Planting Tomato Seeds on Earth Day

On this Earth Day I am planting hope.

I am going to put the seeds that I have saved from last year’s cheery tomato plant into the soil. I went to Home Depot to get a cherry tomato seedling last year. The tomato plant yielded many juicy and yummy cheery tomatoes in the summer and into the fall. They were so good that I decided to save some seeds to see if I could grow them next spring.

I read in a Chinese newspaper that I can save tomato seeds in two ways. I can save some cheery tomatoes and freeze them in the freezer. I saved two and yesterday I defrosted one of them so that I would still have one left, just in case.

The other way is to take out some seeds from a tomato and dry them, so that they will be ready to be planted in the following season. I will experiment to see if seeds preserved by both methods would germinate.

I first tried to grow vegetables in the spring of 1996, after my family moved into a house we bought in Massachusetts. I have grown up in Hong Kong and there was hardly any land for growing.

So in 1996, we started a garden plot of 3 feet by 12 feet in our backyard and grew tomatoes, lettuce, green peppers, green onions, and beans. I also grew a few basils and thymes, herbs I did not use often but gave very fragrant smell.

The tomatoes and lettuce were so fresh when we used them for our summer salads. The most amazing thing was watching the little seedlings grow and bear fruits. Gardening was something I have never tried before and it opened a new world for my family and me.

After growing for several seasons, my family stopped doing it because we were too busy and the summer months were hot. I had many other things to do in the summer: reading, writing, taking walks, and catching up with my life…whatever that was.

Last June, I taught a June course on God and Creation. Our class went on a field trip to see an organic garden at a monastery, about 45 miles north of Boston. A student of mine was in charge of this organic garden and he explained to us the relation between sustainable farming, food, and God’s providence in very concrete ways. For example, he showed how different plants grow symbiotically together in his garden.

After the June term, it was already late for the planting season. But my husband and I decided to start growing again!

We created a new garden plot of 5 feet by 22 feet. We divided it into 6 beds and grew tomatoes, red and green peppers, zucchini, and butternut squash. I was so glad to be able to grow Chinese bok choy from seeds I bought from Chinatown. Though I had only 8 or 9 not very healthy-looking bok choy plants, hardly enough for two meals, I bragged about my success in the fall.

So this year, I am observing the international Earth Day by doing something simple: plant some tomato seeds. This is a concrete way of bringing awareness to my busy life of the intimate connection I have with the environment.

As I watch the tomato seeds germinate and grow, I will learn not to take the foods I eat for granted. I thank all those who have grown the foods I will eat on this particular day and remember those who have very little to eat or have to go to bed hungry.

Why I Like The Economist Magazine

Among the newsweekly, The Economist is the one that the global elite read. Newsweek has been sold by The Washington Post Company and we are not certain if Tina Brown will be able to turn it around. In the shrinking market of the weekly news magazines, The Economist is doing much better than its competitors.

I started reading The Economist since last year for it was sent to me for free. The frequent miles program of an airline gave me a free subscription and I have enjoyed reading it. When the free subscription ended, I became a paid subscriber.

The Economist has a circulation much smaller than Time and Newsweek. Time has a circulation of 3.3 million (down from 4.1 million in 2000) and Newsweek has 1.6 million (down from 3.1 million in 2000). The Economist had only about 823,000 for the first half of 2010 and sold 52,000 on the newsstand each week. Its subscription rate at $127 is several times more than that of Time and Newsweek.

The Economist stands out among the newsweeklies in terms of its global reach. Each issue has coverage on the world this week, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa. While Time and Newsweek tend to focus more on U.S. news, The Economist told you something about Uganda’s election, the French in London, the Swedish company Ikea, and gambling in Singapore in last week’s issue.

With the information overload, it is good to have a magazine that provides a snapshot of what is happening in the world. The Economist’s reporting is short and to the point.

I also like The Economist because China features quite prominently in its coverage. Last year, when Xi Jinping became the designated successor of Chinese President Hu Jintao, The Economist had a detailed report of who this rising star is.

The Economist is a British journal and has its own biases. But it provides a lens for me to look at China from a different angle. For example, we know China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. But exactly how large is this? The Economist matches the Chinese provinces with countries in terms of GDP, population, and exports. I didn’t know that Guangdong’s GDP is almost equivalent to Indonesia’s. The output of Beijing is as big as the Philippines and Shanghai's output is equivalent to Finland's.

I am also impressed by the occasional special reports, which provide in depth coverage on a certain topic. When I taught a course on liberation theology last semester, I was able to use the special report on Latin America.

In the current issue the Special Report on the future of food asks whether we will have enough food to feed the world’s 9 billion people in 2050. I learned that currently the world produces more than enough to go around. The major reason for famines is not shortage of basic foods, but other factors such as wages, distribution, wastes, and politics. To be able to feed the increasing population, one of the key areas to consider is how to balance the production of crop for food and for biofuels. The United States, the European Union, and Japan all want biofuels to supply 10% of energy demand for transport by 2020.

As an economic and business magazine, The Economist has the interests of corporation and private enterprise in mind. Yet its ideological stance is much less conservative than the Wall Street Journal’s. It chastises the European countries for not speaking more powerfully in support of Arab democracy. The EU is accused of being preoccupied with stability in the Middle East and migrants not landing on their shores, than siding with democracy for the Arabs.

As I watched the news from major American media outlets about the uprising in North Africa and the Middle East, the focus has been what this would mean for the USA. The Economist at least provides a wider angle to look at the world.

So What's for Lunch

Lunch means eating rice. This was the way I was brought up in Hong Kong. So I was surprised to see that lunch could mean so many things when I first arrived in Boston.

I still vividly remember the dean of my theological school walking passed by Harvard Science Center, eating a pretzel on his way during lunchtime. My fellow students brought an apple, pieces of carrots, or nuts to eat for lunch. Others had muffins, potato chips, and every kinds of niceties which I would call snacks.

Food has become a major war in the United States. On the one hand, Michael Pollan admonishes us to “eat real food.” On the other hand, the agribusiness and fast-food chains want to entice us to eat much more than real food.

Today, Mark Bittman of the New York Times has joined the fray. His target was McDonald’s “bowl full of wholesome”—also known as oatmeal. Instead of just plain 100% natural oatmeal, McDonald has added many more ingredients. To be honest, Bittman says, the fast-food chain should label it as “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

You can’t have plain oatmeal, just as you can’t simply have rice. Have you been to restaurants and fast-food stores that serve fried rice, curry rice, rice with raisins and nuts? You have to ask if you want white or brown rice.

Americans have so many choices in food. Yet most of the food is of such poor quality. During my recent trip to Sweden, my host took me to a bakery and the aroma of the bread was just delightful. People lined up to buy fresh-baked bread after work. We went to a fish store to buy soup with fish and clams, freshly prepared for the day. It tasted delicious, and much less salty than soup served in the U.S.

I don’t know why Americans put so much sugar and salt in their food. When I first looked at an American cookbook, I thought something was wrong with a cake recipe. It said one cup of sugar. My goodness, you can use this amount of sugar for several months of Chinese cooking. When I told my friends I’d cut the amount of sugar in the recipe to half, if not to one-third, they rolled their eyes in disbelief.

I have a conspiracy theory about why so much sugar and salt are added to food. When the food you eat is so sweet and salty, you have to drink a lot of sodas—alas, not water.

The popular sodas have so much sugar. A 12-ounce can of Coke contains 39 grams of sugar, equivalent to nine-and-a-half sugar cubes. A 20-ounce bottle contains sixteen-and-a-half cubes!

Mrs. Michelle Obama is waging a campaign to provide healthier lunches in schools as one of the steps to address childhood obesity. The federally-funded school program feeds 31-million low-income American children a year. She wants to increase the amount of fruit and vegetables on the school-lunch trays. But the prices of these products have increased significantly. Even if money can be found to fund the proposal, she faces an uphill battle to convince American children to eat healthy food.

My mother has told her children to eat fresh food and avoid canned food and preservatives. We learned to drink green tea when we were young. I would just stick to her sound advice.

Preparing for Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year will be this Thursday. People who are far away from home will return home for the holiday. They will prepare special foods and give children pocket money and new clothes.

The preparations for the New year can teach us a few spiritual lessons.

You have to clean the house, especially the kitchen, which can be full of greasy smell because of the stir-fly. If you don't do so, the Kitchen God will give you a bad report. Periodical cleaning is great for your spiritual health too.

I will give out the Chinese word fu for "blessing" on red paper to the students in my spirituality class. I will ask them to clean out a corner of their room and put the word "blessing" there, and create an altar or a space for meditation.

The Chinese like to buy flowers for the New Year. Before his death, my father used to buy narcissus bulbs and cut them at a certain date so that they would blossom during the New Year. He would give each of his children who were no longer living at home narcissus bulbs for the holidays.

The New Year is the beginning of spring. It is fitting to welcome spring in our lives with flowers. Some of the favorite flowers for the Chinese include peony, chrysanthemum, lily. They also like blooming plum and quince branches.

Family and friends gather for a sumptuous meal on New Year's eve. The people in China have a long holiday for the New Year and traffic will be very congested. Those migrant workers will try their best to return home, as the New Year is the most important time to see the families.

To mark the auspicious New Year day, my mother would only eat vegetarian food on that day. She would offer thanksgiving to the ancestors and pray for the coming year.

Since I have moved to the U.S., I do not keep up with the tradition. But this year when I visited my sister in New York several weeks ago, she helped me to select some narcissus bulbs. They are blooming in the kitchen and giving out tiny white and yellow flowers.

My EDS colleagues gave me a large bouquet of flowers at the party yesterday in honor of me for receiving the honorary degree. I was very thankful for their kind gesture. So now I have enough flowers to fill three vases. My daughter is working and can't come home. All I need to do is cleaning up the kitchen and I am all set for the New Year.

The Silver Bible and Other Surprises

The most treasured book in Uppsala is the sixth-century Silver Bible (Codex Argenteus).

While I have seen other handwritten
and beautifully decorated medieval Bibles in Europe, this is the first time I saw a codex dated back to the sixth century.

The Silver Bible contained the manuscript of the Gothic translation of the four Gospels in Greek in the fourth century. It was written in silver and in gold, and probably for the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The Goths were nominally Arians.

In addition to seeing the Silver Bible, Uppsala has many surprises for me. Let me begin with breakfast. I ate breakfast this morning in the hotel. It consisted of bread, cheese, egg, different cold cuts, cereal, veggie salad. Conspiciously absent were the sweet things in American breakfast: pancakes and muffins. There were also large jars of almonds, flax seeds, and walnuts.

The other surprise was which way to open the door. After I brought my luggage to my room, I tried to get out. I couldn't open the door and thought I was locked. I was pulling the door inside the room. But it should be pushed outside. I have never pushed a hotel door toward the corridor. Then I was never sure whether to push or to pull the doors.

This afternoon I gave a lecture with Powerpoint to the faulty and students of the Faculty of Theology. I asked for a lectern and was told there wasn't any. Surprise, surprise, I was asked to sit down to deliver the lecture, in a classroom in which those at the back could not see me.

I was glad to see my Swedish friends who came to the lecture: Dr. Elisabeh Gerle, an ethicist, Dr. Helene Egnell, author of Other Voices and specialist in gender and interreligious dialogue. My Olso friends Dr. Marianne Bjelland Kartzow and Dr. Anne Hege Grung also attended.

But the most enjoyable surprise was the rehearsal for tomorrow's ceremony. The Master of Ceremony began by saying that he would give a lecture before the actual rehearsal. He really gave the history of the medieval ceremony for 45 mins! It was so entertaining and I laughed so hard that tears were dripping down my face--imagine I had make-up on. . .

The recipients of honorary doctorates in theology were to receive the degrees first. Theology was the oldest faculty and queen of the sciences in the medieval period. The other person who will receive it is Professor Per-Arne Bodin of the University of Stockholm.

He presented a lecture on "At the Bath of the Hole in the Ice: On a Religious Ceremony and the Soviet Tradition." He is a specialist in the Russian Orthodox tradition. He talked about the celebration of the Christ's Baptism in Russia. The congregation would process down to a hole in the ice, often carved in the shape of the cross. After the priest blessed the water, the people would take some home, as it was thought to have healing property. Some even immersed themselves in the icy cold water. The Russian word for winter swimmers, morzj, literally means walrus. He also elaborated how this tradition figured in Chekhov's work and in Russian novels and poetry.

One fellow wrote a novel called The President's Last Love. Putin invited other presidents to take a winter bath in a hole in the ice. The Ukrainian president was able to withstand the cold. But the British Prime Minister and the American President could not. I guess Putin showed his manhood.