Day 3: Food Justice and Overabundance

Food Justice and Overabundance

by Rev. Daniel Wolpert

Every time I walk into a grocery store I’m overwhelmed.  This has been happening for awhile now.  I just cannot believe how much food is in the store.  A never ending supply, piles of fruits and vegetables, shelves stuffed to overflowing.  And I imagine how it’s this way in every major supermarket store all across the country.  I walk down the aisles and I can feel the excess.

When I first began noticing these feelings I started to think, “What happens to all this food?”  Surely it wasn’t getting sold and eaten by the expiration dates.  That was years ago, and since then I have learned all about food waste, how much food goes into those dumpsters out back; the fact that almost 40% of the food grown in this country isn’t actually eaten because it goes bad.

The store that I go to most often has its dumpster out back in an ally.  Sometimes I walk to the store from home and I can take a shortcut through some parking lots and approach the store from the back.  I walk by the dumpster.  It’s huge.  Probably about 15 feet tall and 25 feet long.  Seems as big as a small house.   It’s also completely sealed and fed automatically from inside the store.  No dumpster diving here.

The area around the dumpster smells of all the rotting food inside.  I imagine this great blue beast being fed every day.  It might eat more food than all the shoppers who come to the store.

I think about the story of the manna in the wilderness.  Only gather as much food as you need for one day.  When the people stocked up, the food rotted and they went hungry.  Is food justice about having enough for all but not too much for any?

If so, then every one of our supermarkets is a palace of injustice.  Too much food for some while others don’t have any.

When I used to grow food for a living I was also struck by abundance, but then it was the abundance of the earth.  How strange to sell some of the food for money, while there was still plenty left over.

We have to feed the dumpster, because if we just gave the almost spoiled food away, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell some of the food for cash.

So what is justice here?  God gave the food away.  God gives all the food away.  We never pay God for anything.  It’s hard for us to imagine an exchange system outside of capitalism where all get to eat.

So I continue to wander the isles meditating on the excess and the feeling of being overwhelmed.

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