Picture: Wild Bolete mushrooms gathered with some friends last summer
at Mt. Spokane. It's mushroom season again.

In case you missed it, Michael Pollan is out with his latest article at the NY Review of Books. The article is a good summary of where things are at right now with the food movement. The paragraph below has a personal resonance;

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself. (emphasis mine)

Erik Samuelson @pubpastor recently described me on Twitter as "Pastor and Foodie," but the truth is I'm kind of a Foodie flunky. My dirty little secret is that for someone who talks about food a lot, I don't cook very often and while I like a good meal, I'm not much of a food connoisseur. I love growing all kinds of food and I love eating fresh seasonal foods but when it comes to the intricacies of fine dining I'm less interested. (Lovitt Restaurant being an exception)

When I think of Foodie I think of my friend Kevin Finch. As many of you know I'm not the only Presbyterian pastor in Spokane who is engaged with our region's food community. Kevin leads an organization called Big Table that helps care for workers in the food industry, he has been a restaurant critic for the Spokesman Review among others and has a really discerning palate. That's what I think of when I think of a Foodie. (check out Kevin's blog Traveling Feast)

I'm one of the folks that Pollan describes as being drawn into the food conversation by "more than food." I tend to approach it through the lenses of land, sustainability, community, faith and justice. I wouldn't say it's "only nominally about food" but for me it is about much more than that.

What drives your interest in the food movement?

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