Just my bread and butter

Eco Church, From the Rector

As a phrase, ‘my bread and butter’ refers to our most basic needs and interests, what we require just to get by, but has the ‘ordinariness’ of this foodstuff meant we’ve forgotten to value it as much as we should?

As someone who hates waste, I always use up everything. I’d have been, in that way at least, an excellent 1940s housewife, using up every crumb and crust! So I shudder when I hear statistics like these:

  • The UK throws away around 9.5 million tonnes of food every year – that’s enough to fill Wembley Stadium 9 times over.
  • Our total food waste could feed roughly 30 million people a year.
  • Bread and potatoes are the most wasted foods in the UK, with an estimated 900,000 tonnes of bread thrown away every year, 
  • UK food retailers spend around £51,000 per annum on sending food to landfill while more than 8 million people in the UK are in food poverty.
  • The UK’s food waste emitted 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. (That’s more than Kenya’s emissions – a country of 53 million people – from food that’s simply thrown away.)

Against that backdrop of a rather disregarding, careless, disposable society, sits the rhythmical, cyclical life of our rural village churches. Here we are between 2 traditional festivals which demand a different approach. Lammas, (marked by us on 28th July), is the Feast of the First Loaf, the ‘Loaf Mass’ (in Gaelic – Lughnasadh). It focuses on the first bread made from the new harvest. Later, into the autumn, on 12th and 13th October, we will mark the end of Harvest, enjoying our East Knoyle Supper and our Harvest Thanksgiving Service.

These celebrations remind us that our daily bread is immensely precious and never to be wasted; it may have been hard won, especially considering all this year’s rain, laboured for by our farmers, and something to be relished, not thrown away. As the climate becomes less predictable, and farming more precarious, perhaps we are being forced to remember what previous generations knew all too well – that food should never be taken for granted; that we should be deeply grateful for the good things we enjoy; and that we must be keenly aware of those left without.

Revd Kate McFarlane

(Please do make use of our Foodbank collection box by the door to St Mary’s.)