A spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down. 

Stirring the white granules into my mug of dark roast, I was back in Honduras looking up at the tropical hillsides charred black, broken hypodermic sugarcane stumps jutting from the earth. Orphans play soccer on the field below, thin limbs darting barefoot across the dirt. Between the hill and field, in a gully cut by the wet season’s torrential runoff from the unprotected hillside, mounds of trash smoldered. Ash mixes with red dust, and the burning plastics lend a chemical note to the morning’s earthy perfume.

The connections between that scene and the sugar in my mug slashed through a lifetime of learned narratives like a machete through a mosquito net. The ties that bind food, health, power, justice, climate, economy, and humanity make for bitter medicine when studied in detail.  A lifetime as a caregiver and a conscientious objector to suffering of all kinds primed my healing.

My kids will grow up knowing that we live our values through our food.