As a child growning up in the sixties, I remember our family having a huge respect for food, which we don’t seem to have today. Dinner was plated up and put in front of you and you were expected to eat what mum had cooked and eat all of it, we weren’t allowed to be picky and fortunately, as a child, the only food I didn’t like was baked beans, which fortunately, my mum didn’t like either. It is only with the benefit of hindsight, that I understand why my parents hated to throw food away, we would cut mould off bread and cheese and scrape it off the top of a jar of jam and think nothing of it, happily eating the rest. I can never remember a time when my mum would make something different for my brother and I, we all ate the same and sat around the table. We got our first television in seventy-two and everything changed.
Shortly after taking up my first appointment as a minister in Norfolk, one of my Church members, a farmer, well respected for his work, gave me a copy of a paper he had written about the world food crisis, which I read with interest, I was suddenly informed about situations, that had never been any concern to me before. Put simply, land across the world which has been used for growing crops to feed the world is being swallowed up at an alarming rate as factories, roads, railways, offices, shopping centres, and houses are being built. Land is also being destroyed by flooding, fires, landslides and all the horrors we witness from the comfort of our homes.
The problem is made far worse by the ever increasing population of the world. There is evidence that the growth rate has slowed down, but we are now very close to seeing the world population cap eight billion people, and with the continual loss of land being used to feed the people of the world, a crunch point is very close, when we will simply not be able to feed everybody. Of course, in the western world, we can afford to be quite complacent, the chances are that ours will not be the empty larders and many millions of people around the globe will go hungry long before we do.
Jesus, very clearly teaches us through his gospel message that a part of our Christian responsibility is to care for those who are more vulnerable than we are. We might well remember the story of Jesus feeding the multitude (Mathhew 14:13-21) and over countless generations preachers have crafted and delivered sermons on the feeding of the five thousand. Today, the challenge is greater than ever before, our challenge is to feed eight billion, a multitude way beyond most of our grasp and maybe we stand, like the disciples, overwhelmed by the challenge. This week in our journey through our Climate Crisis Programme, we reflect on food sustainability. Please reflect on this issue during the coming week.
A prayer for this week:
Pray for farmers and fishers for successful and sustainable harvesting, for more environmentally conscious food production, and for more equal sharing and distribution of food and water.