sustainable food

People need three things to survive: water, food, and shelter. None is more important than the other, but what is appalling is the extent to which food has become controlled by corporations and has as a result become disconnected from the people who consume it.

As consumers we need to demand good food. Not just anything to stuff our faces with, but real food. Not the glues, dyes, chemical additives, preservatives, sugars, that are added to processed foods, but real substance. Fresh foods, not food that has been sitting in refrigerators for 6 months. Not food that has been processed many times over until there is barely a trace of natural substance left.

What we need is to go back to a time when we had a fundamental connection between food production and consumption. It wasn’t so long ago that we understood what we were eating - as Eric Schlosser said, it was just 60 years ago following WWII that things in the food industry began taking a turn for the worse. The generation born before the 1940s maintains a strong connection with their food. Shopping at local markets, they know what it is to eat fresh cheeses, seafoods, legumes, and the important connection with the farmer or butcher who prepares their food. This generation still enjoys eating and preparing foods as a social and enjoyable event. Today there are many people advocating a return to slow food.

The difficulties for anyone, even the wealthy, to purchase fresh produce, meats or seafood is an enormous problem. Products are no longer locally grown and are instead shipped from halfway around the world, requiring complex refrigeration and chemical treatments, and new varieties of vegetables optimized for ripening time rather than taste. What must happen is for local farmers to reconnect with city consumers through farmers markets and local stores. Just Food is tackling this issue through its Community Supported Agriculture initiative in New York City.

There are real consequences to eating this unhealthy processed food that are beginning to show in horrendous ways. Obesity levels in the USA are rising at alarming rates: many states that had reported populations with only 10% overweight are now reporting 25-30% of their population overweight. Type-2 Diabetes, once assumed to only occur in adults and called adult-onset diabetes, has been reported among U.S. children and adolescents with increasing frequency. Children born in America after the year 2000 are expected to have a shorter life-span than their parents because so many will be afflicted by medical conditions.

These unsettling facts should be enough to allow us to realize that a fundamental change needs to happen in the way we treat our food. We need to go back to basics with what we eat. All I am asking for is simple, fresh food: Nothing added. Is that too difficult?

Further Reading:

Ontario’s Diabetes Epidemic: The Toronto Star

Save the Architecture Cafe: Urban-ism

Toronto to introduce ethnically diverse street food: The Toronto Star