Food - Life Eats Life

Every morsel of food we eat was once alive, eating and getting eaten is the cycle of life. So where does the food come from for us humans? Let’s look closer at the way we eat now and how food is grown in the industrial food culture.

The dictionary says to be sustainable is to use a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged. For 99% of our existence as humans on planet earth we were hunter-gatherers and for only 1% of the time have we practised agriculture. For just less than a century we have industrial agriculture and industrial food. In the process of converting fossil fuels into food, we virtually eat out of an oil well. The solar-powered food chain processes food by transforming sunlight into protein, carbohydrates and sugars through photosynthesis in an ongoing sustainable way. Now we have dramatically changed this by using synthetic fertiliser and pesticides that have their origins in the two world wars. The German Justus von Liebig, the inventor of chemical fertiliser (the N-P-K solution), wouldn’t have thought that we would one day munch away on the leftovers of the wars.

So from eating sustainably, low on the food chain, we have moved into high-energy use in industrial food production – about 10 calories for every calorie we consume. On top of this we destroy our land base, the soil, water and other life-supporting systems and deplete minerals and trace elements.

The industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest in the market and the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest. We now have a global eating disorder, allergies and obesity especially in our youth.

To change this, we have to make the food chain visible, open up farms, food processing plants and abattoirs and educate the consumer to eat more healthily. Give people choices - the food industry is the most regulated – freedom of food like we have freedom of speech. Read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, or learn more about sustainable food. Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people. Growing your own food is a powerful political statement.