Abstract
The US food system is not environmentally, socially, or economically sustainable. And yet improvements have occurred, thanks to nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers, many of whom based their campaigns on Christian ideas. Their ideas continue to support the drive to make the US food system sustainable. This chapter is about the ideas of food movement leaders who linked Christianity to sustainability since the late 1700s. I consider leaders in five movements: food safety, vegetarianism, organic farming, food justice, and the local food movement. The locally-focused agrarianism of the late twentieth century, led by Wendell Berry, builds on these ideas and on the four older movements. In this synthesis, we can see how both place and Christian ideas become critical to sustainability discourses.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bahnson, F. (2009). Breaking bread: When churches join the good food movement. Good Eats. https://civileats.com/2009/06/09/when-churches-join-the-good-food-movement/#sthash.rve7KcUk.dpuf.
Bailey, L. H. (2015 [orig. 1915]). The holy earth: The birth of a new land ethic (J. Lindstrom, Ed.). Foreword by Wendell Berry. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N., & Malpass, A. (2005). Consuming ethics: Articulating the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption. Antipode, 73, 23–45.
Barns, W. D. (1967). Oliver Hudson Kelley and the Genesis of the Grange: A reappraisal. Agricultural History, 41(3), 229–242.
Barton, G. (2001). Sir Albert Howard and the forestry roots of the organic farming movement. Agricultural History, 75(2), 168–187.
Beecher, C., & Stowe, H. B. (2002 [orig. 1869]). The American woman’s home. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.
Berry, T. (2009). The sacred universe: Earth, spirituality, and religion in the twenty-first century (M. Tucker, Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/berr14952.
Berry, W. (1977). The unsettling of America: Culture & agriculture. New York: Avon.
Berry, W. (1979). The gift of good land. Sierra Club Bulletin (November/December).
Bilbro, J. (2015). Loving God’s wildness: The Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Biron, C. L. (2018, September 19). Eat, pray, farm: U.S. churches turn faith lands into food. Thomson Reuters Foundation (Reuters). https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-churches-farming/feature-eat-pray-farm-u-s-churches-turn-faith-lands-into-food-idUSL5N1VR5DG.
Blake, J. B. (1962). Mary Gove Nichols, prophetess of health. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(3), 219–234.
Blankenship, J., & Hayes-Conroy, J. (2017). The flâneur, the hot-rodder, and the slow food activist: Archetypes of capitalist coasting. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(2), 185–209. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1383.
Bobrow-Strain, A. (2008). White bread bio-politics: Purity, health, and the triumph of industrial baking. Cultural Geographies, 15(1), 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007085783.
Brent, Z. W., Schiavoni, C. M., & Alonso-Fradejas, A. (2015). Contextualising food sovereignty: The politics of convergence among movements in the USA. Third World Quarterly, 36(3), 618–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1023570.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Chamelin, S. (2017, March 3). The keep & till, our new church plant, focuses on agrarian discipleship. Christian Food Movement. https://christianfoodmovement.org/2017/03/03/the-keep-till-our-new-church-plant-focuses-on-agrarian-discipleship/. Accessed 2 March 2020.
Chavez Foundation. (n.d.). Perils of pesticides: Address to Pacific Lutheran University, 1989. The Complete Speeches. https://chavezfoundation.org/speeches-writings/#1549063588679-ed96425e-7969. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Chu, J. (2017). How a North Carolina minister sowed seeds of hope in a food desert. Modern Farmer. https://modernfarmer.com/2017/10/north-carolina-minister-sowed-seeds-hope-food-desert/. Accessed 14 January 2020.
CIW. (2017). About CIW, Coalition of Immokalee Workers. http://ciw-online.org/about/.
Davis, E. (2009). Scripture, culture, and agriculture: An agrarian reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University.
Domosh, M. (2003). Pickles and purity: Discourses of food, empire and work in turn-of-the-century USA. Social and Cultural Geography, 4(1), 7–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936032000049289.
Engel, J. R. (2011). Democracy, Christianity, ecology: A twenty-first-century agenda for eco-theology. Cross Currents, 61(2), 217–231.
Ferriss, S., Sandoval, R., & Hembree, D. (1998). The fight in the fields: Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Fisher, A., & Jayaraman, S. (2018). Big hunger: The unholy alliance between corporate America and anti-hunger groups: Series: Food, health, and the environment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Frayne, C. (2016). Imitating the regimen of immortality or facing the diet of mortal reality: A brief history of abstinence from flesh-eating in Christianity. Journal of Animal Ethics, 6(20), 188–212. https://doi.org/10.5406/janimalethics.6.2.0188.
Fridell, G. (2004). The fair trade network in historical perspective. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, XXV(3), 411–428.
Fridell, G. (2007). Fair-trade coffee and commodity fetishism: The limits of market-driven social justice. Historical Materialism, 15(4), 79–104. https://doi.org/10.1163/156920607X245841.
Gardner, A. (2015). Reimagining Zion: A history of the Alliance of Baptists. Macon, GA: Nurturing Faith.
Goodwin, L. S. (1999). The pure food and drink crusaders, 1879–1914. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Hartman, L. M. (2013). Seeking food justice. Interpretation: A Journal of Bible & Theology, 67(4), 396–409.
Haydu, J., & Skotnicki, T. (2016). Three layers of history in recurrent social movements:The case of food reform. Social Movement Studies, 15(4), 345–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2016.1149459.
Hite, E. B., Perez, D., D’ingeo, D., Boston, Q., & Mitchell, M. (2017). Intersecting race, space, and place through community gardens. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 41(2), 55–66.
Holbrook, M. L. (1888). Eating for strength. New York: M. L. Holbrook. https://archive.org/details/eatingforstrengt00holbrich/page/n6/mode/2up.
HOPE Collaborative. (2019). Policy and campaigns. http://www.hopecollaborative.net/our-work/policy-campaigns/.
Howard, A. (2011). Farming and gardening for health or disease (originally 1945). Oxford, UK: Oxford City Press.
Iacobbo, K., & Iacobbo, M. (2004). Vegetarian America. Westport, CO: Praeger.
Kline, B. (1997). First along the river: A brief history of the U.S. environmental movement. San Francisco, CA: Acada.
Koch, S. (2019). Gender and food: A critical look at the food system. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lappé, F. M. (2011). EcoMind: Changing the way we think, to create the world we want. New York: Bold Type Books.
Lappé, F. M. (2015). Growing up as a species: Accepting the worst, realizing the best. Center for Humans and Nature. https://www.humansandnature.org/mind-morality-frances-moore-lappe. Accessed 10 February 2020.
Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County almanac, and sketches here and there. New York: Oxford University Press.
Linzey, A. (1998). C.S. Lewis’s theology of animals. Anglican Theological Review, 80(1), 60–81.
Lowe, K. M. (2016). Baptised with the soil: Christian agrarians and the crusade for rural America. New York: Oxford University Press.
McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American Journal of Sociology, 82(6), 1212–1241.
Mesman, J. (2016, March). Organic habits: Why nuns are pioneering the green movement. US Catholic. http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201603/organic-habits-why-nuns-are-pioneering-green-movement-30589. Accessed 5 March 2020.
Milano, K. M. (2009). The history of the Kensington Soup Society. Charleston, SC: History Press.
Morgan, P. A., & Peters, S. J. (2006). The foundations of planetary agrarianism: Thomas Berry and Liberty Hyde Bailey. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 19, 443–468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-006-9003-z.
Nabhan, G. P. (2017). An ecumenical, interspecific communion. GaryNabhan.com. https://www.garynabhan.com/news/2017/09/an-ecumenical-interspecific-communion/.
Nelson, R. H. (2014). Calvinism without God: American environmentalism as implicit Calvinism. Implicit Religion, 17(3), 249–273. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.vl713.249.
Nestle, M. (2007). Safe food: The politics of food safety. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Noever, J. H. (1991). Passionate rebel: The life of Mary Gove Nichols, 1810–1884. Norman: University of Oklahoma.
Northcott, M. S. (2015). Place, ecology, and the sacred: The moral geography of sustainable communities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Parish, N. L. (2015). Yes there is a Christian food movement. http://christianfoodmovement.org/2015/03/30/yes-there-is-a-christian-food-movement/.
Peters, R. T. (2006). Supporting community farming. In P. K. Brubaker, R. T. Peters, & L. A. Stivers (Eds.), Justice in a global economy: Strategies for home, community, and world. Westminster John Knox: Louisville, KY.
Petrick, G. M. (2011). ‘Purity as life’: H.J. Heinz, religious sentiment, and the beginning of the industrial diet. History and Technology, 27(10), 37–64.
Pirog, R., Miller, C., Way, L., Hazekamp, C., & Kim, E. (2014). The local food movement: Setting the stage for good food. MSU Center for Regional Food Systems. https://www.canr.msu.edu/foodsystems/uploads/files/local_food_movement.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2019.
Raper, A. F. (1943). Tenants of the almighty. New York: Macmillan.
Rapport, J. (2009). Eating for unity: Vegetarianism in the early Unity School of Christianity. Gastronomica, 9(2), 35–44.
Robbins, J. (2001). The food revolution: How your diet can help save your life and the world. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press.
Schweitzer, A. (1949). The philosophy of civilization, translated by C.T. Campion. New York: Macmillan.
SERRV. (2018). Annual report 2018. https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.serrv.org/downloads/AnnualReports/Annual%20Report%202018.pdf. Accessed 9 November 2019.
Shprintzen, A. (2013). The vegetarian crusade: The rise of an American reform movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.
Smidt, C. E. (2009). The social service activities of religious congregations in America. Review of Faith and International Affairs, 7, 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2009.9523405.
Stoll, M. R. (2015). Inherit the holy mountain: Religion and the rise of American environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Story, M., Hamm, M. W., & Wallinga, D. (2009). Food systems and public health: linkages to achieve healthier diets and healthier communities. Journal of Hunger Environment and Nutrition, 4, 219–224.
Swanson, M. (1977). The “country life movement” and the American churches. Church History, 46(3), 358–359. https://doi.org/10.2307/3164133.
Taylor, B. (2001). Earth and nature-based spirituality (part I): From deep ecology to radical environmentalism. Religion, 31(2), 175–193. https://doi.org/10.1006/reli.2000.0256.
Taylor, S. M. (2007). Green sisters: A spiritual ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, B. (2010). Dark green religion: Nature spirituality and the future of the planet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Van Dyke, F. (2010). Between heaven and earth: Christian perspectives on environmental protection. New York: Praeger.
Watson, R. N. (2014). Protestant animals: Puritan sects and English animal-protection sentiment, 1550–1650. English Literary History, 81(4), 1111–1148.
Whorton, J. C. (1994). Historical development of vegetarianism. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 59(supplement), 1103S–1109S.
Wilson, A. D. (2013). Beyond alternative: Exploring the potential for autonomous food spaces. Antipode, 45(3), 719–737.
Wirzba, N. (2019). Food and faith: A theology of eating (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Woolman, J. (1994 [orig. 1774]). The journal of John Woolman. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Electronic Text Center. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/WooJour.html.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davis, E.H. (2021). Christian Ideas Influencing US Food Movements. In: Silvern, S.E., Davis, E.H. (eds) Religion, Sustainability, and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7646-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7646-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-7645-4
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-7646-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)