A while back I had an entry called Magazine Heaven in which I argued that Canada simply is a better place for magazines. Truly it is. Meanwhile, I was in Victoria (that's in British Columbia) where I came upon another delightful addition to magazine heaven -- this time Geez.The subtitle: "Holy Mischief in an Age of Fast Faith." Geez won Magazine of the Year Award for Canada's best western magazine. (It comes out of Winnipeg.) Here's their mission/description from their website:
Geez magazine has set up camp in the outback of the spiritual commons. A bustling spot for the over-churched, out-churched, un-churched and maybe even the un-churchable. For wannabe contemplatives, front-line world-changers and restless cranks.
And yes, they had an issue of relevance for us here at Cooking with Ideas. Special issue title? The future of food in an urbanized world. Winter 2007, Issue 8 has four parts, each of which asks a question: (1) Who's winning the battle for your taste buds? (2) Who grows your food? (3) Who will feed the future? and (4) What the heck should we do about it? Filled with black and white pictures, with a sort of collage-y feel to it, the magazine offers a wide range of intriguing selections from previously published material --and new things as well. To preview the issue, click here.
Here are a few of my responses the issue:
First and foremost, I found the magazine uncanny. Yes, that's right, uncanny. Something about it attracted and fascinated me --and put me off. Maybe not the right word, uncanny, but I had a weird response to the magazine. It is somewhere between creepy religious (Geez=Jesus?) and the Utne Reader. It reminds me of Andrew Boyd who wrote a truly swell book called Daily Afflictions simultaneously spoofing and taking very seriously a personalized self-help religion in the U.S. The magazine rings of a certain serious religiosity with a twisted sense of humor rooted in rejection of hegemonic culture's religion, politics and point of view. Like Boyd, Geez has been called "culture jamming." Perusing their web site, they have a call for "Sermons You'd Never Want to Hear in Church" with a prize of $2400. Hmmm.
Despite my mixed feelings, the issue on food had loads of things in it that fed my foodie soul. (Or is it sole?) My first hint that Geez was religion with a spin was my reaction to "Taste and See that the Lord is Good" on the cover, in Jello letters and mustard writing on white bread. Yes, an echo of biblical phraseology right there in primary colors. And then, there was the opening art bit: "The Last Breakfast" by Ron English which features breakfast cereal advertising art animated figures (think Snap, Krackle and Pop, for example) seated in a Da Vinci's Last Supper inspired tableau. The picture accompanies the editorial opening entitled "Sugar Coated Ritual." What follows? Quotations from Wendell Berry juxtaposed to Brian Halweil (for Halweil's blog, click here) and a bit later, a few pages of Barbara Kingsolver excerpts and an interview with accompanying excerpts from Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon (for their blog, click here; for my review of their book, click here), photos of the back of a shirt saying "Riding for the Brand Cowboy Church, Amarillo, Texas" only pages away from one of a young girl squatting in front of a huge farm machine, the little girl rendered truly tiny by the juxtaposition. In both the reading -- and in researching this, I learned; who knew, for example, that there was a "cowboy ministry" called "riding for the brand"? Click here if you want to know more. Religion in North America. The magazine is Canadian; the articles both from Canada and the U.S. in the main. Wow. Hovering on the edge of moralism, while critiquing . . . on the edge of Christianity or postChristian secular spirituality while. . . hovering. . .
More specifically, here are a few of my favorite bits:
1. Two pages across from one another: "This is my body broken for you" and "At the policy table: Religion and the US Farm Bill." (The latter is available here.) Ok, the first one is, for anyone who needs to work on your religious literacy, pointing to the traditional Christian phrasing of Jesus' last supper and contemporary rituals associated with it. That page offers loads of fun information about altar bread, from the role of Archer Daniels Midland Company (a major benefactor of US Farm Bill subsidies) to that of the Cavanagh Company (purveyors of altar bread made with Archer Daniels flour) and some DIY directions for communion bread. By juxtaposing this to the article on the US Farm Bill, of course, the editors have rendered obvious the contradition of daily practice and policy. The policy article, written by Robert D. Francis who is Director for Domestic Policy for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Francis writes of the Religious Working Group on the Farm Bill (click here for their statement of principles) -- which finds the subsidies problematic because of their highly negative impact -- directly undermining farmers and poor people in developing countries as well as favoring large producers in the U.S. The bill, he indicates, drawing on the words of other religious leaders, is unfair and unjust both in terms of its domestic implications and its global impact. (He was, of course, writing of the 2007 renewal. For an update, click here.) And for those who are concerned about more than the Farm Bill, later in the magazine you can read a Geez intern's comments on "Coke and God" which reports on student movements against Coca Cola, sometimes on the grounds of a religiously informed environmentalism. For more, as Jenni Berkel notes, see, for example, killercoke.org What did I learn from all this? Loads. We can move beyond asking where our fish comes from in restaurants. For those of you who are religious and Christian, maybe ask: where does my communion bread come from? my wafer at mass? For all of us Coke lovers, we can ask: what makes this a religious issue? Turns out, yes it is.
2. "Farming and feminism" by Jennifer deGroot adds an F word to my list. There are other feminist-ish things in the magazine but the F word I mean is farming.This magazine has loads of essays of, by and about farming. DeGroot's article, in another version, appeared in Canadian Woman Studies (Fall/Winter 2006). Her argument is about connecting across generations of women and, indeed, across the privileged/not-so-privileged divides that mark our lives. One of those divides -- between rural and urban women -- goes less remarked than many others in today's feminism. Worth a read? Yes.
So: another magazine discovered above the 49th parallel. Keepan eye on it. You might learn something too.
