"I bundled weeds in newspaper and took them out to the curb for the trash collector to take away," recalls Meyer. "It seems symbolic of a whole attitude toward the natural world which I am now trying to undo as an adult."

Meyer, a professor of music history at Syracuse University, practices a different kind of gardening in his backyard now, more in line with the growing interest, from California to New York, in wholesome, seasonal, local eating. "I eat from my own garden as much as possible from June through November."

Last year, when the Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Syracuse, New York, blessed Meyer's garden, "it helped to make the connections between sustainability, food justice, and community," he said. "It seems that the ideas were all there in church rites, just waiting to be connected and brought forward."

Baskerville-Burrows was introduced to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) when she served a parish in the Diocese of Newark. Many things contributed to her interest in sustainable, healthy eating earlier in this decade, including an Episcopal Women's Caucus program on economic justice, a local dinner during the 74th General Convention in 2003 in Minneapolis, and reading Fast Food Nation.

"I've always been a home cook, it's central for me," she said. "But over a period of a few years I began eliminating things from my diet, and more importantly asking where my food came from."

After working at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, for a few years, Baskerville-Burrows returned to the Northeast, and found CSAs in Syracuse to be expensive and not year round, "So I began growing my own."

"I discovered other home gardeners in the parish as well as food justice activists. Their being here confirmed my call to Grace Church, and I asked myself, 'Could it get any better than this?'"

Grace Church has the oldest food pantry in Syracuse. Farmers do contribute local produce in season. And when the university is in session a Sunday evening meal follows worship, with organic and local ingredients featured as much as is practical.

Baskerville-Burrows has participated in the Eat Local Challenge for the last two years. This year the challenge posed was eating out of one's own food shed on a limited budget.

"Here in upstate Central New York the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge is not so much a [one-week] challenge as a daily reality," she wrote for the Eat Local blog.

In talking about the community and congregation, she emphasizes the fact that Syracuse is now showing renewed signs of life and vitality.

But Meyer notes that overall the local population has been declining since the '40s "and at times I sense that we are a parish serving those left behind."

That's why the vision of a community garden, of perhaps transforming the broken concrete and gravel of our parking lot into a vegetable plot, would not only complement the food pantry by providing fresh produce, but also be a powerful metaphor for the church's role in the community.

"I sometimes think of our ministry here as a kind of cultural composting," muses Meyer.

The Syracuse Hunger Project has begun to talk seriously about community gardening at its meetings, and to attract people concerned with agriculture and the environment as well as economic justice.

While the Episcopal Public Policy Network is urging action on a number of priorities for the 2007 Farm Bill, including renewed investment in nutrition programs and new initiatives in agricultural stewardship, congregations are finding ways locally to move beyond simple charity, to live out the call to increase food security and sustainability.

Martha Gardner, environmental ministries consultant for The Episcopal Church, praises what Meyer and Baskerville-Burrows are doing.

"In order for us to tackle the environmental and economic issues of our time, we need to be intentional about how we live and the choices we make," she said. "Only then will we be contributing to a more sustainable way of living. It's a large part of what Millennium Development Goal #7 'Ensure Environmental Sustainability' is all about."

"Food is something that's basic to every human being," notes Meyer. "Of course, it's not bread alone. But food issues branch into issues of social and environmental justice. Food is a window through which we can strive to attain justice and a more Christ-like relationship to the world."

Visit historic Grace Church

Find action alerts on the federal Farm Bill

See what the Rev. Baskerville-Burrows is growing and cooking