My Food Route

A lifetime resident of Chicago, I was raised in an Italian American home by parents who loved to cook. My father grew up in a very poor immigrant family in which meat and cheese were considered a luxury. Perhaps that was why he was so insistent that every meal be centered around meat. On the weekends, he would plan elaborate dishes inspired by Julia Child that would take him all day to prepare.

My father’s life was taken by cancer when he was only 49, while his father lived until 92.

Like most people I know, I grew up never questioning the food choices I was raised on. But in 2009, what I began to learn completely transformed not just my thinking about food but, more important, my actions.

It took me completely by surprise to learn how much is at stake in the daily food choices we make. The standard American diet—rich in meat, dairy, and eggs and low in whole grains, legumes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables—is not only sending us to an early grave or forcing us to rely on drugs and surgeries but also is quickly depleting our land and water resources, causing mass extinctions of wildlife, hastening climate change, creating more pollution, increasing global poverty, and, of course, dooming billions of farm animals to factory farms and needless suffering. In short, it is destroying our habitat and the habitat of all other species. This makes the move to more sustainable food systems an urgent issue that governments and corporations all over the globe are grappling with. As with so many other things, we waited until a crisis emerged to finally work on solutions.

Movies such as Food Inc, Forks Over Knives, and Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home and books such as The China Study were wake-up calls for me. Peaceable Kingdom, for example, showed former ranchers whose families for generations had made an honest living from farming animals beginning to question the very assumptions and traditions that justify our use of animals for food in an age of factory farming. And their reflections led them to a profound life change: They abandoned farming and became farm animal protection advocates. A 180-degree turn. They chose a path that was, ultimately, consistent with their values of empathy and respect for the farm animals they knew in their hearts were no different than companion animals.

Looking back at my transformation, the most important insight I gained is that food is much more than something we eat. Food and the food choices we make have deep psychological and sociological roots. They are expressions of our moral and political views, our cultural and racial traditions, our exposure to media and marketing messages, our geographic and economic conditions, and our access to health information and education. Actress Natalie Portman, for example, in a recent interview with Michael Croland expressed her deep convictions about Judaism and how they influence her food choices: “The most important rule in Judaism is that you can break any rule in order to save a life. So, if life is the center of everything, then not taking life three times a day and making that decision is very important.”

The most common objections I hear are cynical—that a plant-based lifestyle is unrealistic and killing animals is not only our natural right as predators but is unavoidable. But this objection reveals what I think is at the core of the sustainability issue. To understand this, we must first abandon the impossible expectation of being perfect beings who do no harm. Next we must look at what evolution teaches us about ourselves: We are an incredibly adaptive species of omnivores that, with the right intentions, has great potential to create a more humane and healthy world. So the goal should be to reduce our impact, to do the most good and the least harm.

Zoe Weil, cofounder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, is the author of the Most Good, Least Harm (MOGO) principle. We use MOGO to make everyday decisions—a minor tweak to our normal behavior that can lead to great strides toward creating a more humane world for people and animals and protecting environment. In so doing, we become “solutionaries,” says Weil, proactively solving the world’s problems with each action we take in the process of carrying out our daily lives.

For affluent and emerging world populations, eating a diet rich in meat, dairy, and eggs is a status symbol. This is a truly tragic irony—a move away from a more sustainable and enlightened way of eating. Since food is no longer viewed as a means of sustenance or survival, eating has become an emotional reaction and food marketers and producers use psychology to appeal to our addiction triggers.

But we can choose not to be part of their experiment, and therein lies the three-step solution. The first big step is to see how this manipulation of our senses is happening. The next step is to see how it is negatively affecting people, animals, and our planet. And the third step is to adopt a big picture view of our food choices so that we can make decisions that have a positive impact we can feel good about.

At a much earlier time in my life I may have been impressed by the exotic ingredients, elaborate preparations, and complicated presentations that chefs such as Julia Child used. But today, my definition of a great cook and a great meal has evolved to reflect the needs and values of our times. Anyone can add a lot of butter or bacon to make something taste good. What we need now is a much more expansive view of food.

The true test of a great cook is how he or she can creatively deliver a meal that not only looks and tastes great but is also healthful and humane. Chef Tal Ronnen has eloquently expressed this vision in his cookbook, The Conscious Cook. This is a sign of things to come. As more of us embrace this vision, we are well on our way to celebrating food choices that not only please us but also contribute to a better world for all living things.

— Robert Grillo is an independent writer and marketing consultant and founder and editor of Free From Harm, www.freefromharm.org.

 

Do you have a point of view you’d like to share? Send a message to tdnkate@ptd.net.

back to top »