Jenny Howell
What are the connections between food, creation and faith? Jenny Howell serves as director of Baylor’s Theology, Ecology and Food Justice Program, which offers a holistic approach to educate students, ministers, leaders and more on the Church’s role in addressing hunger. In this Baylor Connections, she takes listeners inside Waco’s World Hunger Relief Farm, where her work takes place and models approaches to address hunger globally, analyzes complex issues impacting hunger and considers the role of hope as the Holidays approach.
Transcript
DEREK SMITH:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking to Jenny Howell. Dr. Howell serves as Director of the Theology, Ecology, and Food Justice Program in Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary. She also serves as theologian and residence at Waco's World Hunger Relief Farm, where all of her classes are offered. The Theology, Ecology, and Food Justice program was formed in 2021 to offer a holistic approach to educate students, ministers, community leaders and more on the church's role in ecology, sustainability and food justice. It's in partnership with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, and of course, the World Hunger Relief Farm. Really a fascinating topic that we get to dive into. Appreciate you taking the time here as we are really headed into the heart of the holidays here. Dr. Howell, thanks so much for joining us.
JENNY HOWELL:
It's so good to be here.
DEREK SMITH:
Well, it's great to have you here, and you have such a multifaceted discipline, I was thinking about how we could start this. What I wanted to do was see if I could get you just to get a sense of the world you get to inhabit there at the farm and in your work. Take us through the seasons really quickly, if you would. What's one thing that comes to mind or one favorite aspect when you think about getting to work with students or work with the earth in each season of the year?
JENNY HOWELL:
Yeah, that's a great way to start and it's, I think, appropriate to start with the season we're in. Fall is my favorite time to be out at the farm, probably because it's the furthest away from summer you can possibly be in in a year. But right now at the farm, everything is alive, and the weather is so beautiful. The animals are happy. We're starting to bring in our harvest, our fall harvest, so it's busy and lots of good meals going on out there right now. In the winter, things slow down a bit, as you might imagine. That's the time of year out there that the farm is thinking about the spring crops, so there's a lot of planning and prepping, a lot of learning and scholarship going on. With the students, we're beginning to just learn the landscape in the most basic sense and how things work out there, the different parts of life on a farm. In the spring, that's when the farm really comes to life, and it's so busy. We have babies being born on the farm. Right now, at the farm we have miniature cows. If you've ever seen a miniature cow or if you haven't, you can imagine what a baby miniature cow looks like.
DEREK SMITH:
Oh, wow, yeah.
JENNY HOWELL:
It's not the size of a large dog. We also have sheep and chickens and ducks and bunnies, and so spring is a really busy time with the animals. Then of course, we're getting all the crops in for the spring and summer. Then we begin to make our way into the summer months. Living in Texas, I tend to think of summer as a long spiritual discipline. Everyone is on board with the idea of gardening or being outside in the spring, but come summer, it really becomes a challenge. That's when I think we all really begin to learn a lot about ourselves, about discipline, about limits, and so that's something with the students we walk through. Of course, it's something that those who work the fields are really confronted with, especially in the last two summers that have been so intensely hot and dry. So yeah, life on the farm is really ordered by weather and climate, and there's no getting around that. That in and of itself, I think, is an important lesson for students to experience. We're so easily separated from the reality of where we live when all we do is sit in front of a screen every day in an air-conditioned or heated space. But being out on the farm, students really begin to grasp the complexity and the beauty and the challenges of the world that we live in.
DEREK SMITH:
Well, that's great. Obviously, as we visit with you, we're going to be delving into some fun topics that may be different than a lot of your colleagues in Truett Seminary. That's what's fun is seeing what goes on at the seminary ties into so many different aspects of the world. But I want to ask you to help us think through this a little bit. Let's just say that you're at a family reunion and you see someone that you haven't seen in the while and they say, "Now, what is it that you do again?" How would you describe that?
JENNY HOWELL:
Well, I wish I could bring some of my family here to answer that question because I think they're still trying to figure it out themselves. What do I do? Well, it's a unique space to be in, but I am trying to bring attention to first the church, but culture more broadly to the reality of the world that we're living in. It's a world in which climate change is happening, and it's impacting our own landscape and our own way of living. Primarily, the first people to experience the impact of that climate change are going to be the most vulnerable populations, those who are already living on the margins and on the brink of poverty. So this is an important topic for the church to be addressing, right? If we're saying that we're called to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, then we need to pay attention to the realities of our neighbors, and we need to pay attention to the landscape in which we live life with our neighbors. So when our landscape is in travail, our neighbors are in travail. So the church has so many resources and so much capacity to do good in that space, but it's a space that we have collectively, I think, largely ignored or not paid attention to. So my work is to draw attention to that and to bring many people to a table from all different kinds of backgrounds to talk about the challenges that we're facing with all different kinds of expertise and allow students into that conversation to think about how they might go forward and help make a change. Whether it's in the church as pastors and leaders, or if it's in other fields, we all have something to bring to this table, and we all have something to offer the community.
DEREK SMITH:
So you teach at the World Hunger Relief Farm. I know a lot of people at Baylor know what that is. There's a great partnership there. But for people who don't, take us inside. What is the farm, and what do they do there?
JENNY HOWELL:
The World Hunger Relief Farm is a 40-acre farm that has been in existence now for about 50 years. It was originally started as a space to train folks who wanted to go do missions overseas, how to farm in less than ideal contexts. How do you grow food well when you don't have access to fertilizer or pesticides or even electricity? So that was how the farm started, and it's had many iterations over the course of its life. I think where we are right now is we realize that these older ways of farming, these ways that pay attention to composting and caring for soil and how you rotate animals on and off your land, these are actually insights that we need to remember in the United States. So in many ways, while we still have that broader vision of hoping to train people who want to grow food well in any context they live in, our heart, our passion right now is really focusing on Central Texas. If we can grow food in a regenerative way in Central Texas with the climate that we deal with, then I feel hopeful about the opportunities to do regenerative farming in almost any context. So the farm is doing this as a... it's a teaching farm. Its intention is to hand these practices, this wisdom on to the next generation.
DEREK SMITH:
Visiting with Dr. Jenny Howell. Dr. Howell, just curious, so these different threads coming together for you as a career, as a scholarly pursuit, when did that first get a hold of you?
JENNY HOWELL:
Yeah, I've always had my hands in the dirt. I am the granddaughter of an avid gardener, and my grandmother was a tremendous gardener. She grew up on a farm. I'm fifth generation to grow up in the same space in Minnesota, same land, same community, and so I've always had my hands in the dirt. When I began to fall in love with study, academics, one of the ways that I managed being in a library all the time or writing all the time or reading all the time was to garden, and that helped me with my thought process. It helped with my mental health. It was really from that space that this began. My scholarship in turn began to turn more to paying attention to land, what the Bible has to say about land, what the Bible has to say about how we live life together. So as I began to work that out in my scholarship, I continued in my gardening. We used to have a big community garden here in Waco, right in the heart of town with a bunch of neighbors, and that really became the epicenter of our life while I was doing my doctoral work. So it was from there that I began to think creatively about what might it look like to incorporate what I'm experiencing into a seminary classroom space. So initially, it was a pretty modest vision. I just wanted to teach seminary students how creation works. If we're going to talk about loving creation, if we're going to talk about caring for creation, how do we do that? It was a modest vision at first. It really has taken off far more broadly than I had anticipated since then, but that's how it started.
DEREK SMITH:
So how did that come together here at Baylor in the Theology, Ecology, and Food Justice Program? How would you describe that to someone that you're introducing to it for the first time?
JENNY HOWELL:
Well, I'm really grateful for leadership at Truett and at Baylor and at the farm who all agreed that this was a good endeavor to experiment with. There was no Theology, Ecology, Food Justice Program. I just went to the seminary and said," Hey, I have this idea. What if we taught some classes out at the World Hunger Relief Farm?" We talked with the folks at the farm. They were completely supportive of this endeavor, and so we wrote a grant to give it a try for a couple of years. So for two years, we were funded by an external grant where we brought seminary classes out to the farm. From that, the broader vision began to come into play. We have a partnership with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, which is an incredible organization that has a broad impact nationally and internationally. So already out of the gate, Baylor was well positioned with the Baylor Collaborative and some of the other scholarship going on to partner with the farm and try this kind of friendship together, this community friendship, to see what we could do differently if we did scholarship outside on a farm.
DEREK SMITH:
What does it look like to you getting to tie that in to theology with these theology students? What are some of the key themes? I know we talked about the doctrine creation.
JENNY HOWELL:
Yes.
DEREK SMITH:
Take us inside that a little bit, if you would. What are some of the building blocks that you help your students understand?
JENNY HOWELL:
Well, we really start with the most basic building block, which is soil. So soil, it might not be the first thing you think of as a theological topic, but if you look at Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and the story of God creating creation, God creates humankind from soil, from hummus, right? Hummus becomes humans. Adamah in Hebrew becomes Adam, so we start by just contemplating what is soil? Most of us, when we go outside on any given day, we don't step outside and go, "Whoa, soil." It's not this-
DEREK SMITH:
Sure. Yeah.
JENNY HOWELL:
... exciting thing, right? It's just like dirt on the ground. But where we start, I literally will bring soil onto the table in the classroom and tell them that in three tablespoons of soil there's 9 billion living organisms. Try to wrap your mind around that. There's so much going on. We could never fully understand the mystery of soil, and that's what we come from. So we start with that. Then in terms of education on the farm, that means that the first class that students take is they learn how to compost. So compost is just food waste that we allow to break down properly, and it transforms into this rich, nutritious soil that we then put on our gardens. So in so many ways, this is a beautiful example of the kind of education we have out at the farm. In McClennan County, about 30% of what all of us throw away on any given day could be composted and converted into healthy soil. On Baylor campus, the number 60%. 60% of what is thrown away at Baylor could be composted. Now, if you've lived in McClennan County for any amount of time, you know our landfill's about to fill up. So one of the most basic things we can do as community members is composting. If you just throw your banana peels away in the trash can, it's going to go to the Waco landfill, and it's going to get smothered, and it's not going to break down properly. It's going to convert to methane, which is one of the largest contributors to climate change. If you take it out of the landfill and compost it, it becomes this absolutely necessary component of growing healthy food. So that's step one in our classes out at the farm is students learn how to close that loop. You will see them by the end of the semester bringing their buckets of compost out to the farm every week as they come to class and as they participate now in that system.
DEREK SMITH:
Visiting with Dr. Jenny Howell. Dr. Howell, as we think about the challenges that people face, you mentioned that often it's the most vulnerable. We see just some of the statistics out there about hundreds of millions of people living with food insecurity or on the brink of starvation, and of course, there's the biblical command to feed the hungry to serve your neighbor. What are some of the ways that ties into the work you do with your students and that they can take with them as they become leaders?
JENNY HOWELL:
Yeah, this is an issue that is really important for us to be talking about. The USDA just this week released the new numbers. In 2021, there were over 13 million households in the United States that were food insecure. Food insecure means that the family doesn't know where their next meal is coming from. In this past year, the numbers have come out, it's over 17 million households. So we're going in the wrong direction, and that's just in the United States. On any given day, we in the world have close to eight to 900 million people on the brink of starvation. Not just they don't know where their next meal is coming from, but they are starving to death, so this is a real challenge. Since COVID, those numbers have been growing exponentially, and then you have the increase in conflicts globally. The war in Ukraine, Ukraine's the second-largest producer of wheat in the world, and we're such a global food system, when Ukraine isn't growing wheat, children in Yemen are starving to death. So this is a big problem, and one of the jobs that I have at the farm is to teach my students the complexity of this global problem and for them to really sit and take in what we're talking about. The problem at hand right now is not a lack of food. We're growing enough food on this planet to feed everyone, it's access to food, and there's so many reasons why people don't have access to healthy food. Conflict corruption, things like COVID, climate change is causing people to leave their homes where they can't grow food anymore, going to other places where they don't have homes. So we've got a lot of issues. Then, of course, this is just coming home now to us in the United States. So that's definitely one of the big challenges that we talk about in the class, and we explore why is this the case, and then how do we think about solving this complex problem?
DEREK SMITH:
We've talked about your students, but there's other people, you involve other people beyond your immediate students in this. What are some of the ways you convene people to have discussions, to educate, but also to find ways to address these challenges?
JENNY HOWELL:
Yeah, and that's a question that could be answered in many ways. Let's start at the university level. So this is what we would in a university setting call a wicked problem. A wicked problem means that it takes more than one sector to solve the problem. You can bring the world's best economists to the table, and they're going to offer something really important for us to understand when we're talking about the hunger crisis in the world, but they're not going to solve the problem by themselves. You could bring a bunch of theologians to the table. They're going to give a lot of insight, but they're not going to solve the problem. It's going to take all these different disciplines coming together and collaborating with different kinds of expertise to talk about how we resolve these issues. We first of all have to ask the question, what is the issue? What are we solving? Are we solving getting food into people's mouths? Are we solving the question of how do we allow people to thrive in the communities that they are living in? Are we talking about how do we mitigate the impact of climate change? There's so many small or related problems to the problem of hunger. So at the university level, it's been an incredibly invigorating space to be in to see how many people at Baylor are really invested in these questions from all different disciplines. So part of my job has been just trying to bring people to the table, and it's just amazing who's coming. You can imagine that we have ecologists and biologists and nutritionists and ethicists interested, but we also have people in the theater department interested. We have historians who are interested. The English department is one of the biggest actors at the table. So this, to me, is where you really begin to see a creative response is when you bring all these people to a table. Now, from a community level, we also have an interesting conversation going on right now. When we have a place like the World Hunger Relief Farm or the World Hunger Relief Institute here in Waco, they are just a treasure trove of wisdom and insight and community stability about how we grow food well, how we grow healthy food and how we get that food into the mouths of people who need it the most. So working in partnership with the World Hunger Relief Farm with Waco Family Medicine, which is the largest provider of healthcare for people at or below poverty level in McClennan County, how do we get community folks at the farmer's market at the table? Places like Da' Shack Farmers Market in East Waco with Donna Nickerson, who knows so much about indigenous foods and how to grow them well here and their nutritional value, we have a lot of really interesting actors in the community that we need to be bringing together to transform our own local culture. In my mind, if we can do that well, we can become a microcosm to be replicated in other communities.
DEREK SMITH:
That's great. As we visit with Dr. Jenny Howell, and Dr. Howell, as we head into the final few minutes, I want to ask you, what are some things on the horizon about which you are particularly excited? Are there any projects or opportunities that are front and center for you as we look towards 2024?
JENNY HOWELL:
Yeah, this is going to be an exciting year for sure. We're continuing to grow our master's program, so this is not just... these are classes all seminary students can take, but we've also started an MA at Baylor. It's an interdisciplinary master's degree, and so students are taking classes at the seminary, but they're also branching out into other graduate departments across the university taking classes. So it's exciting to watch that program grow and to see who's interested in the program, who's coming to Baylor to study. My own scholarship, I'm very interested in the role that the church is playing to address these issues specifically with their land. How do churches use their land to care for their communities? So this next year, I'll be engaging in a research project with scholars from Duke and Oxford and some other places as we're trying to address that question and try to find answers. I'm also very excited to see how Baylor is going to continue to support and respond to this interest that's growing across the university around these issues, and I feel very hopeful. I've seen a tremendous amount of support from the administration, and I'm excited to see the next steps that we take as a university collectively to address these issues.
DEREK SMITH:
Well, Dr. Howell, one final question for you to tie it into where we are in the year, we started off talking about the seasons. We are very much in the holidays right now, and I'm curious with Thanksgiving, what kind of gratitude do you feel about the opportunity or even the challenges that you get to work on as you serve others? Then also, I'm just curious from your perspective, as someone who pays very close attention to food, food's a big part of these next few weeks, what does that look like to you this time of year?
JENNY HOWELL:
Food is definitely a big part of my work and of the next few weeks. Food is the heart of our celebration of certainly Christianity, but all religions, we all gather around the table. So when we think about gratitude, I think gratitude and hope always go hand-in-hand, and I think to hope well, and not just in a fantasy way like, "I hope these problems go away," we have to see. We have to learn to pay attention to what's happening around us. When we can look and see the reality of where our neighbors live and how they live, that's where hope really can be found. Not by turning our backs or our eyes to them, but to see what the problems are that we have as a community and then to respond from those sites. That's where, for me, Thanksgiving and gratitude can really be found, is seeing all the ways that our community is coming together to address these issues.
DEREK SMITH:
That's wonderful. Well, Dr. Howell, thanks so much for taking the time to share with us today and for the work you do, and we'll look forward to seeing what's ahead as you work with the World Hunger Relief Farm and continue to grow.
JENNY HOWELL:
Thank you.
DEREK SMITH:
Thank you.
JENNY HOWELL:
It's good to be here.
DEREK SMITH:
Appreciate it very much. Dr. Jenny Howell, Director of the Theology, Ecology, and Food Justice Program in Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. A reminder, you can hear this and other programs online, baylor.edu/connections, and you can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.