When food is directly referenced in the services themselves, it seems to be included in an overall concern with health and nutrition—both spiritual and physical. A droll example of this came on the Thanksgiving service (November 20, 2011). For that week’s story for children, a lay leader read a picture book called ‘Twas the Night before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey (of Captain Underpants fame), in which eight elementary school children go on a field trip to a turkey farm just before Thanksgiving and play with eight turkeys. The children are shocked to find out that the farmer plans to butcher the turkeys to make their Thanksgiving dinners, so they formulate an elaborate and sophisticated scheme to smuggle the turkeys off of the farm. The book ends with the children and their new pets celebrating a vegetarian Thanksgiving together.
While the story’s endorsement of vegetarianism on moral grounds is fairly unambiguous (Unambiguous with the exception of the fact that the children are stealing from what I can only surmise is a small, family-run turkey farms—corporate farms, which would of course be an ethically acceptable site to steal turkeys from, would have much more than eight turkeys), its use at First UU Springfield cannot be seen as reflective of a congregational ideology of vegetarianism; though several congregants with whom I have spoken identified as vegetarians, the majority of the congregants seem to be omnivorous, and those that do identify as vegetarian supplied a variety of reasons that range from personal health to ethical considerations. Rather, the story as used in this context seems to support a sort of critical responsibility for and sensitivity to what one eats.
