Bon appétit… take care!

Do you agree with those who think it would be more significant to do something about the increasing inequalities between rich and poor countries rather than just the semblance of fasting per se that is just a trivial relic of the past as a Lenten exercise?

Oddly enough, one of the best available ways of taking a positive part in action against glo­bal injustice is closely connected with food. It is support for the voluntary organisations that have been set up to promote ‘fair-trade’.

There are in Malta shops that sell products from the Third World Countries at fair prices, as against the notorious under-payment for commodities established by the market.

Sociologists have pointed out that ‘fair-trade’ shows there are people in the developed countries who have not been conned by neo-liberalism into total insensitivity to the needs of people from whom they are physically and emotionally distant.

They manage to feel concretely related to these other people through the goods, especially foodstuffs, produced by the others and consumed by them. In fact, the greatest merit of ‘fair-trade’ is that it raises awareness of the radical intertwining of our lives with total strangers.

Moreover, when the goods are indeed foodstuffs they also draw attention to natural environment concerns because the agricultural products mostly exchange through the ‘fair-trade’ system are derived from organic farming. Other food products bring into focus considerations of ani­­mal welfare.

In these alternative systems of food production, care is in principle taken to avoid the cruelty to animals implicit in many of the ways of mass production of animal-originated food in the West.

The scientific analysts of the ‘fair-trade’ phenomenon have been most impressed by the political commitment that is generated through the connection established between food growers and eaters through the‘fair-trade’ system.

For all these reasons a resolution to prefer participation in the ‘fair trade’ network to any other supermarket or neighbourhood retail shop seems to me an admirable contemporary equivalent meeting the same objectives as the serious fasting regime of the past.

Do people who diet to look and feel good fulfil the fasting requirement made by all spiritual traditions Eastern and Western?

The value of fasting in the literal sense of the word is appreciated in all religions as a way of acquiring and exercising self-control and also in the Church tradition as a way of saving money to be given to those in need. The value of fasting is today being recognised by many who present it in the form ofdieting, both for health and foraesthetic reasons.

Consideration of both these reasons is not altogether alien to the religious motivation of the precepts about fasting, since taking care of one’s health and also of the beauty of any part of God’s creation is a religious obligation.

It used to be the case in the Church that the rules about fasting were elaborated by Church authorities in the manner of the Pharisees with the prescriptions being spelt out in even greater detail, although Jesus Christhad made it clear that it was the spirit of the law that had to befollowed.

You have spoken of the voluntary organisation of ‘fair-trade’. Do you not think that little attention is being paid to the fact that this year, 2011, has been declared as European Year of Voluntary Activities?

I suspect that many young people are afraid that the promotion of voluntary activities is supplementary to the cutting down of services by state-paid carers that is happening in many European countries as part of the neo-liberal whittling down of the welfare state.

There is in fact a dire need to re-balance the mix between voluntary and paid care services. While the ‘fair-trade’ movement has been very positively evaluated some other developments that might at first sight have seemed to be instances of solidarity between the rich and poor parts of the world turn out to be in fact problematic.

For instance, Rosie Cox, of the University of London, has noted that “many women in poor countries see their best chance ofcaring for their own children and improving their future opportunities to be in leaving them to be looked after by others while they migrate to carry out care and domestic work for families in richer places.

Sri Lanka and the Philippines are the most important sending countries in numerical terms, but domestic workers also travel from Africa, South and Central America to work in Europe, North America, the Middle and Far East.”

Moreover, Cox quotes a woman from Ivory Coast working in Parma, Italy, saying the following: “I cared for a baby throughout his first year… he loved me as a mother, but his real mother became jealous and I was sent away.

“I was so depressed then… all I wanted was to go back and see him… I will never care for a baby again, it hurts too much.”

These quotations provoke two observations. The first is that obviously care-work is being underpaid.

The second is that for care-work to be done well there must always be a voluntary element, and the employer must recognise that a personal and emotional relationship is entered into, besides the buying of a service.

Otherwise there will not be a generation of the sense of friendship and human solidarity that was noted as resulting in the ‘fair-trade’ networking of producers and consumers.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.