Food Bank by Galilee

It might have been like a Sunday morning listening to the teacher, when the stomach starts to rumble and there's more thought about roast lamb and roast potatoes than the sermon. They were hungry - all 5000 of them. 'Send them away to buy food,' was his suggestion.

These days there's plenty of food around Galilee - fish a specialty, olive groves, oranges, bananas, mangoes, all greening the countryside and when you stop it's $3 a glass of freshly pressed pomegranate juice, though we choose an Americano.

The church over the mosaic of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes has been destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries, most recently by Israeli settlers who don't want Christian holy sites on their holy land. But their damage is hardly noticeable now.

He told them to go to all parts of the world, and they did, but now the world has come back with pilgrims from here there and everywhere. Crowds of them. A group with a radio-transmitting guide sing In an unintelligible language before the altar with the loaves and the fishes. I simply say: 'bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.'

But hardly a stone's throw we're on the lakeside where he named Peter, provided a breakfast and concluded by telling him to feed his lambs - food again! Time for yesterday's kebab leftovers under canvas in a roadside shop.