I am not a Mennonite, but I own four books published by Herald Press, an imprint of Menno Media. I cherish these books because they have a lot to teach me about topics like simplicity and justice.
Three of the books are cookbooks: the classic More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, Simply in Season by Cathleen Hockman-Wert and Mary Beth Lind, and Extending the Table by Joetta Handrich Schlabach. The fourth book, Living More With Less by Doris Janzen Longacre addresses sustainable living. If you want to learn more about making a difference, you can’t go wrong with these books.
More-with-Less Cookbook
This is the book that started it all. In the 1970s, the Mennonite Central Committee called for Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community households to consume 10 percent less food in order to address North American overconsumption and world need. The committee then commissioned a cookbook with recipes that could help households respond to their call to use less. The cookbook is filled with recipe submissions, mostly from the United States and Canada. Think of it as a church cookbook on steroids, covering a larger territory than your typical church cookbook and built around a specific purpose: caring for the hungry by reducing overconsumption.
My copy of the cookbook is a reprint of the original 1976 edition. It contains introductory chapters on the world food situation as it was at the time, a theological reflection on the importance of reducing food consumption in North America in order to address global hunger, suggestions for building a simpler diet, and reflections on how such a diet does not need to be plain or joyless. The chapters that follow include sections with recipes for breads; cereals; beans, soybeans, and lentils; main dishes and casseroles; eggs, milk, and cheese dishes; meats and fish; soups; vegetables; salads; desserts, cakes and cookies; preserves; and snacks and non-food items, such as laundry soap and play-dough.
This is the cookbook I use the least, because it feels a bit dated. Some of the recipes call for margarine, which I never use. But despite the fact that I don’t turn to this book that often, I find it valuable. It does include recipes my family enjoys, especially easy lentil stew. It also has suggestions for leftovers at the end of many of the chapters, including listings of recipes elsewhere in the book that can help you use leftovers.
The 40th anniversary edition, published in 2016, apparently includes some updates to recipes, which may be just what the cookbook needs to keep it fresh. Regardless, using it can help cooks focus on more responsible eating.
Simply in Season
This cookbook is particularly useful for those who wish to cook more in-season foods. Once again, the cookbook is based on contributed recipes. It is divided into five main sections: one with recipes for each season and an “all seasons” section. A short introductory section gives advice on storing and preparing different fruits and vegetables. Some of the recipes I’ve tried have been just “okay,” but others are quite good, particularly the taco soup and slow cooker chili in the All Seasons chapter.
There’s lots of additional material scattered throughout the cookbook, including information on things like crop diversity and personal reflections on food. At the end of each section, there is a list of “invitations to action,” such as visiting a farmers market, starting a community garden, sharing meals with others, buying fairly traded products, and encouraging your grocery store to carry locally grown food.
Extending the Table
The Mennonite Central Committee commissioned this cookbook “to promote global understanding and celebrate the variety of world cultures.” It is by far my favorite of the three cookbooks. It’s one I turn to often, because so many of the recipes I’ve tried are very flavorful. Once again, the recipes were submitted, but this time they come from around the world. Among our favorites are African greens (sukuma wiki) from Kenya, an assorted vegetable sauté (oseng oseng sayuran) from Indonesia, bang bang chicken (bang bang ji) from China, and shrimp curry (chingri mash torkari) from Bangladesh. Like Simply in Season, this cookbook includes supplemental information scattered throughout, including short essays on subjects such as water, marketplaces, and cornmeal porridge, which can help give us a more global perspective on food.
Living More With Less
Living More With Less is very different from the three cookbooks I’ve mentioned. The 30th anniversary edition, the one I own, is made up of three parts. The first part is introductory material. The second addresses five “life standards”: do justice, learn from the world community, nurture people, cherish the natural order, and nonconform freely. The third part is made up of personal stories from people who are trying to live just, sustainable lives. This part is organized around topics such as money and stewardship, cooking and eating, recreation and schedules, and strengthening each other and organizing communities.
The chapters on the five life standards are informative and include practical suggestions. In the chapter on learning from the world community, contributors from Indonesia and Paraguay ask if Americans could try to make do with fewer kitchen appliances. In the section on nonconforming freely, one person from Canada wrote about choosing to live without their van for a year.
We announced our decision to members of our small Mennonite congregation. In the weeks that followed, another couple said they were retiring their old car. With money from a provincial incentive program, they went car-free and bought bus tickets. Another couple sent around an email and said they intended to keep their car but set up a borrowing policy for those who need it. … With these actions in our small, faith-based community, we were embodying a hint of what a more sustainable, interdependent society could look like.
Part 3 is even more useful, filled with ways we can lighten our impact on the planet and care more for our neighbors. In a chapter on homes, one contributor wrote about how his family chose a roofing contractor based on what the company planned to do with the old shingles; the contractor they chose takes the shingles to a place that recycles them into road substrates. The Clothes and Bodies chapter includes a story about a couple who consciously decided to wear shirts that promote nonprofits rather than clothing with brand names. In the Recreation and Schedules chapter, the director of athletics from Eastern Mennonite University shares ways families can balance kids’ sports time with family time.
Some of the ideas in this book won’t be new to you. I wasn’t surprised by a suggestion to wash laundry in cold water; for years, I’ve rarely used anything but cold water to wash clothes. But there are so many ideas for living more simply in this book that I doubt anyone could come away without something new they could try.
We don’t have to be Mennonites to appreciate the ways the contributors to these books are dedicated to justice, the environment, love, and the global community. Any or all of these books are worth checking out from your library or purchasing for yourself.
A note about my next post…
Life is very full right now. I’m enjoying good things, like seeing a family member for the first time in more than a year now that we are all fully vaccinated. I’m also dealing with difficulties, like a pet who isn’t very interested in his food any more. I’m going to take a short break from the blog and return when I have a little more bandwidth. I believe this will be sometime in mid- to late June.
2 replies on “The Mennonites Can Teach Us How to Make a Difference”
Nice suggestions. In line with the underlying theme, do you know the book “Celebration of Discipline” by Richard J Foster, the Quaker author.
And just small note as to referring to Americans, (we all do it thus), but some of my friends in South America will say, “but we are Americans as well” and prefer to refer to the the U.S.A. or North America by way of distinguishing identity.
Thank you, Robert! I do know, and love, Celebration of Discipline. And you are absolutely right about the term “Americans.” One of the things I hate about trying to refer to people who live in the United States is that there is no simple term, like “Canadians,” that truly works. While “Americans” is the shorthand we tend to use for people in the United States (and many of us in the U.S. think the term refers only to us), such usage does exclude a good portion of people who live in the Americas.