Choosing food as if others matter
#foodjustice #eatlessmeat #eatlocal #foodliteracy #foodsecurity #foodsovereignty #eatseasonal
Buying, preparing and eating food is a daily habit: and like any habit, it becomes a pattern, something we do without much thinking.
But like any other habit, once we discover that may be aspects that are unhealthy, unfair or plainly wrong, we can change it.
We live in a multicultural city, and food is an important component of our cultural inheritance and our socio-emotional well-being. For many decades now, we have increasingly been used to find all kinds of foods at the supermarket, like strawberries in winter or bananas and mangoes all year round.
We are told that all this bounty is good. For us in convenient to find almost anything we want on any season and place, and because many of us are young or don’t remember, we think we have access to real diversity.
But we are not.
For anyone just coming new (or coming back) to Canada from their home country, it is clear that the imported food we eat tastes “different”. For those of us who know how a freshly picked tomato, strawberry or blueberry tastes, we also know that buying them in winter or in boxes coming from California makes them tasteless and strange.
But it is more than taste: food that travels miles to come here are treated and packaged in such a way that their natural process of growing and ripening are being affected. This affects the taste, texture and smell as well as the quality and even the nutrient potential.
And there’s even more: the packaging, transporting and distributing of all these foods increases the use of plastics and fossil fuels and the amount of CO2 we produce, fueling climate change. In order to feed demand, many forests are cut, and families displaced to grow monocultures that damage the soil. These changes in ecosystems create more floods and forests fires and the displacement of peoples create city slums, crime and refugees.
Many don’t know, that the apparent diversity and abundance we see in Western supermarkets, and increasingly in other countries’ middle-class neighbourhoods, is not healthy nor sustainable: supermarkets act as a gateway who choses what we have access to, what farmers grow and what sells, so many varieties are ignored and have disappeared: since early twentieth century, we have gone form 15.000+ varieties of tomatoes to only 10 or less in our supermarkets (how many varieties of tomatoes can you name beyond “vine”, “grape”, “cherry” and “roma”?). We have lost up to 80% of the biodiversity for most plants in the last 150 years. Alone, due to artificial selection that has focused on transportation and quantity as opposed to biodiversity and quality.
Biodiversity, as any ecologist and biologist would know, is the main ingredient for resilience: this means that to have the misleading “abundance” we have at the supermarket, and the luxury of eating mangoes and bananas in Canada, we are quickly diminishing the resilience and food security of future generations.
Over the millennia, humans have relied on more than 10,000 different plant species for food. Today, we have barely 150 species under cultivation — and of those only 12 species provide 80 percent of all of our food needs. Four of those — rice, wheat, maize and potatoes — provide more than half of our energy requirements.
Biodiversity, social justice and environmental health are all areas we can support with three simple choices:
- Buy local
- Buy seasonal
- Eat less meat
Let’s explore what each one of these choices really means:
Buy local:
Many people confuse buy local with buying at the closer grocery store or the local town/neighbourhood market. Buy you would be surprised: this past Sunday, I went to Cloverdale summer market (a great place to spend the weekend, meet neighbours and see what local stores offer), but was surprised and disappointed by the amount of imported food was being offered: when asked, the sellers were not even local themselves! They were from other cities and managed whole sales, not retail…
What buying local really mean is buying products that have been grown, produced and/or packaged locally, preferably by local farms and small producers who also provide work to local people and sell to local markets. This is not a matter of protectionism or isolating ourselves: growing, producing and selling locally ensures economic, social and ecological resilience.
Buy seasonal:
If you commit to buy locally produced vegetables and fruits, they would usually be seasonal, right? Not necessarily: many fruits and vegetables are grown in unsustainable greenhouses that are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Many of us are so used to buy anything at any time that have lost the capacity to know when something is seasonal and when it is not. Seasonal food has proven to be healthier for both humans and the environment and may open doors to unknown and lost recipes for things you may have never tried…
Eat less meat:
Meat production and transportation, as well as all the dairy products associated have increased by …in the last decade. The wealthier people are, the more demand for meat and dairy products, but is this healthier for humans or the environment? Meat has proven to be really bad for the environment and the animals involved: not only they are living horrible lives in isolated and inhumane conditions, they also produce 18% of CO2 emissions (around the same all cars of the world together produce!). Meat and dairy products have also proven to be bad for your health when eaten in big quantities. There are many ways you can substitute with pulses, healthy grains and working on creating healthy recipes.
But, if you are like me, you may be wondering how this would affect your ethnic food and habits and what you can do about it?
Ethnic food is one of the things that we miss the most when we move by choice or force to another country. We miss the smells, tastes, colours and textures…but I want to risk saying that what we truly miss the most is the process of belonging: from growing to harvesting, from preparing and sharing meals together and passing recipes from one generation to the next.
I recall when I was younger and finding exotic foods and ingredients was hard and expensive: when we could afford it, it was a feast everyone would remember for months! And what stayed with us was the community that came together and the sharing, whether the food was exactly like home or a bit of both worlds.
So while eating things that are close to our cultures, memories and taste is important, we can always focus on building the community and learning new ways to make and enjoy meals together: we may not eat mangoes and bananas every day, or demand that certain products are always available, because beyond our cultures, there is a bigger vision and care: we all share this planet and we are all and each responsible for its health and the well-being of future generations.
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