I am a lifelong vegetarian. My parents were total hippies when I was born - my 23 year old midwife aunt delivered me at my parents house! Though I was vegetarian, I never had a particularly great diet. I ate a lot of junk, but since I maintained a vegetarian lifestyle for reasons other than health, I didn't really pay much attention to it. As I got older, I started to investigate a little bit more about what I was eating. Finding out that things I thought were vegetarian weren't necessarily so - cheese, sugar, etc. I got increasingly irritated by the fact that on a day-to-day basis, I really had no idea what I was putting in my mouth and body, and I came around to the idea that the easiest way to know for sure what I was eating was to make it myself form whole ingredients. Hence the switch to veganism. My diet is better now than it ever has been in my entire life, except maybe as a child when I wasn't responsible for feeding myself.
I should insert the caveat that I don't think the whole world needs to be vegan. I wholeheartedly support small farms and knowing your local farmer. If you are a member of a meat/dairy co-op or CSA and have visited the farm and know how they treat the animals and such, I applaud you and fully support your dietary habits. Veganism was the right choice for me and for my family and it takes a lot of work (compared to today's fast food culture). It's obviously not feasible for everyone, and I know most people are doing the best they can with what they've got.
The plain fact of the matter is that we can live this vegan/organic/mostly-whole-foods lifestyle because we are upper middle class. We have disposable income and much of it is spent on food. Food is our single biggest budgetary item behind our mortgage. I'm not kidding. I could write a dissertation on how food is a social justice issue. How for the first time in history, rich people are skinny and poor people are fat. How our food culture is killing us and our planet. And not as slowly as we think. I feel very strongly that we need more food activism, that we need a mechanism for social change regarding the way we think about food and the way we treat people who have limited access to food and proper nutrition. Fortunately, there are many people who are smarter and more experienced than me who have already started to speak up on these issues. Jamie Oliver is probably the most well known, since he had a reality show about it. His work is just the beginning, though. Another is Ann Cooper, who was (is?) the director of nutrition for school lunches for the Berkley Unified School District. Her talk at the TED conference was absolutely brilliant and eye opening. My absolute favorite line: "We are feeding our kids to death."
All this is leading up to an amazing video I watched today. It's the beginning of a documentary project on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and how unregulated they are in our food supply. How large corporations like Monsanto and Dow (Dupont) are slowly and silently gaining control of the world's food supply, and how that is a very dangerous thing. Last year, in fact, there was a supreme court decision that said that if Monsanto suspects that your crop has been cross-contaminated with their GMO seeds, they can come destroy your entire crop with herbicide. And what's worse, they bear no responsibility for controlling the cross-contamination. If a Monsanto seed truck drives past your field and accidentally has seed fall off and cross pollinate with your crop? Too bad. Your crop is toast with no required compensation from Monsanto. It's frightening and it's happening.
GMO Film Project Sizzler from Compeller Pictures on Vimeo.
So, while this blog isn't a food activism blog, this obliquely relates to parenting in general. There are so many aspects of being a good parent, and what and how you feed your kids has to be one of them.
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