The Disconnect

In the aisles at Costco. (Photo credit: edeytan/flickr, used with permission under Creative Commons license.)

Organically grown, local, whole, affordable, planetary stewardship, food justice, sustainably farmed, humanely raised and slaughtered, slow cooked and seasonally eaten, nutritionism, vegan, healthy lifestyle – these are just some of the words that come to mind around the conversation of How, What, When, and Where we eat these days. There is so much to talk about, and these words do not exist in isolation from one another.

Many of them however seem light years away from these: obesity, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, fast food, 24/7 shopping, pre-packaged, fried, salted, supersized, processed, preserved, nutritionless, agrifarmed, food stamps, and subsidized school lunches.

After decades of bombarding us with advertisements for prepared, packaged, and processed food because it is quick, cheap, and tasty, the media is now telling us that we need to eat healthier, do our own cooking, eat a vegetarian diet, especially one that includes fish (Pescetarian?)… What’s a mom/dad/kid/cook to do?

Ina Denburg, our Healthy Eating contributor, has some help for us all: “The more each one of us unplugs from the mainstream highway of what our garbage culture wants to feed us, the faster it collapses as we build stronger alternative routes. We can do it, we must do it, for ourselves and for each other.”

In a day and age of being “connected,” we are ironically a disconnected society: our heads from our bodies, our bodies from our food, our food from its source – the source being our planet. Read these three critical pieces in which Ina offers a plan and a process for us to reconnect with good food and good health: The Disconnect, Tough Love for Good Food, and Oasis in Aisle 6.