compost
Jackie Parker rescues food with her husband, Craig Hargett, in Raleigh, N.C. She spoke with Sojourners' Jenna Barnett.
“We have enough food in this country to feed an entire other United States, but it’s going to waste before it gets to people’s tables. It feels crazy to me that with so many people going hungry, the U.S. is wasting close to half of the food that is produced. It’s hard to do anything on an empty stomach.
A year and a half ago, we started dumpster diving. Since then, we’ve seen an obscene amount of food being wasted. We’ve been able to feed our family of three almost entirely on dumpster-diving food, and feed other families we know are food insecure. Often there’s even more than they can eat.
The wheelbarrow outside the sanctuary was overflowing with vegetable scraps; decomposing matter filled the baptismal font; and a pile of rich brown soil replaced the Communion table.
Ashley Goff, minister for spiritual formation at Church of the Pilgrims, wanted to convey a message about the cycle of nature this fall, and she could think of no better analogy than the congregation’s growing enchantment with compost.
“I wanted them to see the process of life and death and change,” she said of her Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation of 70. “It’s a dying and a rising, where new life begins.”
Across the country in the past decade, hundreds of houses of worship have started composting, relating it to theological concepts of resurrection and stewardship.