Our strange relationship to food

On the Fourth of July Matt Stonie shocked the competitive eating world by downing 62 hotdogs and buns. He won $10,000 for this feat. “I trained hard for this,” he said.  The news article doesn’t say how he trained. Or what happened afterward. Or how overeating affects his body. 

Many decades ago my Soviet aunt Aganeta Janzen Block told her young son after she had come home from a long day’s work in the forest felling trees, “Today you can eat until you’re full.”   She had been able to earn a little more than usual, so she bought food for her children. She and thousands of others caught in the Soviet dragnet after World War II had  been shipped to the northern regions in cattle cars to work in the forest on near-starvation rations.  Years later she still remembered how his eyes had opened wide. He could eat until he was full?  How many times in his young life had he been able to fill his stomach?  To eat until he was full was unknown to him. 

To read the whole story of her experience as a forced laborer in the former Soviet Union go to A Strong Frailty by Katie Funk Wiebe.  To learn  how political powers have used hunger to control masses read books like The Hunger Angel, Man is Wolf to Man,  The Bloodlands, and more.   

 In today’s world of refugees, displaced persons, victims of war, and natural disasters, thousands upon thousands of people go to bed hungry. There’s no thought of “competitive eating.”  I’ve heard of children saying that some days it wasn’t their turn in the family to eat so they went to bed hungry. 

Hungry?  Matt Stonie knows what it feels like to be glutted, but does he know what he it feels like to be hungry, so hungry you can’t sleep? So hungry you can’t pay attention at school, or work?

In America we do strange things with food. I am glad I wasn’t there, rooting for the contestants in the hotdog competition as they gorged themselves, not just until they were full, but until they were overfull. Even pigs don’t binge to throw up later.  

In our world food is no longer the bread of life, important because it brings us closer together when we celebrate or mourn.  I enjoy having a cup of tea and a cookie with a friend or a feast when the family gets together. It cements relationships. Food is a gift from God.

For some, food preparation is now a spectator sport.  Shows on the Food Channel have to do with competitive cooking rather than an attempt to show viewers how to prepare food better.  Chefs dash around feverishly, grabbing ingredients, mixing, mashing.  They  flash knives and watch clocks to get something completed in the allotted time, wearily displaying the final product.

At the end of the cooking  frenzy the competitors  stand like a row of convicts in aprons and chef’s hats about to be sentenced to some distant penal colony. One of them becomes a celebrity. But has the spectacle given the viewer the urge to cook better? 

I used to watch TV travel shows to learn about new cultures. Nowadays they focus on food rather people.  The hosts looks for ever more exotic menus to keep the audience from changing the channel, not to gain a better understanding of the people. 

“The transformation of food and cooking into a spectacle means that it is much more difficult to experience food as a precious gift and as God’s delight,” writes Norman Wirzba in Food & Faith: A theology of eating. And when that happens a person’s relationship to food and the world undergoes a profound transformation.  Food is no longer the staff of life, a gift from God. People no longer pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

In today’s society we have a gross imbalance in food distribution – either too much or too little. How can we restore the awareness that food is sacred, to be cherished?  In France supermarkets are forbidden to throw away any food considered edible in an effort to curb food waste. This law will force grocers to either donate the food to charity or make sure it is used as animal feed. It’s  a beginning.  But what about the rest of us? How can we develop a better relationship to food? 

My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986. A Memoir

I knew I had a right to my memories about my father. It took a while to acknowledge that I had an obligation to share them with others. 

As I write in My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986,  A Memoir, I grew up at the intersection of life and storytelling.  My father was a storyteller. His mother was a storyteller.  They told stories not just to entertain but to release joys and sorrows.  They told stories because life was better with stories. 

I wrote my first article about my father in the 1960s.  It took a while to realize the gold lying buried deep in his life, so I kept researching and writing. I launched into a lengthy essay about him in my book Good Times with Old Times: How to write your memoirs. 

I continued with another about his searching for my mother’s family lost in the Russian Revolution of 1917-19. She had not seen or heard from them in about three years.  That story, “Peter had come home,”  which took me to Russia, Germany and research libraries was published in an academic journal.

Another  was published in The Storekeeper’s Daughter: A memoir.

But  I knew I wasn’t finished.  I stopped my work from time to time to pursue other pursuits like the  translation of my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block’s letters about her eleven years in forced labor in the northern regions of Siberia after World War II.  I was thankful my parents had escaped that fate, having left Ukraine in 1923 for Canada.  Two families—one left and one stayed behind to endure Stalin’s harsh brutality along with thousands of other German-speaking citizens of Russia. That book is A Strong Frailty available from Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas.

But, finally, I knew it was time to get Dad’s story done.  I found a publisher and an editor who was a joy to work with.  Last week my book My Emigrant Father was published in Canada by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission with Kindred Productions.

I tell my father’s story through the prism of world events affecting thousands of German-Russians at the time.   My father was easily upset by religious posturing, unfairness, injustice, and violence.  I show in the first chapters some of the cultural baggage he brought with him to the new land.  I knew I had to include something about the family “witch.” 

I give a picture of the Funk family living in the valley of Rosenthal in Ukraine in a “forever summer, forever Sunday” life before the Russian Revolution. They never expected this idyllic life to end. But it did. So Dad and his family knew the terror of opposing revolutionary forces stationed on each side of the ravine and their home in the middle. I write about his political imprisonment and experiences as a medical attendant during  World War I.

A story he told often was of having to bury four close family members who died of typhus fever. That memory was sometimes too painful to talk about, but he did.  My sister Anne wrote me she remembered these stories as well. “I remember how upset Dad would get when he remembered this time in Russia—and yet he couldn’t just ‘leave’ it. It was part of his psyche, his innermost being and it was in a way, cathartic for him to speak about it. Now, as an adult, I look back and realize the pain, the hurt he carried with him.  I wanted to weep for Dad and the hurt he carried with him.” 

I wanted to convey to readers the pain, suffering, and turmoil that happens because of war and its aftermath – disease, famine, homelessness.Only readers can tell me if I achieved that goal.

I carry the stories of his life to Canada and the Depression years,  through church turf wars, and into my parent’s  journey into the land of aging.

In this book I have included a map of Rosenthal, other maps, photos (lots of them), a brief family tree, and a chronology of events that affected both the Funk family and the world at large. 

The book is available from Kindred Productions at 1-800-545-7322 with shipping from either Goessel, Kansas, or Winnipeg, Manitoba.  

I like my book and its stories. I hope you do too.

"Write me a letter, send it by mail"

“Write me a letter, send it by mail”

     Letter writing is seen today as a quaint relic of a bygone era.  Yes, I mean snail mail.

    Yet I like receiving letters and I also like writing them. I like looking at people’s distinctive handwriting and remembering the writer—my father’s angular style, a holdover from using German script, my mother’s less practiced style, my brother’s scrawl,  one sister’s typed letters with hand-written postscript, and another’s written on her lap or wherever she was perched with a few minutes to spare. Each letter brings back memories of the senders and draws them close. 

    I use email. It’s quick and efficient.  But when, later,  in conversation, I mention something I had mentioned in an email, I get a vague response, “Well, yes, I remember seeing something about that in an email from you…” I get the feeling that reading a message on the tiny phone screen doesn’t seem important and gets glitched over .

    I scroll through Facebook quickly because much of it is stuff copied from other people’s stuff and I am looking for personal stuff that will tell me what is going on in people’s lives.  

    So I like letters, real ones, with words written on personal letterhead or scrap paper, quickly or slowly penned, carefully or sloppily.    
  

    I thought about what real letters mean to me as I photocopied a stack of my father’s letters to send to an archivist.  I re-read the one he wrote shortly after my husband died.  He was about 1500 miles away. The year was 1962. “We don’t know what to say, Katie. But I do not want you to suffer.” “Not” was underlined several times.  He told me to phone his bank manager if I needed money. “I want you to write a check or checks as needed to our Blaine Lake bank… Don’t get stuck and suffer. I mean it.”  The last three words were also underlined in red. “Chin up, be strong.” 

     I have often wondered whether he was thinking of his own mother widowed during the typhus epidemic that followed the Russian Revolution. She arrived in Canada in 1923 from Ukraine with no real means of support. Did he remember how she struggled to make ends meet in the new land? 

     In another letter he reminded me, “Remember you are a Funk.” I tacked that to my bulletin board for a long time. His concern for me and my young children came through clearly.

     In a whimsical mood he began one letter: “Dear loving, talented, charming, devoted, unselfish, smart, clever, ingenious, loyal, honest, hard-working, admirable child!!!!”  Where did he get that string of adjectives?  Certainly not his usual language. We developed a bond through letters though he was several thousand miles away.  

     He sometimes retreated into the past in his longer letters to share experiences about his childhood, the Russian revolution and its aftermath of anarchy and famine.  These were the ones the archivist was interested in.  

     For decades he subscribed to a periodical to which I was a regular contributor. When I quit writing my biweekly column after thirty years, he let their subscription lapse. But he commented often – “Katie, I agree with what you said….”  “Katie, be careful, don’t go against the wind. You’ll get sand in your eyes.”  “Critics can be brutal…”

     Mother was the caretaker of the letters when they arrived. The envelope was carefully slit open and the precious pages removed to be read and re-read. Then they were placed in a basket on the coffee table to be able to check a detail again or to allow visiting children an opportunity to read them. Mother then stored them with other letters. You don’t throw away life blood.

     Mother and Dad were devastated whenever the postal workers in Canada went on strike and, sometimes, for weeks at a time, they were without this letter lifeline. Phoning was not yet the comfortable practice it is today. Words spoken over the airwaves were forgotten too quickly, not always clearly understood. And, in early days, too expensive. 

     So I cherish letter writing that still brings the passion and distinct personality  of the writer across the miles that Tweets, emails, texting with its new vocabulary never will.   These have their place in our modern, fast world, but let’s not neglect the personal message. Send me a letter, send it by mail. 

Night Song

The mother of a friend died last week. She was my age.  It caused me to think again of what I had written in my book Prayers of an Omega: Facing the Transitions of Aging.

Night Song

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me (Psalm 23:4).

Tonight, Lord, as I sit by the window watching the shadows deepen, I think about death, the passage to another life—eternal life. I too must travel that way. I don’t know when.

Each morning the newspaper brings news of those who died the day before. I check their ages. I pass over those who lived their allotted lifespan and then some.

But I linger over the obituaries of those who died while quite young—a fifteen-year-old in a car accident, a thirty-two-year old with no stated cause of death. But the word is already out that it was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. And then there’s an infant who died at birth.

The spring of life is no time to die. Then, young people, like plants, rush into leaf and burst into bloom.

Nor is it time to die when you are strong and healthy. Nor when the much-anticipated retirement time arrives, bringing the opportunity to set aside former activities for the challenge of self-determined tasks.

It isn’t even time to die at my age. As long as I’m alive, every tiny cell in my body fights to hold off the invading enemy cells. But people die at every age, and the ranks of my friends are thinning with each year.

When I think about death, I’m like a child at play who doesn’t want to go to bed just yet Playing outside in the empty lot was always most fun at the magic moment just before Mother called us in. We couldn’t tear ourselves away to come in to wash up and go to bed.

I don’t want to die just yet.

I want to hear the Messiah sung against this Christmas.

I want to see my grandson graduate from high school and my granddaughter from middle school.

I want to hold in my arms my new great-grandchild and watch her learn to walk.

Today I laughed at Annette’s jokes until the tears ran. Tomorrow I want to laugh some more.

I want to hold my friend’s hand when she returns from the chemotherapy that doesn’t seem to help.

I want to tell my children again how much I love them. I never do it often enough.

And yet on the other side of the street stands a tree, bent by the wind, scarred by storms, bare of leaves. The city crew marked it with a big orange X, which means it will be cut down. It has finished living. Does it contemplate its dying? Does it fear it?

Am I afraid to die? Shall I be afraid when the time comes? It will come, I know.

At twilight, light loses and darkness wins. Yet night is the promise of day  even as death is the promise of life and love and of the joy of your nearness, heavenly Father. 

I don’t want to go just yet, Lord. But when I hear you calling it’s time to come in, I’ll be ready, for I trust your mercy. Amen.