2nd October 2025 | Jo Swinney | 0 comments

Around the table

In 1986 my mother, Miranda Harris, was tasked with furnishing the first A Rocha field study centre, Cruzinha. She spent a huge proportion on one item, a beautiful, dark chestnut refectory table, at the time already 100 years old. The table is still there at the heart of the house, drawing people into community over lovingly prepared and gratefully eaten meals. And community remains at the heart of A Rocha.

In October 2019 Mum died in a car accident. She had wanted to write a book about hospitality, community and food for years. Although she had begun work on it, she didn’t live to see it finished. It was my privilege to become her co-author. The following is an extract from our book, ‘A Place at the Table’.

[Note: Miranda’s writing is in bold]

An important part of preparing to offer hospitality is procuring the ingredients for the food you plan to serve. This might seem simple on the face of it – make a list, go to a shop or log on to your supermarket of choice and get the items you need. But there are many constraints and choices to be made and, far from being simple, shopping for food is about as morally and intellectually complex as it gets.

Money was tight for our family while I was growing up and more often than not there were many more than the six of us sitting down to eat. Until a certain point, however, we ate a varied and abundant range of foods. Then came the day someone made the mistake of giving mum a book: The Food We Eat[i] – or as we came to call it, ‘The Food We Used to Eat’, by investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman. In it she made a compelling case for considering not just price but the well-being of producers, the skill and care taken over how food is grown, reared or caught and the impact of what we eat on the soil, air and water. She led us over the seldom-crossed chasm between farm and fork, and with knowledge came responsibility. The holder of the household budget now knew the desperate plight of the attractively priced battery chickens. We would henceforth only eat the happiest of birds and only on the rare occasions we could afford them. Mum became equally enlightened about beef, pork and a seemingly ever-growing list of other consumables from chocolate to kiwis, eggs to pasta. I hold Joanna Blythman personally responsible for the abomination that is ‘Shepherd’s Beany Pie’ which made its unwelcome appearance at far too many of my childhood dinner times. For a while we ‘suffered with vegetarianism’ – a phrase I discovered recently while googling whether my newly veggie daughter could eat Turkish delight (yes, it is indeed suitable for those suffering with vegetarianism, the website earnestly informed me). Meat was back on the menu in less-straightened times, but always formerly happy meat.

We talk a lot in A Rocha about ‘joining the dots’ – the ongoing exercise of connecting facets of life that live artificially segregated: prayer from work from worship; money from soil from flavour; humans from nature from God. Perhaps we need reminding that the business of food shopping is profoundly spiritual and imbued with relational consequence.

Community includes not only the people around us, but also the creation itself. We all live in creation and handle its raw material every day. We didn’t even have our own day in the story of creation. We arrived on day six along with ‘livestock, creatures that move along the ground and wild animals’ (Genesis 1:24). We are part of creation, not outside it or over it or above it.

We can’t opt in or out of creation care or take it up as a hobby, like gardening or golf, if we aren’t too busy. We are doing it already – badly or well, living our relationship with God’s world like his children who love him, or like people who don’t know that it was made with infinite care, love and delight.

Care begins with noticing. Anything God makes deserves our attention. Careful observation leads to wonder, worship and giving thanks. Our task is to find a place within creation and to worship the one by whom, through whom and for whom it was all made (Colossians 1:15-17).

When my niece Jessica was three her parents took her to see cows being milked. She watched, entranced, as the huge, placid beasts stood patiently in a row while the milking apparatus throbbed rhythmically up and down on their udders, carrying white fluid through various tubes and eventually out of sight. Finally and thoughtfully she said, ‘Are they putting it in or taking it out?’ Sometimes we become disastrously separated from creation. We all recognise the white stuff in our lattes or on our breakfast cereal but fail to connect it with anything other than a plastic bottle or carton.

Here is a suggestion for consideration: that to the extent we are able, we seek out the very best ingredients to prepare and serve up – the ones with the fullest flavour, the most vibrant colours, brought to market by people who care for the earth; that we savour the experience of peeling, chopping, mincing, slicing, mixing, roasting, frying, steaming. That we do not begrudge the extra pennies, the extra minutes, the burden of care, but offer them up from generous, full hearts, a sacrifice of praise.

[i] The Food We Eat – Joanna Blythman, Penguin Group 1996 (p4).