The Day I realized our Food System was Broken ....

Last week I posted a thread on our social media pages that got a lot of interest and I thought I'd go into a bit more detail on this topic - because it's a big one. 

You can check out the post here

Essentially I titled the post 'The day I realized our food system was broken was the day I realized that ...' and then mentioned some mind boggling information with no context - here is that context 👇🏻

1- Food for the grocery store is produced for quantity and not quality

I think this one is pretty self explanatory but let's get into it anyways.  When grocery/supermarkets became more and more popular, growing our own food and providing for ourselves became less and less popular. The increase in population also happened around the same time, causing a huge demand for food, which in turn eventually led to our food system becoming industrialized (okay, I'm leaving out a bunch of milestones here but you get the idea) - to make food in higher quantities and to ensure more profit, the quality of our food has never been a priority. 

Take for example carrots - my kids (who are 6 and 3) will go to our farm store, open the fridge and easily eat a whole bunch of carrots while they're in season. They will NOT touch them in the dead of winter when they come from grocery stores. They just don't taste same. 

There are so many layers to this topic but let's keep going

2- The giant food companies were bought out by cigarette companies when cigarettes became taboo. Their primary goal? To make food addicting.

I wish that I was misinformed about this one. I vividly remember when I learnt this and my brain couldn't compute. Primarily in the 1980s, cigarette companies bought large food corporations like Kraft and General Foods with one of their main goals to make food more addicting by creating hyper-palatable foods to increase their demand and consumption.

While the cigarette companies all got out of the food business in the early 2000s, many of their marketing tactics and business strategies remain within the industry today.

I highly recommend watching the documentary 'The C word' on Youtube that goes into detail about this and is narrated by Morgan Freeman. Click here for a link to the exact part where they go over this topic. Click here to watch the 1.5 hour documentary.

3- Most produce you get at grocery stores has been picked before it’s ripe, packaged in some kind of plastic/styrofoam/cardboard box and then travels thousands of kms to make it to you. 

I'm sure you've seen green bananas at the grocery store - or even bought green bananas with hopes of them ripening but then they never did (I know we have!). They were picked before they were ready, packaged, put on into some kind of transport (plane/truck/boat etc.) and then made their way to you, ripening while traveling and occasionally not ripening at all.

Think about it - if the strawberries that you get in the dead of winter were actually picked when they were red, they wouldn't really be good by the time they get to you. 

4- The average farmer goes 4% more in debt every year and
5- Corn prices are the same as they were in the 60s and yet a new combine is worth over 1 million dollars. In 1960 a new combine was $35,000.

Let's lump these two together. I will admit that my numbers may be a bit off and that they originate from the states but the gist is the same. 

Farmers come in as one of the top professions in terms of suicide rates 

There is estimated to be a record high of family farms going bankrupt in the states in the next quarter. Farmers are not the ones making money. It's become difficult to make farming a liveable and sustainable option to support one generation, let along a couple. It's a life of lifelong debt with very little return (if any) and yet the expectation is for farmers to just keep trucking along. 

6- Farmers no longer feed cities, the large corporations that buy the corn and soy beans to make our processed food do.

I remember when this thought passed my mind a few years ago.

And it's a tough one.

One of the most common sayings is 'if you've eaten today, thank a farmer' or 'farmers feed cities' and unfortunately, unless we're buying everything directly from the farmer, this is just not true anymore. 

The corn and soy that are in our crackers, cookies, snacks, deserts etc. (the majority of our processed foods and what farmers will get paid to grow from the government) are simply an ingredient in a recipe to make said food.

We don't buy strawberries from Rijke's Farm and zucchinis from Rutabaga Ranch, make strawberry zucchini muffins and then say that farmers fed us.  Without farmers there wouldn't be a food system - yes agreed, but we aren't the sole reason society is able to eat anymore.

7- A lot of gluten intolerance comes from intolerance to the Glyphosate (round-up) that’s sprayed onto the wheat, not the wheat itself.

If you are sensitive to gluten (not talking about celiac's here) and haven't tried heritage grain instead of regular wheat yet, it may be worth a try.

Glyphosate (or Round-up) is commonly used here in North America on our crops to get rid of weeds, it is not used nearly as often in Europe and there aren't as many gluten sensitivities there compared to here. 

I know that this sounds completely anecdotal and that I'm not doing this point justice but definitely worth the trip down this rabbit hole if you're curious. 

8- The push to eat more plant based food from large corporations has nothing to do with actual health and healing of the planet and has everything to do with unethical marketing and increasing profit margins.

Why do I think this? Because there is no such thing as a deathless diet, as a strictly plant based diet.  Labeling our foods like this does more harm then good and puts us against each other instead of keeping the food corporations accountable and ethical. 

The production of plant based foods can and actively does harm ecosystems and kills animals.  Just because it's 'plant based' does not mean that the food has been made with ethical environmental practices. 

9- At the turn of the 1900s, 80-90% of the population were farmers, that number today is 1-2%.

This means that not only have big farms gotten bigger, food has become industrialized causing the disconnection to increase. 

It took 60 years of 'good' marketing for us to distrust what we've known for thousands of years. 

That's only 2 generations and we now forget what it means to connect with the land and come back to what we once knew. 

Our food has become too convenient, It doesn’t come from the grocery store.

We’ve lost the connection and gratitude for our food because we have no idea how it got on our plate.

Want to change the system and make a difference?

The best way to invoke change is by using our dollars to support farmers and producers that are making ethical choices.

It’s not what is on your plate that matters but how it got there.