A Profound Article Series Taking a Look at our Food System..

Whether we are talking about preconception and prenatal nutrition, specific diseases, intolerance, or overall health, the way we eat is having a profound impact on us and our environment. The industrialization of food has made food very cheap, and the poor can eat ‘better’ than they once did, but at what cost? Now, just about everyone can eat meat at three meals a day. Fast food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, most brutally processed and medicated, but it’s within reach nonetheless. I will get into the carbon footprint at another time, but the bottom line is that this is affecting us on every which level. On a personal level we are being affected by all the chemicals we are putting into our bodies, and on a much larger level the environment is taking a beating with the amount of beef being produced.

What Can We Do?

COOK more! Home cooking is essential to solving these environmental issues, not to mention for our health. As long as we allow large corporations to cook for us, we have an industrialized agriculture that is much too big and too abusive for the resources available. When fast food chains are doing the cooking they will buy from the biggest producers possible. There used to be many more small farms, and now we are left with a few much larger ones that run the roost. By shopping at one producer, corporations like McDonalds or KFC can have the lowest costs all around, including the “transaction costs” – the fewest contracts and negotiations. We need more people to get back to cooking in order to prevent the movement for a sustainable food system from hitting a wall. The farmers’ market movement, the push toward individual growers, CSA boxes, small farms etc. .is all limited by people’s willingness to cook. If cooking continues to decline, there no hope of building an alternative to this mass level agriculture system we have in place today.

REAL FOODIE xo

Look out for the next article in the series!