Food Balance

This week I’ve read my second article about why the food movement is not elitist. This recent article is really quite good and touches on the issues that go beyond what appears on foodie dinner plates – environmental impact, worker’s right issues, everything. Basically, this writer says, We have an unsustainable food system and it effects everyone. I totally agree! The food system needs to change. But what I don’t hear is anyone talking about the fact that the majority of the food movement is simply trying to go back to real food – the kind that grows from the ground, the kind that developed on this earth without the interference of scientific methodology, the kind that all of us can grow in our yards if we chose, the kind that doesn’t pose so many health risks. You know the type - the kind of food that has real flavor.

It’s not food that only some should have access to. Every single person should have access to clean, healthy food. Yeah, it’s kind of going back to the way things used to be. But there is, for me, something intangibly real and spiritually significant to a food system that works with the land and not in attempt to conquer the land. A system that makes use of natural processes, cycles, predators, and collaborators to create food that helps us be fully who we are intended to be. I don’t think that a person has to be religious to understand that there is a way in which the world is supposed to function, be in balance with itself. We as humans do not fully understand that way, yet we try to control it anyway, as if we are somehow greater than the system we don’t understand. Our current conventional food system operates in this “we know everything” model, and it’s not working.

The grounding of the food movement when you peel back the layers is about resetting the balance, living with the Earth to produce the abundance of food (and of life) that is possible if we just let go of a little bit of control and learn and marvel in the mystery that is, as James Taylor says, this “wet, green one that we live on”.