THE SMART BITE: ROOTED IN FAITH
Why Is It This Way?
Ever stood in the grocery store and wondered how we ended up eating the way we do? Not whether it’s right or wrong. Just, how did this become the normal nobody questions? Most of us never picked it. We inherited it. And honestly, once you start pulling that thread, you can’t stop. I couldn’t.
It didn’t used to be this way. A few generations ago, most farms were small and mixed. Animals and crops side by side, a lot of it grown to feed the people right there.
Then, slowly, we got really good at producing more. Over the last seventy years or so, we learned to raise more animals, faster and cheaper, at a scale nobody had ever seen.
Small family farms gave way to fewer, far bigger ones, with animals raised indoors by the tens of thousands or more. Plenty of decisions got made along the way, by companies, by policy, by markets. No single moment anyone voted on. Just one step at a time, until it became normal.
Here’s where it lands today. Livestock takes about 80% of the world’s farmland and gives back only about 17% of the calories we actually eat. A huge share of the crops we grow never reaches a human plate at all.
Here’s the good news. We can already see a way forward. With plants, the ratio almost flips: about 83% of the world’s calories grow on just 16% of farmland. Most of what already feeds the world is the efficient path.
And it leaves a quiet question worth sitting with. If we already grow enough to feed a growing world, why are so many still going hungry?
It reminds me of how Jesus questioned the norms of his time. Gently, but persistently. He healed on the sabbath and told the religious leaders they’d tithed down to the last herb while overlooking the weightier things: justice, mercy, faithfulness.
The norms felt so settled that good, faithful people stopped questioning them. And honestly? I wonder if I’d have gone along too.
So I keep coming back to the question underneath it all. What does the Lord require of me? Of you? To act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. Maybe seeing our food more clearly is one small way of doing just that.
Your Small Step
You don’t have to change a thing on your plate this week. Just get curious about one item.
Pick something you eat all the time and ask, where did this actually come from, and how did it get to me? That’s the whole step. You’re not fixing anything. You’re just looking. And looking is more than it sounds like.
That’s it. Just one move.
Pigs Tips
Three easy ways to sit with the question this week:
- Try a field-to-plate meal. Beans, lentils, grains, vegetables, they go straight from the ground to your plate. See how far one pot stretches.
- Cook one big batch of something. Lentils and grains feed you for days and stretch further than almost anything else in your kitchen.
- Find the joy. What does it feel like to be amazed by all the variety that grows from the ground to nourish us?
Go Deeper
- Half the world’s food never feeds people, One Earth. A 2026 study finds the world’s croplands could feed nearly twice the population, but only half the calories reach our plates.
- Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, Our World in Data. See how much land feeds animals versus people, in one chart.
Cold Lentil Salad with Snap Peas and Lemon
Cool, lemony, and crunchy. Lentils straight from field to plate, one pot that feeds a table all week. The small, doable version of “feed more people,” starting with yours.
Pigs’ Scripture and Smiles
And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.
Isaiah 58:10 (NIV)
The question Isaiah won’t let me skip.
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