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Following Our Food Backwards (and Forwards)



In the day and age of microwave tikka masala, canned cream of tomato soup, frozen chicken nuggets, and individually plastic-wrapped beefsteak tomatoes, it is easy to see why the average consumer knows little to nothing about the origins of their food. Why would you? There’s really no need. As long as you are fed delicious-tasting food that is quick to make, easy to clean up, and looks pretty, satisfying your hunger is an obtainable goal that needs no outside context. You buy food products, you eat them, you move on with the rest of your life. Simple. Or is it?


The modernization of food production has divorced consumers from the liveliness of their food. By the time food reaches us, it is nearly dead—in energy, in necessary nutrients, in spirit. Most food products are so chock-full of chemicals and preservatives that there is really hardly any life to begin with. And you might wonder, so what? As long as it tastes good and fills you up, you don’t need to care where it came from.


And that is precisely why our food systems and our collective health is in the shape that they are in.


When we start to ask questions about the origins of our food, we find ourselves moving backward in a process that is ultimately cyclical, not linear. We find ourselves as humans situated in what author Wendell Berry calls “the Great Economy,” the realm in which we consume nature but ultimately cannot create or control anything, a circle of life that is much larger than our own lives. In this Great Economy, we find plants growing, animals eating plants, humans eating both, and the return of nutrients to the Earth through decomposition. There is no beginning; there is no end. But in the modern Western food system, the garbage can is the end, and we have no need to think past our consumption. The beginning is the grocery store, and we have no need to think prematurely to our purchases.


It is no coincidence we have separate names for our meat when it is eaten than when it is part of a living animal. How much easier is it to eat beef than cow, pork than pig? The food system we find ourselves in encourages a forgetting of vitality, pushing us to divorce the food products from the living creatures we take from. Our forgetfulness extends to the environments we never see: as consumers, we don’t have to think about the monocropped farm that is sucking the nutrients out of the soil. We don’t have to think about the water shortages that are choking the once fertile, now desert lands of Mexico and other South and Central American countries we import produce from. We don’t have to see the plastic our waste system buries into the ground, the same ground we use to grow food. We don’t have to think at all, and that is the problem.


In our current food system, we don’t have to think much about how our food and food products affect our bodies, either. We know to check nutrition labels, we look for words like “organic” and “natural,” and we still don’t really know what we’re doing or what we’re consuming. We have no idea what makes up the food we eat, and because we can’t accurately measure what goes into our bodies, we are rife with health problems that could be avoided by eating food that nourishes us instead of hurting us.


As humans, we all long to know our place in the nature of things. I find comfort knowing I’m part of a grand cycle and can remember my connection to all things by eating a fresh, juicy peach on a hot summer day. But I also feel a greater responsibility when I remember my place in the cycle, and it pushes me to bring reusable bags and cook at home more so that I’m not tossing out endless amounts of unnecessary plastic that held a produce or a premade meal for a couple of days. And I think that is an amazing outcome, to feel a connection to the world and want to use this connection for the good of all connections, simply by being mindful of the food I consume.


Have you thought much about where your food comes from? Have you thought about the underpaid migrant farmers that picked your strawberries, all the farmers who grew them? Have you thought about the soil that is endlessly giving life to the plants that grow strawberries, and the nutrients that get passed on from the soil to our bodies? The rain and sunshine it takes to create this life? Is it now odd that you don’t really know where that plastic container goes after the recycling truck takes it away?


It’s a bold claim, but I stand by it, and so do many other authors, farmers, scientists, artists, and so on: being mindful of the food you buy and consume can open you up to a lot of amazing knowledge about the world, and to a wonderful growth of connections and health in your personal life. Perhaps the most important change is that, by taking time to consider our place in the cycle of food systems, we can move from being consumers to caretakers: of ourselves, of the earth, of each other.


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