Why I'm obsessed with the food system – My one time rant
by sarah-linda
This will be a one-time thing. I don’t want to be ranting, complaining, telling you what to do. I’d rather inspire, bring joy and beauty. But this is so important and it’s what got me started, so I just have to get it out there, just once.
Our current food system is the number one cause of climate change. I will tell you why, but let me give you a little bit of context first.
Photography by Daantje Bons
Seasonal Paradise
I grew up in the French Pyrenees, in the middle of nowhere, in a ruined farm that my parents rebuilt into a little paradise. Surrounded by forests and mountains, half an hour by car from the first small town, we had a big vegetable garden. We lived with the seasons, eating mostly from our garden.
Every season has its beauty and treasures and it was only normal to eat what nature had to offer. I still remember the feast around the first peas of the year, the pride we felt when eating the first pumpkin from the garden, or the joy of gathering the first walnuts (before the squirrels could get to it).
When you’ve been waiting half a year to taste the first ripe tomato or the first grown carrot, it’s heaven when you finally do.
Not only because of the wait but mainly because that produce comes at the right moment. It had grown in its own time, in the right climate and has been harvested from the garden when it was ripe. That is pure pleasure – and nutrition.
Maybe thanks to this education, I already cared about the planet and nature when I was a child. At 10 years old, I sent a letter with a drawing to the president of France, then Jacques Chirac, telling him I was very worried and something urgently had to be done to stop pollution. In my eyes, he was the most powerful person in the country, and surely he was the one who could take action and change something.
To my surprise, I actually received a letter back from the Champs Elysées. They told me the environment was very important to them and they appreciated my concerns.
Really? I didn’t see anything happening, or maybe I didn’t believe them, so I donated my little 10 year old pocket money to Greenpeace, hoping they would save the world and planning to join them as soon as I could.
Of course when I was a teenager, I kind of forgot about all this and just wanted to hang out with my friends in the city, far away from boring countryside life.
Food System at the root
While studying in The Netherlands, I slowly started to realise how lucky I was growing up. How lucky I was to have been fed nutritious, seasonal, organic and delicious foods, to have been taught about the seasons and their gifts, about the plants and their properties.
Because the regular supermarket doesn’t exactly offer seasonal, nutritious produce. And if you don’t know what those are, it is hard to realize it..
But it was about more than flavour.
I had always been a “foodie”, a lover of good (preferably healthy and organic) food, and interested in where my food came from, but after reading books from Michael Pollan and watching documentaries like Food, Inc., I started realising it was more than a personal feeling. Food is the essential connection between the health of humans and that of the planet, and we have lost that connection.
I became - what you could call - obsessed. I’ve read all the books and seen all the documentaries about health and the food system; it’s something I can talk about all the time and get very passionate about.
The vicious circle
In this previous article, I wrote about why changing the food system means saving the world. There’s a big vicious circle going on, and we need to break it.
The food system is at the base of many of our major current problems: climate change, desertification, environmental pollution, chronic disease, corruption, inequality, and the list can go on…
One of the biggest problems being that we are killing the soil very rapidly with our “conventional” agriculture, which leads to a decrease in harvests and a planet where nothing grows. The biggest solution? Changing what we eat, voting with our forks. Choosing organic, regenerative, unprocessed foods.
I do have the feeling this knowledge is spreading, but every time I get out of my bubble and see how most of the western world farms, eats and wastes food while getting all the chronic diseases as a result, I’m in disbelief.
Just to give you an example, a few years ago I was traveling with my boyfriend in the US, somewhere between California and Nevada. Somewhere flat and agricultural with many feed lots, factory farms filled with cows. A dark emotional cloud started hanging over me. Anger and sadness. At some point we got hungry and there was nothing to get food along the way other than cheap burger chains. My boyfriend was driving, he was very hungry and so he stopped at one of those places to get something to eat. Of course I didn’t get anything - I was happier with my apple in the car - and he got some kind of burger. I could not believe it. We just passed these horrible factory farms where cows are fed with GMO corn and antibiotics to be slaughtered in the most inhumane way, to end up in exactly one of those burgers.. and he was ordering and eating without even thinking about it. I went back to the car and started crying. Like really, crying. I couldn’t exactly explain why (because he’s eating a burger..? Isn’t that a little weird or oversensitive?). But it just felt so wrong. It felt like we were now also literally trapped in this terrible food system and couldn’t do anything about it – to be fair to him, it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s not as passionate about it as me, and will happily eat something not hyper healthy if there’s no choice. The problem being, that very often there is no choice.
Common sense
But I’m also very optimistic: there are solutions, and they’re easy to implement as well. We don’t need any new complicated expensive technology to start making it better. What we need is more education, more regenerative farming, and more accessible healthy food.
We need more common sense!
Because that’s all it really is. To quote Michael Pollan “Eat food. Not too much, mostly plants”. With “food” being defined as things your grandmother would recognise as edible. All the unpronounceable ingredients on the label of those cookies, sodas and read-to-eat meals? Not food.
Isn’t it just common sense to eat what the seasons give us, to avoid highly processed unrecognisable ingredients, to maintain a healthy soil so the Earth can keep feeding us?
Here is something I don’t understand. I’m truly flabbergasted.
The Earth is our home, right? All humans live here, have children here and need to eat here to survive.
Whether you’re a hippie living off the grid in the middle of nowhere, a CEO of a large corporation putting profit over sustainability, or any person trying to make a living, we all need to eat and all our children and children’s children will have to eat as well. On Earth I mean (because honestly living on Mars doesn’t feel like the best solution to me right now).
Yet we’re living as if this wasn’t the case, not caring about what we eat, not interested in the results of our unsustainable practices, killing healthy soil like we have 3 or 4 fresh backup planets waiting for us… so what do we expect?
Why on earth, are people who try to save the planet from human destruction, seen as hippies, lefties, dreamers, unconventional? Do the righties and the unsustainable growth-focused CEO’s think this will not affect them?
Where do you think endless growth will lead? It doesn’t sound like a great plan to outgrow the planet, does it?
This concerns all of us. And especially if you have children, I do not understand how you can ignore this.
It is already a big concern during our lifetime. There is research and predictions saying our last harvest might be in 60 years (more like 58 years by now), if we keep going like this. I’m planning to still be alive in 60 years, and it would be nice to have something to eat (not to mention a liveable climate). And what about our children?
How can we still be thinking so short term – from governments to corporations to citizens, when the potentially disastrous consequences are already happening in front of us?
Roman Krznaric wrote a book about this, which I haven’t yet read but his TED talk on his homepage explains it very well. We need to think long term as if future generations were already in the room with us.
Or are we all saying ”you know what, thank you very much. I had a great time on Earth, I don’t really care what happens at the end of my life or after I’m gone – and so I’m using up all the resources like there’s no tomorrow” ?
Fortunately, younger generations are starting to stand up and fight for their right to a healthy, liveable planet. And we can all start to do something to make a change: just choose better food. Put a tiny little bit of extra effort and curiosity in your food decisions, and you’ll make a change.
I am no telling you to be perfect. No one is perfect. I’m certainly not perfect, I’m not Greta (and even she might not be perfect). But all our tiny little improvements will add up, be noticed and make a real difference. And that’s what counts.
That was my rant, thank you for reading. Please, please spread the message and make smarter food choices where you can. You taste buds and health will thank you too.
Become an author too
Would you like to contribute to our journal? Are you an expert on a topic related to anything connecting pleasure with sustainablity and good living? Let us know at info@sarah-linda.com. We look forward to hearing from you!