Enough!

This post is an excerpt from the book “Food for Change: empowering everyday people to build nourishing, resilient food systems on a finite planet”

“What joy, though, there is in taking care of one’s health through diet….food may be the first link in a process that will gradually establish a true art of living, based on listening and respect for self, others, and life.”
Perrine & Charles Hervé-Gruyer. Miraculous Abundance. 2016.

I want to feel good from the inside out! I want to enjoy life!

One of my greatest pleasures in life is food. Food and eating done well give us the opportunity to feel pleasure and well-being every day while nourishing our bodies.

Eating a good meal, especially with family or friends, leaves me feeling nourished and satiated from the inside out. On the flip side, food is one of the most common sources of feeling uncomfortable in my body and mind and less than my best.

What’s the difference between the food that leaves me feeling nourished and satiated and the foods that leave me feeling less than great? Simply, it is the story behind the food and the systems from which food came. How and where that food was grown, how and where it was stored, processed, and sold.

Food is all about connections and relationships. The connection between we humans and the thousands of species in our microbiome. Our connection and relationship with the soil, water, seeds, plants, and animals. Being able to look at your meal and know where and how it was grown and made and by whom connects you in a deep and meaningful way. When I eat meals like this, I slow down and savour the taste and flavour of my food. I am filled with a sense of gratitude to the people and Earth’s living systems that have brought together that food.

My body and mind have told me for a long time that there is so much more to food than labels tell us. The smell, taste, and texture of food and my body’s response to that food point to the changes our food systems have undergone. These changes are something that we, as consumers, cannot see, but we can often taste and feel. A prime example is wheat flour, which has just one simple ingredient: ground wheat. I like to make my own bread, and I always have, but after a few days of eating homemade whole-wheat bread made with conventional flour, I get an uncomfortable feeling in my digestive tract, which was not always the case. The same recipe, made with organic flour, leaves me feeling just fine. The same recipe made with organically grown Red Fife wheat grain, one of Canada’s oldest wheat varieties, is delicious, flavourful, and leaves me feeling satiated. But frankly, experimenting with every ingredient of our food is not feasible.

Doesn’t this make you angry? That staple, supposedly healthy foods, can leave us feeling less than well. It makes me very angry because my food is making me! The food I eat largely determines my energy level, how well I feel, and my capacity to work, play, and have fun. But this is the world we live in, where food, particularly staple foods like grains and legumes, are seen and traded as commodities. And don’t even get me started on processed and ultra-processed foods.

We seem to be stuck in a reductionist, technological view that food can be broken down into its base components and remade without any consequences for our bodies and the wider world. This is the food system we live in now—a system that disconnects us from our food is highly consolidated and automated and prioritizes profit over the health and well-being of eaters, growers, and Earth’s living systems.

In fact, the true costs of the global food system are higher than their economic value and we are all paying the price on a societal and personal level. The costs come in the form of health issues such as diet-related diseases, health costs of chemical and pesticide use, water and air pollution, land degradation, reduced biodiversity, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The global food system is the single largest cause of chronic illness, malnutrition, and early death, producing enough calories for 14 billion people yet does not feed everyone. In fact, there are more poorly nourished people than ever, no matter their size and shape. Even in many of the wealthiest countries in the world, there are large numbers of people who are food insecure and poorly nourished, particularly in marginalized communities. This same system is the largest land user, freshwater user, cause of biodiversity loss in nature and domesticated species, greenhouse gas emitter, uses thirty percent of global energy, is disrupting the planetary nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and exposes us to large quantities of potentially toxic chemicals. In short, the global food system is damaging our lives as individuals and destroying our very foundation of life.

All too often, our health and well-being are seen as our own responsibility; the choices of what we eat are our own. Yet, we live in food and economic systems that want us to consume as much “value” added food as possible. Not only do these systems want us to consume, but they also push us to consume foods that trash our bodies and minds, resulting in feeling frustrated and less than our best. We feel that we have failed ourselves and our families. We feel ashamed of our bodies and our lack of self-control. We only rarely feel truly nourished. 

I don’t know about you, but I have had enough of this!

We need a systems transformation. This book is about how we, as individuals, can create food systems that are abundant, healthy, and resilient within the limits of the biosphere.

Every single one of us plays a role in our food systems every day. The fun part is that you can create a system in your image. There are so many ingredients and parts you can play depending on the things you enjoy, your skills, your cultural heritage, and the community, region, and climate where you live.

My own story

Who am I to guide you on this journey? Let me tell you a bit about my own life and journey.

I was very fortunate to grow up in a family and places with close ties to nature and our food, first in Canada, then the United Kingdom, and back again.

My mum, being extremely concerned about food and health, had a vegetable garden, sourced foods from local farmers and cooperatives, and taught vegetarian cooking at night school. Home cooking and baking were normal. Cookery classes were part of our school curriculum from age 9, and as we got older, my sister and I often planned and made family meals.

My dad, on the other hand, was a research scientist working on food manufacturing problems for a large transnational company. He worked on projects involving animal feed, fish fingers, frozen desserts, and low-fat spreads. My grandfathers lived in a city and also had food gardens. Living through a world war and many years of rationing meant gardening was a valuable skill. 

Living in a rural village meant connections to our food and farms were all around us. Agriculture was part of our schooling, with visits to local farms and agricultural shows. The secondary school I attended had a small farm. My sister and I even worked as pea pickers on a small farm for one harvest. It was backbreaking work, as we were paid by the amount we harvested.

As a family, we spent many holidays and weekends walking, camping, being in nature’s space, visiting historic sites and gardens, and attending artisan craft shows and demonstrations. In my family, artisans, crafts, traditional skills, and self-reliance were admired and valued. I took the close ties to the origins of our food and nature as normal and, at that time, did not feel any need to pursue a course or a life in that direction.

When my family moved from the United Kingdom to a city in Canada in my mid-teens, our ties to the source of our food were severed. As a family, we had to rediscover the sources of our food. Our food came increasingly from grocery stores and health food stores. We were no longer connected to the source of our food. Our family dog also had a hard time adjusting to the changes in food; she went from a reasonably natural food diet that included ground meats and organs that we got from the breeder to kibble.

I pursued mechanical engineering at university, and it was a rough road, but I did stick with it. By the last year of my undergraduate degree, my interest had shifted towards energy, ecology, and health. So, I took extra arts and science courses in environmental history and ecology. The history course opened my eyes to how peoples’ attitudes and worldviews affect the stewardship and value of Earth’s resources. The ecology course focused on nature’s cycles and systems and human interactions between them.

I was absolutely fascinated by some of the simple, low-technology solutions that improved human health, well-being, and ecological health. These ideas truly inspired me, and I could imagine a world where, using the best of traditional crafts and skills, simple technologies, combined with a dose of new technologies and energy sources, we humans could live high-quality lives while valuing and caring for Earth’s biosphere. 

With this dream, I pursued a master’s in Energy Conservation and the Environment in the United Kingdom. I loved this course because it tackled energy use, power generation, resource use, and pollution in an integrated way. My thesis topic started with energy use related to vegetarian diets, and for a brief few weeks, food, energy, and the environment collided on a personal and professional basis. For various reasons, including my employment prospects in Canada, I switched to a project on the effects of plants on internal building climates, for example, cooling, light, and humidity. My model was based on a tree called the ficus benjamina (weeping fig), which is commonly kept as a houseplant.  

After graduating, I got a job at a rural manufacturing facility, where I worked in plant (as in facilities) engineering and later became an environmental manager. What was particularly interesting about this facility was that except for electricity, natural gas, phone, and municipal roads, all the other services we take for granted, like water, sewer, firefighting, and waste disposal, were done on-site. The facility had its own water wells for drinking water; the process water and fire-tower water were piped in from a surface mine across the road, a process wastewater facility, a sewage treatment plant for human waste, and a licensed waste disposal site (landfill).

When you work at an industrial facility like this, you quickly learn at a core level, that there is no away. Most waste treatment processes transform pollutants from one form to another and release them into the environment. As this facility was adjacent to farmland, all the air emissions and any discharges from the wastewater and waste disposal site could end up in our food. The creek that the wastewater discharged into became cattle drinking water downstream.

I worked at that manufacturing plant for over seven years, during which time I learned many life lessons and earned a doctorate that I completed part-time. I left because I wanted a new adventure; I wanted to be outdoors, so I hit the road and started working in highway and bridge construction.

During this period, I bought a version of my dream home, a log house surrounded by the woods. Living at this location meant learning new skills like splitting and stacking firewood, doing basic home repairs, and being prepared for power outages. I even started a garden.

After just a few years of working on highway and bridge contracts, I started to remember what I was passionate about—the health of Earth’s biosphere. I wanted to find work that mattered to me. Still, I loved living in a rural area, and remote work was not favourable to most companies, particularly engineering companies, at the time. So, I stayed working in construction by day and pursued my love of health and fitness, energy, and the environment by night. 

It was around 2008 that I started taking a much deeper interest in food from a planetary health and biosphere point of view. I had acquired some certifications through the Association of Energy Engineers in sustainable development and carbon reduction, but the solutions and approaches were not new; they were primarily technical solutions. I was starting to see how many of our planetary health challenges were more than technical and that the current approaches were not working, nor were they likely to work.

At that time, I was working as a structure construction inspector. The project I was involved in meant I spent many hours sitting in my car, watching construction crews work, checking specifications, and filling in diaries while listening to the radio. I heard an interview with David R. Montgomery about his 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. I was fascinated and promptly bought a copy of the book. The book was about soil erosion through the ages, cultural and natural history, and how our future rests on our soil. But what got my attention was the connections between soil health and agricultural systems, land, energy, and resource use. I read an article by James Lovelock, a well-known earth scientist, about biochar and how the process that made biochar could generate electricity, improve soil, and mitigate climate change. I started to make the connections between my long-term interest in food as a source of human health and well-being and my professional interest in energy and environmental issues.

I started reading more and more books and articles written by unconventional and outspoken farmers and activists about growing methods that improved soil health, allowed animals to engage in their natural behaviours, and produced highly nutritious food. I was excited about the possibilities, but I was also frustrated. I am not a farmer; I was not even a very good gardener. The other problem was that I could not buy this type of food at any grocery store or health food store where I lived. I had no access to the foods I really wanted to eat. The farmer’s markets in local communities were all on weekday mornings when I was at work. The best I could do then was to pick up some of the types of food I wanted when I visited food festivals or family members who had better access to these types of foods. I did not wish to be a consumer of the commodity-based foods that the grocery stores had.

Over time, I gradually discovered different places to source my food. A local gourmet store had delicious, seasonal foods from more local farms. A farmer on my road made delicious maple syrup. The health food store in the next town had many organically grown grains, seeds, nuts, and legumes. Once a year, I would visit a cranberry festival to stock up on local cranberries and wine for the year. I started getting meat and honey directly from local farmers. My work locations moved around regularly, so I would make a point of finding out what was available where I was working. I also started improving my gardening skills and expanded my food gardens. I was beginning to really engage in my food while building connections and relationships. But I did not feel like I was impacting planetary health, just my health and well-being.

A major breakthrough came for me at the end of 2012 when I took a graduate course in life cycle assessment and sustainable supply chains. As part of this course, we calculated our ecological footprints using a simple life cycle assessment method. We also did a project where we did a detailed comparison between two similar products. First of all, at that time, my ecological and particularly carbon footprint was relatively balanced between my home, my transportation, and my food footprint (when I took into account my dogs). But the food footprint was the highest.

I did my project on two nutritionally similar but different foods. The two products had very different stories. In effect, the whole system and ethos of the systems were different. One was part of the industrial system, and the other was a local family business that was run from their home in a very frugal way. When it came to the end product, the local business gave a better-tasting, longer-lasting product with a significantly lower ecological footprint. This was a big aha moment; when you change the system behind the food and match your foods to local conditions, you can make giant leaps in ecological footprints while producing fresher and better-tasting food. This project started giving me ideas about how the actions of individuals and small businesses can create meaningful change. I started dreaming about working to transform our food systems for the benefit of human and planetary health and well-being.

Since then, despite many twists and turns, my constant has been my continual learning, engagement, and practice around systems thinking, food, and food systems. These learning and engagement experiences have enriched my life and my entire food adventure!

The most fun parts of this have been the hands-on, skill-building projects. A few of these are described below.

• I transformed the greenspace around my house into food gardens, planting fruit trees, shrubs, herbs, and vegetables. I have found many places to grow food, such as my driveway, fences, and walls. Each year, I learn and experiment more with growing an increasing variety of foods.
• I have been learning how to prepare and eat some of the diverse foods I have grown. Growing or buying different foods is fine, but how they taste depends on how you prepare them.
• My concern for my dogs’ health and ecological footprint took my food sourcing and growing to the next level. With the help of some pet nutrition software, they now eat a diverse diet. Their diet includes a lot of fruit and vegetables, some grains, eggs, legumes, organ meats from local farms, and home-grown turkey. They are also very good at harvesting some types of food for themselves.
• I became certified as a personal trainer specialist with Canfitpro and have focused my continuing education on nutrition and health-related topics.
• I have laying hens that provide eggs for my dogs and me to eat. The hens also help to break down and compost garden waste, leaves, and bedding materials while adding manure, which feeds my garden.
• I have gotten to know my local and not-so-local foodscapes much better so that I can source the foods I want, including organic grains. It is incredible what you can find where you live when you start looking and talking to people.
• I built a turkey and chicken house inside my garage with a seasonal outdoor removable pen. The pen is used to raise a small flock of turkeys and chickens for meat and, in the winter, is used for storage. Turkeys are lovely, if challenging, birds to raise; they have so much character.
• I hosted an online summit called The Regenerative Food Summit, where I interviewed some inspiring people working and sharing their skills in building food systems, food sovereignty, ethnobotany, fermenting, butchering, permaculture, and foraging.

Throughout this journey, it has become clear that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We all have unique bodies with different cultures and histories, lifestyles and locations, and access to resources. This is why I have developed and tested an approach, a visual framework, and a set of strategies. Using a visual framework and a set of strategies has made taking action so much easier. 

When I started, I did not expect food to become a never-ending source of discovery, engagement, connection, and nourishment on a mental and physical level. That food would help me meet and engage with so many different people. That food would help me feel that I was living within my core values and positively impacting this world.

I want to share my approach, strategies, and model with you so that you can experience joy, connection, adventure, and nourishment from the inside out.

If you have had enough of just being a consumer and want to create a food system that nourishes our bodies and minds and connects us to one another and the Earth, then read on.

If you have had enough of living in a world of outdated worldviews and flawed strategies around food and planetary health, then read on.

If you want to go back to first principles and learn the basis of my approach, model, and strategies, then read on.

This book is structured like preparing for and going on a trip:

• We start with a big-picture vision of where we want to go (our destination)
• Take a good look at where we are now; this helps to define our path (starting point)
• Figure out the essential attributes, characteristics, and feelings we want to fulfill (details of destination)
• Identify the constraints, boundaries, and limits
• Look for examples of what already exists or has been done before to speed our journey (look for models and pathways)
• Get more specific in our vision, attach it to our own lives (helps define action)
• Take action to create our vision.

If you would like to join me, let’s get started!