ARC offers ideas for the Harvest Festival

In a world of terrible starvation matched against the obscenity of butter and wheat mountains, it can be hard to know how to celebrate getting yet more out of the earth than we did last year.

Our increase in harvest is often the result of eliminating wildlife and the rooting up of age-old hedgerows; most of our cheap meat and eggs come from factory farming; our rivers are polluted by insecticides and chemical fertilizers which have washed from the fields; and we are increasingly running the danger of changing the biology of food forever with GM crops.

So can we still pretend that the wheat, fruits, eggs and other things that we bring to church are the fruitful signs of our partnership with creation?

In many cases, we are so removed from how our food is made - and the true costs to our world that Harvest seems to have become little more than a celebration of supermarkets or the multi-nationals.

Yet the need to give thanks for our food and for the beauty of our world is still fundamental that despite all the problems and uncertainty, Harvest has kept its pull.

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