We all know that we are supposed to eat right and exercise everyday. But have you ever thought about what effects whether you do these simple things or not? We are all a reflection of our most immediate food environments. That is to say that all health is local.
When it comes to food, it is important to understand what a food environment is. According the to the European Public Health Alliance, Food environments are a combination of the ‘spaces’ in which people make decisions about food, and the foods and drinks that are made available, accessible, affordable and desirable in those spaces. And food environments have the most immediate influence on our health. Whether it is home, school, the office, cafeteria or the local grocery store this access to food dictates the majority of what we eat.
In the home I grew up in, there was always plenty of healthy, nutritious food available. We brought our lunches to school and although we bought quite a bit of food from the grocery store even with a garden in the backyard, there was an emphasis on eating healthy food options and this is what made it back into the house. We ate and tried new dishes throughout the month and ate together almost every evening. Most everything we ate was made from scratch with exception for our bread, including any desert type items served on occasion. This is not even close to the situation that we have going on in America any longer.
There has been a significant and nutritionally detrimental departure from how we used to eat in America. A 2017 report from the USDA Economic Research Service indicated that we now spend more food dollars outside the home than inside the home; 54% to be exact. In the 1940’s, we ate approximately ½ this amount outside the home. This one statistic really explains a lot. This means that we are essentially not in charge of what is being put in our bodies. Assuming that all individuals have access to the food we want, it’s not that we are not making conscious decisions about what to eat, but more that it is not possible to be aware of what we are putting in our bodies because of where our food dollars are being spent.
Many times people do not have access to the foods they want. In this case, the nutritional quality of what is available is perhaps even worse. As a practicing dietitian for 30 years, I have watched fad diets, food trends, and all sorts of hocus pocus around food and dieting come and go. Meanwhile, the foundation of our healthy food behaviors that keep us engaged with food and wanting to take care of ourselves holistically, has degraded very gradually over time. We eat out too much and it is affecting our health negatively and substantially.
As Ann Wigmore from the Natural Health Institute once said “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” If given a choice, which would you choose?
Our modern day food systems favors single bottom line agricultural food production which means high profit margins with little consideration for anything else. Efficiency is most important which leaves any health or environmental concern associated with food production or equity by the wayside. This goes on essentially unnoticed because we Americans are not in charge of our food any more. We have for all intents and purposes outsourced our food and our health to other people to manage. One would think that with all the modern agricultural as well as medical technology available to us, that we would in fact be the healthiest country on the planet but we are not. Not even close.
With this in mind, eating food has also become somewhat of a political act. Where we spend our food dollars so goes the support for that food system. It’s really that simple. If we buy a lot of processed food we support the industrialized and highly mechanized food system. If we buy local, regenerative we support local food systems. We support our neighbors. We support our people. The American consumer is the largest economic engine on the planet. And if we decide as consumers, to support local, regeneratively raised food the market will have no choice but to respond. We unfortunately get wrapped up in the new, trendy food items on the market that have diminished food values because they are cool rather than nutritious. And we outsource our health because of it.
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