Food for thought
People may not know it, but the biggest improvement for Earth is within reach. To change the world for the better means we must change our relationship to our planet. Unselfish sustainability is not only possible, but it is the best outcome to cope with our new reality of pandemic, climate, and biodiversity crisis.
No longer able to support billions who are out to exploit every opportunity, Earth has been very clear that we have four primary areas that are unsustainable: Inequality, unfair capitalism, universal healthcare, and what you eat for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner.
In these four areas, you are not powerless, even if it may feel that way. But, surely, it is the last one: what we eat, over which we have the most power.
Food insecurity
In glaring light, COVID-19 has exposed all of the excess of the first three areas. Let’s look at food in relation to each of the first three unsustainable factors. If people are unequal, they suffer from unhealthy food, food deserts, non-nutritious food, heart disease and obesity, and/or possible food shortages. Whether inequality is due to gender imbalance, or racism, it prevents people from getting healthy food systems that work worldwide.
Capitalism, too, has had obvious flaws exposed. With non-balanced, or rapacious capitalism, inequality persists. Food is obtained by those who can afford it, then hoarded. It is also farmed, harvested, packaged, and distributed by people with less who are in service, to those with more. This is our present system, and no one can argue that it protects public safety. Therefore, it makes a huge impact on the third societal problem, inadequate healthcare systems that cannot meet the needs of people in lockdown, or afterward, efficiently.
Despite denial of it, the COVID-19 disaster is directly linked to people eating wildlife, such as bats and pangolins. Other epidemics, such as swine flu, bird flu, and more — are linked to domesticated animals. If we continue to eat them as we do, we cannot sustain a comfortable life for many billions.
Add to the healthcare needs that food insecurity, especially in impoverished world pockets, presents. It creates crowding, other disease vectors, civil unrest, and predictable refugee movements. Where and when people combine commerce with food, there is time and place for disease to emerge. Obviously, we can’t ignore food as a human need, so then, we must address shortcomings in these areas.
The other great issue with unfair capitalism is that it consistently rewards, at public costs, things like cattle ranching, logging, soil destruction, and mining. Each of these degrades food security in the long run. Arable land is finite, and, therefore infinite growth in dollars is impossible. Poverty itself does not call for a redistribution of wealth, but for more equal opportunity. This can only arise with public demand for diversity-based solutions.
The UN goals for sustainability
Unknown to most people, the United Nations, UN, sets Sustainable Development Goals, (SDG). If these goals were realized, it would be not just a healthier world, but an abundant one that provides generously.
These are goals which economists and other scientists research deeply in order to discover what people must change in order for industry, healthcare and education, local and global economies, to fight climate change challenges and inequality.
COVID 19 may not have made SDG a household word, but the effect of the pandemic has been to open the eyes of almost everyone to the very real threat of unsustainable living.
Food is one universal marker that every one who eats can relate to, and notice.
Food under threat
Our food networks, are now clearly seen as vulnerable, even to privileged people. The news reports how our wasteful system has endangered slaughterhouse workers, put unhealthy dietary habits on full view, and revealed how shortages and hoarding affects availability. Then, there is the very real, and terrifying fact that most of our pandemics come directly from our indifferent relationships to animals.
A tiny virus in the food supply, absolutely assured to resurface again, changes our relationship to food, and one another, forever. We must choose how.
What food relationships can you affect, personally? For one thing, buying locally, and staying informed about your food will help. Knowing the source of your food, how deeply it impacts exploitative systems, whether it is without excessive additives and contaminants is something we can put under our own control. Eating less CO2 generating, food decreases your carbon footprint as well as ensuring your food supply is close at hand.
If we choose to keep addicted to junk food, and prepackaged food, we are not developing healthy habits for the next pandemic by way of approaching it with healthier bodies. Obesity, but also, hunger are real threats. Diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, are problematic, but so are respiratory diseases exacerbated by our over-use of CO2.
Food culture and habits
Remaining dependent upon unsustainable networks of powerless workers, and degraded lands and exploited animals, keeps each of us insecure. Taking power to tweak your food intake, even just a tiny bit, affects the entire planet.
Some ways to eat a healthier diet include eating less meat. Veganism may not be your thing, but just eating a bit less meat, supports a healthier populace. Rather than get into the destructive name-calling game that such food fights have fostered for decades, it’s time to admit we must insist on healthier food supply for personhood and planet.
There are a myriad of ways to approach the meat problem, not just one answer for all.
Growing your own vegetables, on-site, or in a community garden, is an easy way to eat more real food. This method also provides critical social interaction and promotes mental and emotional health. Sharing food, too, has the same effect.
To promote cultural inclusion, making efforts to connect to foodways of diverse peoples is also helpful. Many indigenous, and inter-sectional cultures have great wisdom we may put to use in everything from crop sustainability, to recipes, and festivals.
Food should be something to celebrate, think of soul food, Italian pastas, sustainable North England seafood, Tex mex, or apple festivals in the Pacific Northwest.
Instead, we now eat primarily monocultural bland foods. We need to reconnect to local, even as we stay aware of the threat to orangutans, (avoid palm oil) the biodiversity of the Amazon, (protest illegal logging, ranching) and support for immigrant and exploited food workers, (avoid xenophobia) are just a few examples of how your eating habits affect the world for better or worse.
New food in new environments
No one knows just yet how cafes, restaurants, food workers, distributors, will look in the future. We don’t know whether downtown streets will be closed off to traffic to create wider walkways for physical distancing. We don’t know if food workers will have work, or be dependent upon industry changing tactics.
The optimists out there who understand the critical inter-dependency of food networks are planning for huge upheavals. The revolution in how we eat, is at hand.
The pandemic has revealed inadequate food systems around the world. Innovation and technology are also being presented as part of the solution. High tech agriculture, if engineered in sustainable ways can produce higher yields, better nutrition, and more efficient circular-economy driven elimination of waste and pollution. In the months since lock-down, technology that produces plant-based meat alternatives has found growing popularity. People are looking not just for more secure food, but for more creative meals. Clean meat, lab meat, and more are not yet at a scale that makes them affordable, but images of animals being culled as a result of lay offs and loss, is driving interest in cruelty-free, REAL meat.
Imagine no lost limbs in meat packing industries, no exploitation of BIPOC and animals, and/or no contagion due to working in cramped quarters. It is likely that the origin of the meal on your plate will be very different.
Innovation and investment in all of these areas of our food network are no longer meat-pie in the sky aspirations, but very real goals every person who eats food should consider.
Food for the human spirit
What you eat for breakfast matters. A new collective, communal spirit for the public good has been unleashed right along with our greatest fears, and uncertain pathways. This provides food for the human spirit.
Unselfish people may continue to share. Selfish people may continue to hoard.
But people of every kind, with cultural pride, imagination, drive, determination, and collaboration, are going to change how, and what is on the menu.
Eat as a community, as one family on one planet, and you will be okay.
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Previously published on “Greener Together”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: Jen Theodore on Unsplash
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