A topic that has been on my heart a lot over the last several years is the subject of what we eat, but these are not the typical issues I hear homesteaders discuss. Often, we’ll hear homesteaders talk about ethically produced meat, sustainable food sources, heavily processed food, or maybe whether it is even okay to eat meat at all. I think those are good questions for us to ask ourselves, and if we haven’t wrestled with them at all, then we probably should. We should be praying about those things and thinking about those things, because God has asked us to tend and keep and care for Creation. Our response should matter. But there are other issues that I don’t hear talked about as much that I think deserve attention, especially from a Catholic lens.

I want to talk about fasting, feasting, and food preservation. We’ll start with the last. When my family began to homestead, we set the goal for ourselves to raise as much food as possible for our family. We wanted to do what we could to lessen our reliance on the grocery store. There are multiple reasons for this- to feed our family the best quality food possible, to lower our grocery bill, and for a bit of self-sufficiency should things go wrong (loss of a job, economic woes, famine as a result of drought, emergency situations).

The year 2020 really gave me an interesting look at the concept of food preservation/storage and self-sufficiency, and I won’t go into the details, but what I will say is that it began to make me look at the moral/ethical side of food preservation. Where I live, if we only ate seasonal foods as they grew, we’d essentially have nothing to eat from October to April/May, unless it was hunted animals. Some type of food preservation and storage is absolutely necessary. The question is, how much is enough? In 2020, we were faced with the real possibility of needing to feed extra people due to job loss and food shortages, but we were only just getting to a point where we were reaching the goal of feeding our family from the land as much as possible. We’d always been willing to share some of the fruits of our labor, but it made us question what to do if times got really hard. And when is it okay to store a lot and when is it not? Again, how much is enough, how much is acceptable?

Scripture gives us some answers to this question. When we look at the story of Joseph in Egypt in the Old Testament, he interprets the kings dream about the cattle and the ears of corn, and says that they will have seven fat years and seven lean years. He helps Egypt store extra food for the time of famine, and through this dream of pharaoh, Joseph ends up saving his family. Even in a good year, some level of food storage is necessary. And if we have an abundance, we should intend to help others with it. That might be right now, and it might be in a few months. But Scripture also makes clear that we are not to store up earthly treasures, and in fact, we have another agricultural parable that Jesus uses to illustrate this point.

The rich man with the good harvest has no place to store his harvest since it is so abundant, so he builds new barns to store his gains, thinking he can live a leisurely life as a result. But God chastises the man and demands his life that very night, and all of that food would have to go to somebody else. We are supposed to be generous with God and with others. Was it wrong for the man to store the harvest? No, not inherently. It was wrong for him to be greedy with his blessings.

So, as Christian homesteaders, what can we learn from these two examples? First, that we need to consider the care and needs of others. Second, when we have an abundance, we should be blessing others. Third, we need to remember to trust God when it comes to our food. He will provide for us in the lean times like the widow of Nan, or for Jacob and his sons during the famine. The story of the manna in the dessert is actually a great reminder for us to put up what is necessary and take what is needed. When the Israelites didn’t trust God and collected more manna than commanded, it rotted. But they were told to collect extra manna on Friday so that they would have enough on Saturday, their day of rest, and yet the manna did not go bad. Moderation is the key.

The issue of how much food to preserve is still not resolved for me. My family continues to grow, so our food consumption continues to change. We don’t grow all we need for the year, but we put up enough that when somebody is having a hard time, we can share, and when guests visit unexpectedly, we can feed them, too. Our surplus food during the growing season goes to friends, family, and neighbors whenever possible, and nothing goes to waste because what can’t be used goes to feed the animals who in turn feed us.

It was only in the past year or two that I realized that we needed to account for times of fasting and abstinence in our food planning and production. Today, many American Catholics have no idea that we really should be abstaining from meat all year round (and if not, then doing some other form of penance). Fasting is limited to two mandatory days: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but we don’t try or care to try and fast more than these two days of the year, unless it’s for weight loss goals. Yet Lent is known as “the great fast.” It is supposed to be modelled on Jesus’s 40 days in the dessert. Our concept of fasting today is also wildly inaccurate for the most part because we’ve become so distant from the traditions. An excellent book on the topic is The Definitive Guide to Catholic Fasting and Abstinence by Matthew R. Plese. I highly recommend reading it if you want to gain a better understanding of the history and determine what you are actually able to do. It’s true that we give things up for lent. Maybe it’s television or chocolate, and these are good things to do, but it is also important that we learn to temper our appetites and focus on our spiritual needs.

The 40 days of lent and other traditional fasts and days of abstinence aren’t a small portion of our eating throughout the year. If we want to adopt any of the older traditions, they should be accounted for in our planning. Though it is absolutely not a requirement and it may not be practical for our growing climates and the foods available to us, the practice of abstaining from lacticinia (animal products such as eggs, milk, and cheese) would greatly impact how my family eats during lent or traditional days of fasting that we might choose to observe. We eat a lot of eggs and cheese during days of abstinence, but if we were to choose not to do that, we’d have to have a food plan well thought out. More vegetables, grains, and fruits would be necessary for those times. Again, these are not requirements of us as Roman Catholics, but if they were, it certainly would need to be part of my growing plans for the year!

Another idea that should be seriously considered is feasting. When I know what feasts and solemnities and memorials I will celebrate in a special way, I may want to raise food just for those purposes. We’ve had goose for Martinmas, a venison neck roast for Christmas, and purple potatoes for Easter. We’re still determining what special meals we want to eat for various feast days, but I have to plan a year ahead for these things. Potatoes are planted in spring, harvested in fall, and if I want them for Easter, they are the very last of the previous year’s potatoes. I need to know how to store them and I have to plan to store them until the appropriate time. I can choose to look to some of the feast day cookbooks for inspiration, or I can look to what grows well for my area or take ideas from favored meals of our family that are too time consuming or rare to have regularly.

Our food production also takes into consideration the limited nature of certain things, and I think particularly of butchering animals for my example. I was hilariously misquoted once for discussing this topic. The reporter said that I said I could feed my family with one chicken instead of six, but he did not accurately quote me and clearly didn’t understand the point I was making. The example of a limited food I used is chicken breast. We can go to a restaurant and get all the chicken breast we want. We can go to the grocery store and buy bags of chicken breast or packages of it. If I want to feed my family a meal with chicken breast as the main dish, I would need 5 chickens to do so: one breast for each family member. When we shop in the store, we don’t often stop to ask ourselves what it takes to provide that food for us. What happens to the rest of the animal? When I’m butchering my own animals, I recognize the scarcity of that particular cut of meat, and it makes me rethink the way we eat. So instead of eating a meal that required the lives of 5 chickens, I can serve a meal that just takes one.

I took the example further using bacon as an example. We love all things bacon today, but on a pig, there is only so much bacon. It comes from the belly of the pig (also known as pork belly), and you might get 10 pounds of bacon off of a pig, uncured, but it will depend on the breed of pig. And what of the rest of it? Let’s say we eat bacon every day. Well, my family could go through a pound every day. That belly would last for about 10 days. Now, a person raising a pig only for the consumption of one person wouldn’t go through as much or as quickly, but it’s still worth considering. If we wanted bacon only for Sunday breakfast, that’s still only 10 out of 52 Sundays of the year. Now, I could raise 5 pigs, and have about enough to eat some for every Sunday, but then I need to ask myself what is happening with all the rest of the meat from the pigs. How is it being used? Would we use it all? Is bacon so important that I want to take the lives of 5 pigs?

The reality of raising our own meat means that we have to consider how the whole animal is being used. The food industry doesn’t just let the other parts of the animal go to waste. Some animal intestines make casings for sausages. Some cuts get turned into ground meat for sausage, people eat ham and pork chops… what you don’t eat, somebody else will. Some people like eating drumsticks from a chicken but not the breast, the bones of animals are used to make broth, and bones can be used to make bone meal, blood goes to make blood meal, skins from some animals are used for leather. Parts of the animal that people don’t consume can be turned into food for dogs and cats. It’s quite impressive what the industry can accomplish. But the question of the homesteader, or the person who raises their own meat is how to use it all, when to use it, and how much to raise.

Because we are intimately connected with the animals we raise for meat, it matters how they are raised and what is done with what we harvest. The rarity of certain cuts of meat or the work that goes into preparing them has caused us to rethink how we use what is raised and what we want to raise. So yes, I may cook a chicken breast dinner for the family, but it’ll be once a year, not 10 times a year. And we’ll also cook up fried chicken with the legs once a year, and we could make wings once a year. So when do we want to eat those special things? We’ll save them for feast days or a baptismal anniversary or a birthday celebration, because those things are important, those things are special.

One of the biggest learning curves for our family over the years has been trying to figure out how much food to grow and what foods to grow. Aside from looking at the foods we love to eat, it would have served us well to have early on, looked at our food production and preservation through the lens described here: fasting, feasting, generosity with others, and scarcity and abundance. If you are new to homesteading, I urge you to consider these things and start planning around them, because it will give you a much clearer picture of how you should invest your time, energy, and money. The way we raise our food and what we eat and how we eat should all be done for the glory of God.

Lest you think we’ve got it all figured out, I just want to assure you that we are still working on it. We still go out to eat from time to time, I don’t cook everything from scratch, we buy processed foods, and we eat too much junk. We are a work in progress. So don’t lose hope if you feel this sounds overwhelming. Start where you are able! Even if you don’t grow much of your food yet, let the calendar of the Church and the special occasions in your life set the tone for how you eat. May God guide you on your journey!

In Christ,
Danielle