Organic food: A little off topic, but important. Would love feedback.
 Normally I wouldn’t write about this subject here, but found this to be of interest and in a way ties into what is going on globally. Because the lines of food culture are becoming more and more blurred as we eat apples from New Zealand, tomatoes from Mexico, corn from who knows where… We should all be interested in where our food comes from and how our actions (what we CHOOSE to participate in) affect ourselves, our families, our community and our environment.
I had a very interesting conversation with someone today. The conversation started out about holistic living that morphed into eating organic. That opened up an enormous well of topics from farmers to big business to community support for green projects.
Now, I don’t like to label myself, so I’m going to just let you know where I stand. I primarily eat organic vegetarian food. I don’t use standard pharmaceuticals and opt for natural healing as much as possible. I try not to eat any daily, but the occasional cheese might slip in every once in a while. When it does, it’s organic. I shop at Food Co-Ops, farmers markets and other markets and stores that offer an organic option. I support local businesses as much as possible. And I work for a magazine that supports local artisans, farmers and products. Our main objective is to educate people and businesses about the importance of buying local and eating locally.
Why do I do this? Sure, I want to be healthy. I want to be conscious of what I eat- what I’m putting in my body and how it affects me. But also because I care about what the alternative is doing to our water supply, to our air and our soil. I care that our local farmers are being put out of business in lieu of genetically modified foods from various parts of the world with little or no regulation. I care to do something (in whatever small way that I can) before our necessities of life disappear. At least I can say (guilt free) that I tried.
The part of the conversation that I found interesting is that this person agreed with me. Yet, still made vast many excuses why he could not change his own habits and lifestyle. Is it because organic food tastes bad? No. In fact, you can still have your potato chips and chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. You can even have beer, wine and alcohol. You can keep your hamburgers, bacon and fried chicken. So the excuse that organic food is boring is obsolete. His reasoning for not eating organic is because it isn’t convenient.
With this I have to agree. It is not easy to make the choice to eat organic foods and then expect to go someplace like Texas and assume you’re going to be able to find an organic restaurant. I was just in Texas for the holidays. I had to travel 35-40 minutes to get to the nearest store that sold organic food. Shouldn’t this option be available to everyone? During today’s conversation, I started to feel bad because this person was telling me how they don’t feel they have an option. He and his wife keep a busy schedule taking their 2 children to various after school activities not to mention work and the other projects and priorities they have going. So, I completely understood when he told me he wasn’t able to drive that far to the market to get the organic food he’d like to get. Got it. But when I mentioned getting together a petition of other people in his community who would like to have the option of eating local and organic food things changed.
It felt like all of a sudden he was going to have to take action. And who wants to do that? I mentioned it because I know he’s on the board of his Chamber of Commerce. And I wasn’t suggesting that he do it, but I was suggesting that someone gather names. If there really is a call for a Whole Foods market or some other such entity to come in and fill that need, it will happen. We’re talking money here. Right?
He explained to me that there were other people on the board who were committed to green projects like planting trees. Ok, fine. But choosing what you eat and where you get it from is an act of being green as well. I tried to get him to see that by supporting these big businesses (they are not farms) who produce these chemical ladened products, they are saying it’s ok to continue to put pesticides in our food that will go into the soil that will then go into our water supply and into the air. Not to mention poisoning our bodies. And that’s not very green is it? What good is planting a tree is you’re just going to spray the fuck out of it with chemicals?
So I was told that there are too many people that won’t give up their Hummers and don’t consider being conscious about the food supply and the money going into the food supply as a priority. Again, I agree. But I also believe there are more people who do care and they just have a gap in their knowledge and understanding about what they can do and how relatively easy it is. But couldn’t get him to budge on this.
So I started thinking, why do I meet so many people that agree with what I am saying, but CHOOSE to not do anything about it? Is it that they are waiting for someone else to do all the work for them? Will these people be the first people to complain there is no air to breathe, no water to drink and no food to eat when it’s too late? How can we change apathy into action? There is a huge fear preventing people from taking action. What are people scared of?
Yes, I understand it is a whole convoluted drama of money, big business, government, survival of small family farms, people’s own personal habits, fear of the unknown not to mention fear of granola eating hippies. But change has to start somewhere. And if people have a resistance to making small changes within their personal lives how are we ever expected to make bigger changes that affect us all on a larger scale?
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