Food and Faith
16 Oct 2011
I promised last week to write about *why* I care so deeply about sustainable agriculture, eating local foods, supporting the local economy, and gardening to produce food. For me, this is a necessary part of being Pagan.
Even though I converted in 1995, I didn’t start thinking about the connection between faith and food until about 8 years ago when I started actively honoring the spirits of place. I felt a disconnect between being a part of a “nature religion” yet knowing relatively little of the nature all around me.
I started paying attention. I learned more about the trees in our woods, noted on my calendar when local flowers bloomed and when fruits came into season. The more I immersed myself in learning about the land around me, which at the time was Middle Tennessee, the more I wanted to learn. Each step I took brought me to a deeper understanding of the cycles of Nature in my area. All land is sacred, but this was my land, where I camped and hiked and worshiped and raised children. I began marking the holy days by what was blooming and then joined a CSA and started a vegetable garden so my family could participate by eating foods grown on our land. The local foods movement was just taking off in our area and as I learned more about sustainable farming the connection between environmental action, local and sustainable food choices, and living my faith became ever stronger.
Moving back to Florida was a huge change. The land here is drastically different from the Cumberland River Valley in Tennessee. The seasons are different, the plants are different… and here I have plunged even deeper into the local foods movement and my connection between food and faith, starting a cow pool to increase access to affordable local free-range meat, committing more of our food budget to local produce, and sourcing staples like rice and sugar.
Eating the food grown on the land you hold sacred is a powerful act. The French concept of terroir, the unique quality of foods specific to a region, is terribly Pagan. The terroir of the foods grown near my home, these distinct flavors of animal and plant, the nutrients from my soil, eating foods in their natural seasons, and supporting farmers who treat the earth and its creatures gently… this is how I choose to live my faith.
June 18, 2013 at 1:42 pm 
June 18, 2013 at 12:32 pm 
Oct 16, 2011 @ 15:52:25
Love this!!!
Oct 18, 2011 @ 08:56:38
Thank you!
Oct 19, 2011 @ 00:14:13
I had a very similar watershed experience in moving back out West, but coming from the other direction – it started out very intellectual, and later became suffused with meaning and spiritual significance. It was right around the time I took family cooking duties back over – 2006? – that I read Renewing America’s Food Traditions, and I found the image of food nations, of meta-terroirs, incredibly compelling – part geographical determinism, what can be done with the land in a particular place, and part culture and history. Making a conscious choice to shift my family’s diet toward chiles, squashes, tomatoes, low-processed/unprocessed corn products, and other foods that aren’t just locally grown, but regionally significant has become a spiritual practice, an act of local-spirit veneration, over time. I’d love to be able to do as much with animal foods as I do with vegetables and staples… we’re getting there. This has been a hard year with a lot of compromises, but I’m trying to get momentum under a fresh start.
Oct 19, 2011 @ 09:24:04
“Making a conscious choice to shift my family’s diet toward chiles, squashes, tomatoes, low-processed/unprocessed corn products, and other foods that aren’t just locally grown, but regionally significant has become a spiritual practice, an act of local-spirit veneration, over time.”
This made me shiver. Absolutely, absolutely, yes. There isn’t the same strong super-regional centuries-old food tradition here because people didn’t really much LIVE here, even native peoples. I have been concentrating on the super-local, the varieties and especially fruits that are either indigenous or varietal that you really can’t get much outside of this region, like the fuyu persimmons. Now I really want to read that book.
Aug 01, 2012 @ 16:52:01
Wow, what an interesting re-read.
I’d add that converting from Wicca-Flavored Generic Neopagan to a specific ethnocultural reconstructionist tradition had a lot to do with finding an interest in seasonal food, as much as coming West had do do with finding an interest in local food.
There’s a deep, deep tradition of forest-gardening and wildcrafting throughout Eastern Europe; some wild foods have been as important as cultivated foods right down to the present day. Much of the mythology and iconography of Romuva is tied up in those harvestings and the turning of the seasons. I don’t do nearly as much wildcrafting as I’d like to do, but even just the act of harvesting fresh herbs from the garden is touching the Goddesses in a small way, you know? I look at the nativized mint and wild lambsquarters and gourd in my yard and it tugs on a part of my DNA that saw wild rye and wheat come up outside the house where threshing was being done the fall before, twelve thousand years ago, when agriculture was on the cusp of being born. It makes me know in my body what it is to be a woman, a pagan woman, in the same way that fertility magic and mother-centered rituals do for other women I know.
Aug 01, 2012 @ 21:27:18
Can I totally steal that quote for my post tomorrow?
Aug 02, 2012 @ 12:42:52
Um, of course? (Am I replying too late? I see you already have a new post up!)
Reaching Beyond the Choir
Sep 17, 2012 @ 16:07:13
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