This month’s Christianity Today leads with an excellent article on food. Leslie Leyland Fields writes “A Feast Fit for The King,” 
which is a balanced assessment of the sustainable food movement.
Fields does a nice job of setting up the issues that confront us when we take something off the shelf in the supermarket: Is the purchase of this product propagating the poverty of someone in this country or on the other side of the world? Does the fact that the meat we raise requires enough grain to feed all the impoverished people of the world make carnivorous activities morally culpable? Is there a moral obligation to treat raised animals humanely before we kill them for our food?
So the essay highlights a number of questions that we need to be wrestling with as those entrusted to steward creation.
But Fields is also all-too-aware of the problems besetting the sustainable eating movement. Not only is there the red flag of “legalism” that some Christians are surely going to be quick to raise. There is the more insidious problem of idolatry.
The sustainable food movement offers life for us and salvation for the world. It offers purification of our bodies en route to purification of our souls. It creates a system of morality and righteousness designed to lead toward the eschatological salvation its system envisions.
As for me, I think that the questions raised in the sustainable food world are crucial questions for us to ask and to take sacrificial steps in answering as those who claim to represent God in the world.
First, there are important questions of justice toward our “neighbors” who
enable us to eat, do the harvest work we don’t want to do, provide our cheap food at their own expense. I continue to commend Julie Clawson’s Everyday Justice as a good start to thinking through these issues. After reading this, our family made the decision to only buy fairly traded coffee, chocolate, and bananas. It was a small first step, but an important one for us.
Then, there are the issues of environmental stewardship, and using the world with which we have been entrusted to see that holistic thriving is possible as broadly as possible. This means using our resources to feed people, it means using the land to produce abundance, it means using the land in such a way that we preserve the water, land, and animals. It means tending the animals with wisdom.
Or, if you prefer hymnody, it means to participate in the work of the resurrected Christ who “comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.”
