the body of the Lord:: foods, fast

According to the Boston Globe, the film Food, Inc. has a corporate sponsor for free screenings at the hipster theater in Cambridge: Chipotle, the fast-food burrito joint.
I always thought Chipotle was owned by McDonald's, & had a pretty negative impression because of that. But the piece on the film sponsorship talks up their environmental woohoos, like how their stores are green and they are trying to use naturally raised meats (whatever that means). So I scouted around online; apparently McDonald's had a fairly large investment stake in them but no more (yes, that's a link to Wikipedia). And their meat and dairy does seem much more sustainably sourced than other fast food, by a long way.

Is this a better-than-nothing? Or a making-it-worse? Really great, that their food sources are better than most, but does the super mass-produced and meat-centered eating still do more damage in the long run? Always hard to know when to support good incremental steps, and this is a good step. At least I'll go see the film for free.

why farm? why food?

Wendell Berry, from "The Pleasure of Eating":
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act.

Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers."

...How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one's consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one's own part in the food economy.

...Eating with the fullest pleasure -- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance-- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

2 comments:

Dave said...: Good questions. I may have been the one who planted the Chipotle-McDonalds conspiracy in your mind. I've been blabbing to people about that for years. I guess I have to stop now.

My feeling is that Chipotle doesn't have to think twice about its food supply; it chooses to, as part of its identity or business model, and we should be glad for that. I hope other restaurants see that this minimal social responsibility doesn't ruin a business, and start to follow. But you're right that at the end of the day, they're still a corporate food distributor that drives everything around in trucks. I guess my real hope is that if Chipotle's small changes work well, eventually consumer demand might cause restaurants to compete in terms of their agricultural responsibility -- a sort of "race to the top," for a change.; 12:07 PM
Steve Thorngate said...: A couple years ago Chipotle got together with Ten Thousand Villages in St Paul to donate a night's proceeds to the Land Stewardship Project. And they testified in favor of pro-sustainability legislation at the state level: http://bit.ly/12HSUp .

I've always been deeply ambivalent: http://bit.ly/4FtWn .; 1:14 PM

the body of the Lord:

foods, fast

2 comments:

why farm? why food?

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