Miracle of the loaves and picnic baskets: uncounted women make world food go round

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 6, 1996 by Rosemary Radford Ruether

One recent Sunday I went to Mass, as I usually do when I am in town, at the Sheil Center, the Northwestern University Catholic parish. The gospel text was the Matthew 14:13-21 story of the feeding of the 5,000. The priest read the text, making a wry face at the concluding phrase, "And those who ate were about 5,000 men, not counting the women and children."

The priest, a Dutch Jesuit theologian who frequently celebrates Mass at this community, apparently recognized the way this text reflected a society in which only men were counted, not women and children, but chose to make no comment on this phrase.

In his sermon, the priest told us that he had just spent the past six months teaching in Rome. There was one thing that Italians and Americans have in common, he said -- they both like to eat. He went on to reflect on good eating, not just consuming food physically, but a sharing of food and company that brings deep satisfaction, which can and should go on for many hours. No quick snack, this kind of good eating, but a time where it is not outlandish to sit down for lunch at noon and get up at 9 in the evening.

He connected these memories of good eating to memories of famine he had experienced, reading a poem he had written about the famine that descended on his country at the end of the Second World War. He recalled a time when his father, "thin as a rail," had gone off into the countryside to search for food for the family and finally returned with many pounds of meat, peas and potatoes. His mother took the food, and before anyone could say anything, put aside part of it for hungry neighbors. "If you don't share with others, you die," she said.

On the way out of church, we greeted a couple, also regulars of this university parish. The husband, a former editor of a Catholic magazine, remarked jokingly about the phrase, "not counting the women and children."

I replied that the reason there was so much food was that all the women, as women are wont to do, brought picnic baskets, food enough for themselves, their children and one or two neighbors. So of course there was more than enough for all. But since the women and children were not counted, the gospel writer did not know where the food came from and presumed it was a miracle performed by Jesus.

I have been thinking since then about this miracle that women are always performing, feeding those who would otherwise starve because they are left out of the official ways of counting. The women get no credit because their work in providing this food is also not counted. The gross national product, by which economists measure the output of a nation's productive work, counts only the products of paid labor.

This means that the vast amount of work that women do in the "informal" and unpaid sectors of the economy goes uncounted in the GNP. This work includes not only all the domestic work that women do in cooking, housekeeping and caring for the families within their homes, but a vast sector of work worldwide in which women garden, gather food and sell goods in the marketplace to garner the wherewithal to feed their children and other dependent family members, including their husbands.

The United Nations, in a famous report on the status of women some years ago, estimated that women worldwide do two-thirds of the work, received only one-tenth of the wages and own only 1 percent of the property. Perhaps even this is an underestimation of the share of work that women do who often must combine domestic labor with underpaid labor in the "paid" economy. Feminist economists call this the "double work day." This also means that women generally work many more hours than men. They get up earlier to do domestic work, then put in eight or 10 hours of work outside the home, and return home to put in more working hours.

The world economy has increasingly split into two sectors -- a top 20 percent that enjoys 80 or more percent of the world's resources and an 80 percent that scrapes along on the remaining 20 percent. A lower fifth of that 80 percent is on the brink of starvation. It is women who hold back the full impact of this disastrous maldistribution.

It is women in Nicaragua, Brazil and so many other countries who add to the load of their double work day a third sector of work in which they keep the poorest women and children among their neighbors from outright starvation.

In Nicaragua, popular kitchens run by women for the poorest women and children are called ollas de soya, or "pots of soya." Some countries of the European Economic Community (in contrast to the United States that is only interested in loans to the wealthy) contribute soya flour to these kitchens of the poor. The women then manage to get together vegetables and fruits from their own gardens to mix with the soya flour to make a variety of nourishing drinks and main dishes to feed the poorest women and children. They can only feed those who are on the brink of starvation, the poorest women who are pregnant or lactating and the children who are dangerously underweight. Once the children are back to more normal weight (undernourished but not starving) and the women are not pregnant or lactating anymore, they are not fed in these kitchens, in order for the limited supply to be reserved for those most in need.