Nutrition, Matza, Freedom

Apparently it is ‘National Nutrition Month’.  I find this strange and uniquely American-that we choose one month in the year to acknowledge or celebrate important things, like Black History, Women and Nutrition.  Of course, if you know me at all, you know that I acknowledge and celebrate (in addition to black history and women) nutrition, health, food and sustainability pretty much every day.

This week also happens to be Passover-the Jewish holiday that commemorates when Jews were slaves in Egypt, escaped across the red sea (which God parted and then closed on the Egyptians who were chasing them) and then crossed the desert for 40 days while their dough baked into flat crackers-matzah. 

Jews are fairly literal in their holiday observations, and they always revolve around food.  As my mom said at our Seder (the Passover ritual meal) “they tried to kill us, we won, we ate”.  So, in most of our holidays, the food is very symbolic, representing specific people, events, or foods from the story.  We are supposed to restrict ourselves to eating matzah (and no risen/expanded foods) for 8 days, as a way of empathizing with the Jews escape to freedom.

In my family, we also learned that being Jewish meant working to improve the world-the Jewish commandment of “Tikkun Olam ’Repair of the World’.  For us, that meant my parents marching in civil rights protests and doing anti racism work before that was the term.  It meant both of them dedicating their lives to equity and justice through policy work and activism.  And, it set the stage for me and my siblings to do the same.  

When I returned to the US after a college year of living on a Kibbutz (communal farm) in Israel, I was shocked, disturbed and confused.  What, at the time I would have explained as a presumption of the right to excess consumption-a kind of “I can have what I want whenever I want it” attitude, I would probably now just call privilege.  

Somehow, all of these experiences culminated through food for me.  (There’s a longer version, where first I try to fix all the excess in the world by limiting my own consumption of everything.  Spoiler alert-that didn’t work).  Eventually I found the Seward Cafe-a window into the alternative, sustainable, plant forward food movement before any of those words were used.  It was there that I began to understand, in a visceral, social and physical way how fundamentally food is connected to equity and justice. 

At the time I didn’t have the words but I witnessed the way that community was built, health was supported and the earth was taken care of by what and how we choose to consume food. That people, and the earth are inextricably connected, and that food is a fundamental part of that. The next 35 years (!!) would be, and still are, an extraordinary journey.  I have participated in the work of changing our food system. I have witnessed, learned from, worked with and fed so many people who have been and are feeding the earth and her people-mostly without much recognition, or adequate compensation.  

They do this work because they know that their liberation is bound up with others’ liberation. That no one is truly free when others are oppressed.