Description
How you eat affects the planet – and everyone else on it. What you eat might literally cost the earth. It also has implications for your health, for the grower or producer, and for the way you think about the world. What in God’s Name Are You Eating? faces what many of us choose to ignore in the Western world: we, as adults, have allowed a childlike innocence to mask the real cost of the environment in which we are cocooned, while thousands elsewhere find themselves drought-stricken and starving. “What in God’s name are they not eating?” “Enough” is the simple answer and we are part of the reason why.
The price of ‘life’, as we know it, is high. To those of us who have ‘life’, there is a moral imperative to enable others to share it rather than suppress them. With its advocacy of a globally responsible discipleship, What in God’s Name Are You Eating? enables us to see how the world’s peoples can have life and a long future. While the reflection is rooted in radical Mennonite Christianity, the challenge is to those of faith – and those of none.
About the Author
Andrew Francis is a writer, community theologian, and former executive vice-chair of the UK Mennonite Trust. His doctorate (Princeton Theological Seminary) examined how religious communities use food and eat together. He is a published poet, and author of Hospitality and Community after Christendom (2012).
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part One: Introduction
1. Four Snapshots and a Question
2. Cooking Up a Storm
Part Two: The Nature of Our Challenge
3. Global Concerns
4. Discipleship’s Demand
Part Three: The Big Issues
5. Water, Water, Everywhere
6. Food Miles, Free-Range, and Animal Welfare
7. The Big Meat Debate
8. Cereal Killers and Genetic Modification
9. Free Trade, Fair Trade, Fair Prices, Fare Labels
10. Self-Sufficiency, Simplicity, and Grow Your Own
11. The End of the Line …
Part Four: Changing the World
12. Start Here
13. Developing a Global Strategy
14. Conclusions
Bibliography
Endorsements and Reviews
Andrew Francis leads us on a tour of some big challenges for living faithfully in a world where the food system is placing unsustainable pressure on our shared and finite planet.
David Nussbaum, Chief Executive, WWF-UK
Having read this compelling book I can only conclude that it is a book that has been a long time in coming and it should be read by every living person, young and old, who cares about the impact of human activity on our world.
Allan Armstrong, author of Notes on Meditation
Francis sets out to tackle what is undoubtedly one of the most important issues we are facing today: our diets. What we put on our plates, and how it found its way there, has political, economic, and steep environmental repercussions. What in God’s Name Are You Eating? can have a direct and immediate impact on our lives, the lives of others, and the planet. Put down whatever else you’re reading and read this book. It’s that important.
Tripp York, Co-editor of The Peaceable Kingdom Series
What in God’s Name are you Eating? might both help us to keep hold of a vision of a more sustainable future and provide a practical manual for the taking of some positive personal initiatives…As this book consistently reminds us, ‘Just one step starts a journey’. Finishing the book, I looked hard at my lunch before me on the table. After eating with a little more awareness of the bigger processes that led to the placing of that food before me, I got up from the table resolving, in fact, to re-establish my own rectory vegetable garden. Aspiration had become application – and that’s what we need now to carry us forward.
Rev Andrew Norman, in Methodist Recorder, 26 June 2015
If we did what Francis recommends, the world would be better. Sam Janse In Kerk en Theologie, Vol, 74, No. 4, 2023
