First Parish Unitarian UniversalistNo Strawberries in Winter
A very condensed version of this sermon was preached
by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 27, 2008
I did not write a completely original sermon for today, due to pressures associated with my medical situation combined with having to attend a nearly day-long meeting this past Thursday on what is normally my sermon-writing day. But, I’m not going so far as to re-use one of my old sermons, as was suggested by our president (and I thank him for that) when I told him that I was feeling strung out and concerned to not exhaust myself before my surgery on Tuesday.
Instead, I’m going to borrow from a colleague’s sermon, and share with you my enthusiasm for the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by one of my favorite novelists, Barbara Kingsolver. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her from the pulpit a couple times early in my ten years here because I remember telling you that one of the reasons I like her novels is that they’ve got good sex. This book has good sex in it, too, even though it’s non-fiction. Are you ready for an R-rated sermon?
But, first, let me start with a sermon by my colleague in Albuquerque, New Mexico the Rev. Christine Robinson, a sermon called “Sustainability—Do We Have To?” (from Quest, the monthly publication of the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship, May 2008, p. 1). The answer to the question was given in the first paragraph and it was YES!
“I know,” she says, “that I don’t need to convince you that ecology is important, that global warming is real, that other species are important both to us, and for their own precious sakes, and that the answer to the question “do we have to?” is “Yes. We have to.”
You weren’t surprised? After all, this is our Earth Day worship service, and our seventh Unitarian Universalist principle is (as you can see, if you don’t already know, on the back of your order of worship, at the bottom of the left hand column) that we covenant to affirm and promote “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
So, having answered the question in the first paragraph, in the second paragraph, Robinson re-tells a story that’s so tame it’s not even PG-13. It’s from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh! As she retells it:
“Pooh bear has gone to visit Rabbit and squeezed his rotund figure into Rabbit’s round front door. He has made a bit of a pig of himself and eaten so much of Rabbit’s honey that he can only squeeze halfway out of Rabbit’s hole, and gets stuck there. Christopher Robin is summoned to this emergency. After pushing and pulling, he proclaims that Pooh is Stuck, and that it will take a week’s fasting to cure the problem. Pooh is distraught, but Christopher Robin says that he will read to his friend to pass the time. Pooh sighs, a tear rolls down his cheek, and he says, ‘Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?’ ” Here, I want to chime in: If you remember the writing style of A.A. Milne, the “s” and the “b” are capitalized in Sustaining Book, likewise the “w” and the “b” and the “g” and the “t” in Wedged Bear in Great Tightness. Thus the reader gets the impression that there is a very serious problem, which only a serious fasting campaign by Pooh will solve.
Which is just what Robinson is getting at in regard to the environment, that our American life-style is no more sustainable than Pooh’s honey-feast was. She says, “When it comes to the issue of sustainability, I feel a bit like a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness: a bear who has made a bit of a pig of herself while enjoying all that my host had to offer, and now things are feeling tight, and I can’t seem to find my way out of this fix….
“If I could wave my magic wand,” she says, “I’d put some areas of the world [let’s call them the rabbit areas] on a population-growth diet and others [the bear areas-that would be the U.S.] on a resource-use diet and we’d all tough out the fast together, forced to live in a sustainable way, and all in it together, working our way out of our Stuckness.
“In the absence of magic wands, I’m afraid that our world is in for some generations of Great Tightness, turmoil, and suffering. Adolescent humanity is going to have to grow up or die in the trying. It will have to grow out of its gluttonous bear and fertile rabbit stage, endure the consequences of its foolishness, and find a way to live sustainably on the earth.”
Like Winnie the Pooh, the dieters might wish for a friend to read aloud from a Sustainable Book while we work our way toward a sustainable future. And, for those of us bears on the resource-use diet (most Americans), let me recommend the afore-mentioned book by Barbara Kingsolver, which is going to be released in paperback this Tuesday. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
You may recognize the title as a play on the name of a used-to-be popular “twenty question” guessing game called “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, other” the name of which came from a line in the "Major-General's Song" from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Pirates of Penzance.
"I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical."
The book is the story of (as she put it) “how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”
Her family comes across as very real and very normal: two write their own side-bars for the book—her husband, Steven Hopp, a biology professor who provides the science behind the story, and daughter Camille (age 20) in whose voice you can hear her generation, wry and smart; plus, there is delightful Lily (age 11), the entrepreneur in the family who starts her own egg business that year. When ordering her chicks, she chose them in part according to the color of their eggs and arranges them in her egg boxes in a rainbow pattern, with a label she made herself on each box branding them “Lily’s Lovely Layers.”
They live on a farm in southern Virginia, a warmer clime than ours, but the challenge they set out for themselves is not that much different than it would be here: how to eat healthily of only “in-season” foods from plants or animals raised within one hundred miles from their house, with canning and freezing allowed.
Admittedly, as a fulltime writer, Barbara had a lot more free time than many of us. And they’d had a major garden for years; they were not new to growing food. She acknowledges this, saying “This is not a how-to book aimed at getting you cranking out your own food. We ourselves live in a region where every other house has a garden out back, but to many urban people the idea of growing your food must seem as plausible as writing and conducting your own symphonies for your personal listening pleasure. If that is your case, think of the agricultural parts of [this book] as a music appreciation course for food—acquainting yourself with the composers and conductors can improve the quality of your experience. Knowing the secret natural history of potatoes, melons, or asparagus gives you a leg up on detecting whether those in your market are wholesome kids form a nearby farm, or vagrants who idled away their precious youth in a boxcar. Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.” (p. 10).
At the beginning, they agreed that each person could choose one luxury item for all four to enjoy in limited quantities for the year, on the condition that they would “learn how to purchase it through a channel most beneficial to the grower and the land where it grows.” (p. 35)
What would you choose? Coffee, anyone? That’s what Steve chose. Camille opted for dried fruit. Lily’s indulgence was hot chocolate. And Barbara chose spices, rationalizing that “dry goods like these, used by most households in relatively tiny quantities, don’t register for much on the world’s gas-guzzling meter.” I think I’d choose olive oil. What about you?
In addition to Lily’s eggs, the family raises chickens and turkeys and harvests them with their neighbors’ help. They grow all kinds of vegetables and many kinds of fruits, eating them fresh, or canning, preserving and freezing many. Camille shares the family’s favorite recipes in the book, some of them designed to help you use up a bumper crop of zucchini or tomatoes, and she often provides a week’s worth of menus to show how you can still eat well even in the dead of winter or, again, use up all those zucchinis!
The writing is delightful. Barbara Kingsolver has some great lines. So does her daughter Camille. From the mother, “In my observed experience, boys in high school cafeterias treat salad exactly as if it were a feminine hygiene product…, and almost nobody touches the green beans.” (p. 54). And the daughter:
“When I was little, asparagus season wasn’t my favorite time of year. The scene was the same every spring: my parents would ceremoniously bring the first batch of asparagus to the table, delicately cooked and arranged on a platter, and I would pull up my nose.
“Just try one, Camille, you might like it this year,” Mom would say, enthusiastically serving me a single green shoot.
Yeah, right! I would think. Ever so gingerly, I would spear the menacing vegetable with my fork and bring the tip of it to my tongue. That’s as far as I would get before dramatically wincing and flicking the asparagus down in disgust.
“Okay, good,” she would respond with a sparkle in her eye, “more for us then!”
I decided that even if I grew up to love asparagus, I would always tell my Mom I hated it. I didn’t want her to be right about my personal preferences….
Now my family laughs about my days of asparagus hatred, especially since I’ve become such a veggie hog, they have to move the dish out of my reach so there might be a chance of having some leftovers... I’m glad my parents did their eat-your-vegetables act in a household were fresh vegetables were the norm. If they had tried this with the flavorless, transported kind widely available in this country, I might still be the wincing asparagus drama queen.” (p. 41).
Before I acknowledge that some of you might be protesting that organic food outstrips your food budget, or that it’s hardly likely that we all will become self-sufficient food-wise and, even if we do, won’t that harm the banana farmers in Latin America and the olive growers in the Mid East? and before I try to bring this sermon around to a more spiritual conclusion, I want to get to the R-rated part, about how turkeys have sex. Or don’t.
Did you know that 99 percent of the 400 million turkeys Americans eat are of a single, quick-fattening breed: the Broad-Breasted White, which was been bred for the industrial-scale setting? The ability to fly, forage and mate was bred out because those abilities are useless to a creature packed wing-to-wing with thousands of others, all destined to be slaughtered before they’re one year old.
Explains Kingsolver, “The scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex.”
“So how do we get more [turkeys]?” asks Barbara Kingsolver. “Well you might ask. The sperm must be artificially extracted from live male turkeys by a person, a professional turkey sperm-wrangler if you will, and artificially introduced to the hens, and that is all I’m going to say about that. If you think they send the toms off to a men’s room with little paper cups and Playhen Magazine, that’s not how it goes…When our family considered raising turkeys ourselves, we know we weren’t going to go there.” (p. 90).
The family was able to learn about heirloom turkey breeds, “birds whose endearing traits include the capacity to do their own breeding, all by themselves,” from an organization called Slow Food USA. In 2003 it launched a campaign to promote these breeds as Thanksgiving turkeys and so many people signed up in the spring to order one, forgoing the sexless Butterball they could get for cheap at the grocery store, that an unprecedented number of U.S. farmers were called upon to raise them. And the demand has continued. Don’t you think a turkey that had a little fun in life might taste better?
About the cost of organic food, I think that if those who can afford it, buy it, the demand will go up and the cost will go down, as will the usage of toxic pesticides and oil-based, polluting fertilizers, which will benefit everybody, whether they eat organic or not.
About the impact of the nascent “Buy Local Food” campaign’s impact on food exporting nations, I think we have to remember that our demand for year-round foods created their export situation in the first place, causing them to have to import their basic food necessities, so as we grow and buy local, they could too. This development will be hastened if the U.S. follows the European Union in starting to tax fuel costs for international food shipment, as reported in the New York Times yesterday, so that we who import will pay the full cost of our food demands.
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (April 20, pp. 19-21, 88), which was entirely devoted to “going green,” author Michael Pollen asked “why bother?” It’s related to the question asked in the sermon on sustainability, on being a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness, do we have to?
Pollen gives answers that sound like the answers of a faith community such as ours: If you bother, you’ll set an example for others. If you bother, you might change the mores of our time: “not having things might become cooler than having them.” If you bother, you’ll have the moral standing to demand that others change their behavior—other people especially elected officials, corporations, and countries (like China where he says lives his “evil twin” “who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of carbon dioxide I’m struggling no longer to emit.”)
If we bother, we live by hope. And if we don’t bother, we’re doomed to living in fear, with food fights (as we’ve been seeing in Haiti) becoming a world-wide phenomenon and not just in school cafeterias.
So, Pollen says, “find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involved spending or voting… Such as observing the Sabbath: one day a week of abstaining completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.” We could even
walk, bike or at least carpool to First Parish on Sundays!
But, he says, the best “one thing” to do is to grow some of our own food, like Kingsolver’s family, whether in our own yards or just a few patio pots, or get a plot in a community garden. Or, if you’re not able to garden, then buy into a CSA, community-supported agriculture, where you get a set portion of local produce from a nearby farm such as Brookwood or Moose Hill Farm.
Why bother? He writes, “The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing our world.”
Like Winnie the Pooh, that Wedged Bear in Great Tightness, while we’re fasting, we’ll re-discover that what really sustains us is not the material things, it’s the life we celebrate here every Sunday: love, truth and serving others; the beauty of the world around us and of the spirit within each of us, music, art and the joy of being in community with kindred spirits. This, not strawberries in winter, is the good life, and we’ve got it!