Disconnection to Reconnection: Why Food Is About More Than Eating

From Disconnection to Reconnection: Why Food Is About More Than Eating. In this episode, we are going to talk about our relationship with food, because so many of us have become stuck in the roles of eaters and consumers, and that is impacting our health, wellbeing and the health of Earth’s biosphere.

Food is very personal and intimate, connected to the broader world and the systems we live within. We take our food and put it inside us; it becomes a part of us. Every day, our bodies are made and remade from our food, drink, and interactions with our environments. 

This means that we are putting our trust, our very lives, in our food systems. 

Food systems are simply all the processes and infrastructure that work to feed us. These can be as simple as gardens, community gardens, urban and rural farms, markets, cooperatives, neighbours trading and bartering food, and people who process and prepare food, such as butchers, bakers, and chefs. But more commonly, in regions like North America, they include industrial agriculture, grocery stores, fast food outlets, factory food processing, and a lot of packaging and waste disposal...

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to Creating Change with Food. I'm your host, Dr. Tara Naylor. Creating Change with Food is the podcast that goes back to basics and explores what it really takes to build nourishing, resilient food systems for a finite planet. Today's episode is called From Disconnection to Reconnection: Why Food is about more than eating. In this episode, we're going to talk about our relationship with food because so many of us have become stuck in the roles of eaters and consumers, and that is impacting our health, well-being, and the health of Earth's biosphere. I want to start this episode with a story. One of my favorite foods used to be green peas. I used to go to the grocery store and buy a big bag of frozen peas almost every week. When short on time, one of my go-to meals was peas, tomato sauce, and pasta with cheddar cheese. The ingredients were simple. Sometimes I added other vegetables or ate peas with just some melted cheese, yum, and I could easily eat more than a cup of peas at a time. Until one day I started to grow some of my own peas. At that time I only had two small raised vegetable beds, but peas were one of the plants I wanted to grow. I remember the enjoyment my sister and I had growing up, picking and eating peas right off the plants, and how sweet and crunchy the peas and pods were. So I sowed some seeds, and as they grew, I lovingly tended and staked the plants until I had some peas to eat right from the plants. My dogs and I would go outside and pick a pod from the plant and enjoy eating it. One of my shelties would gently pull the pods right off the plant and eat them. I would sit on the edge of my race beds and open up these beautiful little pea pods and look at these little peas inside before eating them one at a time. That experience changed me because I understood the love and care it had taken just to get a few pods of peas. When I bought the one kilo bags of frozen peas at the grocery store, I never thought about the soil, the plants, the weather, or the farmer. I just thought about eating the peas because I liked them and they were inexpensive and convenient. Since then, my relationship with peas has forever changed. As we can see from this story, food is very personal and intimate, but it's also connected to the broader world and the systems we live within. Because we take our food and we put it inside us and it becomes part of us. Every day, our bodies are made and remade from our food, our drink, and the interactions with our environments. This means we are putting our trust, our very lives, in our food and our food systems. Food systems are simply all the processes and infrastructure that work to feed us. These can be as simple as gardens, community gardens, urban and rural farms, markets, cooperatives, neighbors trading and bartering food, and people who process and prepare food, such as butchers, bakers, chefs, local meat processors. But more commonly in regions like North America, they include industrial agriculture, grocery stores, fast food outlets, factory food processing, and a lot of packaging and waste disposal. I know I can tell what I've been eating when I look at my recycling bins. In fact, I call them the bins of truth, because I can see if the food I've been eating was heavily packaged or not. The industrial food system disconnects us from the life cycle of our food, the land, the earth, and the industrial process that brought that food into being. In fact, I bet that if as individuals we saw how industrial food is grown and prepared, most of us would be put off eating it for life. I experienced this as a teenager. I won't tell you which burger chain I worked for, but I worked very briefly for a well-known burger chain. And after a few weeks, I left and have never eaten there again. The industrial systems leave us in the role of eaters and consumers. And our role in that type of food system is just to consume value-added food products. This disconnection leads us to distrust our very innate wisdom and needs. When we're disconnected from the source of our food, it's very hard for us as individuals to use our senses, such as appearance, touch, and smell of food, to evaluate its quality. It's almost impossible for us to know who the farmers are behind that food and how the land, people, and other living beings are treated. So how do we judge which foods to choose and how do we take care of our bodies? Well, we become reliant on packages, advertising, labels, and the advice of experts. The problem is that labels and nutritional advice reduce food down to just a few characteristics. For example, calories, fats, sugar, protein, fibre, and these can be easily manipulated by the food industry. Heck, almost anyone who can cook can manipulate the food they make for just those few nutrients. This further disconnects us from food as a whole. The problem is that the health and fitness industries and the climate change and greenhouse gas reduction industry use the same reductionist tools. Part of my disconnection from food came from the health and fitness industry. In my teens and through my twenties and beyond, I used to buy and read fitness, physique, and sometimes bodybuilding magazines. Those magazines were filled with lean, strong, athletic women. And I wanted to be strong, lean, and fit like them. In truth, in many ways I was, but I did not look anything like the fitness models. But the diet sheets in those magazines seemed to revolve around egg whites, oatmeal, and protein powder. In those magazines, food seemed to be measured in terms of protein, fat, and carbohydrate. This created a disconnect because I loved and enjoyed food, I still do. And I came to believe that there was something wrong with me, despite enjoying a varied and mostly whole food diet. So even though I had the energy and ability to run, bike, lift weights, and do other fitness activities for hours a day, as well as go to university and later work, I really felt there was something wrong with me. This narrow view of food is the same tactic being used by many environmentalists. Food is evaluated solely by its climate impacts, by a narrow and often inaccurate snapshot of greenhouse gas emissions. I have seen ridiculous comparisons on some health and nutrition sites that compare greenhouse gas emissions from a kilogram of broccoli to a kilogram of beef when they're nowhere near nutritionally equivalent. They are simply not interchangeable. So food companies can then manipulate food formulations to give the food the appearance of being healthy or environmentally friendly unless you look through the ingredients list. I think the widespread availability of food and nutrition trackers on watches, phones, and other devices makes the disconnect between us and our food even greater. At least that was my experience when I briefly used a food tracker. I became obsessed with making sure I checked the boxes and I judged my food only through a narrow group of nutrients. But my body definitely tells me a story that the food labels do not. When I put my dogs on a mostly homemade diet, I started off with some nutrition sheets from a doggy nutritionist, but later I bought a software program to help me create and balance their diets. I wanted to ensure they got all the nutrients they needed and the proper ratios. And I found it quite challenging, but I did manage it and came up with some simple recipes for their food with ingredients I could easily get or grow myself. But then I noticed something, and this was when I was trying to balance one particular mineral. The database did not and could never consider the different nutritional values of food depending on how and where they were grown, stored, processed, and sold. The database did not and could not take into account the phytochemical richness of the foods or the bioavailability of the nutrients. My food formulations could not consider my dog's individual needs due to their different body types and shapes. After realizing all this, I relaxed and stopped worrying about their food and focused on giving them high-quality real foods in a generally balanced formula. At one of their physicals a few years ago, the veterinarian complimented them on their body shape and health while still trying to push commercial foods by saying they had all the proper nutrients in every meal. But that approach assumes we know everything about what a dog or a human for that matter needs, and that we know everything about that food and how our bodies respond to it. And through my experimentation, I've noticed that my own body reacts differently to something as simple as the fineness of a flower grind. Then I realized that the problem with both stories comes from our technological and industrial worldview. This mindset believes we can reduce anything to its parts and put them back together in the way we want. That if we collect enough data and we can solve all our people and planetary health problems and find the one solution, the one nutrient, medicine, or energy source to fix everything. That we can hack and reprogram ourselves as if we're a computer, that big data and artificial intelligence can solve all our problems. And this mindset is arrogant and misguided and misses living beings' beauty and complexity and ever-changing nature on a dynamic planet. If we as individuals and communities want access to food that truly nourishes us, we need to consider our true nature. Now, enough of this for now. Because this podcast is not about dwelling about what is, it's about creating change. It's about creating systems that work for us as wonderful, complex, interconnected living beings, living within and wholly dependent upon a living world. So, how do we reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the living world? In recent years, there has been a focus on technology where we often talk about our bodies using computer terminology, using terms like hacking our bodies and hacking our microbiomes. But this is taking us in exactly the opposite direction of where we must go. And that is to reconnect to our true nature and our role in a living world. So I wanted to take a few moments to reconnect to the wonder of us and the plants and animals that are our food. I wanted to start with us humans. In the book Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom by Fred Prevenza, there is an equation that describes individuals as the sum of genes, environments, organisms, and charts. Now I am no biologist, but when you start looking at the number of genes in our bodies, then the number of types of RNA those genes can produce, and then the number of proteins that can be encoded, the potential variations are astounding. When it comes to our environments, we are constantly reacting to, responding to, and being shaped by them. From the air we breathe to the water we drink to the vibes from the places and people we surround ourselves with. Then there is our microbiome, which is absolutely fascinating. Our microbiome contains roughly 10,000 species of microbial life that occupy our human ecosystem. Our guts alone are home to more than 40 trillion bacteria. But that's not all. We're also teeming with other life such as viruses, archaea, fungi, algae, and more. And although we often see viruses as enemies to be eliminated, they do play a role in our digestion and health. Yeasts can also play a protective role in reducing inflammation and maintaining an immune defense. This microbial life is constantly changing depending on our environments, our lifestyles, and stages of life. Then there is chance, which makes life unpredictable and can forge who we are as individuals. This same equation holds for the plants and animals that make up our food. In recent years there has been some fascinating research about plants. This research has started to reveal that although plants are different from us, they are sophisticated living beings with a different but real intelligence and ability to communicate. I read an article in Nature Food from 2020 that stated that our understanding of how diet affects human health is limited to 150 key nutritional components. But high-resolution spectrophotometry clearly identifies at least 26,000 different chemicals in the food we eat. All this means that we are these fascinating, unique individuals that contain an entire ecosystem of other living beings within us. And the food we eat can also be made up of a vast range of nutritional components. For me, this means that reducing our food down to just a few components like calories, fat, and protein will never work for us. Another dimension of us that we have not yet talked about is that although our food and bodies are physical entities, we are so much more than that. Our food impacts our mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds. We human beings are social, communal, and spiritual beings, and our health and well-being depend upon our relationships and connections with one another and with the broader world. And food is a universal connector. We all have food in common. Food can also connect us to our families, our histories, our cultures, and it can show people we love and care about them. Food can give us a sense of comfort when we feel isolated and alone. Our food can connect us to the sun, the soil, the seeds, water, and earth's processes, as well as the people and skills needed to produce it. When we engage with this type of food, we can feel genuinely nourished, valued, and cared for. And in turn, we can truly connect to and value this type of food. So how do we know what food we are eating? How do we reconnect with our food, our bodies, and each other and the living world that brings us our food? Well, I've given you quite a few clues through this episode. The answer is simple, it's ridiculously simple, but it took me a long time to figure it out. For me, this has come from connecting with the story of food. If food were a piece of artwork, it would be like tracing its provenance, from seed to fork. It comes from looking at the values that underpin our food. It came from getting involved with my food and building my food skills. From growing food, sourcing beyond the grocery store, learning to store and process and preparing foods in different ways to sharing it with other people. The defining values that underpin our industrial food system are money, maximizing money, profits, and the consolidation of food systems. When we buy or eat a box of ultra-processed food, there is no connection or relationship with the plants, animals, people, and places involved in that food. When we buy food from the grocery store or superstore and go through a self-checkout, there is no relationship beyond a monetary transaction. But underneath other types of food systems, there are values such as the health and well-being of people and the health of well-being of life as a whole. You can see and feel this when you talk to the people involved. I had one experience where I was feeling very low, and I remember going to my local farmers' market and talking to the vendors, meeting people I knew in town, and I came away from that experience feeling so cared for just through the connections with people around my food. Because local food connects food producers, small-scale process, and consumers together. It can also connect us to our very seasons, climates, and ecosystems as a whole. Whether it's through neighbor-to-neigh markets, subscription services, business networks, cooperatives, or food festivals. I know I had the experience last year of having a neighbor over and walking around my garden, and I would pick different things and give them to her, and I felt such a sense of abundance that I could share this with somebody else. The connections we make around our food change the value we place on it. It allows both eaters and producers to learn from each other, often resulting in better tasting, nutritious food, and it can create more resilient food systems. I have learned that the real joy of food does not come from just being an eater. It comes from meeting and connecting with other people over food, developing and using skills and connecting to the living beings and earth processes that bring us our food. So, to recap this episode, food is very personal and intimate, and but it's also connected to the broader world and the systems we live within. We take our food and we put it inside us and it becomes part of us. The predominant industrial food system leaves us in the role of eaters and consumers, and our role in that food system is just to consume value-added food products. The industrial food systems disconnect us from the life cycle of our food, the land, the earth, and the industrial processes that even bring that food into being. We humans are social, communal, and spiritual beings, and our health and well-being depend on our relationships and connections with one another and with the broader world. Food is a universal connector, it can ease our relationships. When we become active participants in our food systems, we can improve our relationships with our bodies and the people and ecosystems that bring us our food. That's it from me for today, Dr. Taranella. Until next time.