I am fed up with having to do extensive research just to be able to give my kid food or a toy! When did buying things for your kids become a lesson in chemistry? I was shopping for a big boy bed the other day and ran across an article informing me there are dangerous chemicals in the frame and paint. Awesome, just what I need to buy my baby boy. There goes his batman bed.

Sometimes I feel as a society, we are encouraged to live in fear.  Which in turn, will make us consume. From day one, you are told bottles are toxic, so you should buy BPA free.  Everything has to be organic, because there are chemicals in their food. And don’t worry, that awesome ‘it’ toy you just bought is sure to be recalled in a year, because it is deadly too.

What do we buy for them to eat, play with and sleep on? What can they watch on TV that won’t give them ADD?

I find myself getting more and more annoyed.  I can’t only buy wooden toys because my kid loves Batman. He needs Batman in his life to prevent breakdowns.  I don’t want to be the A-Hole parent that doesn’t buy him his super hero sh*t.

I will be the first to admit things have changed since I was a youngster, especially in our food.  I am the soda police at work (yes that girl, but I have convinced a few to get off the juice)!  However everyday something new is on the evening news, warning of us of the ‘deadly’ side effects.  Some days, I don’t want to be a lunatic who is over protective of my son.  Some days, I just want to go to the grocery store and buy a regular piece of fruit.  Some days, I just want to go to the toy store and buy something without reading: Caution: this could kill you and your kid. I am going to have a nervous breakdown trying to keep up with all this! Can’t we just live in ignorance? Wishful thinking.

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It bears mentioning two other complications in this argument. First, why does healthcare need to be so expensive in the first place? Second, and more germane to this blog, the general working public would not have to eat cheap, unhealthy food if they could afford better alternatives. It’s a vicious cycle. Don’t pay people good wages. They are then forced to find cheaper and cheaper ways to live including what they eat. So they will inevitably pick the value meal at a fast food chain over fresh, natural foods that cost more. And why is processed/manufactured food not more expensive than simple produce coming out of the ground? You have f*cked-up government subsidies to thank for that illogicality. Besides, laborers are already working longer hours with more responsibilities, so they don’t really have time to cook with healthier ingredients anyway! And then they need healthcare because they are getting sicker from the unhealthy food they eat. The medical industry profits the sicker people are, while insurance companies profit the healthier they are!

I think it all points to the conclusion that we value money in a very narrow way. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; capitalism only concerns itself with profit, right? But I am hoping for a more holistic approach – one that keeps the health and well-being of both humankind and the planet in mind. And they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, raising the minimum wage will increase labor expenses but it doesn’t have to hurt profit necessarily. Again, what do people do with more money in their pockets? If their basic needs are taken care of, they will eventually spend it. More people spending more money? Sounds like a pretty good formula for a strong economy to me! Remember what a vibrant middle class can do! Create more markets for more products and services, revitalizing more companies and causing them to take on more employees to keep up with the demand and growth. In other words, more jobs! Indeed, this rampant stinginess on the part of corporations has created a stranglehold on the economy. Only a few profit (say, the 1%) while the rest live in scarcity (say, the 99%). What would it take for the money-hoarding 1% to loosen their purse strings to get the economic faucet flowing again? When will they realize that it would actually work in their best interest to have a more broad-based spending population?

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And this is just one example. Think of all the restaurants discarding unwanted or unused food. Think of all the events where leftover food is tossed. Think about your home and how many rotten vegetables you had to toss. It’s hard to imagine the magnitude of waste that’s happen on a daily basis throughout the world. The latest studies show we are throwing away about 50% of the food we produce. And yet hunger is still an issue both stateside and internationally. What’s wrong with this picture?

I wish I had the solution. I know making cheap food in mass quantities is not helping. If we actually viewed our food as precious and limited, we would probably respect it more. Furthermore, it takes thoughtfulness and diligence to reduce waste. For example, I review my schedule every Sunday for the week, and determine how many meals I need to make. I then only cook that many servings so that I am not overproducing food that won’t get eaten and that will end up in the garbage. It takes discipline and practice…and I am only cooking for two people! Imagine the brainpower that would have to go into restaurants knowing how many customers, and therefore how much food, to plan for on a daily basis. There are lots of known and unknown variables…almost seems impossible not to create waste, right? Some places that are trying to do a good job have extended their efforts to donating leftovers to soup kitchens and others who could really put them to good use. Ultimately, there is no quick fix and it requires deliberative attention throughout the whole food system.

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After talking with several professionals involved in food sustainability, this past week, I realized that my passion is to cook for people. I would like to do this in the future by taking care of the environment at the same time. Today, I am fed up of watching how people are wasting food in some parts of the world while in others people barely have enough food to eat. We are eating because we need it. However, are we eating the appropriate types of foods? In countries where food is available, people should ask themselves ‘what is the quality of food that we are consuming?’ In the end, the quality of food—primarily prepackaged food: frozen, pre-maid, and fast food—are not helping us survive, instead they are affecting our health. We are not eating to survive, we are eating more than what we should. In our diets we include a lot of carbohydrates and high fat products, leaving aside all the fruits and vegetables. We don’t prepare meals at home anymore; we usually eat something cheap outside of our house. We need to open our eyes and realize that all these new trends are the ones causing “modern diseases” like: diabetes, hypertension, obesity and many others.

What fills me up is people working together towards the benefit of the environment and society. I love to cook with organic and locally grown food for my family and friends. Hearing that they love the taste of what they are eating and knowing that we are not devastating the earth, is what makes it such a special occasion.

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Enter innovation. Welcome to the new world of food hubs and food aggregation. Smart entrepreneurs are developing networks for gathering the crops of smaller farmers into larger quantities, so that they can fulfill the large orders from bigger supermarkets. There are even now online tools for a restaurant, for example, to make large orders, and the company behind the website has built the infrastructure to source from multiple farms, aggregate the product, and then deliver it to the restaurant. And scaling up means more business and profits for the farmer as more of his/her crop is getting to market. No more small-time CSAs or farmer markets, but a legitimate business model! The result: local, independent farming can be a sustainable way of life. And a broken food system that relies on factory farms has a truly viable alternative.

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