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You are here: Home / Thoughts / Real Food

Real Food

02/19/2019 By Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie 18 Comments

REAL FOOD

For years, we’ve heard that the healthy diet is one found, not in the aisles of the grocery store but on its perimeter. At the supermarket in my little town, this includes the bakery, dairy, produce, meat, seafood, and pharmacy sections. Wait! This is a food store, not a drug store. How did the pharmacy get in there?

The division between the two has gotten mixed up. We may think we are eating a healthy diet, from growers and producers who care about our safety, but really what we are eating is
not food at all. We are eating products and commodities.

We very much want to believe our food comes from the family farmer, whose nostalgic image is so often seen on plastic, hermetically sealed, non-compostable packaging, but that is simply not so. The system we have bought into assumes we are dumb enough not to ask who is profiting each time we open our mouths to consume products making us fat and sick, while at the same time making a small, less than 1% of the population, rich. For years, Madison Avenue PR firms have created and pitched products in media campaigns that appeal to, and ultimately are bought and eaten by, the average consumer. We, the consumer, have been fed a pablum of words and images designed to make us feel that the food we buy is good, safe, flavorful, and healthy.

Real food, good food, healthy food, the kind of food that one does not need a degree in chemistry to understand the list of ingredients on packaging, hasn’t been around on our supermarket shelves for generations. Even our grandparents could not count on eating real food fifty years ago, as by that time we had already swallowed the poison. Perhaps our great-grandparents, or more likely our great great-grandparents, had the privilege of not worrying about where their food really came from, and what was in it, as there were more family farms in their time and they may have grown it themselves in time-honored ways that had been proven successful and sustainable for generations.

At one time, we knew the provenance of food served on our family table. We knew that seeds were saved, and planted on small family farms of less than six-hundred acres. Seeds planted were specific to a region because they grew well, and, weather permitting, would provide a decent harvest supplying the farmer with enough cash to make it through to the next year. In addition, a crop was planted with a flavor profile in mind. If it didn’t taste good, who the heck would buy it? The farmer knew that flavor didn’t come just from the seed, but had learned from preceding generations, that flavor comes from carefully cultivated, fed, and tended soil, and not from dirt, which is what is found on a playground. The farmer of yore knew the most important crop, ensuring the survival of both people and place, to be healthy soil.

Soil, a simple four-letter word, has become an abomination of what it once was. Family farmers bought “snake oil” to add to their soil. Soil, in which once healthy crops grew and nourished generations, is now tainted with chemical additions, which were promised as being able to provide effective and safe insect control, higher yield, shorter time to harvest, and purported ease of management, not to mention more cash for the farmer. The “modern” farmer was encouraged to turn away from old and proven ways, and embrace the future. All it took was a line of credit to procure the chemical powders and oils that would be paid for with the ensuing abundant harvest. In the short term, there was success. But, as years went by, more often that harvest didn’t come because soil was no longer productive. Soil had now become dirt. Insects had caught on, too, and adapted to pesticides that were now ineffective. “No problem,” the chemical industry said. “We have NEW and better products for you. Just sign on the line and turn away from your out-dated ways of farming right here.”  It is easy for one to imagine Star War’s Darth Vader telling Luke Skywalker to embrace the Dark Side. What the Dark Side didn’t share is that with more and frequent pest infestations and crop failures, there would be no smiling bank manager willing to extend yet another line of credit, until the only option left was to see the family farm, the backbone of our American way of life for generations, auctioned off to agri-business giants, whose owners were oh so happy to snap up for pennies on the dollar. With family survival at stake, was there any choice?

Corporate greed took away the core identity of our nation. From a nation of small family farms taking pride in feeding friends, neighbors, and countrymen, farmers were played as pawns in a huge land grab by corporate entities, and oh how well they were played. No longer do we have real farms with farmers producing real food. Now we have corporations that produce genetically modified, pesticide-laden monocrops, lab-engineered Frankenfoods, and antibiotic laced livestock feed, to which bacteria has become resistant. Farms and farmers have been replaced by agricultural technicians, and corporate sponsored scientists and lobbyists, who skew data, and compete for funding every five years from the U.S. Farm Bill.

Foods are designed not with our good health in mind, but with our poor health in mind. We are presented with products designed to look like food; products giving a fake promise that they are grown by the healthy, happy, farm family pictured in the supermarket advertisement; products designed for quick growth, ease of mechanical harvest, and storage in temperature controlled warehouses, until ready to be brought to market when there is an attractive price point. Food like this supports the cancer, diabetes, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries.

And flavor? A red tomato in the produce aisle may look like the real thing pictured in those shiny PR materials, but nowhere in the seed engineering process, has flavor been considered to be of primary importance. Color, uniformity of size, storage, and ship-ability? Absolutely. But flavor? Not even close. There are now generations who have grown up with absolutely NO idea what a ripe tomato tastes like, or from where it comes. A two and one-half inch red orb, which tastes like cardboard, is what many believe to be the standard because that is all they have ever eaten.  

If you have ever had the pleasure of eating a sweet and juicy, sun-ripened, just picked peach out of hand, you will understand flavor. This peach requires one to lean over when eating it because it is so juicy. You automatically slurp back the juice in to your mouth as it drips down your chin because you don’t want to miss a drop, and at the same time all the nerve endings in your body are doing a little dance, while you close your eyes and say “Oh My God,” because that peach is perfect. Eat a peach like this–one that has gold near the stem because it has been left on the tree long enough to receive all the sugar that the water, sun, and soil can provide. A peach like this is not a hard, green around the stem, crunchy product, picked too early, placed in a box for cold storage, and later to be shipped. Eat a seasonal peach like this, and there’s no turning back. There is no factory-farmed product that comes close to it. It is no wonder that we are seeing a rise of obesity and diabetes in children as they are being raised on sugary junk food and soda, rarely having tasted real food, and how good and satisfying it can be.

Years ago I listened to a corporate scientist/chef speak about injecting grapes with carbon dioxide in order to make them more appealing to kids. As I listened, I couldn’t help but think, “Aren’t grapes perfect just as they are now?”

Our senses, sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing, are barraged with products–agri-business factory farm products–designed to appear as being good, safe, and healthy. If we would take the time to think for ourselves, to ask questions, and to “look under the hood,” we would find that what we are being “fed” by agri-business and PR campaigns, is not what it appears to be, but is a by-product of corporate “snake oil,” and not real food at all.

Filed Under: Thoughts Tagged With: real food, thoughts

18 Thoughts on Real Food
    Holly
    19 Feb 2019
     6:24am

    Right On!

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:19am

      Thanks, Holly!

      Reply
    Paul Ericksen
    19 Feb 2019
     6:24am

    Kate, I am so glad you published this. I wouldn’t be surprised if the link gets passed on and on and on giving it wide circulation.

    May include the link in my Industry Week presentation, i.e. where I talk about the difference in taste of tomatoes that come from Family Farms and Industrial Farms and compare it to the what happens when Family (or otherwise privately held) Manufacturing Firms are replaced by Holding Companies?

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:21am

      Paul- I would be honored if it were to be included in your Industry Week presentation. Thank you! Kate

      Reply
    Susan Claire
    19 Feb 2019
     6:50am

    This is why I have fruit trees, berry vines, a summer garden-I grew up with produce that was delicious and healthy, and now I must grow it myself. I feel sorry for the generations who have no idea what things should taste like. Your description of a summer peach is spot on-nothing like fruit straight from the tree!

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:22am

      Real food, clean water, clear air…I believe that these are things that should matter to all of us.

      Reply
    SandyF
    19 Feb 2019
     7:50am

    I just started a subscription to a weekly delivery of “imperfect produce”. Not too impressed so far-as I struggle with the fact that they still have to truck it and delivery it-using more resources. But it is a good concept-so I will give it a look for awhile. I still prefer my weekly farmers market. Eat what is in season and available, my family were all in produce-my Dad and Grandfather were produce brokers, my Great Grandfather a produce grower and shipper. The days of running up and down the LA Wholesale Produce Market, the big rigs picking up lugs of fresh produce, getting samples from the brokers, watching the bidding between the brokers. The art of fruit labels, the vacation time only around the fruit seasons. I was so lucky to grow up around this. I have to have fresh produce-and celebrate the seasons.

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:24am

      Yes, you were lucky, Sandy! Have you ever thought about writing about it?

      Reply
    Rick and Annemarie Worrall
    19 Feb 2019
     8:21am

    Thank you Kate!
    I think it is our job as elders to shout this from the hill tops.
    We are the last of the real food eaters.
    Parts of our world has changed and not for the better.
    It is amazing what we let the food industry get away with.
    I hope enough of us will demand some of the food standards that are in Europe.
    Complete disclosure on food content and food education for our grandchildren.
    Best regards

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:26am

      Thanks Rick and Annemarie. I believe it is, too. I’m rarely “political” in my posts, but real food, clean water, and clean air is something that we must reclaim, and it will take all of us to make that happen.

      Reply
    Patricia
    19 Feb 2019
     8:24am

    I could not agree more! My father had the soul of the farmers you described. One of my fondest memories of growing up back in the 50’s and 60’s was enjoying the bounty of my fathers gardening. He had planted fruit and nut trees all around the edges of the quarter acre lot our house had been built on, with rows and rows of built up soil in which he planted all the annual veggie crops – from onions, tomatoes, radishes, corn, squash, spinach, along with rows of strawberries. He grew potatoes in 50 gallon cans! Mum was an amazing cook and we had what I remember as delucious meals.
    A different time then, and your writing here allowed me the opportunity to remember all that and be eternally grateful for their care and education.
    Thankyou.
    A return to the soil has been one of my greatest pleasures in retirement.

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       8:28am

      You are lucky that you had that modeled for you. A return to the soil is imperative for our survival.

      Reply
    Stevie Cooley
    19 Feb 2019
     9:58am

    My family lived in a big city, but my father would visit a farmer friend and they would fish together on his lake. More often that not, returning home my father would bring a bag of fresh vegetables from the farm. I can still almost taste the absolutely delicious asparagus, and I can picture my mother eating a tomato for a snack just like an apple. And the beautiful colors! So little like that nowadays.

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       9:59am

      My hope is that we can bring back more than our nostalgic images. Thanks for checking in, Stevie.

      Reply
    Dana Dantzler
    19 Feb 2019
     2:29pm

    This is wonderful, thank you. It’s so simple yet made so complicated. It gives me hope when I remember that food future is in my hands (and everyones) – with a small herb growing next to the house, a bouquet of something fragrant for the bees and other insects that so desperately need to be remembered. I can take the step to better the world around me. I can vote with my dollars at farmers markets and stores. Small steps become giant leaps when taken together.

    Reply
      Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
      19 Feb 2019
       2:31pm

      “Small steps become giant leaps when taken together.” Well said, Dana!

      Reply
        omma
        20 Feb 2019
         2:02pm

        Amen!! We of the generations who were blessed with real food in our growing up and retain those pleasurable times through support of farmers markets and backyard gardens – salute you! Our most important function now is to educate the grandchildren.

        Reply
          Kate McDermott-Art of the Pie
          20 Feb 2019
           4:26pm

          Yes it is!

          Reply

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