Fresh Food
Over the last week I have had an opportunity to watch two movies and a TEDprize presentation about America’s un-sustainable food industry: “Fresh“, “Food, Inc” and Jamie Oliver’s TED prize acceptance video. I wasn’t seeking out information on food … but they all presented themselves in the last week so I felt it was time to talk about it.
I found both of these movies provide a great insight into how our food is created and brought to market. Yes, they are both a little depressing with pictures of chickens, pigs, and cattle that are never given more than a few inches of space in which to move around during their entire life … but the uplifting part is there is something we can do about this. Most of us can choose which foods to buy at the grocery store.
The things that struck me most about these films:
- I feel like I understand how we got here — 50 years ago the world was trying to solve problems of poverty, how to feed a lot of people inexpensively, how to apply our ‘industrial’ knowledge to food production so we could continue to expand our wealth, our population, and many people may have believed that overall health would improve.
- I also feel like I understand why applying our industrial knowledge to this problem resulted human and animal diseases, resistance to drugs, poor soil quality, increased crop pests, unhealthy food, unhealthy people, and an unrealistic, unsustainable (subsidized) cost structure.
- Finally, I feel like we CAN make a difference by choosing to buy products from local farmers with sustainable farming methods — as long as my local grocer and farmers markets are willing to answer a few questions about where their food comes from.
The TED talk was especially inspiring because it brings home what cheap food is doing to our health and to our kids. I enjoy Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows and I was excited to see him receive the TED award and explain some of things he has been doing to educate individuals, schools, kids, and entire towns about food problems and how we have to demand better for our own children and grandchildren. His talk also tries to address the very real problem that there are many people who cannot afford to pay more for better quality food. We need to work with our schools and government programs that subsidize foods to pick the right foods to subsidize.
I am optimistic that cleaning up our food chain can be achieved through grass roots efforts because the ‘power of the purse’ really does make a difference in America. Even if our politics is so totally broken that the government can’t govern, we can still choose what we buy to eat. We can choose to support a large meat packing company where antibiotics, steroids and diseases are abundant — or the farmer a few miles away whose animals graze freely and he rotates crops and animals to enrich the soil.
Sometimes the hardest part is getting the information needed to make smart choices. The food store I go to labels some things as organic or local, but it doesn’t label everything and I don’t have time to read every label…plus if I do read the label, I don’t know if ascorbic acid is ‘natural’ or not; and, of course, there are some foods I just like to eat (and I know they are unhealthy).
So I’m not going to change over night… but I’m willing to ask people who work at the store some questions about the source of foods; and I’m choosing to buy things that I feel good about eating. I’m still not really excited about cooking, though… so if someone can help out with a cook book for people who don’t really like to cook, but want to eat healthy… that’s the one I’m looking for.
