What you eat (and buy) matters

We live in a world where health care costs are skyrocketing, where industrial chemicals are making their way into everything (not the least of which is breastmilk), where many of us work more, have more "stuff", but are less happy. 

We live in a world where farms, as we knew them, are disappearing,where most of our food is picked well before it is ripe and imported from all over the world, where most of us do not know the people we buy our food from, and where it is harder and harder to support a family in a rural community.  We live in a world where a large portion of our food comes out of a factory, where we can't understand the ingredient labels and where our hamburgers are made mostly from corn products.

We live in a world where people think doctors and pills will keep them healthy, where people in their 30s (or even younger) have chronic pain and lack of energy think this is a normal part of getting older.  We live in a world where people assume if you are thin, you are healthy.  We live in a world where 2/3 of American adults are overweight and 14 1/2 percent of American's are considered food insecure.

We live in a world where accessibility to complex food is so easy that we have no idea the number of calories we eat, the source of the food or the social, cultural and economic implications of the purchase we just made.

Your health, public health, big agribusiness, social equity, global food supply, eliminating world hunger, environmental contamination....these are huge and complex issues.  But each and every one of us contributes to these problems everyday.


Each and every one of us has the ability to change these trends simply through what we choose to have for dinner.

We can decide that what we eat matters.  

We can make the choice to eat food that is provides us with actual nutrition and food that contains fewer chemicals (including preservatives, artificial ingredients and pesticides).  We can decide that our health is a priority and look to what we eat as a way to improve it.  We can decide to learn more about where our food comes from and the consequences of eating and buying certain things.  We can decide to spend food money on products and restaurants that support our small businesses and farms, our communities. 

We can make informed decisions regarding food.

We all can and we all really need to, for our health, for our communities, and for our planet.