Stay weird.

I recently read the book The Locavore's Handbook.  It was a great read, and in it was something that I loved so much, I had to bookmark it.  It was a fable that described the way I feel so well.

There was a town that had two wells.  One supplied the castle at the top of the hill; the other serviced the villagers below.  The village well became contaminated with something that made the villagers go mad.  They didn't realize they'd gone crazy, because everyone around them had too.  It seemed normal, since everyone was in the same condition.  Meanwhile, the king in the castle on the top of the hill was drinking water from his well, which was not contaminated.  One day he went down into the village to see his people and to accompany his chef on a shopping trip.  He thought it would be a fine way to connect with his constituency.

The villagers were insane because of the contaminated water they'd been drinking.  The king and his chef were sane because they'd been drinking from an uncontaminated well.  The villagers immediately noted, with alarm and concern, that their king was not acting like them.  There was something different about his behavior, something not right.  They considered whether it was possible to oust the king from his throne.

The king and his chef got thirsty on their shopping expedition.  They took a moment to stop at the village well for a refreshing drink.  Of course that well was contaminated and they immediately went crazy.

Seeing this, the villagers rejoiced and gave thanks that their king was once again 'normal.'"

I was raised with a mom who cared about food, so caring about food isn't a new concept to me.  But for a long time, I found those who focused so heavily on food to be weird.  I had a friend whose parents were raw foodists: people who consume food that isn't ever cooked above a certain temperature to preserve the maximum vitamins and nutrients.  It was the first I'd heard of such a thing and I thought it was really bizarre, but now I know there is an entire movement devoted to raw food.  I found the people who refused all processed or GMO foods to be pretty extreme, too.  Never in a million years did I think that one day, I'd buy into all the same literature as those folks.

But I have.  That day is now.  I've been researching food for years, but it wasn't until this past month that I decided to really research.  I've been reading every bit of information I can get my hands on.  And not to be biased, I've been reading all different types of literature, because as many who've studied food know, there are all sorts of conflicting opinions out there.

One thing that is for sure, undeniable, is the fact that by and large, we are a fat and sick country.  We rank number one in obesity.  We spend as much as $147 BILLION dollars on obesity in this country each year and we rank fiftieth in life expectancy.  A 2009 comparison study by WHO said the U.S. ranks 29th in infant mortality.  Almost two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese.  The childhood obesity rate has - get this - TRIPLED IN ONE GENERATION.  More children have asthma, allergies, ADD, ADHD, autism, type 1 and 2 diabetes and even formerly adult-onset diseases like cancer and heart disease.  Autoimmune disease rates are much higher now than they were a few decades ago.  Americans used to be taller, on average, than those from all other countries.  According to John Komplos, Ph.D., the leading expert in the field of anthropometric history, the average adult height attained by a population is a historical record of the overall nutrition of that population.  His research documented the height of almost a quarter of a million people from the 1700s to the present.  Americans were the tallest in the world until right after World War II.  Now, we're the same height as the men and women of the Czech Republic, a country that has been economically repressed and nutritionally deprived for hundreds of years, and shorter than many other populations (with more nutritionally sound diets than ours).

I feel like I'm knowledgable enough about food, the history of food and the current state of our food to made a broad, sweeping generalization.  Now generally I don't love broad, sweeping generalizations so please keep in mind that what I'm about to say is just that.  It's basically a paraphrase of all that has gone wrong to get us to the point we have currently found ourselves, and it leaves out a whole heck of a lot of details, which over the course of the next few months I'll probably continue to blabber on about here on the blog, but to make things short and sweet and easier to understand, here goes:

Quite awhile ago, it was decided that the food system should be made more efficient.  It wasn't a flawed idea.  After all, food is expensive (relatively) and lots of people go hungry.  Why not mass-produce it more cheaply to reach more people?  Rather than small family farms, we implemented factory farms that were able to churn out massive amounts of food by cutting corners, using chemicals and now, genetically modifying our plants and our animal feed.  We figured out that we could make our animals grow fatter faster by pumping them full of new food (food they have never eaten before and, interestingly enough, food they will never choose if given the option of grains or grass).  We figured out that we could pack lots and lots of animals tightly together to make even more meat.  Rather than have individual avenues by which to buy our food, like the butcher and the dairy farm and the baker, etc., we opted to put all the food together in one place: the grocery store.  And when that wasn't good enough, the big box chains.

Then, once we had accomplished all of that, we targeted the way in which we eat our food.  If we could make the production of our food that much "better" and more efficient, why not make preparing food more efficient, too?  And then came the packaged/processed foods.  Many were created to take advantage of the cheap, subsidized food like corn.  That's how high fructose corn syrup came to be.

The problem with all of this is that at its basic level, food was never meant to be mass-produced.  This is evidenced by the very fact that to mass produce our food, we have had to re-engineer our plants and animals.  We had to develop pesticides to combat the problem that is created when you plant one single crop in mass quantities.  If you've gardened, you've likely heard of companion planting: the idea that you plant complementary things together to naturally combat insects and disease.  We have had to genetically modify our foods, feed our livestock food they are not equipped to consume, inject them with hormones to grow more quickly and then with loads of antibiotics (80% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used on livestock) to combat all the disease that exists in the filthy environments in which we keep our livestock (to cut costs and mass-produce).  We have spent so much time and money coming up with "solutions" to all of the many problems that have arisen that one has to wonder why in the world we are still mass-producing our food.  It clearly wasn't ever meant to be.

Finally, to combat all of the problems that we experience because of the food we eat (because it is mass-produced), we have to spend millions of dollars on health care costs and take lots and lots of medicine.  And we are a sick, fat country getting sicker and fatter all the time.

I'll be staying weird.  If weird equates to a greater chance for health, I'm okay with that.  And I hope I can inspire you to be okay with that, too.  Maybe together, we can make the whole world weird.