I have recently been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It is an excellent book about her move to Virginia and her family’s decision to start sourcing their food from local, organic sources. Their decision is driven by many factors but the main issue is the commoditization of calories. Large, often subsidized, soy and corn farms have become the dominant contributor to American meals. This change has significantly increased the numbers of calories we consume, but they are primarily empty calories with little nutritional value. The other change is that we now ignore the seasons, even in California, and eat fruits and vegetables that have been shipped from around the world. The result is that our modern American diet is now designed not for taste and nutrition but instead for durability and shelf-life. This has significant impacts on our health and well-being.
In these depressed economic times, people feel the need to economize on their trips to the grocery stores. Kingsolver brings up a good point when she asks the reader, how would you react to other health risks? As an extreme point she mentions a "plume of benzene running through a school basement". You wouldn’t keep sending your kids to a school with carcinogenic compounds in the basement so why are toxic food habits acceptable? She goes on to cite some interesting statistics that are worth repeating. "One out of every three dollars we spend on health care, by some recent estimates, is paying for the damage of bad eating habits. One out of every seven specifically pays to assuage (but not cure) the multiple heartbreaks of diabetes – kidney failure, strokes, blindness and amputated limbs."
One of the best things you can do is plant a small amount of food for yourself. Put in a small herb garden in a window sill. Grow a couple dwarf fruit trees on your balcony. If you have the space, put in a garden. We do a bit of each of these around our house to minimize the time commitment and maximize the variety.
Another approach which works better for most of us is to head out to your local farmers markets. Without the costs of transport and marketing, the food here is often as inexpensive as a discount grocery store. Speak to the farmers about how they grow their food and you will find that most of it is made with love which tends to result in food with a lot higher nutritional value than the mass produced, fast food variety. Here is a list of local markets from 2008 in the Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/161/story/935699.html or you can search here for some more options www.cafarmersmarkets.com.
Happy eating!
-Dr Michele Raithel NMD