Use Your LOAF this Christmas

We eat so much at Christmas! Gorging ourselves on roast turkey, Christmas pudding, mince pies and chocolate is what Christmas is all about! Or is it? What, really, has stuffing our faces with high calorie food got to do with the birth of our Lord, born in a stable and placed in an animal feeding trough? The only food around was probably hay! Well, eating, together, with our family and friends is a way to celebrate, a way to remember this good news. Keeping your family's Christmas traditions is a way of renewing the emotional energy and bonding of the past. But over-consumption can be damaging to the world and its inhabitants. Is this right that Christmas should place such a burden on the earth that Jesus was born to save?

When shopping for food this Christmas, why not try to follow one or more of the following criteria to reduce your Christmas's damage to the earth?

 

• L ocal produced. Buying locally, either in the village shops, market, WI and surrounding farms, or preferentially purchasing British at the supermarket will support our local community and reduce the enormously damaging climate-changing pollution from the “food miles” travelled by the produce.
  
• O rganically grown. In Genesis we are commanded to take care of the earth. Organic farming is kinder to wildlife and causes less pollution.
  
• A nimal friendly. We have a duty, under God, to care for our fellow creatures. For some, this means being vegetarian or vegan, but it doesn't have to. If you eat meat, buying free range, or even better, organic, will mean the animals have been treated humanely. And our welfare standards in this country are better than most so if you can't justify the cost of free range, at least buy British.
  
• F airly Traded. For food that cannot be grown in Europe e.g. coffee, tea, bananas, orange juice and chocolate, try to buy fair trade to ensure that you are not supporting exploitation of workers in poor countries. The baby born at Christmas had a heart for the poor – buying fair trade is a simple way to express that we do too.

 

The acronym LOAF was devised by Barbara Echlin
of Christian Ecology Link.

 

Other articles you could use in your church magazine