Food for Freedom
I recently had a life changing interview by a friend for a book that she is working on. I agreed to meet with her to help her finish the last chapter, but little did I know it would also be a monumental day for me, and bring closure to some of the questions I have been stuck on for months. Its funny how the universe sends you things when you most need them. After we spoke for almost an hour, she asked me my last question- my view on how to bring back stability in government. Seeing this as a very loaded question, I just said the first thing that came to my mind, rather than dwell on forming an answer. Food. Food was my answer. We have become so completely disconnected to what we are putting into our bodies, and the choices we make with not only what we put on the fork, but also how we go about buying it. Half our food is dead before it even gets to the store, and I am not talking about the animals. Some of our food travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles before it even goes on the shelves. Dont get me wrong, I love bananas, I love pineapple, avocado is my favorite fruit, but when is the last time you stopped to think about its journey to your home? Ever thought about what it has been through? What the people have been through getting it into your mouth? Have we come so far out of alignment of our earth that we dont even see the importance of this all?
As I sat and the words flowed out of my mouth, I couldnt help but dig deep into what my spiritual practice has taught me. Awareness, not of just myself, but all that is around me, and all that goes inside me. I recently watched a video from 2015 that stated Americans were eating 1 million pounds of chicken an HOUR. I can only assume that number has risen in the past 5 years. What does that mean for us? What does that mean for our children? This is not a speech about going vegetarian, this is a speech about where are you putting your energy? Are you so focused on emissions, pipe lines, and polluted oceans, that you dont even realize half of this stuff could be resolved if you became more aware of our food? We send chicken to China to be butchered and sent back to us, because it is CHEAPER this way. We cannot even affordably keep up with demand here, we have to send in thousands of miles away. We have almost completely wiped out whole species of mammals in order to graze cattle. Farmers are shooting wolves that attack their cows. Guess where those expensive grassfed cows go? In your mouth. We fight for clean water to drink, but where does all the waste from factory farms go? You guessed it, in the water supply. You know we wouldnt need plastic bottles if our water was safer to drink. We wouldnt have a plastics issue if we werent a country of over consumption of processed foods. I mean, think about it. Where does most of the plastic in our water supplies come from? FOOD. Think of how much fuel, energy, and pollution food distribution takes. Sending chickens to China, shipping bananas from South America, soda factories creating, bottling, and sending out millions of product every day. Theres so much waste, it can make you head spin.
How do we fix it, how do we save ourselves? I cant even ask how do we save the earth anymore, mother nature could wipe us all out in a heart beat. Stop focusing on saving the planet, and start focusing on how to save yourself. If we all made more of a conscious effort to cut back on packaged foods, to eat more local, organic produce, to buy water purification systems, instead of plastic… We could fix so much that one day our waters will run clean, our grass will be cleaner, our bodies will be healthier, and mother nature may spare us all.
Anyone up for a challenge? Join me in making small changes. 100 small changes leads to one bug change.