"Our Actions are our Future": thoughts on World Food Day

Today is World Food Day. I've learned that it's been observed on this October date since 1981 to draw attention to global hunger and stimulate action to support the most needy people of our world. It's also an opportunity to reflect on the food we eat and its significance for us personally and as societies. Recent themes for the day have included food security, agricultural co-operatives, food prices, migration and rural poverty. This year's focus is "our actions are our future".

As it happens, I've been thinking a lot about food this year. I went to the surgery in June to get myself checked out by the practice nurse. She looked me in the eye and said: "you're overweight with a BMI* that's well above the safe limit of 25. You need to reduce". So for the last four months I've been reducing. My ambition has been to get back to the weight I was in my mid-twenties. That would give me a BMI just within the safer zone (for as the nurse also pointed out, when you're a male of my age, you are automatically at risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke. This year I've had to learn about the first two on that ominous list - but that's another story).

As we all know, there's nothing like dieting to get you thinking about food. I don't say obsessing about it - but it has a way of taking up more than its fair share of mental space. If you've watched Michael Mosley on TV (Trust Me, I'm a Doctor) or read his books, you'll know that he believes in the habit of regular fasting to stabilise our attitude to food. His 5-2 diet - five days of normal eating each week, two with significantly reduced calorie intake - has been widely adopted. My sister who is a professional personal trainer recommends it.

And of course, this matches the importance attached to a healthy rhythm of feasting and fasting in the world's religions. In the Christian shape of each week, Sunday is a festival (commemorating the resurrection) and Friday a fast (in memory of Good Friday). Lent and Eastertide offer annual seasons for self-denial and celebration. Every feast day has its vigil or fast. I dare say that if we ate and drank accordingly, we'd be healthier as a result. When I've got down to the weight I want to be (86kg since you ask - nearly there!), Christian discipline or askesis, if I stick to it and eat and drink sensibly, ought to make sure I stay there.

Eating sensibly maybe comes down to eating reflectively, thinking about what we eat and why. Here's where World Food Day comes in. "Our actions are our future." What actions might these be? There's any number of possibilities, whether we're talking about personal, or collective, political, actions. It's obvious to all of us that the unequal way the world's resources are distributed means food affluence for some (most of us in the west), food poverty for far more in the developing world. No little personal act of mine is going to make a difference to that global fact on the ground.

Yet we also know that a lot of littles can add up to a great deal. They can symbolise to ourselves and to others our resolve to work for political and economic change, to influence public attitudes so that imbalance is redressed in favour of those who are in most need. It's an offence to our human inventiveness and capacity for problem-solving that millions of people still cry out for their daily bread. It also means thinking locally: about supporting or volunteering at our nearby food-bank, for example, or at this time of year, asking what harvest festival gifts we can bring to church that will make a difference to the lives of others.

So I'm trying to be a little more reflective about what I eat and how. The sacramental quality of food becomes more important when you are careful about your habits - how much is symbolised by our eating and drinking, especially when we are with family and friends where the beautiful word companion comes into its own - literally, a "bread-sharer" as in the French word for a chum, copain. All of this is gathered up and transcended in the Christian eucharist, the sharing of bread and wine together in memory of Jesus who died and was raised up, who commanded us on the eve of his passion to do this in remembrance of him and in a shared meal, revealed himself as the risen Lord.

What's struck me most forcibly of all during these dieting weeks is how our eating habits are intrinsically bound up with the future of our planet. George Monbiot in his Guardian column has done more than most to highlight the effects our addiction to meat-eating is having on climate change. Last week the International Panel on Climate Change published its report. It tells us that unless temperature rise over pre-industrial levels is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world faces catastrophic environmental damage which will lead to untold human consequences. Moreover, we have just twelve years left in which to address this crisis. Excessive meat consumption is part of the problem.

I'm struck by how disparate our attitudes to climate change are. Our government officially accepts the science behind the IPCC report and recognises the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel dependence. Yet in the week after the report's publication, it reduces subsidies on electric cars and stands by while a court verdict allows fracking to begin again in the North of England. The public largely "gets" the message about fossil-fuels (don't use your car more than you have to, don't travel by air if there's a train you can catch, think about burning renewables rather than coal or gas) and plastics (you don't see many plastic bags being dispensed at supermarket checkouts nowadays). Yet it's far more resistant to the message about meat-eating, even though the cost to the planet of clearing forests for grazing, and of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle is unacceptably high.

So I link this year's World Food Day theme, "our actions are our future" with that of two years ago, "climate is changing; food and agriculture must change too". Food is not only about personal choices. It's political too. And as I've said, it also has profound theological and spiritual aspects. In the Lord's Prayer, daily bread really means "bread for tomorrow". I find that suggestive: if our decisions create futures for ourselves and others, so do our prayers. As for the present, our attitude to food and drink, like everything else, goes with the kind of care and responsibility we associate with mindfulness. The reflective eater, the mindful eater, the responsible eater, even the prayerful eater - I like the sound of those adjectives. They speak of wisdom. Late in time, as old age beckons, I'm trying to learn how important mindfulness is.

On last night's Look North there was a piece about the legendary Teesside Parmo that featured in a recent MasterChef broadcast. Obesity campaigners have pointed out that this North East delicacy consisting of chicken deep-fried in breadcrumbs topped with béchamel sauce and dripping with melted cheese comes in at around 2000 calories. That's close to what an average adult male needs each day to maintain his body weight. I don't want to score points but I somehow don't think this menu is for me.

By the way, I'm not a vegetarian though I love vegetarian food. I'm not teetotal. Most of fasting and dieting comes down to, not don't ever eat or drink this or that but if you do, do it with restraint. My wife tells me that portion-size is everything. Avarice and gluttony are among the seven deadly sins. Avarice is uncontrolled desire for what we don't need, gluttony uncontrolled consumption of it. Food and drink aren't the only things we desire to excess or consume too much of. But our eating and drinking can tell us much about ourselves. Which is why World Food Day is important, if only to make us think.

*body-mass index.

We Need Thanksgiving - but not Black Friday

A Song for Friday. "If you go down to the shops today, you're in for a nasty surprise." Or maybe not, if you knew that it's Black Friday, that annual orgy of shopping and spending that is enough to put some of us off shops for life.

The Guardian has an editorial today that makes interesting reading. It reminds us that the Black Friday custom originated in America (where else?) as a way of filling the space between Thanksgiving on the day before, and the coming weekend. You have a great celebration on the fourth Thursday of November. Families gather not only from across the States but from all over the world to be together on this the most important day in the calendar. It's a wonderful way to enter into and keep alive the founding myth of America, express solidarity with generations past and generations to come, and all under the rubric of giving thanks. There is something deeply eucharistic about that, allowing memory to foster gratitude for blessings past, present and future.

So you are gathered by the fireside in your home with those you love best in the world. Like the eighth square in Through the Looking Glass, it's all feasting and fun. And no doubt every American family, aware of how abundant are the gifts they celebrate, will also be sparing a thought and a prayer for the many who are less fortunate, left outside the warm glow of privileged good fortune. It's a time for generosity, large-heartedness, good will. Americans are among the most kind and generous people I've ever met.

But then Black Friday dawns. Everybody, it seems, gets up while it's still dark and heads for the shopping malls. You’re among them, thinking to yourself, “Christmas shopping”. There are bargains galore to tempt you, big budget items offering eye-watering reductions. You find that some people have waited all night to be at the front of the line at store-opening time. In the headlong rush for the best bargains, people get hurt. Sometimes there are fisticuffs. Extra security is brought in. (We Brits know all this if we’ve ever been rash enough to pay an early morning visit to the Boxing Day sales.) It's as if the normal conventions of polite behaviour (such as queuing and holding the door open for others) break down. The crowd acts out unusual (to them) behaviours that in other contexts we would call feral. If you ever wonder what would happen to humanity if civilisation were stripped away, just watch TV news following an eventful Black Friday.

I'd be glad to be told that this is a wicked caricature perpetrated by liberal elites who read broadsheet newspapers and would never be seen dead in a shopping mall on Black Friday. But even if it is, there's a deeper aspect to it that needs airing.

It's what question Black Friday is meant to be the answer to. The answer is that it's a direct response to Thanksgiving. It stands with it, depends on it like a parasite for its very existence. And yet, hard on the heels of the exquisite evening before that so affirms the American founding fathers’ and mothers’ spirit of gratitude, public faith, social and family values, the importance of remembering together, how can Black Friday not be bathos of a particularly glaring kind? On this of all long weekends, who wouldn't want to share memories and laughter in long happy conversations, play sports or games together, enjoy the fresh bracing air, read, make music, indulge your hobbies. Who wouldn't want to continue the spirit of Thanksgiving into the next few days, maybe linking it to visiting someone who is sick, or volunteering for at the local foodbank or sharing your foyer with a guest who would otherwise be alone?

It's hard to see how a shopping spree doesn't trivialise much of what Thanksgiving stands for. The dead hand of monetising everything always has that effect (“knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing”). It's as if Americans can't think of anything more creative to follow Thanksgiving than the emblematic cliche of going shopping. But in the UK it's rather worse. We have lifted Black Friday straight out of American culture and reinstalled it in our own country in both its physical and digital forms (except that there's nothing virtual about parting with money: it comes down to the same thing in the end). It has taken off in a big way. But what we didn't import along with it was the day before. Here there is no Thanksgiving to give it even the vestige of a larger meaning. So Black Friday stands alone, revealed in all its overt, rampant consumerism. It is a shameless day of homage to what we have largely become: a nation of shopkeepers and shoppers whose aspirations are to buy and sell, make profits and grab bargains. The infamous Greggs' sausage roll is placed in the manger where the Christ Child should be, and made an idol of for the Magi and all of us to adore.

I exaggerate of course. But The Guardian is right to argue that shorn of Thanksgiving, there is no case for this indulgence of Black Friday. Somehow the very name, a conscious shadowy echo of Good Friday, tells us that it can't be good for us. Among the seven deadly sins are named greed, lust, gluttony and wrath, all of which could describe aspects of the Black Friday Experience. A theologian might argue that the root of all these behaviours is perhaps the original sin of all, envy. (I gave a lecture on this a few years ago in which I made a case for its being the primal sin at the very core of Adam's rebellion against God in the mythical Garden of Eden.)

I don't want to be unduly portentous about this. I'm not one of those preachers whose Christmas sermons are tiresome diatribes against consumerism and commercialism. Let's be positive as Advent begins, and hopes and longings are reawakened. As Christian faith has always understood, it's thankfulness that is the foundation of a healthy, hope-filled way of life. There are more than enough shopping days to Christmas that allow us to go in search of good gifts for family and friends, not in the mad feeding frenzy of Black Friday, but in a virtuous, ethical, thoughtful, happy and above all thankful way. That will add quality and integrity to the precious act of giving to the people we love.

So don't let's encourage the worst instincts of a retail industry greedy for profits. Forget Black Friday. Make it a personal Thanksgiving Day instead. Because that's something we should certainly learn from our American friends. (And to any of them who are reading this, Happy Thanksgiving Day to you all!)