Why our Food is Making Us Sick — and What We can Do about it
In writing about regenerative agriculture as a path to meaningful change, I realized I would need to focus on something that bridges the waters between self-transformation and ecological activism. That “something” is food. Whether we are talking about food as a means of personal sustenance, a natural resource, or a market commodity, how food is cultivated, altered, and commodified affects every facet of our lives. What we eat, and more so, what is available to us to eat, determines our level of health both as individuals and a society.
Without food, of course we would quickly perish. But without good nutrient rich diverse foods, we become listless copies of ourselves, incapable of original thought and purposeful action. When it comes to something as vital and intimate as what we put inside our bodies every day, why are we not taking more ownership over it?
Well, that’s what I’m here for, you may be thinking. I want to learn how. Teach me how.
Right on. But in over two decades of teaching, I’ve found that people are much more likely to follow through with actions when they understand not only how to do something, but why.
Here’s a few very compelling reasons for reclaiming our food sovereignty and our basic right for food that is fit to eat.
Same old thing
Chances are, if you’re reading about how to grow your own food in an organic holistic way, you’re probably already trying to eat well too. Great! But what I really want you to know is that for reasons completely beyond your everyday realm of choice, the food you eat is nutritionally poor, bland, and lacking in diversity compared to what you can grow yourself, even in a small space.
But...but I eat a salad every day. I put kale in it. I’m really trying!
I hear you, believe me I do. It’s not your fault. But you can do something about it.
First let’s examine what’s available in the typical salad bar and even the typical grocery store. In fact, let’s up the game and look at what’s available in a fancy place like Whole Foods.
Sure, all those mounds of colorful produce look divine. They seduce you into looking past even the astronomical prices. But take a hard look at all of it. How many different fruits and vegetables are really there for your salad?
Take lettuce, for example. There’s green leaf, red leaf, butterleaf perhaps. There’s kale, of course, and spinach. But is there sorrel, lamb’s quarters, and purslane? Baby maple leaves or bloody dock? Violets, nasturtium, dandelion, or plantain leaf? These aren’t exotic or expensive greens. They are likely growing in your yard or strip of grass running along your sidewalk. You might think of them as weeds. But they are nutrient-rich, delicious, and very easy to grow. You just don’t know they are edible and good for you because they haven’t been commodified into grocery store produce.
There’s also a real shortage of choice when it comes to how many varieties are available for each fruit and vegetable. Try this for an exercise: next time you walk the produce aisle of a well-stocked grocery store, open an online seed catalog on your smartphone.
Let’s look at beans. Ok, the store has typical green beans and skinny French ones. Now scroll the selection of seeds available: Blackcoat runner, Kentucky Wonder, Vermont Cranberry, Winter White, Golden Gaucho... to name only a few. Now let’s meander over to the squash. The store, as usual, has butternut, acorn, and if it’s autumn, some cute gourds. But where’s the Sugar Loaf, Hubbard, Sunshine, or Homestead Sweet Meat? Now let’s stroll on over to the carrots. What do we have here in the store? Orange carrots. Let’s look in the seed catalog. There’s white, purple, yellow carrots...whoa check out these Black Nebula carrots! And even in the “regular” orange carrots, the catalog lists several types. See how little you actually have to choose from?
No variety is exactly like another. Each has a unique mineral and vitamin profile, subtle variations in micronutrient content — and much of that depends on the soil in which it was grown. Our bodies need them all. Why are there only one or two (at best) varieties for you to choose from?
Don’t think for a minute that some higher power with your best interests at heart is selecting the “best” produce for you. With the exception of local seasonal items when they are stocked, the fruits and vegetables on the shelves were selected mainly for one trait: resistance to spoilage or bruising during the long hard road to the grocery store. Flavor and nutritional content simply aren’t a priority for the food industry.
Basically, you have been presented with the illusion of choice in a system where the decision-making power has been taken away from you.
A day’s harvest from the Sueño de Vida farm = freshness and diversity
The same goes for pretty much everything on the tables and shelves. Yes, it looks like an abundance. Yes, there are some different things available seasonally. But, by and large, compared to what could be available for us to eat if our choices weren’t made for us by the agro-industrial complex, a closer examination reveals that those beautiful mounds of produce are like still-life paintings. They stay pretty much the same week after week after week.
Here’s some numbers for you to chew on: While there is no list in existence of all the edible plants in the world, scientists estimate there are 40,000 to 80,000 species of edible foodstuffs, both wild and cultivated. Today, fewer than 200 cultivated plants contribute in a substantial manner to food production worldwide. Of these 200 food crops, only nine represent 66% of the total agricultural production.*
Of the “top 9,” engineered wheat, corn, and soy — not even intended for human consumption — make up the bulk of production.
No wonder we’re all getting sick.
The possibilities of what we could be and should be nourishing ourselves with are much more limited than we commonly think.
So Far Away
As if the appalling lack of diversity weren’t enough to make us take pause, take another look at the contents of your salad bar container or the produce in your shopping basket. Let’s ask a few key questions:
Were the plants grown in nutrient-rich or depleted soil?
How long ago did these plants touch the soil?
How many times have they been transported, washed with bleach solution, refrigerated, rehydrated, and handled in their long journey from soil to your basket?
More than two-thirds of soils worldwide are seriously depleted of minerals and important micronutrients, so it’s very likely the soil that produced most of your food is too. Unless you only eat produce you grow yourself, or order from local regenerative farmers, it’s a fair assumption that the fruits and vegetables you eat every day aren’t living up to their health-promoting potential. Maybe they aren’t “empty calories” but they aren’t nearly as nutritious as they could be.
To answer the second question, How long ago did these plants touch soil?, simply read the tiny labels affixed to your produce items:
Bananas from Ecuador
Pineapple from Costa Rica
Papaya from Belize
Strawberries from México
Avocados from California
Oranges from Florida
Grapes from Chile
Kiwi from New Zealand
etc.
Now roughly calculate how long it takes to travel by cargo ship, train, and truck from each of these places to where you live. Days? Weeks? Months?
If you’ve ever worked in food service, you have some clues about the rest. All you have to do is think about what any restaurant food locker or grocery store produce room smells like. If you don’t know, I can tell you from experience, It doesn’t smell like anything you want to eat. It certainly doesn’t smell fresh or good. Somehow, it smells both slightly spoiled and sterile, like the food in it.
Plants take in minerals from soil. So it follows that plants grown in mineral-depleted soil have a lower mineral content. But vitamins are stored in the plant’s watery tissues. Except for very thick-skinned produce, every day a fruit or vegetable spends in storage, water evaporates from it, and with it important water-soluble vitamins.
If the food you are putting in your body every day is old, tired, and travel-weary, how do you think it’s going to make you feel?
Imagine
Imagine a very different scenario. To make your daily salad, or veggie bowl, or green smoothie, instead of going to the grocery store to buy imported, non-seasonal, sterilized and plastic-wrapped produce, you simply step outside your kitchen, or walk upstairs to your apartment rooftop, or stroll over to your community garden. You snip a handful of tender spinach, borage, spicy purple basil, and hardy red Russian kale. Raspberries nestle in the groundcover and asparagus shoots poke out of the soil like tiny Loch Ness monsters. Think about how your body can transform this food into energy. Imagine the delight of eating food that never touched plastic.
Buying produce directly from farmers is a good way to get more diverse and healthful foods into your diet. By buying directly from the people who grow the food, when it’s in season, you actually empower them to keep providing more diversity and abundance.
Not exactly sure what grows in what season? Check out this no-frills guide to how to get more fresh and regionally grown foods in your diet.
That’s just the beginning…
Once you start nourishing yourself with more in-season and locally grown food, you may want to take the next step and grow some yourself. Even a very small patch of ground in the city can be transformed into a colorful and productive space.
The beauty of agroforestry isn't just for large pieces of land. A home garden can also be a food forest.
Intrigued but not sure where to start?
Sueño de Vida offers a fully online Food Forest at Home course that breaks the art of permaculture gardening down for you into the most practical and actionable steps. With engaging explanations of how to do everything from make a space to keeping weeds in check to naturally saving seed, our course takes you through the entire growing season journey from early spring to late fall. Also loaded with planting guides, easy-to-follow tables, and short demonstration videos, this learning experience is designed to show you how to nurture your own green space with ease and joy.
At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Kristen Krash is the co-founder and director of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature to create a better world for us all.
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