In February of 2008, I decided to stop eating animal products. In the two and half years since then, I have embraced a whole foods, plant-based diet. I have also answered some form of the question “What are your reasons for being vegan?” more times than I can possibly count. To be honest, I think that many times I have done a poor job presenting my reasons, which I believe can be attributed to a combination of my changing and growing convictions about veganism and a hesitancy to speak out in fear of being thought of as crazy, judgmental, or pushy in regard to my vegan habits.

In light of this, I want to use this platform to speak to why I am vegan without being condemning or abrasive. I am certainly not articulating a position on behalf of the ELCA. It is not my aim to offend, convert, or say that what I believe is the one right way. (My parents operate a hamburger restaurant and I still get along with them!) In my experience many people are very interested in my lifestyle, and I’m simply hoping to express my reasons for it while being informative and respectfully challenging.

The very first reason I started experimenting with a vegan diet was for my personal health. I firmly believe that eating a whole foods, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to live, and that I am avoiding cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and other health problems that have been associated with the overconsumption of animal products – all animal products, not just meat. Eating vegan makes me feel energized and healthy. I learned to eat new fruits and vegetables, a greater variety of whole grains, and enjoy food more. I care for myself through the choices I make about what to eat, and honoring my body is a central aspect of my faith.

As I experienced the health benefits of a vegan diet, I began to learn a lot more about a vegan lifestyle’s impact – an impact that goes way beyond myself. I’ve committed to veganism as a way of life for the long term because I believe it promotes justice for all of creation: other people, the environment, and animals. I cannot personally reconcile eating meat knowing that 1.02 billion people in the world are undernourished, and, while I realize this is not a direct equation, much of the water and grain used to raise animals for food could be used to nourish humans instead. I learned that eating is an environmental act, and came to understand some of the harmful environmental effects of farming and producing animal-based food, including more pollution and land and water use. Now that I have been vegan for two plus years, I am simply not comfortable with the idea of eating animals, or anything that comes from an animal. It doesn’t feel right. This stemmed from a general uneasiness about the impact of factory farming and slaughterhouse policies on the quality of animal life. Also, I’ve learned startling things about food production and distribution, science, industry, medicine, and the government that raise numerous justice issues and further convince me of my commitment to veganism. I’ve “become aware,” as L. Shannon Jung writes in Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment, “of the chain of human labor that leads to our tables – from those who cultivate good seed (or not), practice ecologically responsible agriculture (or not), harvest, sell, and package food equitably (or not), and distribute its costs in a sustainable way (or not)” (114).

Before I became vegan I was able to largely ignore food – its quality and how it got to my table. Becoming vegan helped me to remember and be conscious of the fact that food is a gift from God. I realized that my nourishment depends on a widespread community beyond myself.

This summer I’ve had the opportunity to look at a lot of different hunger resources to inform my work at ELCA World Hunger. A few quotes in a publication called Just Eating: Practicing Our Faith at the Table, by Advocate Heath Care, Church World Service, and the Presbyterian Hunger Program, speak to my reasons for being vegan:

“Setting limits that fit our values is a part of eating well.”

“To eat well is to consider not only your own body’s needs but also the needs and weaknesses of others.”

In summary, I am vegan out of care for myself, other people, other creatures, and creation. I love being vegan. I don’t see it as an ascetic lifestyle; I believe it is a lifestyle of abundance and I love food more than ever. I have found that eating vegan is not as hard as many people think it would be, but diverting from the mainstream in eating does not come without challenges. One of the biggest challenges for me has been the impact on my experiences of social and communal eating. But maybe that will be material for a later post. I will wrap up now though this topic as a whole is far from exhausted. I am more than willing to expand on my thoughts, provide more information about my sources, and take others’ ideas into consideration. Thanks for reading!

Julie Reishus

I wanna be Your hands
I wanna be Your feet
I’ll go where You send me
I’ll go where You send me
I’ll be Your hands
I’ll be Your feet
I’ll go where You send me
I’ll go where You send me
And I try, yeah I try
To touch the world like You touched my life
An I’ll find my way
To be Your hands

–Audio Adrenaline, Hands and Feet

I hear the phrase, “being Christ’s hands and feet” a lot. I imagine you do too. I hear it at church, when I talk with my friends, and in popular Christian music. I read it in books and on blogs, and I’ve used it myself. I feel like today the idea of being Christ’s hands and feet in the world is very trendy, especially for the social justice-conscious crowd. The context I see it show up most in is in relation to serving those who are poor and needy.

In their book Exploring Ecclesiology, authors Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger write, “Just as God ministers in the world through his two hands – the Son and the Spirit – we are his hands and feet through our union with Christ in the power of the Spirit. As the body of Christ, the church…goes out to the world, serving as Christ’s hands and feet” (246). As right as this sounds, I would press the authors, and anyone else who ascribes to this belief, to be a little more critical of it and cautious about what this metaphor might mean.

I believe the idea of being Jesus to others, of being his hands and feet, is problematic. It’s problematic because in truth, we are not. We are not Jesus to those who are poor. In a sense those who are poor are Christ to us; they are people who are hungry and displaced and oppressed who we must love. Jesus said whenever we serve the least of the members of his family we serve him, not that we are him when we serve.

By claiming to be the hands and feet of Christ we can edge into the dangerous territory of placing ourselves on the center stage and claiming we have Jesus’ redemptive power. It can tempt us into thinking the church will only survive through our efforts and if we are faithful. It can give us the impression that human deeds could take the place of God’s action. Instead we have to realize that we are not necessary for the salvation of the world, though we are called.

At the same time as I express this caution, I wonder at how my concern squares with the notion that we are the body of Christ – with Christ as the head and specific body parts ascribed to us – found in Scripture. Ephesians 1:22-23 says, “And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all,” and Romans 12:4-5 reads “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”

Maybe the point here is on our inter-connectedness, and how as the people of God we rely on one another to be whole, rather than on us being Christ to others. I continue to think through this, and hope you will too.

Julie Reishus

Last week one of the items of “Top Hunger News” featured on Bread for the World’s blog was this video, recently released by NPR, explaining the unintended impact that giving away free food has had on the local economy in Haiti.

In the aftermath of January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, post-disaster relief is creating a new kind of problem for businesses there. The massive influx of food aid has altered the price of rice, throwing the delicate balance in Haiti’s food supply chain out of whack and threatening to collapse the country’s rice market. – Bread blog

I watched the video and with its implications on my mind, throughout the week had conversations with different people and read more on the topic of food aid, like this article about outside organizations overwhelming Haiti’s local aid economy.

Last week I blogged about Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. The questions and wonderings and conversations I had surrounding food aid were piqued in part by one of the chapters, “Who’s Aiding Whom?” focusing on Nazareth, Ethiopia in 2003. The authors write of Jerman Amente, an Ethiopian farmer and grain trader who “shook with anger” when he saw American food intended for starving Ethiopians pour into the country, while homegrown Ethiopian wheat, corn, beans, peas, and lentils “languished untouched” (86). Kedir Geleto, the manager of a grain-trading operation in Ethiopia, says in the chapter, “American farmers have a market in Ethiopia, but we don’t have a market in Ethiopia…We don’t oppose food aid. When there’s a deficit in the country, of course we need it. But when there’s plenty of food in the country, then it’s unbelievable” (87).

I’m relatively new to this conversation about food aid. While I certainly had a sense that not all aid is equal, and that very well-meaning people with good intentions can actually cause harm, the past few weeks have been the first time I truly gave these ideas more than a passing thought. With just a little digging I found a wealth of opinions and information that help me be better informed and more respectfully critical. Here’s my question: who else is new to the conversation about food aid and what have you been learning? How about veterans? What should we know?

Julie Reishus

I am a book lover. I am always reading, and usually that means I’m working my way through five or six books at the same time. My dad laughed at me the other day as I explained to him which category each of the eight books sitting on my bedside table falls into: currently reading, haven’t started but up next on the list, or must reread. I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read, and my work at ELCA World Hunger so far has inspired the addition of many new titles.

While my list is long, there’s one book I’m happy I gave priority to and proud to say I recently finished: Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman.

Thurow and Kilman are Wall Street Journal reporters who’ve been writing on Africa, development, and agriculture for decades. Enough is a result of their extensive reporting about global hunger and the forces behind famine. Each chapter is a compelling story and an illuminating piece of the history or current reality of hunger. The book’s coverage is expansive; rather than try to sum it up I’ll include this passage from the preface:

This book tells the story of the squandered promise of the Green Revolution and the neglect that brought hunger and famine into the twenty-first century. It is the story of Africa and the missed opportunities, the wars and megalomania, the folly and the good intentions gone bad that have left its agricultural potential largely unrealized, its people hungrier that ever before, and the entire world aching for more and cheaper food. It is a tale of self-interest and hypocrisy in the United States and Europe, how subsidies and food aid have gone awry, how geopolitics influenced by remnants of colonial-era policies and practices of the old European powers determine that some countries should bloom and others should starve, how markets failed, how warnings went unheeded, how the present crisis is engulfing us.

This is also, in Part II, the story of the new movement to reclaim the revolution’s lost promise and restore its momentum. It follows the trail from Borlaug to Bono, the Irish rock musician haunted by the chorus of the hungry he first heard in Ethiopia in 1984. From Bill Gates and his foundation colleagues, who realized that the medicine they were bringing to Africa was useless in a malnourished body, to Joe Mamlin, an Indiana doctor who became a farmer in Kenya so his AIDS patients would have something to eat. From Eleni Gabre-Madhim, who kept tilting at windmills until she brought a commodities exchange to her native Ethiopia, to Francis Pelekamoyo, whose Bible led his conversion from Malawi’s central banker to humble microlender. From a small town in Ohio to a tiny village in Kenya. From European CEOs to a couple of American sitcom-watching moms to a son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. From British church activists to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to statesmen in Ireland working to ensure that their country’s dark history of famine isn’t repeated elsewhere in the future.

The authors’ hope is to “outrage and inspire.” With this reader they certainly achieved both. I would add that they also inform. The writing is extremely accessible and engaging, and the treatment of the issues is both broad and in-depth. The authors don’t prescribe one political view over another, but do take a critical stance on some powerful groups. I gained a helpful current and historical understanding of complicated issues that was not impossible to digest and not overly simplified. Enough was a hard book to read in the sense that I felt sorrow and anger at many points, but it’s also a hopeful book. I absolutely recommend it to anyone troubled by the 1 billion undernourished people in the world.

Check out this video about one of the stories in the book, and Roger Thurow’s blog.

“At the end of the day, when in doubt, I’ll feed the hungry.” — Dr. Mamlin, page 163

Julie Reishus

I graduated from college about six weeks ago, and was thrilled to be done with papers, exams, projects, and school in general. But I’m a learner, so honestly you can’t keep me away from that stuff for long. I just finished watching the DVD series EarthBound. It’s an educational series about creation care, put together to help Christian communities learn about God’s call to care for creation, and figure out their role in doing so. The series is broken up into six different episodes: Created/Called, Here/There, Domination/Dominion, Me/We, Now/Forever, and Enough/Too Much. Each one is a little less than a half hour long, and explores the title topic from three angles. First, each episode raises a problematic issue in the Christian and Western traditions, then explores parts of the Christian tradition that can right these issues and deepen our understanding, and last it shows people and organizations that are doing awesome things to live out God’s call to creation care.

The DVD has a definite educational focus. It was created by a team of institutions and programs in and around the ELCA like Gustavus Adolphus College, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and the Augsburg Center for Faith and Learning. You can hear from some of the best biblical scholars, theologians, pastors, teachers, and lay persons across the Lutheran Church, which to me is pretty cool. I imagine the highly academic, “talking head” nature of the series has potential to bore some people (I wouldn’t choose this for a Friday night movie night). But since the series’ ultimate purpose is to be an educational tool, it does an excellent job of engaging watchers as learners with the capacity to really grapple with and understand the theological basis of our call to relate to the whole of creation.

I won’t shy away from labeling myself as a complete nerd; while watching I filled five pages of a notebook with my notes, and occasionally pulled out lecture outlines from my sophomore year Intro to Theology class in college to make connections, remind myself of some terms and concepts, flag my questions, and try to be a critical learner. There is a lot of compelling information packed into the 157 minutes of video, but for the purpose of this blog I’ll pull out a few ideas that got me excited.

The “Here/There” episode emphasized that salvation is not limited to life after death; God does not want to snatch us off this earth. God and the world are bound up together. It urges us to immerse ourselves in creation as a deliberative faith practice – one that I know I, and many others, find incredibly life-giving. I liked what the “Me/We” episode brought up about the radical individualism that goes along with what it traditionally means to be American. Recently I’ve been learning more and more that there is no such thing as a Christian. One cannot be a Christian by oneself, and the Christian community is not made up of individuals who can say, “My choices are mine alone and don’t affect others.” I was reminded watching “Now/Forever” that God’s timing and our timing are vastly different. Thinking short-term is exhausting! Rather than thinking we are in control of everything, we can trust in God and acknowledge that the vitality of the rest of the world is not ultimately up to us.

I could keep going but want to keep this a quick read, so if you’re interested, you can borrow the DVD from ELCA World Hunger and look for a film discussion guide coming soon in the Books and Media discussion group on the Table. As always, comment with your thoughts because I’d love to have a conversation!

Julie Reishus

Hello readers! I’m the other World Hunger intern for summer 2010, Julie Reishus. Today is day eight of this amazing internship experience, and so far every day has been energizing, convicting, affirming, and challenging. I am sincerely thankful to God for the opportunity He’s given me to learn and serve within this incredible organization. I think I’m in the right place!

A little background on me: I grew up in Naperville, IL, and this past May I graduated from Hope College in Holland, MI, where I studied communication and ministry. While in college I had a number of experiences that contributed to my passion for seeking justice, and in particular the deposit placed on my heart about injustices related to hunger. I may explore these influences in more detail in future blog posts, but here’s the quick run down: first, my personal eating habits, and consequently the way I think about food, changed dramatically when I became a vegan. Second, I took a class on World Christianity that opened my eyes to an understanding of the missio Dei that refuses to separate social justice from evangelism. And third, I shared a powerful solidarity meal with 17,000 other people at the Urbana09 student missions conference.

I am thrilled to be learning and working at ELCA World Hunger this summer. I’ll be working on projects like developing the Taking Root curriculum for Vacation Bible School and adult education, and specific opportunities for volunteers to help ELCA World Hunger meet its education, advocacy, and fund-raising goals. I’m excited to blog here every Wednesday and also engage in conversation with you on Facebook and at the Table.

I enjoy dancing, drinking tea, summer sun, concert-going, reading, theology, making delicious vegan meals, learning constantly, the company of good people, Twitter (follow me @jujubeee), and above all worshiping, serving and loving the triune God who first loved us.

Julie