Food Justice
Matthew 14:13-21
I am the cook in my household. I enjoy the routine of purchasing ingredients and making meals out of them. The meals I get to make for my family, friends, and guests are a way I can “do” an act of love. And this is important for me personally as I have a hard time with expressing emotions generally. So if I get to make you a meal, thats my way of expressing some love and joy with you.
It can be easy to overlook the cultural, social, emotional, and familial importance of food. We can forget how food is at the center of important conversations, how we celebrate holidays, and how we engage with one of our most important ritual practices as Christian people.
Food is a gift given to us by the world God has created. Food is something that brings us together. Food has been at the root of human revolutions throughout history. And, today, food remains a frustrating paradox. Because while we absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, grow more food than we actually will ever eat across the world, we also bear witness to staggering, tragic, and even evil instances of famine, food scarcity, and a general lack of access to healthy food, especially for people living in poverty.
Hunger today doesn’t exist because of naturally occurring food scarcity. Hunger exists because we, as a global humanity, make choices that create it. Whether it is in the midst of famine in Gaza, disruptions to the logistics that allow food to be transported where it is needed, increasing climate disasters due to human cause global warming, or diminished access to affordable healthy food which affects people disproportionately on the basis of race and class, an abundance of food is objectively available to us today.
But unfortunately, in our sin, we have managed to create scarcity out of that abundance.
And that scarcity can lead to things like an ongoing obesity epidemic caused by a restriction of access to nutritious food in lieu of cheaper calorie dense and processed food. It results in the existence of food deserts that primarily affect people in poverty. It creates hunger crises of our own making!
And so, the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand in the Gospel of Matthew is interesting for us to explore today. Because there are some details we can tune into that might resonate more closely to our experience today than we realize.
This miracle story starts with Jesus withdrawing out of a sense of caution after learning that John the Baptist had been arrested by Herod Antipas. But the crowds found him anyway and followed him. Jesus could have hid further—he was on a boat and the crowds were on shore—but instead he had compassion. He healed their sick. He taught. And then he pulled off the familiar miracle: he fed more than 5,000 of them (scripture says it was 5,000 men along with women and children).
What caught my eye in this story was the disciples’ concern and their answer to the problem of a crowd like this needing to be fed: “send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Isn’t this our response to the growing masses of people affected by human-caused hunger today?
We assume that hungry people can buy food like we can and that they can actually get to where food is being sold. And yet we know today that it isn’t as simply as just going somewhere and buying food for oneself. By saying this to Jesus, the disciples demonstrated how they were trapped in their own belief that the only abundance to be found is in the oppressive economy of the Roman Empire.
But Jesus overturns this idea because Jesus was tuned into a deeper, divine abundance. He gave thanks for it, and then he deployed it. The food was there, and there was so much of it, that leftovers remained after everyone ate!
I have been excited to witness the new effort by New York City to provide city-run grocery stores that guarantee a 30% markdown on market rates for food that will be located in a few of the city’s food deserts. That is one way public policy can turn scarcity into abundance!
As people of faith, the good news we proclaim is that it is possible to tune into God’s abundance in our midst, even when all of the outward signs point to scarcity.
But it is on us to notice it.
