to historically marginalized and traumatized people. I see habitat creation on land that is now lawn. I see relocalizing economies, because the availability of church-owned property already dedicated to the work of God, which is health for all creation. I don’t just see these possibilities. I know it is possible. I know it is possible because of Plainsong Farm. So, Plainsong Farm is 20 minutes north of Grand Rapids in Rockford – a semi-rural part of Michigan. Our local community is 96% white people. That’s why this is a slide of white people. But, because I know these people, I know they represent a diversity of churches, Lutheran and Methodist and Episcopal. And, I know they are having a hands-on experience of a parable that Jesus spoke to all of us, not just accessible to white Christians. The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow. He does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But, when the grain is ripe at once, he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come. They’re having a hands-on experience of that parable, which is going to provide wheat for their communion bread, as part of Honore Growers Guild. They are also conserving biodiversity because that’s an heirloom grain. That’s Turkey Red wheat. They are also learning about carbon drawdown because that’s part of what we teach when we do this program. They are also participating in the redevelopment of a small grains economy, because we will blend this grain that we grow as an educational experience with other small-scale growers’ experimental heirloom wheat. But as a religious leader seeking health for creation, what excites me most is that they are learning to see communion with new eyes.

I believe that by beginning to ask where and how their communion bread begins, they will also learn to ask where the rest of their food begins. A spiritual and ethical revolution in our relationship to each other and to land is what God is calling us toward, in my experience as a disciple of Jesus. God has scattered seed on the ground. Look at all the seed that God has scattered even just in this room, and then all of the places that you come from. God will bring a harvest of grace and plenty through God’s will in God’s time. And I pray to be a laborer in that harvest.