GMO OMG (Genetically Modified Organism, Oh My God!)

What is a GMO?

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. Genetic modification involves the mutation, insertion, or deletion of genes. Genetically engineered crops are crops that are altered with inserted genetic material to exhibit a desired trait.[1]

            GMO OMG is a documentary which offers a glimpse into the life of a concerned father and film-maker.  His two young boys and baby girl take a road trip with him to navigate the confusing roadmap of our food.  His main question at the beginning of the film is:  “Are GMOs safe?”  If they are in 85% of America’s food (unlabeled), he wants to know what the health and environmental effects are for the sake of his absolutely adorable offspring.

            The evasiveness of Monsanto corporation employees is comical.  Until it’s dismal.  No one will answer a worried parent as to the studies conducted by Monsanto itself on lab rats.  The 3-month study has been the basis for World Health Organization and other agencies in deeming GMOs generally safe for consumption.

            Seralini, a French scientist in Caen, conducted a lab experiment on the same breed of rat Monsanto used.  Rather than stopping at 3 months, he followed the effects of GMO food on the rats, as well as Roundup pesticide traces on rats.  The female rats began to grow large tumors and suffered effects on their pituitary glands in months 4-5.  The male rats suffered damage to their kidneys and livers along the same timeline.  Within one day of this study being published, London scientists (all heavily supported by biotech companies) began to attack the methods of Seralini’s article.

            Jeremy, director and reporter of this film, has a wonderful question.  If there is any merit at all to the findings of Seralini’s research, why blindly refute the study and continue on with our ingestion of genetically modified food?  Shouldn’t this spur a second (and much more thorough) look at the health effects – closer scrutiny over a longer period of time?  This is our health we are talking about.  But it becomes clear very quickly that health is not the goal here; it is money.  Lots and lots of money for large corporations who conducted these initial rat studies and refuse to publish the raw data.

            Jeremy does a beautiful job of showing the balancing act of feeding his family.  He filmed Halloween on his family’s street on the heels of some bleak conversations about GMOs in the American diet.  There were closeups of his children in precious costumes, taking candy from neighbors, and sucking on lollipops.  The heart of his documentary, to me, is here.  In a country where GMOs are prevalent in our food production and our food is unlabeled, it makes it nearly impossible for us to choose wisely as parents and to still experience cultural events.  When we act with the precautionary principle, are we sacrificing identity in our culture?  Do we then opt out of all the communal activities that revolve around food?  This is a choice parents and individuals should never be forced to make. 

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[1] http://www.gmofilm.com/faq.aspx#bookmark0

Boxes and Bibles

Rachel Sanders of BuzzFeed recently published a blogpost entitled 31 Things to Do with Confusing CSA Vegetables.  The article shows pictures of the most prolific and odd-looking produce.  There is a blurb following each and then a list of recipes  - a creative springboard for those who cringe at kohlrabi and groan at garlic scapes. 

“As a CSA subscriber, sooner or later you’re bound to end up with strange, inexplicable vegetables you have no idea what to do with in your share. And you panic, and you freeze up, and they sit in your fridge, and then they rot, and you waste your money, and then everyone’s sad.”

She is so right about the panic and the paralysis!  Our family had never encountered purple peppers, kohlrabi, or bok choi before this year of local eating.  Not only do you get it for a week, you may get it for a month – or two.  Our dinner no longer starts at Kroger, browsing aisles.  It starts on Google, with me researching what in the world this new thing is – and trying to find something “like” it that will give us a clue as to how to interpret it, to know it, and to know what to do with it.  Kohlrabi is related to cabbage; it looks kind of like a turnip; it is crunchy and sweet.  Sunchokes are roots of sunflowers.  You cook them like you would a potato, but they have a taste similar to artichokes.  In the newness and the strangeness, we grasp for the familiar – it helps us to cope with the different and the weird.

It struck me that we do the very same thing with Scripture.  Much like strange-looking vegetables make it to my kitchen in a box, truly bizarre-sounding texts surface in a book.  I sometimes encounter passages that, although they have been around eons and eons, I have never seen before.  Sometimes what is written is so outlandish sounding, I freeze up and turn the page to the verses which are familiar, comfortable, old friends.  And if the paralysis doesn’t take complete hold enough for us to let it rot on the counter or turn the page, we start trying to make it make sense by comparing it to things that are in our minds, “like it.”  We try to create a framework to understand earth-shattering snippets from Jeremiah or visions of Ezekiel.  And then we try to solve it; to put it neatly into a category we already understand.

In my growing love for local food and in my journey of faith, I am learning more thoroughly (and more frequently) to sit and just admire the unknown, to marvel at the mystery.  Each weird vegetable and each off-the-wall Scripture passage reminds me that God is at work, constantly astonishing us with the new and the different.  It is all part of the world that has always been (natural or Biblical), and yet God confronts us with challenges and unique flavors.  Some things don’t fit into a paradigm we understand, at least not at first.  It makes life more deeply rich to cook with brand new flavors and to feast on words that stretch us.  Thank God for spicing it up – for the surprises and the challenges.  

A Fair Feast?

   

           The longer I grow into my passion for good food, the more I realize it was pretty much inevitable.  I was raised in the South where hospitality is not just a formality, where you can always smell the kitchen from the street.  My mother is a well-rounded cook with a particular expertise in baking things from scratch.  This doesn’t mean you add fresh ingredients to a mix, this means pancakes require the measuring of baking soda before the buttermilk and the homemade rolls are a day-long process as the yeast has to have time to rise.  Twice.  My Sundays and Wednesdays were spent at church where we gathered around the Table on Sundays and the table on Wednesdays.  The luncheons at church on Sunday were a feast for the eyes and tummy – deviled eggs, four different macaroni and cheese varieties, green bean casserole, chicken yumminess, gelatin salads, and curried fruit mixtures.  There were vats of sweet tea and white paper table covers.  We ate ourselves into naptime around round tables while the girls in smocked dresses chased the boys in their penny loafers.  Sometimes the gatherings took place under oak trees in the back of White Bluff or on the oceanfront in St. Simons – church cookouts with chili and hot dogs or barbecues with Granny’s famous slaw.  And more sweet tea.  It’s really no surprise the longer I think about it, that fellowship, hospitality, and ministry are inseparable from a Table of food.

            As we approach Thanksgiving, I am struck again by the enormous reconciliation that happens around a table in our own American tradition.  In 1621, the Pilgrims, fresh from Europe had been depleted in number from various diseases, and were befriended by Squanto and the Wampanoag tribe.  Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants.[1]  After their first successful corn harvest, there was a celebratory meal wherein the pilgrims brought fowl and the Wampanoag brought deer.  Fellowship, food, and joy.  That’s what we anticipate and celebrate at Thanksgiving time. 

            This nostalgic celebration of ours preserves a time of harmony between settlers and Native Americans that was fleeting.  We would rather dwell in the pretty moments of peace and relative plentitude instead of tell the rest of the story, which could put a damper on the mood.  The part of the story which tells of how we got up from the table and started a trajectory that lead to the Trail of Tears. 

Issues of justice and injustice are underwritten into an uplifting story of the meal in our Thanksgiving holiday.  Just so, potential for great reconciliation as well as surreptitious injustice greets us at every table and every meal in which we partake.  Christian folks gather at the Eucharist table confessing our sin and bringing our hungry, broken selves to the body broken and the blood shed in an ultimate act of reconciliation and hope.  In our day-to-day lives, we sit down for meals with our family and ingest injustice when we eat food that was grown and harvested by exploited workers or when we eat food that traveled thousands of miles to reach us, harming our planet on its journey.             

I have a history of loving tables of food.  America has a history of loving tables of food.  Muslims, Christians, and Jews have a history of loving tables of food.  This thanksgiving, I encourage you to think a little more critically about the reconciliation that happens at tables.  I encourage you to seek healing in the relationships of those you share Thanksgiving feast with; I encourage you to seek healing by choosing local foods that support health of the earth and wholeness of communities; I encourage you to give thanks for the way our Creator warms seeds from the soil to our tables and warms our tables that we may be nourished seeds of joy in this world.  Blessings to you all this holiday season! 

Love,

Kate Buckley

*If you are in the Atlanta area and would like to add local seasonal foods to your Thanksgiving Table, here are some ways to do that!

Local, pasture-raised turkey:

White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia http://whiteoakpastures.com/

(through Sunday, November 20, 2013)

Darby Farms in Monroe, Georgia  http://www.darbyfarmsga.com/

Whole Foods, Atlanta  (404) 853-1681

Produce (sweet potatoes, radishes, carrots, collards, etc.) and pork, beef, eggs:

Grant Park Farmers Market  Sun am 9:30-1:30  http://www.grantparkmarket.org/

Morningside Market  Sat am 7:30-11:30  http://www.morningsidemarket.com/

Decatur Farmers Market  Sat am 9:00-1:00

http://decaturfarmersmarket.com/wordpress/

Riverview Farm’s Farm Mobile (stops all over ATL!)  http://www.grassfedcow.com/farmmobile_schedule.html

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[1] http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving

Gaping Gates and Precarious Paths

Matthew 7:13-20

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?  

So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

            Here’s the honest truth, if you’re willing to read it.  I watched a food documentary in May of this year.  It changed me like not much I’ve seen ever has before.  I’ve since watched several documentaries, all of which I take at their word (these professional fact-finders who spend their livelihoods investigating food industries and writing/filming about it).  Some books I’ve read have helped me understand more about the farming industry in this nation that I knew very little about and still find myself grasping to understand. 

            In reaction to a food industry that is more business-driven and technologically supported than it is people-driven and ecologically motivated, our family has been eating locally as much as we possibly can and supplementing with organic foods or at least well-researched brand names of meats and eggs.  And I still go grocery shopping and market browsing with little confidence that I am putting my dollar to its best use.  What qualifies to me as the “best use” of a dollar when buying food?  This is complicated:  several factors have to be balanced out.  I don't want to put my dollar where huge food processing companies who have no regard for the workers they exploit or the earth they abuse can reach it.  I want to feed my family healthy food.  I want to actually get something for my dollar.  And I want to support local farmers who are up against giants in the food world.

            Here is a concrete example of how hard it is to balance all of these desires and still have time to do my job, go to school fulltime, and mother my two girls.  We were out of town for the Saturday and Sunday local farmers markets in our town this weekend.  So we did not stock up for the week on grassfed beef from Tink’s or get Darby Farms chicken or Riverview Farms’ sausage links.  This means the protein we eat this week is going to have to come from another source.  Which means more research is involved in finding something that is humanely raised and is not exposed to antibiotics or growth hormones. 

I want to support local food, which is difficult to do when lots of the chain grocery stores do not advertise their brands genuinely and the salespeople do not know how to answer questions like, “Where is this raised?  How was it fed?”  Springer Mountain Farms raises chickens in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, less than 2 hours away from us.  I know about them and how they are American Humane Certified, receive no antibiotics, and are fed only a vegetarian diet.  So the only grocery store chain I know of where Springer Mountain Chicken is sold is Publix.  So after I drop the girls off at preschool, I drive up to the Publix where just two weeks ago I was pacing back and forth with a sign that read, “Fair Food!”  I protested with a group of Columbia Theological Seminary students and faculty and hundreds of others with CIW (Coalition of Immokalee Workers) for Publix to raise the price of their tomatoes by 1 cent per pound in order that the workers on the tomato farms of Immokalee, Florida could earn a living wage. 

I park my car and guiltily glance over my shoulder as I dart in to pick up my chicken.  My local, healthy, humanely treated chicken that I can only purchase at the place I just picketed against.  And I tell myself, “Well, I’m not buying tomatoes…” 

Nothing about food choices is easy.  If I opt out of corporate foods and support local farmers, how do I weigh in amidst the chaos of grocery store aisles?  When I buy my butternut squash from the farmer down the road, how do I give my vote that were I buying butternut squash at Publix, I would choose organic over pesticide treated crops?  By opting out of lots of grocery store foods, am I missing out on an opportunity to change how food is grown?  I know I’m giving myself a lot of power in this scenario, like it matters a whole lot where my grocery budget goes every week.  But I think it is what the huge producers of monocultures of crops are most scared of and what would change the food system the fastest:  educated, dedicated, picky consumers who demand fairness and quality. 

In reading this text from Matthew, I think gates are not so recognizable as narrow or exceptionally wide when we are faced with the “choosing.”  I think gates are tricky, the latches don’t always catch behind you.  It’s not all bad to not have the energy one week to squeeze your way into the crack of the narrow gate (especially while juggling toddlers and grocery bags all at once).  But I am more and more convinced every day that there are in fact false prophets, with brightly colored labeling and evasive (and persuasive) wording.  And there are diseased trees that we somehow are convinced still produce good fruit. 

Lord, help us to sort out this mess.  Help us to take one step at a time, and reveal to us the path you would have us take.  And while we jiggle the latches of rickety gates, guard our hearts from despair and confusion.  Fill us with new hope and fresh food as we journey through life in this 21^st century.  Amen.