When I’m on my pilgrimages, I always try to take a day off from walking on Sundays and look for a local church to attend for a service. However this year, with all the restrictions as regards church activities because of coronavirus, I’ve only been able to attend a few acts of worship in person and the current alternative of a ‘remote’ service isn’t generally practical for me.
However, with my husband kindly acting as my support vehicle for a week or so when I was in the south-west of Scotland recently, I had the opportunity to see my own home church’s online harvest service coming from the small town of Abergavenny near where I live in mid-Wales.
But this harvest service started with a rather different kind of song to what many of us, perhaps raised on We plough the fields and scatter and similar traditional hymns, are used to! This was In my trolley, written by Jeff Hammer, which begins with the following words;
Eggs and apples in my trolley ( x 2)
Every time I shop,
I will thank God for the ‘crop’,
Of eggs and apples in my trolley.
Rather like the old children’s party game, different foods are added to the list each time the song is sung through. So, the second time around milk and carrots are added and so on. The song concludes with;
Every time I shop,
I will thank God for the ‘crop’,
of all the food that’s in my trolley.
Hearing this lovely song for the first time, cheerfully sung online and inserted into the church service because of the coronavirus guidelines, was a very real reminder of how many of us are so distant from the growing and processing of the food we put into our supermarket trolleys. The first time many of us come into contact with what we eat is often that act of reaching out and picking up something in a shop-whether it be eggs and apples, milk and carrots or whatever.
In my trolley also very much resonated with what I had felt earlier in the year on my pilgrimage from home to Winchester in the south of England. Then, walking in early July, I had made a point of photographing maturing crops as I passed through fields on footpaths. In many cases I was unsure just what was being grown. Even though I have lived much of my life in quite rural areas, I found that I had very little knowledge of just how the various cereals and root vegetables that I saw fitted in to the supply chain that eventually leads a supermarket trolley and on to your and my dinner plate.
Walking on pilgrimage again in the last few weeks in the south-west of Scotland was a further reminder to me of the distance so many of us are from the production of the food that we all depend on. Making my way amongst what seemed the endless pastures of Dumfries and Galloway, I saw many herds of cattle grazing on the rich grassland of this area of the British Isles. Whether they were being reared for dairy produce or for beef often wasn’t obvious, at least to me, but again I found myself thinking about how food gets into trolleys from farms such as these.
Perhaps one of the benefits of the situation with the virus is that it has highlighted the resilience of the food industry. We have all been thankful for the work of all those who provide for us, whether agricultural workers, lorry and delivery drivers or supermarket staff.
In our increasingly urban society with what often seem complex supply chains, at this time of harvest we can indeed gives thanks to God for all the food that’s in our trolleys.