It’s been a while since I’ve felt passionate about an issue, but I’m on fire after reading this article about our food system.
Joe Salatin, a sustainable farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is not afraid to stand up and shout it out–and hey America, we need to hear it! Our kids know NOTHING about food. For example, a student told his high school art teacher that his family didn’t have a cooking pot at home because the family just opened the box and put it in the microwave. Another kid, while touring Salatin’s farm with a school group, asked to see the “salsa tree”. And then there’s the college students who complained, when trying grass-feed beef for the first time, that they weren’t used to having to chew their burgers.
As an elder who still cooks three meals of actual real food a day without the help of a microwave, I have a hard time believing that we’ve become so alienated from our food. This is a tragedy! We need to reconnect ASAP. And not just because industrial agriculture is unsustainable (read more on that at 10 Calories in, 1 Calorie Out – The Energy We Spend on Food). We also have a health crisis going on. The obesity rate has skyrocketed, even among little kids. This means a tsunami of disease disaster and enormous health care costs are in our near future.
Want to read more? Check out Joe’s book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal. And then get into your kitchen and start cookin’ some real food sourced from a local farmer.
Leave a Reply