EEEtheWorld

A rant in grad school:

Why am I personally having such an identity crisis about food? When did it all begin? I am doing an exercise and not going to stop typing for 3 hours. My only break can be when Ryan calls me to tell me he has won presidents club. I really hope he wins- he has worked so hard and he deserves it.

So what should food really be about? We have so many terms and labels floating through the brains of consumers around the grocery store aisles and farmer’s markets today: Local, non-GMO, sugar free, gluten free, low fat, natural, whole, real ,slow, fast food. In this tornado of food terminology how does one decifer what it good, healthy and sustainable? How did it get this way? What should we do about it?

First off, I need to figure out what the hell I belive and that has been tough with this class. I was raised in an environment of health conscious eaters, who never once had to questions where our next meal was coming from. Partly because we had a big beautiful garden and also because we had the income to buy pretty much anything we wanted at the grocery store and pretty much anything we wanted to order at a restaurant. My parents are in the medical field so I’ve assumed they are in touch with what physiologically is healthy in my body. My mother made all our lunches before school everyday and she had dinner at 6 ocklock hot and fresh on the table ready for dad to get home. This was usually the best part of my day, eating, uniting, socializing, the food brining us together, if only for 20 minutes. For breakfast growing up we ate cereal, predominantly cheerios and my mother was health conscious enough to never allow us to eat coooookie crisp or even fruit loops- honey nut cheerios were reserved for special ocaions if you get the picture. She bought a lot of fresh incgredients and did love to cook so I was spoiled in my palette by age ten. We also were more conscious of food because of my sister’s diagnosis of type one diabetes, or Juvenile Dieabetes. For an unkown reason her body’s immune system, attacks her pancreatic cells which produce to hormone insulin which blanaces your body’s glucose levels in accordance with what you eat and how active you are thorughot the day so you can have the proper expenditure of energy. Because we wanted the best for her, we counted carbs as we ate. We looked at nutrition labels. We were not allowed to drink soda, we had to eat fruit instead of fruit snacks, we ate ice cream but it was proportioned, we learned what was in a lot of foods. I learned not to take what I eat and how my body digests in and fuels me for granted.

I am angry at the state of health of our US society and do believe something needs to be done about it. I read an interesting article which shared our current state of health affairs and that more people in the US and developing nations are becoming fatter and fatter everyday. Where 500 million are obese, and 1 billion are hungry, its expected to equalize by 2020. So how do we cut the fat!? Food education and awareness? Children are perhaps where its at.

When you travel the world and realize the indigenous populations of people which have been healthy for generations, it is apparent what type of diet is healthiest for human consumptions. Whole, natural plant based diet with a bit of pasture raised proteins and dairy for some essential elements. I go along the lines of what Weston A Price foundation preaches. But I vaccinize myself and my children and will also create from a global health perspective, believe in the importance of pastureization.

In the US, people have access to food, but not necessarily everyone, there are food desserts. And there is choice galore.. frozen dinners, highly processed, checmicalized food. Sometimes I worry about Ryan, because he eats so few vegetables, and his father and uncle passed away from prostate cancer. His attitude is so laissez-faire about it.. since virtually all men develop prostate cancer by the time they die, im just gonna live my life. But he needs to eat more vegetables because whole, plant based diets can be so instudmental to our health that they can even prevent disease. Thomas Edison even quoted, the doctors of the future will not treat us with medicine but cure us an even prevent disease through food.

What are my major goals in life?

~For the world’s population to have just, affordable access to sustainable food choices and education surrounding their ultimate health and happiness in nourishing their bodies.

~I’d like to zero in on compariative studies between Colorado and Nepal. Kentucky and Thailand. Mali/Africa and farming practices, techniques, and culture also interest me.

FIX YOUR MIND, FIX YOUR FAT

Be a better traveler than your food

Michael polan chapter thirteen the market one the average meal travels over 1500 miles and is usual better traveled than its eater

of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.

A chicken— or steak, or ham, or carton of eggs— can find its way from Polyface Farm to an eater’s plate by five possible routes: direct sales at the farm store, farmer’s markets, metropolitan buying clubs, a handful of small shops in Staunton, and Joel’s brother Art’s panel truck, which makes deliveries to area restaurants every Thursday. Each of these outlets seems quite modest in itself, yet taken together they comprise the arteries of a burgeoning local food economy that Joel believes is indispensable to the survival of his kind of agriculture (and community), not to mention to the reform of the entire global food system.

markets in the Washington, D.C., area. On the drive, Joel and I talk about the growing local- food movement, the challenges it faces, and the whole sticky issue of price. I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise. First off, those weren’t any elitists you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food- borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water— of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food."

All those things— all those pastoral values— globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.

Joel Salatin and his customers want to be somewhere that that juggernaut can’t go, and it may be that by elevating local above organic, they have found exactly that place. By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture— new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. It’s a lot more complicated.

“We don’t have to beat them," Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse— we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.