Grace #2 Jon Bergstrom

God of Abundance,
We give you thanks for the many machines, hands, and soil
that produced this food we are about to eat.
Help us to remember our rural brothers and sisters in this country and around the world.
Let us remember countries’ right to food sovereignty
even as we remember your sovereignty in our lives.
Supply us with more than calories.
Supply us with nutrients that will help empower us to do your work.
Amen


This grace comes from my studies about farm subsidies over the past couple of weeks. I wanted first to remember how intricately our food in the US is connected with industry, as well as the traditional connections with farmers and soil. For many of us, this is good because it enables our lifestyles away from the farm. But many of our problems in the agricultural sector come from the rapid proliferation of industrial agriculture. This has led to the decline of many of our rural areas in the US. And the massive overproduction that it enables has also led to the continual oppression of rural peoples in developing countries. This is why I pray for all those living in rural environments. The prayer for food sovereignty reflects a principle that says countries should be enabled to grow the food they eat and not have their livelihoods destroyed by free market agricultural trading. And the final part about nutrition and calories comes from a reading I did that mentions how in the US, calories are cheap (because corn subsidies make high-fructose corn syrup cheap) whereas actual balanced nutrition is more expensive and harder to acquire. We should support efforts that try to make healthier food more affordable.