Food, Farming and Religion: Emerging Ethical Perspectives

143 Pages·2018·1.183 MB·English

by  Gretel Van Wieren

FOOD, FARMING AND RELIGION
Although the religious and ethical consideration of food and eating is not a new
phenomenon, the debate about food and eating today is distinctly different from
most of what has preceded it in the history of Western culture. Yet the field of envi­
ronmental ethics, especially religious approaches to environmental ethics, has been
slow to see food and agriculture as topics worthy of analysis.
This book examines how religious traditions and communities in the United
States and beyond are responding to critical environmental ethical issues posed
by the global food system. In particular, it looks at the responses that have devel­
oped within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, and shows how they relate to
arguments and approaches in the broader study of food and environmental ethics.
It considers topics such as land degradation and restoration, genetically modified
organisms and seed consolidation, animal welfare, water use, access, pollution, and
climate, and weaves consideration of human wellbeing and justice throughout. In
doing so, Gretel Van Wieren proposes a model for conceptualizing agricultural and
food practices in sacred terms.
This book will appeal to a wide and interdisciplinary audience including those
interested in environment and sustainability, food studies, ethics, and religion.
Gretel Van Wieren is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Michigan State
University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
Routledge Environmental Humanities
Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin
Editorial Board
Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK
Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK
Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK
Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia
Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK
Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia
Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK
Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia
International Advisory Board
William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK
Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA
Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA
Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of
Edinburgh, UK
Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technol­
ogy, Stockholm, Sweden
Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co­Director, Rachel Carson Centre,
Ludwig­Maxilimilians­Universität, Germany
Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA
Kirsten Wehner, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Australia
The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recogniz­
ing that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion,
global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and
environmental justice are all crises of culture.
The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future envi­
ronmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclu­
sively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human­focused
disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.
We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an
inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favor manuscripts aimed at an international reader­
ship and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and stu­
dents from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the
human dimensions of environmental change.
FOOD, FARMING
AND RELIGION
Emerging Ethical Perspectives
Gretel Van Wieren
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Gretel Van Wieren
The right of Gretel Van Wieren to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: V an Wieren, Gretel, author.
Title: Food, farming and religion: emerging ethical perspectives/
Gretel Van Wieren.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series:
Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057474 (print) | LCCN 2018013200 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315151168 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138557970 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781138557994 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315151168 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Food–Religious aspects. | Food supply–Religious aspects. |
Agriculture–Religioius aspects. | Environmental ethics.
Classification: LCC BL65.F65 (ebook) | LCC BL65.F65 V36 2018 (print) |
DDC 205/.64963–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057474
ISBN: 978­1­138­55797­0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978­1­138­55799­4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978­1­315­15116­8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For my parents, Glenn and Jackie Van Wieren, who taught
me to love nature.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: thinking ethically about food 1
1 Down on the farm: the historical roots
of the ecological crisis – agriculture? 21
2 Soil: sacred and profaned 33
3 Plants: the power and miracle of seeds 48
4 Animals: humane, sustainable, spiritual meat? 64
5 Water: precious, polluted, purified 81
6 Climate: religion and food for a hot planet 97
7 The new sacred farm 112
Index 129
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several notes of thanks are in order. To the farms that graciously welcomed me
into their spaces to learn more about their work: Coastal Roots Farm in Encinitas,
California; Mother Carr’s Organic Farm in Lynwood, Illinois; Ryan’s Retreat in
Fort Plain, New York; Rooster Haven Farm in Ghent, New York; Fowler Camp
and Retreat Center in Speculator, New York; and Gaining Ground in Concord,
Massachusetts – thank you all, for your amazing work. Thanks to Michigan State
University for awarding me a Humanities and Arts Research Program Development
grant that allowed me to take a semester off teaching and focus on writing. To
my colleagues in the Mellon­funded Humanities Without Walls New Ethics of
Food project, I am grateful for our far­reaching conversations about food eth­
ics, many of which have influenced my thinking here. Many thanks to my edi­
tor, Charlotte Endersby, for her early enthusiasm about the project, and to Leila
Walker for guiding me through the publication process. Grateful acknowledgment
to the following for permission to reprint previously published material (at times
in significantly revised form): Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics,
and Ecological Restoration published by Georgetown University Press (2013); “Soil
as Sacred Religion: The Spiritual Dimensions of Sustainable Agriculture,” 2016
Proceedings of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EURSafe)
published by Wagenigin Academic Publishers; “The New Sacred Farm” published
in Worldviews: Global Religions, Cultures, and Ecology, 21:2, 2007, 113–33. And to my
husband, Jeff Ericksen, and our children, Inga, Clara, and Carl – my inspirations
every day.
INTRODUCTION
Thinking ethically about food
In many respects, there is nothing new about the ethical consideration of food and
eating. In late antiquity, theologians such as Clement of Alexandria denounced the
luxurious, elaborate menus of his age, believing that lavish eating practices deni­
grated the character of the Christian community. The Rule of Benedict specified
that monastic meals should consist of two cooked dishes, apples or vegetables if
available, and no meat from the flesh of quadrupeds. In the sixteenth century, the
Protestant Reformer John Calvin emphasized the importance of public fasting,
admonishing pastors to encourage their congregations to do so during times of
social disaster as way to deprecate God’s anger.1
Yet the questioning about food and eating that goes on today is distinctly dif­
ferent from most of what has preceded it in the history of Western culture. This
becomes particularly evident when one looks at the types of worries related to
food production and consumption that began to appear in the decades following
the Second World War. The Green Revolution, which focused on the research and
development of agricultural technologies, raised fundamental questions about global
hunger and food production in terms of the extent to which new agrichemical
pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers and breeds of high yield crops were necessary
for meeting a growing human population’s food needs. The publication of Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 (interestingly published one year prior to the coining
of the term “green revolution” by former United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) director William Gaud) generated widespread public con­
cern about the potentially deleterious effects of chemical biotechnologies such as
DDT on the natural world. The counter­cultural organic foods and anti­hunger
movements that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified in the work of
Wendell Berry and Francis Moore Lappé, raised additional questions about indus­
trial agriculture and its relation to the problems of land degradation, global hunger,
and, in Berry’s terms, “the unsettling of America.”