It Takes a Village to Change our Eating Habits
Just today, Change.org's Sustainable Food blog released its Top 5 Foods You Should Avoid in 2010 list, a wake-up call for the New Year and decade. Unsurprisingly, the usual offenders were present: high-fructose corn syrup (HFC), seafood on the watch list, out-of-season produce, and factory-farmed meat. Anyone who's read "Fat Land" or the "Omnivore's Dilemma" will never look at their meals the same way again. But gradually, the horror fades and these lessons get lost in the pressures of the daily grind, as most working people struggle to put food on their table. Whether it's grabbing a donut in between meetings or stopping off for fast food with the family after soccer practice, most everyday working people don't have the time to carefully research and plan their meals. We eat just to survive. And we get complacent and make choices out of convenience. For a person like myself, a single urban professional without children, it should be easy to make smart food choices, but I too fall into the trap of grabbing a bag of chips on the go or gorging on greasy fries after a boozy night.
But I know that slowly, or not-so-slowly, our food and sedentary lifestyle is killing us. I've lost two friends in their 30s to diabetes. Our national epidemic of obesity is exposing us to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and their long list of complications. Hormones in meat and dairy are causing early puberty in girls, increasing their risk of reproductive cancers. Not to mention, the toll of mass-produced agriculture on our environment.
This fight cannot be won alone, but by acting together, to gradually shift our collective mentality to encourage more produce vendors on the streets, remove fast food from inner cities, and strip soda machines from school cafeterias. Subsidize farmer's markets, community-supported agriculture (CSAs), and community gardens, and make fresh fruits and vegetables available to working-class people. The shift must be institutional and collective to succeed.
