stop being so damn cheap: mennonite economics

Those of you who know me well know how tediously and endlessly conflicted I am about the Mennonite church. Having grown up a one hundred-percent Swiss ethnic Menno in central Kansas, gone to a Mennonite college, and basically lived and breathed all things Mennonite for all of my growing-up years, I thought I could not be more sick of Mennonites. Then I went and wrote my master’s thesis on them, which was my ticket into the morass of Bitter Mennonite Writers; there I spent several years attempting to write extremely depressing essays about the Mennonite obsession with martyrdom and hardship, and how much it screwed me up. To this day, with everything in the world there is to be pissed off about, I can still raise my blood pressure by scanning any Mennonite publication for more than fifteen seconds. Oh, nothing can get to me like some smug Menno patriarch writing an editorial about…anything.

And yet, honestly, when you look at some of the wacko churches out there, the Mennos are not really that bad. (Eric and I are even considering going to church here in Lawrence because we’ve been told by numerous sources that the Mennos here are a bunch of left-wing, tree-hugging, gay rights-obsessed, bleeding heart liberals like us, and we need friends.) They may be, in a few years, if they keep trying to market themselves as mainline evangelical Christians, but right now there is still a concern for peace and justice and other good stuff that many a church chooses to ignore in favor of fixating on “salvation.”

One thing that I have long felt holds Mennos back from being viable advocates for economic justice is their cheapness. So many of the Mennonites in my home town, sustainability-minded, educated people who should know better, are still addicted to the narcotic sense of righteousness that comes from spending as little cash as possible on the stuff you need. Either that, or they’ve just gotten used to buying their groceries at Wal-mart and Sam’s Club and aren’t ready to rearrange their budgets to make room for local produce and fair-traded coffee, even when they pay lip service to the idea that one should. A good friend of mine who spent a few years working at the headquarters of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the church’s international NGO/”liberal” justice wing, was routinely disgusted by her colleagues’ unwillingness to trade the cheapo Walmart coffee in their break room for Equal Exchange, the fair-trade, organic brand that MCC actually distributes.

A lot of Mennonites, particularly those of us who grew up on farms or with a farm sensibility, were raised believing that materialism was the enemy, and that the less money you spent, the less materialistic and more godly you were. This was a model that worked pretty well back when everyone grew their own food and bought their other necessities at local stores run by their neighbors. It made less sense when the discount stores rolled in and saving a buck came to mean deserting the local economy, and by extension, your neighbors who made their living from it. It bugs me to see the children and grandchildren of small farmers buying their groceries from the same filthy agribusiness conglomerates that are holding the bulk of the world’s arable land hostage and making it nearly impossible for small farmers to even exist, let alone make ends meet. What a painful irony—the values we learned on the farm are making us willing drones for an economy that is destroying farmers.

So you can imagine how joyous I was when the Mennonite Central Committee’s latest commission was published: a cookbook called Simply in Season that promotes local, seasonal eating and sustainable agriculture. I guess I can stop feeling self-righteous in a corner now—evidently I’m not the only Mennonite who is het up about this. There are a lot of cookbooks out there that address these issues—my personal favorite is Local Flavors by Deborah Madison, who has goddess status in our kitchen—but since a lot of them are too glossy and yuppie to reach the down-home Menno audience, it’s very cool that this one came out. It’s actually a really decent cookbook. You have to be careful when a cookbook is composed of recipes from Mennonite contributors—we are not a people known for flavor sensibility. But Eric and I have been cooking out of this one all week and haven’t made a bland doozy yet, so I’m optimistic that Mennonite taste buds as well as economic ethics are beginning to move with the times. Plus it’s full of all these lovely educational nuggets about why it’s fun to shop at the farmer’s market, and why it’s actually in line with Mennonite values to buy fairly traded food as opposed to the cheapest.

I love to bitch about Mennonites, but I love it even more when they do something that can actually make me proud to be one of the clan—in a cranky, errant sort of way, of course. Here’s the publisher’s link, though if you live near a Ten Thousand Villages store, you can probably buy it there too. (Buy the way, Jeff Henquinet, if you’re reading this you should know that there is a recipe for Venison Broccoli Salad in there, which sounds heinous to me but might give you something to do with all that dead deer that I know is in your freezer…;) )