FUSF Green

A Unitarian Univeralist's Trip to the SuperMarket

A sermonette by Jonathan Kava

When I was browsing in the supermarket the other day, it struck me that so many things have changed since I was a kid. There's a whole new generation of product labels sprouting up, labels that I never saw when I tagged along through the aisles with my Mom.

No, its not just new products. There are new ideas.

For instance, the labels:
on eggs - cage free hens
on chicken - free range
on beef - never fed antibiotics
on shampoo - never tested on animals
on veal - humanely raised
on produce - organic or transitional
on coffee - free trade certified
on produce - non-GM   (non-genetically modified)
on produce - locally grown or grown in "Massachusetts, etc"
on milk - no artificial growth hormone used
and curiously on the same milk carton
"milk produced with growth hormone has not been shown to be different from regular milk"

When the common food we have bought for generations in the local grocery store suddenly sprouts all these urgent and confusing warnings in front of us, what are we to think? 

Better Living Through Chemistry?

A sermonette by Mark Sadecki

In the book Fatal Harvest, Andrew Kimbrell writes “Industrial agriculture is devastating our land, water and air, and now threatens sustainability of the biosphere.  Its massive chemical and biological inputs cause widespread environmental havoc as well as human disease and death.  Its centralized corporate ownership destroys farm communities around the world, leading to mass poverty and hunger.”

When we actually examine the history of modern industrial agriculture some clear trends jump out. Marketed with catchphrases like “better living through chemicals”, it has marched steadily towards ever increasing consolidation of food production and profits in the hands of a few large corporations.

Industrial agriculture can be traced back to the large scale corporate development of hybrid seed in the 1930’s, which brought about the end of farmers saving seed from their own crops for replanting.  This was the beginning of their loss of financial independence to corporations. 

Food and Global Warming

A sermonette by Ted McIntyre

Food and global warming may not seem to be linked, but in fact they are closely intertwined.

We UU’s espouse seven principles. I want to remind you of two of them, and ask you to keep them in mind as you hear about global warming and food. The principles are
· 2) Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
· 6) The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
We have all experienced the humidity of summer- warmer air holds more water. This has implications for our future. As the earth warms, the places that are ‘wet’ now will tend to be wetter, while the dry places will be drier as the hot air dehydrates the land. Think increased drought and flood. As the oceans rise they will infiltrate freshwater aquifers, making them unusable for drinking or irrigation.
As the Washington Post recently noted, all of these trends will be magnified in the lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live and grow their food. India for example could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s. While we should keep in mind that our own children may see these consequences, it seems that the poor of the world will be the first to pay the price in hunger and malnutrition for our ‘lifestyle choices’ like   SUVs,   McMansions or Kiwi Fruits from New Zealand. 

From Farm to Feedlot – A Tale of Corn and Gunpowder

A sermonette by Steve Derdiarian

At the turn of the last century forty percent of Americans made an independent living off of their land as farmers.  In the breadbasket state of Iowa they grew an array of crops including corn, hay, oats, wheat, potatoes, apples, cherries, plums, grapes and pears. 

They also kept horses, cattle, hogs and chickens, returning nutrients to the soil organically.  The diverse landscapes of these farms retained plant cover year round, reducing soil erosion, and produced 20 bushels of corn per acre as but one part of their harvest.

Today, less than one percent of Americans remain farmers.  And in Iowa, up to 200 bushels of hybrid corn are grown per acre, but only 2% of the land remains as native landscape.  No longer are there orchards, rotating fields of diverse crops, grazing areas for animals and land left untrammeled as oasis for wildlife.  The land has been transformed into seeming endless fields of hybrid corn during growing season and bare black earth for the remainder of the year.

Think Before You Eat

Sermonette by Donna Miller

John F. Kennedy once said, "One man can make a difference, and every man should try." This is especially true when it comes to considering the foods we eat.

So before you prepare your next grocery list, consider the 600 million chickens raised yearly on the Delmarva Peninsula of Chesapeake Bay. Those chickens alone produce more waste than a city of 4 million people. The Delmarva cannot absorb that much nitrogen and phosphorus, and now the bay has "dead zones" that cannot support fish, crabs, oysters, or other species of ecological significance.

Before you put that neatly packaged slab of beef into your grocery cart, consider that animals fed on grain require nearly 50% of the U.S. water supply. To produce 1 pound of beef, it takes about 1,200 gallons of water and 7 pounds of grain. Because of population growth in the U.S., the land required to raise feedlot beef is disappearing. To counter this problem, corporate agriculture is turning to (what else?) the ever-shrinking rainforests, as a land source.