Solving For Our Broken Food System - Simplifying Food for a Better World
June 04, 2022
It’s no secret that our current food and agriculture systems today in the United States are beyond broken, positioning themselves as some of our leading contributors to poor health and chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, just to name a few.
Moreover we have sickened our soils, depleting natural resources, neglected our natural biological balance with healthy microbes in the soil, air, water, and very own biomes: gut, brain, skin, oral, etc. We’ve grown increasingly intoxicated seeking instant gratification and immediate pleasures, drunken and abusive towards our sacred Mother nature. Polluted water ways, festered dangerous algae blooms, pushed our trash underground into landfills and into other people’s backyards in order not to face the harsh realities of our transgressions.
We’ve exploited people, cultures, climate, and geography all in hopes to make ourselves bigger, better, wealthier yet we’re left still dumber despite our immature endeavors. We’ve tortured certain breeds of animals and spoiled others. We then go about pointing shaking shaming pointer-fingers at other countries around the world for choosing different animals to domesticate or kill.
American food systems are destroying the world, not just the West. What’s even crazier is that we actually import most of our honest good fruits and vegetables from other countries.
Pursuing profit over principles is a common thread of poisonous pretext when it comes to most political or economic decisions by those we have elected, or entrusted our hope and faith in for the purpose of checking, regulating, securing the safety and sustainability of the American people and the American way.
But in reality, we have failed.
Some suggest the FDA was purposely masked as regulator in hopes to instead act as trusted stakeholder for corporatist capitalism, catalyzing growth, power, and control by those who’ve manufactured the very need for the products they sell.
We expected informed consent and we receive contentious greed masquerading as friend while we remain affixed to relentless consumerism, atrociously addicted to the products provided, specifically designed for overconsumption with the help of massive industrialization, cheap labor, chemical-driven processes, commodification of food and the human right for healthy nourishment.
We’ve chastised farmers and ranchers, placing them in a complicated mess of AgriBusiness processes, millions of dollars of debt, enslaving them to near similar pharmaceutical warfare upon our sovereign soils and taken their cherished love and admiration for growing good and healthy food for others right out from under them.
It shouldn’t come at any surprise, we’ve performed similar acts towards doctors, teachers, psychologists, pharmacists, and others. Profits over people tends to lean towards destruction instead of promoting population health and preventive measures of health and wellness.
What would be a better option?
Food that is good, clean, and fair for all. Food that benefits humans, animals, agricultural ecosystems of scale in balance and abundance of diversity. Food that is well nourished in fertile soils, plentiful in nutrition, and bioenergetically tuned to support people and the planet together – not mechanically stripped of its sacred form, void of any nutrition to which it formerly possessed, bioengineered for our latest favorite fad diet instead of coming to face that perhaps we humans are the ones who should think about changing our habits (and health) instead.
So how might we inject some collective higher conscious into the West if we come to accept we lack any form of appropriate priorities in our current state? How might we drive farming from a place of deep transcendent empathy and understanding instead of fickle fixed opinions of greed, distancing ourselves from every atrocity we commit.
Will some form of a higher power seek to slap us on our wrists until we decide to straighten ourselves out?
Or will we continue to turn the other cheek in apathy?
Will we learn to heed or hollow our hearts even further, digging our graves deeper still?
In generations’ past, we faced hunger, famine, and many unknowns around where we could find our next meal to eat. This is not the case any longer. We simultaneously showcase food swamps of fast-food behemoths along main streets of most small cities and metropolitan areas while many communities live in food deserts with poor transportation, poor access, and problematic economics when a banana at the bodega costs a buck twenty, but a giant soda goes for three quarters. To make matters more interesting, we can no longer ignore the facts from other aspects of social determinants of health which teach us about the drastic differences of just a few feet and a change of zip code could grossly spoil your life expectancy and potential healthspan.
Any novice coming to the scene would be able to point to at least a couple of the fouling offenders which have led us here – most notably the likes of fearful overproduction towards mass industrialization of food products (not real food), fraudulent and fantasized food marketing, “advances” in chemistry, biosciences, and scandalous systems which are supposed to protect being scant of any form of loving righteous discipline.
We abandoned common sense many years ago.
We’ve only just recently began waking up from our dopey slumber.
At least we’re waking. At least we’re talking, thinking at least about what we can do to change, to catapult ourselves back away from the dystopian nature of our snowballing destruction of all of Mother nature’s gifts to give. We have much to learn, relearn, and remind ourselves going forward. We have much to do and many opportunities to take active participation in creating a better, healthier food future for all of us – from algae to albatross to armadillo to Abraham.
If it sickens you like it sickens me to see sickly people sickening our shared planet then I hope you also can see the need for actively participating in building our healthier future together.
I’ve seen a surge of personal garden plots rising up around small towns and shared community plots as well. Community shared agriculture (CSA) programs are just one of many growing programs activating change, supporting health, and reconnecting people to the food they grow and the hands involved along every step of the way.
It's obvious that we face many challenges going forward. But our fate shall be worse if we choose not to face the facts to see our broken system has broken planetary biology, breaching any historical sense of sacred economics we held with all of beautiful Mother nature who follows us everywhere we go – no matter how deep inside our cozy homes we try to hide.
To the soils we must go. To get our hands dirty – together – is the only way we can find a way to find a healthier way to grow.
Let me go ahead get us started to work us through the initial boulder of inertia we need to push on to get going. Here are just a few ideas for us to consider for a healthy, holistic, thoughtful, conscientious food system.
Protect consumers from exploitive marketing trends of sugary drinks and junk food to children. – Restrict the marketing and selling of junk food to our kids, including but not limited to athlete sponsors, government public school subsidies working with brands and conglomerates like Pepsi Co, Coca Cola, Impossible Foods, Mars, Hershey, Red Bull, and others.
Incentivize healthy whole food consumption in accordance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). – Despite the erroneous history and corruption involved in lobbying government policies, representatives and powerful agencies via loaded PACs (political action committees) and entrenched science research publications COI (conflicts of interest), the current USDA My Plate Guidelines for Americans actually do a pretty okay job for giving us a starting place when it comes to the all-important question, “what the heck should we eat?”
10 Ideas to Improve Public Health in America (past story you can read here)
10 Reasons Why We SUCK at Talking About Public Health — and How to Fix Our Fickle Thinking (past story you can read here)
In recent years we’ve emboldened ourselves under the historically unlovable Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations to highlight the nutrition facts label listing of added sugars, calories, and reminding consumers that somehow a small can of soup might have 5 servings so you’ll need to multiply all those numbers found below. Now, the catch here is that real whole foods don’t come with a nutrition facts label. You can’t turn over an avocado, tomato, head of garlic, or even a pineapple shipped from the other side of the world to read its important nutritional info. But, with all that being said, if everyone were to even simply meet the recommended daily intake for veggies and fruits per day, which is less than 10% of Americans today, we’d be one heck of a leap better than where we are today where the vast majority of our food consumption comes from ultra-processed junk food.
Better align government aid to farmers. We need farmers. We should support farmers. But we shouldn’t shackle them into destructive practices that degrade the soil and enslave them to big chemical companies pushing thousands of gallons of synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, and other excessive biological harms. We might want to support agricultural diversity, independent farmers’ flexibility and autonomy with safety and consideration for soil longevity but also soil resilience. As long as the government and giant agribusiness groups control American farmlands, the least we can do is to give farmers a fighting chance to get back to farming real food and not GMO commodity crops used for industrial feedstuffs and processing ingredients. They need our help for autonomy and change just as much as we depend on them to sustain our food production for our growing populations.
Factory farms are finished. – We have to face the facts of the disgusting history within CAFO production facilities. Animals are creatures, not plastic products made in a factory and shipped overseas to make a profit. Creatures deserve respect, attention, compassion, nurturing, and honestly… love. Once we sell our souls to demonize one creature in pursuit of profitable gains, it is a slippery slope of endless destruction on all of biology as we forget to honor our sacred connection to nature and interconnectedness to all of biology.
That’s just a starting place. Feel free to share all of your wonderous ideas with me below in the comments about how we can work together to empower a healthier food future for all of us – together.
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