"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.

Gathering Fragments One Year On

It's the autumn equinox. Night has overtaken day. Up here in Northumberland, the leaves show little sign of turning. But the rose-hips are swelling in the hedgerows and the rowan glows bright red alongside the magenta hawthorn and deep purple elderberries. The scent of coal fires re-lit in village hearths now hangs in the still September air. Golden stubble fields are ploughed chocolate-brown ready for winter. The new academic year has begun: children file past our front door morning and afternoon chatting excitably on their way to and from school. 

The year has come full circle. This time last year, I was in my last few days in office as Dean of Durham. It was a week of high emotion. I was filled with real sadness at the thought of leaving a place and people we loved. I blogged about it here: http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-deans-last-blog.html?spref=tw. At the same time, we were looking forward to our new life across the hills in the Tyne Valley. It would, we imagined, be quieter and gentler than Durham. Cathedrals are wonderful and exhilarating but they are fast places. You need to be intellectually and spiritually agile; you need plenty of stamina. It's not that I was running out of steam (whatever Mrs S says), but I did think I should retire before it became apparent to me and to everyone else that I was overstaying my welcome. And I wanted to be able to have something to give to church and community in retirement, try different things, volunteer in new ways.

It has turned out to be an eventful, not to say turbulent, year. If you've followed this blog you'll know about Storm Desmond and how it invaded our home last December at precisely the same time as one daughter gave birth to our second grandchild and another was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Having fully recovered, she sensibly got married in the spring and is now expecting a baby. But then in the early summer my 93 year old mother fell ill and died a few weeks afterwards. All this on top of laying aside a life's work, moving home and beginning again in a new place in an entirely different role, that of being "retired". Oh yes, and the EU referendum campaign and the awful prospect of Brexit.

It's the first anniversary of my farewell in Durham Cathedral next Tuesday. By coincidence (is there such a thing?), I am giving two addresses to a clergy conference that day and the next on "Ministry for the Long Haul". I asked the Bishop why he thought I was qualified to speak to his clergy on this topic. After all, I had never lived or worked in the demanding urban environment that is mostly the setting of their ministry. He replied, "Well, you've completed the long haul. Tell us what's kept you going and sustained you over forty years. Tell us what's been important to you". Fair enough I thought a year ago when we spoke. I'm now trying to work out what to say to these good people. No spoilers! You never know who is reading this blog. I'll post the talks next week. If they've gone well, that is.

But it's been valuable to have to undertake the exercise of thinking about forty years of public ministry as I look forward to the anniversary. I might not have done it otherwise. I had never tried to articulate to myself, let alone to anyone else, what I'd found to be central in inhabiting the vocation to be a priest, though I suppose some of it got expressed in the ordination addresses I gave a few years ago that later became my book Wisdom and Ministry. So I went back to my farewell sermon in the Cathedral on 27 September 2015 (how hard I'd worked on that one!): http://michaelstalks.blogspot.com/2015/09/all-in-end-is-harvest-farewell-sermon.html?spref=tw. The clues are all there, I realised, for I'd intended the sermon to be a valedictory not only to Durham but to all the places where I had served as a priest. My text was the words of Jesus in St John after he has performed another of his "signs" and fed the crowd: "gather the fragments so that nothing may be lost" (John 6.12). So that is what I've tried to do in these two addresses, share some harvest gleanings in a way that I hope is helpful and finds echoes in what others have experienced in ministry. 

It's always important in life to do our best to make sure that "nothing may be lost". I believe it to be a key spiritual task, and especially in later life. One of the gifts of retirement has been to have time (even amid the dramas of the past year) to look back and ponder. I've blogged under the "woolgathering" title for some years but this is the first time in my life when it feels as though it can mean something creative because proper time and thought, reflection and prayer can go into it. 

But the more wool I gather, the more I realise that what I think and say on this first anniversary is still provisional. At this early stage, my musings on the story of my ministry are no more than a ballon d'essai, a first go to test whether I've got it even partially right. Who knows what themes may emerge later on in retirement when the foreground has receded a bit and distance lends perspective? 

That last bit was a photography-inspired spoiler, by the way....