I remember my first experience of culture shock. I had been living in a rural village in Malawi, where the only food available was that growing in your garden or strutting around the village.
When it was time for me to go home, I went to the capital city and entered a modern grocery store. Suddenly, there were pyramids of all kinds of fruits and vegetables, shrink-wrapped cuts of meat of every beast and aisles and aisles of every food imaginable. It was such a striking change that I needed to leave the store.
In Canada, this grocery store exists every day.
Most of us have never known it another way.
It seems food falls magically from the sky and onto our grocery shelves. We assume it will always be that way but, in fact, our food supply is quite precarious.
We forget that nature is nutrition’s invisible infrastructure.
Without a healthy environment, we cannot have healthy food.
For example, should we be promoting eating fish regularly, when fish stocks are in serious decline and there is legitimate concern about contaminants in their flesh?
Can our environment support eating plenty of fruits and vegetables without consideration of how they are grown, or the remarkable distance they travel?
Unfortunately, the price consumers pay for food – the biggest factor in most people’s food choice – does not reflect the true price of production.
So what food advice is both environmentally and nutritionally sound?
• Eat locally-produced foods whenever possible, organic if you can afford;
• Eat less meat, more beans and pulses;
• Eat less processed and packaged foods;
• Try grow your own food.
We eat every day, yet our food systems remain a mystery. Oil, water and soil quality, climate change, political uncertainty and rural decline are all factors that will change the food supply of our future.
It is important that we engage in this discussion and understand the relationship between food and our health, and the interconnections between our food systems and the environment.
-Serena Caner is a registered dietitian who works at Shuswap lake General Hospital.