Eat More Plants!!

Here’s another Great Idea stemming from Katharine Hayhoe’s Talking Climate blog’s What You Can Do section:

Tackle food waste.

I’ve long been a proponent of local congregations becoming food wisdom centers: church people know how to grow vegetables, when to harvest, how to cook and how to preserve them, and we have grounds for gardens and commercial-grade kitchens in which to share this knowledge. (See our Community Garden = Community Gathering and  Hunger, Pollinators, & Community Gardens Great Ideas for inspiration.)

Hayhoe writes, ‘Eating more plants and cutting food waste are often the two biggest steps people can take to cut their personal and household emissions’.

She suggests trying a new recipe – like the 40 listed on Plant-Based School’s site or the video collection of top plant-based recipes on TikTok; and/or check out Herald Press’s Sustainable Kitchen and Simply in Season.

Hayhoe also urges us to ‘tell others so they can try it too!’. Here’s where being the church is handy: we can tell one another and then tell our neighbors, and then post in our media outlets, and then share our learning opportunities in the local paper…

And there’s the Holy Spirit’s fire revving up all over the place, again…

P.S. Hayhoe also shares a link to her conversation on Disarming Leviathan about Cultivating Healthy Conversation around Emotionally Charged Topics. We’ve got a toolkit for that called  Courageous Spaces: Congregations that Listen, Lament, and Repair; and we’ll be sharing, Graceful Conversations, a five-part video series with member congregations – watch for the link (we hope!!) by August 21.