Summer Food
What’s your classic summer dinner?
I have a dear friend visiting from Mexico, so I’m serving up the classic Vanni family summer dinner tonight. Pete’s cheeseburgers on the grill, with the option of a roasted sahuaro green pepper from Marshall’s farm stand plopped on top. Fresh corn (although thanks to this year’s rain, that will probably come from way further south right now!). Sliced tomatoes and fresh basil, with a nice drizzle of olive oil. Yum. I’m getting hungry just visualizing it!
As the gardens and the farms of our region start producing the abundance I take for granted, it’s good to stop and reflect gratefully on the fact that my larder is rarely empty. Even though there have been years that our household faced financial strain, we always made our money go far enough for a run to Cub or Costco. And I’m also grateful that at the one point in my young adult life that I didn’t have enough money for food, I was handed bags of groceries by people who loved me.
Food is on my mind now after reading that Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has announced plans to cut off benefits to 3 million SNAP (food stamp) recipients as well 250,000 free school lunch recipients. According to the most recent data of the USDA, 11.8% of our neighbors, or 40 million people, are food insecure in this country. 6.5 million of those people are children.
For the followers of Jesus, helping those who are hungry is a spiritual imperative. Describing what it means to follow him in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks of sorting the sheep and the goats. Those who inherit the kingdom in heaven will be those who gave him food when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, cared for him when he was ill and visited him in prison. The listeners are a bit dumbfounded: When did they do this? “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Catholic Social Teaching is a body of values and principles the Catholic Community has developed since the mid nineteenth century, and it is embraced by Ecumenical as well as Roman Catholics. Its fundamental call is to protect human life and dignity, central to which is recognizing that people have a right to food. The U.S. Bishops articulate it this way: “Every person has a right to life and to the material and spiritual support required to live a truly human existence. The right to a truly human life logically leads to the right to enough food to sustain a life with dignity. The poverty and hunger that diminish the lives of millions in our own land and in so many other countries are fundamental threats to human life and dignity and demand a response from believers.”
For Catholics and many others of good will, providing the social safety net to those in this country who are hungry is not simply a moral or ethical undertaking, but a spiritual undertaking. Our task is not to strip supports from “the least” who need them. Our task is to make sure their cupboards and refrigerators are full as we interrogate the systems and situations that keep them empty.
I’ll be grateful for the good company as we eat our summer dinner tonight. And I’ll pray with my friends in gratitude for the bounty of our table, and for those who are not sharing in God’s feast so abundantly. But I’ll be in action, too: Getting my contributions to PROP, voicing my objections to the planned SNAP cuts and, as Pope Francis so beautifully expressed it, working with my community to “become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”
