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Who brings food to their table?When you sit down to eat a meal, how often do you think about all the hands that were involved in bringing that meal to your table? After all, the food had to come from somewhere – it didn’t just appear magically. This isn’t the “Star Trek” future where we walk up to a food replicator and tell it what we want, and it is composed before our eyes, like a biogenetic symphony of nutrients. Our foods begin in the sea and on the land. One of my favorite museum exhibits as a child was the one on farming at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, showing the development of planting and harvesting machinery. Although the processes have become more automated through the years, we still rely on people as an important part of the process. Especially here in Florida, where agriculture is a year-round business, and where it is so critical to the state’s economy, farmworkers are essential to our welfare. They work in citrus groves and tomato fields, and with the low-lying strawberry plants and corn stalks that grow tall. The Florida Catholic newspaper has for years sponsored a Lenten drive to collect long-sleeve shirts for farmworkers to protect them from sun, pesticides and other hazards in the fields. The campaign has grown from about 1,000 shirts in the first year to more than 20,000 shirts collected earlier this year. Now those who minister to and with the farmworkers have asked us to partner with drop-off sites around the state for a special grassroots Food for Our Families drive to help the farmworkers. Their needs are simple and basic: Rice, beans, pasta, cereal, canned vegetables and fruit, baby formula and cereal, soup and protein, such as peanut butter and canned meats, too. Ironic, isn’t it, that the folks who are so intimately connected at the beginning of food production are often in need when it comes to the end – their own kitchen? For those who help bring the food to our table, who brings the food to theirs? The food drive will run through Farmworker Sunday, Nov. 23. If you cannot participate in this drive because the locations are not convenient, please participate in a local parish, St. Vincent de Paul or Catholic Charities food drive; their pantries are almost bare these days, as well. A CAPITAL GOODBYEOur newspaper family said goodbye last week to a woman who made great contributions to the Florida Catholic. Jacquelyn Horkan was the newspaper’s statehouse and public policy correspondent since 2004. When I came to the paper five years ago, I realized that while we covered most of the state, we didn’t have anyone on the capitol beat on a regular basis. It was too hard for our Pensacola-based bureau editor to make the three-hour dash to Tallahassee every time significant legislation came up for discussion. We wanted someone in the capital city. We were fortunate to find Jacque. You might say that politics was in her blood. Her dad, Thomas Horkan Jr., was the first executive director of the Florida Catholic Conference, and had retired a while before we retained Jacque. As a freelance journalist, she became our eyes and ears at the conference and the capitol, monitoring legislative sessions and other public policy issues. She was fair, had a great sense of what made a good story, and she knew the territory. Because of distance, most of our staff never met Jacque in person, but worked with her by phone and e-mail. I got to see her several times, and was always impressed by her bright smile and cheerful demeanor. Jacque battled cancer over the last couple of years – working on stories, even blogging for the first time, as she underwent treatment. She died last week at the age of 49. We’ll miss her reporting – and her smile.
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