In this episode, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss the relationships among food, power, and labor. Rev. Deborah talks about the rise of agribusiness, and Dr. Thorpe discusses Cesar Chavez.
Transcript
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
DDM [00:40] Welcome. So today Elizabeth and myself want to speak a little bit about agriculture, our food systems, farm workers, and some of the issues that are important for us to be aware of as we consider issues of justice, human dignity, and the earth itself, which of course are deep biblical values central to our faith. Elizabeth, I don’t really know if you watch the Super Bowl at all.
MET [01:09] No.
DDM [01:10] Okay, you too.I also don’t watch the Super Bowl, but I remember a couple of years back, I sometimes on my Facebook feed will see different adverts that come out on the Super Bowl. And there was a Super Bowl advert about, and God made a farmer. Did you ever see that one?
MET [01:27] God made a farmer?
DDM [01:31] Yes. You skipped that one
MET [01:31] Just the ridiculousness. Okay, whatever. I’ll leave that.
DDM [01:34] There we go. Well, I must say, honestly, it was one of those adverts that was really designed to pull on your heartstrings.
DDM [01:42] It was this beautifully curated advert about the sacredness of farming, the humanity of farming. They had this farmer sitting with this little foal, and it was highlighting the creativity of farmers to meet any challenge, the hard workingness of farmers, that kind of strong masculinity, but also soft. The son wanting to follow in the father’s footsteps and it was really highlighting this whole concept of almost this idyllic family farming with great honor and integrity. I don’t know what farming was like in the past in the USA.
DDM [02:19] I mean, I do know that America used to largely be a nation of farmers, but that’s certainly not the reality today in the USA. So much has changed. And I felt like that video in some ways was idolizing maybe something that’s was in the past or maybe something that’s never actually been. I’m not sure, because I didn’t grow up in this country. But the reality is that what I know now is that only 2% of the population are actually farmers. And farming is… it’s not at all what the advert was portraying. And what I’ve done because I’m passionate, you know myself, I’m passionate about agriculture and about farming.
DDM [03:01] What I discovered is after World War II, farming in this country changed dramatically. Because in World War II, you had all your war ammunition factories. They were producing weapons and gunpowder, all the nitrogen-based bombs that were being produced. And so when the war ended, the big question was, what do you do with all these chemical factories that have now been built after the war?
DDM [03:28] And so they began to build and produce nitrogen-based fertilizers out of those war ammunition factories. Nerve gas, which I discovered, was slightly modified to create insecticides. You had your development of DDT, and these were huge corporate businesses. And I think there were incredible promises kind of post-World War II of what chemical fertilizers could do to your produce.
DDM [03:59] All kinds of chemicals were developed to boost yields, eradicate weeds. And so farming pretty rapidly shifted into a chemical process that needed obviously both chemicals but also heavy equipment. And ironically, I always think this is quite funny, it was called the Green Revolution. And the thought was that these chemical ways of farming would make food available and cheaper for people all over the world, and that it could be the end of poverty.
DDM [04:30] And so farming started to shift to these large monocultures, which is obviously the planting of one single crop. And there was a great increase in food production. But these monocultures obviously were susceptible now to rampant disease and insect problems. And so farmers had to keep spraying and spraying more and more stronger insecticides and herbicides in order for their crops to survive.
DDM [04:55] And so farming started to become more and more costly, and farmers therefore became more reliant on government subsidies. And one of the things I learned, which I thought was fascinating, is that it actually costs more to produce many of our crops today than they are actually worth. Yeah, and we put more calories into producing the nutritional value of one calorie.
DDM [05:18] But the reality is, is those subsidies were increasingly being used to support chemical companies. And farmers were basically told adapt or die. And for many small farmers they started dying. About 330 farmers leave their lands every single week.
DDM [05:37] Increasingly we know in our country that farmers cannot afford to farm. And this whole shift in farming really was called the birth of agribusiness. It was a term that was first coined in 1955\. But agribusiness really is that large scale farming involving monocultures.
DDM [05:56] It often involves owning the whole system from the development of treated or genetically modified seeds to owning the farms or leasing privately owned farmland. to owning the methods of farming, the companies that produce the machinery and equipment, the chemicals and the fertilizer, the pharmaceutical companies, the food processing and distribution and even retail to customers. So agriculture has really expanded to develop such a monopoly on food production and distribution at almost every level of the process. And so those who are actually in charge of food production increasingly are not farmers but businessmen.
DDM [06:43] And increasingly farmers themselves have become captive to agribusiness. They either have to rent out their land to agribusiness to survive financially. They can’t compete with the cheap produce that agribusiness produces. And so more and more farmers increasingly are just put out of business.
MET [07:02] So this is a really random thought. But when founding fathers way back when Thomas Jefferson had this idea that the best way to organize him, like he had this idea that we’re going to be a nation of yeoman farmers, and he wanted to just divide America up into these large, pretty much just squares of farmland. And that was going to be his version of democracy, is these gentlemen farmers who are just going to create this utopia.
MET [07:32] Anyway, that was Thomas Jefferson. But it’s funny to me that what you’re describing is very much more of a Alexander Hamilton kind of won the day with capital and money. Okay, that has nothing to do with what you’re talking about.
DDM [07:46] That’s so fascinating, those two different models of agriculture and how that impacts society. That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. Well, I mean, for me, the contrast between what it’s become and that advert on the Super Bowl was just so stark because really our food systems aren’t about food anymore.
DDM [08:05] They’re not about healthy soil, about farmers or labor. They’ve really simply become, as you said, about profit, you know. And so everything is simply reduced to a commodity. It’s something we use to make money.
DDM [08:17] Food is increasingly not grown for flavor or nutrition, but it’s about the bulk food and often quite toxic food. And we’ve seen the shift now away from what was called that quote-unquote green revolution to increasingly what became then the gene revolution. And so newer food developments were all about genetically modifying seeds, genetically modified plants that can now actually survive the chemical toxicity of the land and what’s being applied. And so you’re really looking at almost a biotechnology revolution.
DDM [08:55] And so what we’re seeing now in agriculture is a number of crop varieties are now being made that if the insect eats the plant, the insect will die. I mean, my question is, what damage does that plant then do to us if we eat that same plant? You know, seeds are modified to be sterile. So increasingly you can no longer save seed or use seed that crops produce, which again makes us completely dependent on the seed companies.
DDM [09:24] Pesticide industry basically bought out the seed industry and so it’s harder to find not only seeds that aren’t genetically manipulated but also chemically treated. And then the final blow in this entire shift was the whole patency issue. In the Constitution, creating patents was allowed, but it’s interesting that food was always excluded on moral grounds. So the idea was you couldn’t patent nature.
DDM [09:53] But in 1978, that was overturned for the first time by one vote in the Supreme Court. Are you aware of this?
MET [10:03] I don’t know much about that.
DDM [10:03] Okay. Yeah, and once that happened in 1978 there was a race for patenting everything so genetic engineering became more and more rampant genes were patented and Wherever genes go then you own whatever they take root in if you own that patent So if you’ve patented a gene and it goes into a plant you now own that plant if it goes into an animal you own the animal so the question is If that gene goes into a human, is that human owned? So Monsanto owns, I think it’s like over 11,000 patents of seed and they actually send, as an industry, people into the World Food Bank to research what seeds are not patented and then they immediately start proceedings to patent.
DDM [10:54] Because they realize whoever controls the seeds controls the food not just for the USA but ultimately globally. And so the problem that many farmers have found is that if Monsanto finds any of their seed has taken root in your land, they then legally own your crop and they can sue you for patent infringement because they say you are growing their seed without their permission. The problem is seed spread with the winds and the birds, you can’t control them. And so increasingly seed saving is becoming a legal issue because you’ve got to ask, is the seed patented?
DDM [11:32] Farmers have often had to destroy thousands of pounds of seeds that they save because of contamination. Farmers become too scared, therefore, to save their own seed because they can’t afford legal battles. But the reality is, is 75% of the world’s 1.4 billion farmers depend on saved seed to farm. So this is a huge issue.
DDM [11:57] And multinational companies are increasingly prosecuting farmers, because for them it’s about controlling that monopoly on food. The other issue that has been really a problem from the environment and justice issues is the standardization of food. So we’re finding that increasingly a crop variety is being reduced now to only one or two varieties. So previously we had thousands of varieties of tomatoes, of potatoes, of collards, of whatever the crop was.
DDM [12:32] But 97% of food varieties that were being grown at the beginning of the 20th century have now become extinct. And so the environmental impact on that is absolutely frightening. The other issue which I think sometimes we don’t realize how it’s impacting also immigration into this country is that the USA started exporting all of these genetically modified crops. These crops then were taken into other countries.
DDM [13:02] They destroyed and contaminated local varieties in those countries and the problem is again the same thing happened as we started to see farmers being put out of business because we produce food cheaper than any country in the world and they couldn’t compete and so as farmers lost land and lost the capacity to to farm and have that business increasingly those families are thrown into poverty and then of course look for a different place to be able to find a way to survive and sustain themselves and their families. And so there was this myth that biotechnology would feed the world. And that’s absolute nonsense because we have currently 800 million people starving every day around the world.
DDM [13:46] The issue is not about the amount of food we produce in the world. The real issue is how we distribute that food, how we actually enable that food to go to where it is need. So really the problem is equitable access and distribution. So I think sometimes when we speak about these issues, and that’s partly why I did this whole long introduction, is because we don’t understand the very real power of the agribusiness industry.
DDM [14:17] It is just one of the biggest global powers. They are in the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re in the Food and Drug Administration. Monsanto supports political candidates on both sides in this country of the political divide. They fund research in universities that leads to research that is beneficial specifically to the agribusiness industry and sometimes it even becomes a marketing arm of those industries.
DDM [14:43] And so I think, you know, any of looking at these issues, if we don’t take seriously how farming is actually completely changed in this country, we really don’t understand how to address those issues. Sorry, that was a mouthful.
MET [15:01] OK, that was a lot. I will be very honest, I don’t know a lot about the process of agriculture. That’s just not, that’s not my jam. But what I do know about is the migrant struggle, and people that are involved in this and kind of public discourse. And some of it, and I’m going to talk about this in just a second.
MET [15:22] Some of this is as much my background, you can’t not have some kind of not insight, but awareness of some of this just coming from Texas, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I went to a high school that was something like 60 or 70% Hispanic, right? I mean, there is a large influx of immigrants from where I’m from.
MET [15:51] So while you gave us this huge introduction about the process of agribusiness, I’m going to talk about some specific ways that people are involved in this process and the way agribusiness affects communities. So I’m taking this in a slightly different direction, but I think in the end we’re going to see how these things all kind of come together. I’m actually going to begin with a discussion about Cesar Chavez.
MET [16:21] Do you know a lot about Cesar Chavez?
DDM [16:22] I know some because he was really a South African hero.
MET [16:27] In no way does that surprise me. I’m just going to say this, if you’re interested in learning more about Cesar Chavez when I say this, there’s a lot of good information at the United Farm Workers website and the site for the Cesar Chavez Foundation. I’m putting that out there because for a variety of reasons that I’m about to go through, people don’t know as much about him as I think they should. But I have found that Chavez is sort of a regional hero.
MET [16:51] Like I said, where I grew up, pretty much every major city had a Cesar Chavez Boulevard, right? San Antonio, Austin, they all found a way to honor Chavez because he really is the MLK of the migrant and agricultural worker population. And like I said, it makes sense that, you know, he would be a folk hero in South Africa.
DDM [17:11] Absolutely, in South Africa, land issues.
MET [17:15] But when I came up north, I found that nobody here had heard of him. My students have no idea who he is. And at first I thought, well, I guess that makes sense because there aren’t as many Latino and Latina people here. But that is a huge mischaracterization of what is happening, I think.
MET [17:34] Because there are very large, very important migrant populations in this area right here.
DDM [17:40] Especially in Western New York.
MET [17:42] Yes. Like for example, there is a Mexican market just a mile away from my house that caters to the migrant community. and my husband and I go there frequently to pick up hot sauces and chorizo. It’s just, it’s a great place.
MET [17:55] So migrants are here. Agricultural workers are here. Maybe not at the same level that they are in Texas and California, but stores like Wegmans depend on the work of migrants and people from countries all over. So we have to ask this blatant question.
MET [18:10] Why don’t white people know about this Chicano hero? and I will tell you, it is because the North is still segregated. And this is often shocking to my Yankee friends, but it is true in about a thousand ways. The community that I am in right now is an incredibly segregated community.
MET [18:30] In this very county, you have some cities with town lines right next to each other that are on one side about 75% minoritized people and on the other side about 95% white. And I love to hear the excuses of, “Oh, that’s not segregation, that’s just historically how it happened.” Like, “Sis, what do you think segregation is? What do you think redlining is? How do you think bank loans work?”
MET [18:53] Point being, there are a lot of people in this very town who are completely unaware that we have large migrant populations living within our very hometowns. But those people are separate from us. The people who provide us food and make sure we are taken care of are not a part of our daily lives.
MET [19:14] So nobody knows who Chavez is up here because the people he championed are persona non grata up here.
DDM [19:20] That’s so interesting.
MET [19:20] So with that little, you know, social justice rant, let me tell you a little bit about Cesar Chavez. Sorry, in no way should it surprise you that I started there. Chavez was born on March 31 in 1927\. He grew up in Arizona, where his past kind of speaks to who he grew up into.
MET [19:42] His home was swindled from his family by dishonest white men. So Chavez knew something about injustice kind of from early on, right?
DDM [19:51] And the loss of land.
MET [19:52] Yes, exactly.
MET [19:54] Chavez’s father agreed to clear 80 acres of land and in exchange, he would receive the deed to 40 acres of land that joined the home. But this agreement was broken and the land was sold to somebody else. So Chavez’s father went to a lawyer and advised him to borrow money and buy the land, and later when Chavez’s father couldn’t pay the interest on the loan, the lawyer bought back the land and sold it to the original owner. So it was just swindling in every way. Chavez did not like school as a child, probably because he spoke only Spanish at home.
MET [20:29] So it’s the same thing that affects children all over America today. Specifically because the teachers were mostly Anglo and only spoke English. And Spanish was forbidden in school, so there was no sense of English language learners. Some schools were still segregated, and he was punished with a ruler to his knuckles for speaking Spanish in these places.
MET [20:53] He felt that integrated schools made him feel like a monkey in a cage. And in 1942, he graduated from the eighth grade, but his father had been in an accident. And he did not want his mother to work in the field, so he did not go to high school and instead became a migrant farm worker. So this is kind of the background that leads into why he became the person he did.
DDM [21:15] Beautiful son.
MET [21:16] Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was, right? Yeah. In 1948, he got married.
MET [21:21] You know, he had family life as it was. On his honeymoon in California, he visited the missions from Sonoma to San Diego. And then he returned to San Jose, where he met this guy named Father Donald McDonnell. And they’re talking about farm workers and strikes.
MET [21:41] And Cesar Chavez began reading about St. Francis and Gandhi and nonviolence. And after he met this guy, McDonnell, he came across another very influential person, Fred Ross. And Chavez became an organizer for Ross’s organization, the Community Service Organization.
MET [22:01] And his first task was voter registration. Then in 62, he founded the National Farm Workers Association. And this was later to become the United Farm Workers, the UFW. He was joined by Dolores Huerta.
MET [22:16] If you don’t know Dolores Huerta, you absolutely have to look her up. She’s an amazing woman, and she’s one of those people that just kind of gets lost in the fray of history. But she was every bit as important to this movement as Chavez. She’s just a woman. So people don’t talk about her.
MET [22:30] But this led to the birth of the union. And this is where Chavez gets into that activism, right? The boycotts and the hunger strikes and this tireless work that he did this emphasis on nonviolence, the movements that he made to get the farm workers involved in their own agency, right?
MET [22:55] And ultimately, Chavez was willing to sacrifice his own life so that this union would continue and that violence was not used. So he fasted a number of times, like this was an ongoing process for him. And I’m not going to go into like every single bit of the movement and the union. But Chavez was really involved in the activism of the United Farm Workers that really led to the changes that happened in the Southwest.
MET [23:22] And they weren’t like, there’s still mistreatment of farm workers, obviously, but there were changes. And the fact that there was a non-white person that wasn’t MLK, obviously, a non-white person that was standing up for this population that had been just completely forgotten for generations. And he was able to say, no, here we are, we deserve some rights, was a huge moment in the story of immigration in the US.
DDM [23:57] Fascinating.
MET [23:58] Yeah, he’s a really fascinating dude. And I think it’s really sad that more people don’t know about him.
DDM [24:03] Yeah, yeah. You know, I think so often in when we listen to this discourse around farmers and around labor, I think the problem is that so often in our strategies, we very quickly divide farmers and labor. And it can be very easy to demonize the farmers when I think the real enemy is very often agribusiness. And both farmers and labor have become victims in the system, of course, as well as the earth and all plant and animal life.
DDM [24:34] Because if you look at the reality, farmers are really not making much money in this country. But it’s the multinational corporations on either side that are really reaping in the profits. And the only way that farmers really stay in business is through those government subsidies. But the reality is that farmers themselves have become labor for the agribusiness. And I think the problem with any of these oppressive systems is that so often what happens is the one with even a little bit more power turns around and does to the weaker one what is being done to them. And so often what we see is that farmers will use the very little power that they have, ironically, to block changes in laws that would bring about justice for farm workers.
DDM [25:21] And as they are put by agribusiness under more and more pressure, they then put more and more pressure on workers and also, of course, onto the soil itself. And so really workers are the ones currently who suffer the most. It’s almost like they together with the earth are on the bottom of the chain of oppression and they’re working in the toxic environment with all of those chemicals. You know, the USA can boast of being the cheapest provider of food in the world.
DDM [25:49] But the reality is the cost is always borne by the workers. And so the cost of all this quote-unquote cheap food that we have can really be measured in the poverty and misery that result from the system that legally allows the exploitation of those who produce this food. And that cost falls on the shoulders of farm workers who labor in the fields to provide these cheap foods we enjoy and we boast about. And so I think the reality is, as you mentioned, so often in this country, you know, it’s the farm workers who’ve been excluded from the basic working rights that are available to everybody else, you know, the minimum wage, the 40 hour work week.
DDM [26:31] Child labor provisions, unemployment insurance, legal protections. So many of these farm workers just don’t have any access to. And so farm workers to this day ironically remain some of the nation’s poorest workers. And I only discovered this when I became involved in some of the farm worker movements here that New York actually has, and this maybe bears with what you were saying Elizabeth, you know the segregation in the North and you know some of the ways we don’t acknowledge the
DDM [27:02] reality of the North, is that New York has some of the worst, worst legal rights for farm workers in this country. I mean, they are ineligible for overtime. They often do not qualify for disability insurance, even though farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in the USA. They don’t qualify for employment insurance, even though their work is seasonal.
DDM [27:26] They often are working seven days a week. They do not have sick days or the right to a day of rest. Even to attend church services, they are exposed to some of the worst toxins and yet not given access to health care.
MET [27:41] Yeah, this is another one of those things that I talk about with my students, because they’re always shocked, like, New York, we take care of everybody. No. So I think that’s really important to think about spinning off from the conversation about Chavez, right? Like, if we’re going to talk about changes that are made, and why are they made, and who this affects, and that kind of thing.
MET [28:05] So one of the questions I always have is, Why do changes happen, right? And for me, one of those things is because there is a communicative force, right? I believe that one of the things that matters is what we say in public, right? I think it matters when the president stands up and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
MET [28:31] And there are some people who think public speech doesn’t matter and that kind of thing, but I think it does. So I’m going to return to Chavez because you’re talking about the rights that farm workers do and do not have. Well, Chavez led a movement that made a change in the rights that migrants, at least in the Southwest, have. And I want to talk about how he made that difference.
MET [28:57] And the reason I want to do that is because I’m curious about what would it take to make that difference again.
DDM [29:06] Right.
MET [29:07] And I think it’s curious to think about what was different about his approach that I mean, he was a very different kind of speaker than a lot of other people. So it just kind of, I just want to go over a few things. Because he really did have a profound effect on policies in terms of how we treat our agriculturals in the Southwest. And I could easily talk about just the last few years and the work has been done to address agricultural worker rights in just my own community, right?
MET [29:41] But I think Chavez is a more generalized place to start. So one of the things Chavez did outside of all his political activism in terms of direct action was, as I said, he was a remarkable speaker. And this is notable because he didn’t come from a background of this erudite speaking education, right? Like I said, he dropped out after the eighth grade, but because he relied on his roots, he spoke from his cultural background, not as a polished orator.
MET [30:12] And I think that’s really interesting when you were talking about, what is a farmer? You know, the gentle, whatever a farmer is supposed to be. On the one hand, as I said, he was the MLK of his movement, and that is true. He was the visionary leader and the prophetic voice, but he wasn’t a preacher like MLK.
MET [30:32] He has many notable speeches, but there isn’t an I Have a Dream or Sermon from the Mountaintop or any of those. But there are a few things worth noting about his speaking abilities that indicate why he was successful in motivating action. One, he was excellent at using narrative. He spoke using stories, stories from his life and experience, and stories from the people he knew.
DDM [30:58] Powerful.
MET [30:59] Yes. He spoke in narratives that dramatized the issues he was trying to advocate for. He seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that people need appeals to pathos.
MET [31:12] People need to have an emotional connection to the issues at hand. We may have talked about this before, but if you’re going to make an argument, it should have three kinds of appeals, right? Appeals to character, logic, and emotion. And the appeal to emotion is called an appeal to pathos, and Chavez understood this.
MET [31:33] People don’t respond to stories that are completely lacking in humanity. Chavez knew how to make a story human. He also knew how to make a story have impact. Just because a speech has emotion does not mean it should lack reason.
MET [31:52] And Chavez was known for making very reasonable and logical arguments as well as tapping into people’s hearts. For example, he commonly made comparisons between the farm workers movement and other social movements, and this does a few things. It inspires a certain amount of hope, because if you can see success in another movement, there’s hope for yours. And it also provides a logical foundation for the structure and organization of Chavez’s movement.
MET [32:21] So if he could point out that this strategy over here had worked before, then it was reasonable to try it again. He also knew how to make appeals to character, and what that means is that he could make himself seem like (A), a member of the community, and (B), a person of ethics. And one of the ways he continually did this is by staking out the foundation of the movement, not as political, but as a moral and ethical imperative. And he couched his actions not as a political movement, but as a moral one.
MET [32:54] So finally, Chavez insisted on nonviolence. Hence, the hunger strikes and the boycotts. In many ways, he was really following the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr. and to some extent, Gandhi.
MET [33:06] But this also contributed to his character and political ethos. So because of all this, and I want to emphasize this is the stuff of successful rhetoric, it is of interest to think about why so many people were against him. For example, the phrase sour grapes and putting that in quotes was used to describe the boycotts and Chavez by detractors who wanted to belittle Chavez and those who are fighting for their rights. Sour grapes in the sense of like, oh, that’s just sour grapes.
MET [33:36] You’re just, you know, being whiny. but also sour grapes in the sense that they weren’t picking grapes. But here we can look at other social movements, right? Just as with the Montgomery boycotts or with Malcolm X’s rhetoric about self-determination, the criticism came from privileged white people.
MET [33:54] And the criticism was 100% about minoritized people demanding equality and the inconvenience that would cause people who benefited from their oppression. If agricultural workers were treated fairly white people might have to deal with a little discomfort at the cash register. And, as is so often the case, the majority of Americans are much more interested in saving a buck fifty than the human rights of those we have segregated away. That’s one of the reasons we segregate them, right? If we lived and worked with people and saw them every day and had community with them, it would be a lot harder to say, “Well, we’re crushing you beneath the weight of systemic oppression, but my squash is cheaper, so, meh.”
DDM [34:38] Yeah, I mean unfortunately what you say is 100% true, 100% true, you know. So, you know, I think these are huge issues that we really do need to be looking at, you know, because what we really need in our world is an agriculture that really starts to see the earth as a sacred gift and works with the earth to heal the earth rather than destroying and constantly taking from the earth. We need an agriculture that allows for polyculture and diversity from seeds to insect life and soil microbes to start being cultivated again because we know that diversity is the measure of a strength of a system.
DDM [35:18] We keep forgetting that in every aspect of our social and political lives. God created this phenomenal diversity in creation that over time we’ve just decimated. We need food to be grown that is nutritious and healthy as God originally created it to be. We need food to be distributed equitably so that food scarcity does become a thing of the past.
DDM [35:39] I mean Jesus is so clear about the hungry being fed in his own ministry. And we do need land to be owned by people. I mean, the amount of people that have lost land in the last couple of decades is frightening. And of course, people of color and indigenous people are the largest groups that have been expelled from their own land.
DDM [36:01] And so what would it mean for land to be owned by people and communities, not companies, and for labor to have a share in the profit of their labor? You know land always biblically was there for all to be gifted by and these are the systems our government should be subsidizing rather than these chemically genetic toxic systems they currently fund and the oppressive systems that obviously hold them in place. So there was a lot today that Elizabeth and I went through, but if you’re interested in agriculture, in the migrant movements of farm labor, if you’re interested, many of these Trinity Episcopal Church partner with a phenomenal organization called Rural Migrant Ministries. And I really encourage you, if you are interested, to check out their website and some of what they’re doing, because as you were sharing, Elizabeth, with Chavez, they really root themselves in narrative.
DDM [36:57] Much like he did. What are the actual stories of people? What are people actually living and experiencing? And how do we really allow that lived experience to increasingly shape our policies and our ways in which we are community together or not?
MET [37:20] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/.
MET [37:39] That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [37:49] Music by Audionautix.com
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