Talking to kids about food and where it comes from can be hard. We all eat regularly. None of us, though, fully understands where every piece of our diet originates, nor do we contemplate the baffling array of hands and vessels that process, prepare, package and transport our food. Even as one of Vancouver's most passionate local food activists I regularly eat meals blindly, without the time or resources to be able to engage with and understand where my food comes from.
Even if children only experience food under the fluorescent lights of the grocery store they possess an intuitive understanding that what we eat is natural and wholly. They can readily accept that having healthy earth to grow healthy food in is healthy for us. They understand that doing this all locally is the smartest option. They see this inticing reality as entirely possible. Trying to explain how our food system has become disconnected from this reality and how they can take it back is far more challenging.
How, then, did intelligent human beings ever make the mistake of deviating from this basic human intuition? The answer is not simple. It is tied up in centuries of political and social upheaval. It is rooted in an economically engineered ecology wherein diversity of stuff outweighs diversity of life. Through generations of patriarchy, power politics, and corruption our life force, our food, has been vacuum sealed and certified safe. It has become controlled by multinational corporations operating to increase the abundance of a handful of stakeholders. Our food is grown for wealth, not health.
If you want to know what it would look like to grow food for health, speak with a 10 year old child honestly about food and how it grows. Use your adult brain to think about the possible history of every morsel you ingest over the span of one day. Talk to the 10 year old about it. Take a moment together to think about the diversity of organisms that share the earth with us and ask how could we produce food that helped more than it hurt?
If you are able to be honest with yourself and accept that other 'non human' life forms are worth considering (the 10 year old will not have issue with this) you will quickly recognize that we desperately need a radical shift in agricultural practice. If you decide to look into this at all, and engage with other adults who have actively studied the alternatives, you will find that such a shift requires movement at all levels of society and may require new transformative economies and cultures to emerge. All of this change is sure to do one of two things: 1) scare you, or 2) excite and then (perhaps) frustrate you. The frustration will be caused by an inability to create the change you were initially excited by.
If you are interested in maintaining or increasing your monetary “value” then you may be invested in the existing economic and cultural order. This will understandably cause you to reflect negatively upon a shift away from such orders. Supporting emerging agricultural practices may not seem feasible to you.
To a 10 year old child, having locally raised and organically grown food is the smartest option. If you are happily fed and in a loving community, what else might one need? That said, if you are a single mother living in the city, what options do you have?
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