Our faiths have rich traditions of guiding our food choices. These traditions include certain times for fasting, limitations and restrictions on specific foods such as meats, and simply reminding us of the sanctity of life and the importance of social justice and fairness. The way our crops and livestock are raised, harvested, processed, sold, packaged, and transported are all really important. We have the power to choose the right way to get our food. In order to make the best food choices, we need to make sure that our food is obtained and processed fairly and in ways that do not cause harm.

Our current system of food production damages the health of our lakes and streams, forests, wildlife, and worsens the threat of global warming. It is leaving many laborers with unfair wages and the poorest without food. Additionally, it can cause health problems for all of us with the use of pesticides and growth hormones.

Fortunately, you can make healthy, equitable, and sustainable choices about food. With the help of your congregation, it is possible to get your community to support food systems that are just and sustainable.

Steps Your Congregation Can Take

Education
Learning about the best food choices is the first step toward making the best food choices. Here are some resources for food education:

Cool Foods Campaign website teaches about the link between the food we eat and global warming with comprehensive explanations and statistics. Their website has plenty of concrete facts and green food tips that can get your congregation going. There’s also a free Cool Foods Mini Shoppers Guide that can be easily shared with your whole congregation.

“Just Eating?” is a useful resource for those interested in a faith-based approach to learning and teaching about good food practices. This curriculum teaches about food justice with a Christian perspective, and also includes religiously universal issues such as the sacredness of meals, healthy eating habits, world hunger, and food and the environment, and creating community with food.

Hazon is an organization that has several resources including a detailed food curriculum and information on their Min Ha’Aretz: Jewish Food for Thought, Hazon’s Family Education Initiative program. While drawing from the Jewish tradition, Hazon’s programs teach about food justice issues that people of all faiths can use and relate to.

Action
There are many ways to make food justice actions into fun activities for your whole congregation.

• Introduce sustainable foods to your congregation. One fun idea is to have a congregation-wide pot luck consisting only of locally grown and organic foods. Another way to take action with your congregation is to organize a group visit to a local farmer’s market with your congregation. A list of local farmer’s markets can be found at rawDC.org
  
  
• Organize organic, local meat sales through your congregation. KOL Foods sells kosher and non-kosher organic, local meat to the DC area. Green Zabiha, a Muslim organization devoted to providing halal meat for the DC area, is currently forming a program to sell organic, locally raised poultry.
  
  
• Give food to those in need. For example, you can organize a picking with the  Washington Area Gleaning Network, which is a network of volunteers that gather the produce that remains on farmland after the harvest. Gleaners of all ages and walks of life can come together to pick these fruits and vegetables and give them to food shelters.
  
  
• Have your congregation start up or join a CSA. Community Supported Agriculture, or “CSAs,” are programs organized by local farmers and groups of consumers who agree to support these farmers financially in exchange for a share of their harvest. CSAs have been recognized as an effective way to get people involved with the source of their food and help them connect with the land. More detailed information on CSAs can be found at the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service website, and the USDA’s National Agriculture Library.
  
  The following congregations in our network are sites for CSAs:
• Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring
  Silver Spring MD
• Tikvat Israel
  Rockville MD (see Tuv Ha’Aretz, their program)
• Tifereth Israel
  Washington DC

Personal Steps
Keeping these guidelines in mind can be a big help:

• Keep your food choices in your thoughts. Don’t be afraid to talk with your congregation members about the significance of the food we eat. Share your good practices with others; be a food leader! Prayer always helps, too.
• Find alternatives to regular meat. Eating less meat each day is not only healthy, it is also much gentler on the environment. Producing one 6 ounce beef steak requires 16 times more fossil fuels than the production of 1 cup of broccoli, 1 cup of eggplant, 4 ounces of cauliflower, and 8 ounces of rice combined. Additionally, meat production creates about 900 million tons of polluting manure annually, in the U.S. Meat lovers can improve their eating habits by making sure their meat is organic and raised ethically, or trying meat-flavored vegetarian dishes.
• Look for the USDA Organic label. This ensures that the foods were not produced with pesticides, irradiation, hormones, antibiotics, or bioengineering.
• Shop at local farmers markets. Eating fresh locally grown food is energy efficient in a very simple way – less transportation! Also, getting to know who grows your food and reconnecting with the land itself can be an enriching experience.
• Forget the frozen dinners and pick up fresh produce and ingredients. Choosing to buy food that has less packaging and is less processed creates less waste, and also allows you to make your food special and unique for you.

DC Green Muslims traveled to Kayam Farm, a Jewish educational garden in Reisterstown, Maryland, to learn about growing food locally and organically.

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