Whole soul, whole heart, whole food: reclaiming our health for body and planet
Kelly Moltzen joined the Climate Cafe Multifaith for a conversation on food policy, food justice, and how faith communities can encourage and support a healthy and equitable food system. Moltzen’s work comes right into that intersection. As convener and co-founder of the Interfaith Public Health Network, Moltzen researches health disparities and outcomes and traces those disparities to the food system. Simply put, our food system is unsustainable both in terms of the costs to the planet as well as costs to the health of children, families and communities. Our food system is dominated by processed foods and marketing—and its making us sick.
Moltzen experienced a vocational call to this work. As a teenager, she encountered the spirituality of St. Francis, as well as his teachings of humility and ministry to the poor. There are few things so clearly divided by wealth, than access to good healthy food. In New York City where she lived, Moltzen only need to look neighborhood by neighborhood to see disparities of food access, food quality, and nutrition-based diseases and health outcomes. Added to this was the often predatory practices of food company marketing. Adults and children are the direct target of corporations seeking to enrich their bottom line as they market nutritionally poor soft drinks and sugary cereals, even and sometimes especially, to children.
In the above video, Kelly Moltzen walks us through a presentation about food inequality, food systems, and food policies that can improve human and planetary health. Included in the presentation is information as to what faith communities can do.
Our bodies need nutritious food to grow and develop. Yet, Moltzen quotes the Rudd Center for Family Food Policy and Obesity, “On average, children in America get 40% of their calories from nutritionally poor foods like desserts, pizza, fruit drinks and sugary soda.” The result is visible in the health diagnosis of children and adults with liver, kidney and heart diseases, strokes, and cancer. Adult onset diabetes is simply diabetes, now. And, says Moltzen, it is now well established by the Rudd Center and others that we are now “raising a generation of children that are expected to live shorter lives than their parents.”
The temptations of a childhood sweet tooth and a human liking for fat and salt is exploited by for-profit marketing campaigns that make the foods seem all that more desirable. Explains Moltzen, “The food industry spends a massive amount of money, almost two billion dollars, to get kids to eat and drink more sugary drinks, sugary cereals, sweet and salty snacks and fast food.” Food advertising is a 14 billion dollar industry, and, according to the Rudd Center, “the worst thing is these ads work.” The problem compounds again for Black and Brown communities, and where food choice and access is more limited.
“Food marketers spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to make kids want their products. They often use kids’ favorite TV and movie heroes to get kids’ attention and create an emotional bond.”
—The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity
Photo by Jamie Albright.
Before the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 it was common for school districts to have contracts with certain food companies that gave those companies ‘pouring rights,’ meaning only the one company’s products, such as Coke or Pepsi, could be sold to students at that school. There could also be sales quotas that schools were expected to meet, and these contracts could be profitable. This practice is no longer allowed in elementary through high schools. But the practice—and pouring rights contracts—continues in colleges and universities.
Sugar not only adds health risks for humans, but sugar production is also highly problematic for the earth. Says Moltzen, “this diet is not only wreaking havoc on our health but also the planet.” Industrial agriculture and monocrop practices deplete the soil and worsen carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Plants that do make it to market are processed in a way that their nutritional content is diminished. Moltzen raises up a number of examples, such as when corn on the cob becomes a frosted corn breakfast cereal, or when a harvest of brown rice becomes a rice crispy treat.
This is not a plant problem alone. Moltzen explains the similar challenges arising from meat, egg, and dairy production, where processing and profit-driven practices cause the same types of problems. When a chicken becomes a chicken nugget, for example, or when milk becomes a sugary yogurt, nutrition is lost while fat and/or salt and/or sugar are added. All this occurs all while overproduction and overconsumption exceed the planetary boundaries of sustainability. Moltzen explains that farm production of cattle, soy and palm oil drive deforestation in tropical forests, even where such practices are illegal.
In this short clip, Kelly Moltzen talks about efforts to push back against the marketing machine of the big food companies. These counter-marketing efforts are sometimes framed as efforts of David against Goliath.
So what does an equitable food system look like? Moltzen refers to the EAT Lancet report, a report that shook up the food policy sector as it laid out the problems and solutions of our current food system. Moltzen also draws from the Good Food Purchasing Program report highlighting the framework they developed outlining 5 key areas of food production. The 5 areas that need to come together if we are to re-think and transform our food systems are Nutrition, Local Economies, Environmental Sustainability, Valued Workforce, and Animal Health.
Where do faith communities fit in? A number of ways: Be informed and make informed purchase decisions for potlucks and church events; Keep an eye on local and federal policies designed to improve food quality, access, and sustainability; And, attend to labor practices and historic injustices in the food system.
“We can vote with our fork. We can decide what is the food system that we want based on what are the food choices that we're deciding to make each day.”
—Kelly Moltzen, Interfaith Public Health Network
Photo by Krisztina Papp.
As an example of how these things might come together, Moltzen shares that in 1920 there were a million Black farmers. Now? There are “less than 50,000 today. Today of the country's 3.4 million total farmers only 1.3% are black.” Black farmers also earn significantly less with smaller holdings. Says Moltzen, “Black farmers make less than $40,000 annually and their average acreage is about one quarter of that of white farmers.” How might faith communities lean into positive change? A good beginning is to learn the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous history of our farmlands. From this knowledge, churches might want to intentionally support Black farmers and Black-led food justice organizations, as well as to support policies such as the Justice for Black Farmers Act.
And there is one more thing faith communities are uniquely positioned to do. Faith communities can affirm the sacredness of our earth and the sustaining food that grows from the soil and nourishes us with sacred practices. Sacred practices could include “bringing liturgy back to meals,” Moltzen suggests, returning anew to table centered eco-spirituality with things like song, grace, and preparing the meal together. In many, maybe all, faith traditions there is an understanding of Holy Ground as a home-place, mountain tops, forest spaces, homeland, and/or garden places. Food traditions rise from these places, and food is gathered, prepared, stored, eaten and shared together.
“My path studying nutrition and growing deeper in my faith has run on parallel tracks throughout my life, and learning to integrate them together has deepened both my faith and my commitment to food justice.”
—Kelly Moltzen, Interfaith Public Health Network
Photo by Jade Seok.
Moltzen offers a few examples of food based eco-spirituality and practice, including the dinner-church movement which includes churches such as St. Lydia’s in New York City. She talks about the Black Church Food Security Network that turns church halls into farmers markets and promotes the ‘power of the plate.’ And also, Moltzen is an advocate of the practice of mindfulness. “This concept of mindful eating, and connecting the mind and body together,” says Moltzen, is a practice that helps us be “conscientious about our food choices.” It helps us also to “connect the dots between the food that we're eating and the larger food system.”
Attention also needs to be paid to the harms and injustices that are embedded in our food production industries and social mechanisms. Exploitive labor practices bring injustice to our dinner plates. And the land where monoculture crops are widely produced—the global breadbaskets—were once the homes and villages of Indigenous people, many of whom were forcibly and violently removed. The result is a lasting trauma that separated people from generations of food knowledge and sustainability. Moltzen explains, “the food system that we have is a result of centuries of colonization and industrialization and racism.” The people who are impacted, “which is all of us,” she says, need to also recognize that this “adds to the trauma” manifesting in how we deal with food.
“By re-centering sacredness around meals, we can bring back our faith values into the food we choose to eat, which can have ripple effects throughout the food system.”
—Kelly Moltzen, Interfaith Public Health Network
Photo by Nina Luong.
Such dreams are possible. Moltzen invites us to re-connect the “sacredness of the land” and “food justice,” making change manifest through “small changes” that recognize “food as a gift from God.” This eco-spiritual dinnertable re-orients diners to the food of the land itself, generational return to “bio regionality”—which means your bio region, and the food and practices of your home-plate. Add in some “intergenerational community gardening and dinner events in churches,” says Moltzen, and you have created a path toward deep spiritual and ecological renewal, a restorative dinnertable.
The home-plate in the home-space has never been far from faith. Moltzen notes that “the parables are rooted in agriculture,” as are stories in many faith traditions. All we need to do is take notice. Communities like the Diné Nation, who passed policies to support food sovereignty, offer a guide path to others. This community effort proves that sustainability can be prioritized and the power of mass marketing reduced and even eliminated. In our churches, our teachings matter, too. Moltzen invites us to dig deep into food justice, teaching “this rootedness, this groundedness, the sacredness of the earth, and incorporating that into sermons, incorporating that into the work that we do through our faith communities and,” she adds, within, and with respect to, our “bio region.”
For more articles, also news and information, see the Faiths4Future blog page.
Kelly Moltzen is a co-founder and convener of the Interfaith Public Health Network, which inspires people of faith to be agents of change in transforming communities into ones that promote health and well-being for all. As a steering committee member of the Center for Earth Ethics' Faith and Food Coalition, she helps bring faith voices to the United Nations Food Systems Summit process. For more than 12 years, she has worked on programs that increase access to and consumption of healthy food to address health disparities in the Bronx, New York. Kelly is a Registered Dietitian and received a Master’s in Public Health from New York University. She was a 2015 Re:Generate Fellow with the Food, Health and Ecological Well-Being Program of Wake Forest University School of Divinity and was named to Hunter College's NYC Food Policy Center 40 Under 40 Class of 2020. Kelly is a member of the USA Secular Franciscan Order Ecumenical & Interfaith Committee, a 2021-2022 Fellow at Abrahamic House in Washington, D.C. and a Rockefeller-Acumen Food Systems Fellow.
Social media image of healthy plate by Jasmin Scheiber.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.