Food consumes me even when I know that I should be consuming it. I really never thought too much of food until I stopped smoking almost thirty years ago and immediately put on twenty new pounds which were neither needed, nor good for my health.
In today’s TEDx Talk one of my favorite authors, Vicki Robin, co-author of Your Money or Your Life, shares her relationship with food and gives us a few interesting facts like: the local grocery store has only three days supply of food on hand; 30% of our food is thrown away; agriculture accounts for more greenhouse gasses than transportation… YIKES!
Ms. Robin talks about her experience with the 10-mile diet. In his “landmark work” The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry in 1988 suggests a 100-mile diet or a return to an understanding of bioregions from which we came and according to Berry we must return if we are to save our beautiful “garden planet earth”. He writes that we must turn from our anthropocentric thinking to a biocentric norm, saving not just humans, but the entire life community:
The solution is simply for us as humans to join the earth community as participating members to foster the progress and prosperity of the bioregional communities to which we belong. A bioregion is an identifiable geographical area of interacting life systems that is relatively self-sustaining in the ever-renewing processes of nature. “ (p. 166)
Three eating actions you may enjoy trying to adjust to our new post-industrial world:
- Dine out at a restaurant featuring “Locally Grown” food.
- Learn about your own bioregion, i.e. Chicago is neighbor to the Indiana Sand Dunes State Park.
- Cooking from scratch using as many local ingredients as you can find.
We are a community of laymen and laywomen who, with vowed Passionists, seek to share in the charism of St. Paul of the Cross through prayer, ongoing spiritual formation, and proclamation of the message of Christ Crucified.
