Peace from food. This is the theme of our summer fundraising campaign for ARI, and I was asked to share with you some things we can learn about it from ARI’s graduates.

By the way, I am Steven Cutting, the coordinator for Graduate Outreach, which means I frequently communicate with our graduates. I talk to them almost every day, as a matter of fact. So, I am probably the best person to assign this task.

But…Peace from food. Peace from food. What does this truly mean? No peace from no food is easier to imagine. Have you ever heard the saying, a hungry man is an angry man? In English there is even a new word to describe when someone becomes irritable because they are hungry. It’s hangry. hungry + angry = hangry

One of our graduates from Malawi once told me that when he was a kid, there were times when they didn’t have food in the house, so his mother would give him a glass of water and send him to bed. Hopefully, there would be something in the morning. I wonder how well he could sleep.

Another graduate, this one from Uganda, said he and his classmates used to go to school together and then sneak out in the middle of the lessons to look for food. They would not have had any breakfast. I don’t know where they went to find food, but certainly the urge to fill their empty bellies was of far greater concern to them than learning math and history.

Another graduate from Sri Lanka told this story from his childhood. He was one of ten children and his father was a day laborer. If his father had work that day, he could eat. If not, he, along with the rest of the family, went to bed hungry.

Without food, what peace can there be? So oppositely, does that mean food brings peace? It must be so. Perhaps this is why Takami sensei so frequently spoke of food in his teachings. “We know by experience that unless we become self-supporting, in staple foodstuffs at least, it is practically impossible for us to gain selfhood or independence,” he wrote. And “let us participate in creating the world in which life and food, which sustains life, have central value,” is basis of ARI’s Foodlife. This emphasis on food may stem from his own experience with hunger. After the war he used to climb two mountains to reach the sea so he could dive for clams. He nearly drowned teaching himself how to swim, but the clams could be sold for rice or salt – food for himself and his family. Never would he have done this, if not for the urgency of hunger.

Peace of nations. Peace of the family. Peace of mind. The simple comfort of a full tummy! Foodlife is not only about farming, but about growing and cooking food as a community. Every meal is a celebration of our labor, our harvest, taken together. What an image of peace this brings.

So, getting back to the first question. What can we learn from ARI’s graduates about Peace from Food? Well, it is only a matter of asking them. And since I have their email addresses and WhatsApp numbers, I will do just that, and share with you over the next weeks all that I find out.

Steven Cutting
Graduate Outreach
Asian Rural Institute