How to Navigate Some of Today’s Most Pressing Issues
Research suggests that, on average, we make well more than 200 decisions every day about what we eat and drink. And yet, most people are aware of making only 15 to 20 daily nutrition-related decisions. These findings could easily be extrapolated to other areas of decision-making throughout a typical day. Not only do many of our choices lack intentionality, but often we aren’t even aware we’re making decisions at all.
We humans are an adaptive bunch. Arguably, there are thousands of micro-decisions to be made each day, and it would be overwhelming to deliberate over each one. (Chidi from The Good Place, anyone?) Part of the problem is that our commercialized culture presents us with a dizzying array of choices about things that don’t really matter, as author Thomas Merton famously diagnosed one day while shopping for toothpaste after spending the previous months “off the grid.”
The trick is to identify which decisions are worth weighing carefully and which aren’t. It might help to relearn the art of asking what might be termed “foundational questions.” Foundational questions come packaged in the rawest, most basic language and demand an answer not just from the information in our heads but from the very fabric of how we understand the mysteries of life.
Asking foundational questions is built into the very DNA of toddlers and college students, but somewhere along the way we mistakenly “outgrow” the habit. During our young professional years, many of us are busy developing the expertise and specialization necessary to analyze profit margins, decipher CT scans, or diffuse temper tantrums. Incidentally, the young professional years — when there is the least amount of mental and emotional space for asking foundational questions — are when many of us begin making for ourselves what might equally be called foundational decisions that shape the course of our lives and the type of people we’re becoming: deciding what neighborhood we live in, what kind of work we will do, and what and how much we consume.
For more than two millennia, folks in the Church have been asking foundational questions about life in this beautiful, broken, and messy world in light of three beliefs central to the Catholic Christian faith: 1) God lovingly created a good world; 2) the goodness of creation has been damaged by sin; and 3) God became human and invites us to participate in His saving work here and now toward our final good in the life to come.
Guided by these three tenets, people of faith and goodwill throughout the Church’s history have accumulated questions, time-tested good ideas, and real-life examples in building up what is known as the Catholic social tradition, or CST.
Waste Not, Want Not: Catholic Social Teaching and Reducing Food Waste
“Pass those plates down to the food disposal,” Grandpa would inevitably boom at the end of each meal, scraping sandwich crusts and half-eaten bowls of applesauce into a pile on his plate. Through the doorway of the adjacent dining room, our parents winced as Grandpa smilingly gobbled down his 18 grandchildren’s scraps. They knew that their admonitions to “Eat your dinner or no dessert” had been empty threats, for Grandpa’s presence at the kids’ table and his commitment to letting no food remnant go to waste were as ritual as the Sunday Mass we had just attended.
Grandpa hated wasting food. As he enthusiastically drank the briny juice from a pickle jar once the last spear had been consumed, he passed the value of being conscientious down to his children and grandchildren. Our attitude toward food waste is more than a family tradition, though; it is a value intimately tied with our faith. And it’s particularly linked to one of the greatest treasures of our tradition: Catholic Social Teaching.
Informed by Scripture, the Catechism, Vatican documents, bishops’ letters and more, Catholic Social Teaching offers an abundance of wisdom and guidance on living justly in our current world. The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops has identified seven key themes that run throughout the tradition, and some of them are especially helpful when considering how we treat the food that passes through our lives.
Option for the poor and vulnerable
Keeping a preferential option for the poor means considering first how the choices we make will impact the most vulnerable members of our world. This includes the small, everyday decisions of our lives. When the burger we ordered is overcooked, do we send it back and ask for a new one? What do we do when we’d prefer a fresh meal to finishing yesterday’s leftovers? When we’re in a hurry, do we take the time to wash and prepare the soon-to-spoil vegetables in the refrigerator? In each of these choices, we are called to keep the poor and vulnerable in mind and to remember that our decisions have repercussions. Refusing to waste may not solve the problems of world hunger, but it can reduce our grocery budgets so that we are able to share more with the poor, and it can act as an antidote to entitlement, reminding us that our priority should be considering the vulnerable, not minding our own preferences.
Rights and responsibilities
Human dignity can only be honored if basic human rights are met, including the rights to food, housing, medical care, education, equality, and freedom of religion. Those of us with full pantries have the responsibility to not only make thoughtful individual choices but also to consider how our food system can better protect the rights of the most vulnerable.