Distorted Imagination: Land, Food, and Economies

During the summer of 2020, the Wendland-Cook program hosted a series of webinars under the theme: Liberating People and the Planet: Christian Responses at the Intersection of Economics, Ecology, and Religion. Originally planned as an in-person conference, these webinars featured insights from theologians and scholars of religion reflecting on our climate and economic crisis. The original papers are being prepared for a book to be released in 2021.

In preparation of the book release and to contextualize the webinars, we featured brief overviews of each of the chapters in an Interventions forum. To see the entire forum, click here. This is Tim Van Meter’s contribution to the forum.

DISTORTED IMAGINATION: LAND, FOOD, AND ECONOMIES

TIM VAN METER

September 24, 2020

Each day, people participate in small decisions carrying long term global impact. Contemporary moral statements about the right way to eat or ethics of plant based diets are promoted as ways to make moral judgements that can ‘save the world.’ However, many of these decisions place a moral and economic burden on others while ceding food production and distribution to industrial systems. Recent examples include the significant, and well placed, outrage at the vulnerability of workers in the meatpacking industry, such as chicken and pork processing plants in the Midwest during the pandemic tying their working conditions to meat in a person’s diet. I’m in agreement that industrial agriculture as seen in meat processing and centralized animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are places of exploitation of workers. The Immokalee workers and other collectives of vegetable harvesters were calling out for review of their spaces of injustice with as high or higher rates of COVID infection but their calls may not have been amplified with the same vigor. At the same time, workers for a vegan food company were fighting for the right to organize in the face of company union busting.

All of these examples are evidence of the oppressive values at the heart of our industrial food system. However, there might be better, less heroic, ways to join in solidarity for food security and sovereignty through cooperative models. In this paper, I assert that choices in our diets should be allied with commitments to human and animal labor in small local farms and cooperatives offering the greatest health for people, animals, soil, and shared vocation.

Dr. Tim Van Meter is an Associate Professor at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO) where he leads ecology and justice specializations in the M.Div. MAPT, D.Min, and co-directs the new Master of Arts in Social Justice (MASJ). He also serves as the Coordinator of Ecological Initiatives, leading work on food security, community responses to climate change, agroecological theology, and social justice. His research interests include: how ecology is taught in theological schools, ecological practices of faith communities, and farmers’ understandings of the sacred in relationship to land and vocation.