Food!

Props

It will help to have a selection of foods (fresh, tinned, packets) from different countries - including rice.

Click here for a Powerpoint which can be used with the worship

Gathering

Leader: We gather together in Jesus' Name

All: Help us to explore, discover and learn together

Engaging

Whenever you visit different countries on holiday, one of the interesting things to do is to try all the different kinds of food that you wouldn't get at home. Sometimes these might be different fruits and vegetables you've not seen before, or it might be different ways of eating the food, like using chopsticks, or different ways of cooking the food. Can you identify any of the different foods here and tell me which country they came from originally?

There are quite a lot of Indian restaurants in this country and you can buy Indian ready meals in the supermarkets, some of you might like eating a lot of Indian food at home already. Can anyone tell me the name of some of the special Indian foods? - curry, naan bread, chappatis etc.

Indian people often like their main courses hot and spicy and their puddings, sweets and drinks really sweet, so sometimes English people find it a bit difficult to eat Indian food because they are not used to it. Indian visitors to England can have a lot of problems with English food too, because they think it is really boring and tasteless when compared with their own hot curries! You might have some difficulties actually eating food properly in India too, because traditionally you are given a big banana leaf to use as a plate and you eat everything just using the fingers of your right hand. I expect your school dinner ladies might like this idea though, because it means there is less washing-up to do at the end of the meal; all you have to do is fold the banana leaf in half and throw it away, and then wash your hands!

Food is important for every living thing, so it is not surprising that you can find quite a lot about different kinds of food in the Bible. In fact the most famous Christian prayer of all includes a prayer for enough food for the day. This is the Lord's Prayer which you can find in Matthew chapter 6 verses 9-13. Whether or not your school uses the Lord's Prayer regularly, take this opportunity to explain "give us this day our daily bread" - a request to God for enough basic food for this day i.e. need not greed!

If Jesus had been an Indian instead of a Jew the Lord's Prayer might have been a bit different, because in India the main staple food of even the poorest people is rice not bread. Probably the prayer would have said "Give us this day our daily rice." Everywhere you go in India you can see paddy fields full of growing rice. Sometimes as you drive along the country roads you will suddenly come across low piles of rice stalks spread out like a carpet over the road. You are not supposed to swerve and miss the piles because the farmers want you to drive over the top of them. When you do this the weight of the car, or the bike, or the bullock cart ,helps to thresh the rice so that all the rice grains fall out and the workers can gather them up more easily later.

In Southern India there is a special harvest festival each January, just to say thank you to God(s) for the rice harvest. It is called Pongol, look for the bubbling Pongol pot on the powerpoint and the cow being fed some curry and rice (although she didn't like it very much!).

It is worth remembering how fortunate we are in England. We can get whatever kind of food we like brought into our country from all over the world. Just the small pile of food that we have here covers at least ******** different countries. Often the people who grow or harvest the food for us do not actually know what it tastes like, because they are too poor to afford the finished products for themselves, they have to send it all to us. (For example there are slave labourers on the west coast of Africa who work for many years harvesting cocoa beans, but will never taste a luxury like chocolate. Or workers in the West Indies who never get to eat bananas, although they may become seriously ill from the chemicals used to grow them and with which they have to work.) We should remember when we pray the Lord's Prayer and say "give us this day our daily bread", we really expect to get a lot more food than just bread today, but when poorer people throughout the world, like some of the poor Christians of India, pray that prayer they really mean it.

Responding

Pray for the poor of the world who have trouble getting their daily bread or daily rice. Consider together whether there is anything you can do to support them (e.g. Fair Trade goods)

Sending

Leader: Go in peace to discover God's world and your place in it.

All: We go in Jesus' name

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