My parents gave me a cookbook for my birthday called “Simply in Season“, by Mary Beth Lind and Cathhleen Hockman-Wert, published by the Mennonite Central Committee. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful book that offers recipes in four sections, appropriate to the seasons; the recipes often have several variations and pretty good instructions (although I am a fan of editorialized recipes, and these are a little more terse, it’s probably for the best). They also include paragraphs on nearly every page about food, sustainable agriculture, world agricultural economy, hunger, and cooking. After a while I glossed over the bucolic “when I was a kid we did a lot of canning” entries because they seemed almost too good to be true, though now and then someone’s story will get to me, and I’ll tear up at the hugeness of this topic, the immense ability for food to heal, connect, bring life.

The paragraphs are written by parishioners, missionaries, teachers, and gardeners in the Mennonite community, as well as by Lind and Hockman-Wert. There are other “faith communities” working on food issues (for instance, The Sacred Foods Project), but my experience of them is relatively limited. So I’m left questioning this connection between faith and food, and also enjoying expanding my perspective of Hazon and Freedman’s activism around Jews and food as a piece of a larger movement.

First, it caught me off guard to see Christians quoting the same bible verses about tilling and tending (Gen 2:15), or Isaiah’s ‘Why do you spend money on things that aren’t bread, that don’t sustain you?’ (55:2). The use of ancient verses from scripture to prove or underscore our modern moral questions sometimes drives me crazy; no, the Torah does NOT say we should all drive electric cars and have green roofs, no matter what we would like it to. But in the subtler and more pervasive sense of gratitude to God and concern for living things, Christians and Jews do have an opportunity to use biblical verses as inspiration for environmental and food work–and even come come to understand each other through the common use of these verses.

And, in reading about these people who’s faith in God is so closely tied up in their gardening, or farming, or food coops, or work in Nicaragua, I’m prompted to ask myself what it is that drives my own passion about food issues, and - related to that — why do I get so excited at the thought of starting CSAs in synagogues across the country? I’m learning that all this sustainable agriculture projects are as much about the people as the food — sometimes even more. People are in need of healing. We’re in need of having connections, of feeling needed, and appreciated, and needing others. The organized Jewish community is constantly harping about the ‘loss of tradition’ and the fact that our kids don’t learn Hebrew, or that Hebrew School is so miserable, or that we intermarry or don’t keep Kosher or Shabbat. Really these are all problems of community; we live far away from our parents and we are extremely busy, the rituals that we share (many of them around holidays, and by extension, for Jews, food!) erode as we have less people to share them with, and less time to do it in. So I see this food work — which is grounded so firmly in tikkun olam and just general values of doing what’s right, when you can — as a way of connecting people, connecting Jewish people, to each other and therefore to tradition.

And it’s also about gratitude. I hate that word, actually — it evokes arms-wide-open pastel-colored love-speaking that makes me squirm, and I want to shout that the world just sucks, corruption just is, it’s hard, it’s not fair, then you die, period! When overpopulation, groundwater pollution, water privatization, global warming and poverty loom on the horizon — why bother with any of this nonsense? It’s a constant struggle to keep my enthusiasm for local, sustainable food and my despair at all the things going or about to go wrong in balance. The saying “It is not up to you to complete the work but neither may you desist from it” is some comfort, small comfort. But a faith-based activism presumes that there is something larger than us–whether it is a God who made all of Creation, or future generations that will continue our work of healing the world, and for this above all else we must be grateful.

In reading this Mennonite cookbook I felt glad at knowing there was another community out there — different from Jews in many ways — who also connect their religion and their social activism, and who care about and respect seasons, and farms, and farmers, and biodiversity as an extension of keeping their faith. It also made me think about our base assumptions for doing anything good. They’ve got belief in God to keep them going, as do Jews. I wonder sometimes how to explain this to my friends who aren’t religious. Rabbi Rebecca Joseph taught in a class about the birkat hamazon that saying grace, saying thank you after you eat, is essentially acknowledging that we are not the highest power, that in fact we are depending on something larger than ourselves. I’m not sure what drives people for whom this isn’t true. Or, put differently, if you don’t believe in God or the goodness of life, why should you bother to care for it? Now, _I’m_ not sure if I believe in God or the goodness of life all the time either, so at the same time my passion for this stuff is fueled by my excitement at new growth in the Jewish community, it also pushes my own questions about What I Believe and the Meaning of Everything, Etc.

Oh yeah, and there are recipes in this cookbook too, and they look quite good! Recipes for food for breakfast, food for lunch, food for dinner, and food food for dessert. And also, apparently, food for thought.