How can short blogs tackle deeply difficult issues regarding our food systems and our planet? I'll try by addressing some points in a sequential series.
Most everyone who is both thinking and eating has increasing concerns about our environmental health and food safety. The reasons for our concerns regarding our oceans are real, pressing, and in the category of inconvenient truths that are not going away. The concerns regarding food security, healthy food quality, and nutrition are all connected.
Recently I was asked for my thoughts on a current campaign being waged by a citizen/consumer-watch group, SumOfUs.org. The organization is calling out CVS for, as they state it, "putting our entire Antarctic marine ecosystem at risk" through the massive market stocking of krill oil in health supplements. You can check out the statement of science behind the Sumofus.org campaign under the title, "Vacuuming Antarctica for Krill: the Corporation's Plundering The Earth's Last Frontier".
CVS, according to one online report, is "hitting back" by referring to certifications their product sourcing received from a well-managed krill fishery under two seafood-based conservation entities "the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) to the Aker Bio-marine krill fishery, as well as another certification by Friend of the Sea".
This came to my attention as a friend asked me to weigh in on what is, or is not, "real about the (environmental) certifying groups". SumOfUs.org states that they are 'fighting for people over profits'; CVS is essentially saying, 'hey, I'm doing the right thing and have an MSC seal to prove it'. So...who's right?
Oh dear...Right is not really adequate, as the points involved take place within a much larger set of issues. The CVS product is a food supplement, part of an industry that has emerged in rather direct relationship to deep concerns regarding what levels of nutrition we are/are not getting in a "normal American diet".
That title of "normal American diet" has really snuck up on us over the past half century to become challenged on all fronts, and for good reason. It is as if we are just awakening to how utterly disconnected we are from the sources and, therefore qualitative information about the food we buy and eat. We eat too much red meat, and know rather little about how that meat is raised. We know this. We rely on convenience foods and beverages loaded with calories to fill us with substances that are often beyond our capacity to pronounce or understand. We know this. We find that the convenience products of our mainstream food industry have led us as a people down a path that leaves a vast percentage of us, and especially our children, with diabetes and obesity. The consequences of these chronic illnesses, directly attributable to our convenience food industries, are overweight citizens with overburdened healthcare demands breaking the back of our national health and economy.
While more of us seem aware of these issues, still we seem unable to do much about it, year after year, after year. These food corporations are big. Getting movement from them is tough. When you further track the linkages between food corporations, chemical corporations, pharmaceutical corporations, agribusiness, political policies, relentless marketing to children and families all seeking convenience food for fueling us in our busy worlds... well, it's really tough. And we've let this happen. We're complicit.
When we began to look for better ways of developing connections to the sources of popular convenience foods, there emerged expert agencies that stepped up to the task of making information connections for us. These were it seemed well-intended groups, either from citizen and consumer awareness side, the health sciences side, or the environmental side of these issues. The purpose of these various agencies was, and remains to provide access to data that will help us citizens, food consumers, with a greater depth of background, science, and other information pointed at telling us what we should buy by making it easier (read, again, more convenient) for people to make better food choices.
Many of us have learned to be circumspect of experts. We've learned the wisdom of 'following the money' of where these experts get their funding; or, what is their "business model". Following what and who supports any certifying or watchdog group is always good counsel.
Further, I find myself continually looking at these questions:
•What is the culture out of which the need for certifications comes?
•What is the intention for the solution set they provide?
•And, what are the cultural outcomes of these intentions?
If the culture of convenience-over-connectedness in our food chain is at least part of the problems we are faced with, I have come to have deep questions regarding the impulse to delegate to other parties what is good for us. I see increasingly reports demonstrating that our mainstream food industry profits directly from our purchases even as it is revealed that those same food corporations do not care about our health or the health of our planet's ecosystems. You know, where our food grows.
If a significant core of the problems we face comes out of a culture of conditioned disconnection from the sources our food, especially convenience foods; just how wise is it, then, for us to delegate our sense of what is 'good' for us and for our planet to a seal on a package out of, well, convenience?
Are we not going from one expert to another with the common driver being convenience? I know this line may seem rather tedious, however, it calls for some deeper questions. I'll continue to look deeper in this conundrum in my next blog.