“Food and Inclusion” by Aaron Brown

In this service–sponsored by Dr. Greg Feinsinger–we will explore the way that our relationship with food shapes our world and our individual lives. We will discuss the power of plant-based eating while also looking at the way to harmonize diet and worldview–whatever that might look like for each individual regardless of your chosen diet. Thematic music coming your way by Olivia, Micha & Paul.

I was struggling with where to go with today’s service because the topic is both vast and intensely personal for me. Greg sponsored this service during the auction, and asked me to speak on the topic of a plant-based whole foods diet knowing that I mostly adhere to such a diet myself.

He was very generous, both supplying me with some wonderful information about the power and impact of these diets and giving me total leeway to decide how I wanted to proceed. 

I considered making Greg the focus of this talk because I am deeply impressed by the work he’s done throughout his career and that he continues doing to help people choose these diets. PBWF diets can help heal everything from heart disease and hypertension, to stroke, dementia, macular degeneration, diabetes, kidney stones, gout, and cancer. They are also–arguably–the single most significant lifestyle change you can make if you want to reduce your carbon footprint.

I have seen Greg at City Market helping people who are new to the diet find the right foods in the grocery store. As a working doctor, Greg helped my brother among countless others find the benefits of plant-based eating. After retiring, he founded two non-profits–La Clinica Pueblo and The Center for Prevention and Treatment of Disease through Nutrition. He is a passionate and inspiring force in trying to help all of us live healthier lives and I am deeply grateful for the work he does.

However, most of you know Greg and the amazing work he has done. I felt like it might get a little embarrassing if I kept on in this fashion. If you don’t know Greg or if you want to learn more about the power of plant-based eating he is incredibly generous with his time and resources and can support you in your journey.

So what am I going to talk about? The topic of food and diet is an incredibly rich one. It intersects with just about everything in our lives. We are what we eat, after all. And not just in the physiological sense. Eating is core to human culture. It is one of the primary means by which we gather together to socialize. It is one of the primary ways parents can show love to their children.

In a wonderful article for the July 2022 National Geographic, Charles C. Mann wrote about the surge in movements across the country toward greater sovereignty for native nations. In addition to examining such crucial elements of sovereignty as language and law, Mann focused a great amount of attention on the way traditional food practices enrich the land, lives, and livelihood of these nations. Food is life.

For the Klamath tribes in the Pacific Northwest, helping to restore salmon to their rivers involved a decades-long battle to get 4 dams removed that had created a great deal of decline and damage to the broader ecosystem. Those dams have since been removed and the areas around are beginning to heal. 

For the Haudenosaunee–who we’ve spoken of before as the chief exemplars of a living, balanced system of democracy for the founders of our own system–restoring ancestral varieties of corn and traditional ways of farming the “three sisters”–corn, beans and squash–has not only helped heal the land but has brought back significant elements of culture and community.

For the Blackfoot, meanwhile, bringing herds of free-ranging buffalo back into their reservation lands has similarly repaired both ecosystem and culture.

Meanwhile, a whole generation of small and mid-size farmers today have been discovering (or rediscovering) processes of regenerative agriculture that make the land truly rich and thriving without destructive pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and they involve integrating animal and plant systems on their farms.

The reason I bring this all up is there are complications related to the incredibly compelling story that can be told on behalf of plant-based whole food diets. If we are to be truly inclusive, I believe it is important to note how essential animals are to the healing and thriving of our damaged world.

I don’t know what all of that means when it comes to advocating for any particular diet, but I do know it is potentially dangerous and destabilizing for our world to imagine systems that completely eliminate animal agriculture.

The other reason I bring all of this up is because I have talked to a lot of people over the years about food and I have noticed how intensely personal and sensitive the subject can be. Diet is a deeply intimate and essential part of people’s lives. It’s not just about the food they eat, but it’s also the family they grew up in, the culture they identify with, the comfort they find when stress threatens to overwhelm them. 

Telling anyone to change how they eat often feels like telling them to change who they are. Particularly when we pile up pressures around health and climate change, it can feel overwhelming. What I have found is the more I have pushed on people to change their diets, the more I have pushed them into stress-eating bacon double cheeseburgers AND feeling bad about it.

So I have no intention of doing that here. I do want to say, if you are struggling with a health issue and the medical system (or as Greg rightly calls it “the disease management industry”) isn’t helping you to get healthy, know that there is great power in plant-based eating. Despite the fact that we are what we eat, medical schools–in the grips of big pharma and for-profit models of care–typically only require one semester of study on nutrition and that is often influenced by highly suspect, industrial food lobbies. All of the rest of medical education is “pills and procedures”–as Greg rightly sums it up.

But no, beyond that I’m not going to try to convince anyone to change how you eat. 

As I was starting to write my reflection, I read a great interview with Denzel Washington. In it, he said two things that really inspired me. The first was an offhand reminder that the universal stems from the specific. The second was this little parable: “Man goes down to the ocean and tries to fit all the knowledge of the ocean into his little brain instead of just jumping in the water and enjoying himself. Sometimes you just have to have faith in things bigger than our ability to understand them. Sometimes you have to just jump in the water and enjoy yourself and not try to figure it out.”

So–inspired by that and by counsel from both my partner Jessica and my daughter Wyllie who offered me advice as I was struggling through the thicket of what to say this morning, I’m simply going to share my own food story and invite you to reflect on your own. I’m going to pose questions to which I have only personal answers, not global ones, and which–frankly–are pretty messy.

The three questions I invite you to consider are:

1. How does your food make you feel physically?
2. How does your food make you feel spiritually?
3. How does your food make you feel emotionally?

 Physically:

• Mom cancer
• Bison burger
• Processed food and weight fluctuations

Spiritually:

• Drive back from Carbondale in 1988
• Melanie Joy and Iliff – Eat or be eaten
• Fast, cheap, & disposable consumer society

Emotionally:

• Bacon double cheeseburger
• Thanksgiving
• Kids, friends, and family

Jumping mouse is a story of transformation within the food web. It has a fundamental lesson at its core. Eat and be eaten.