Friday, October 13, 2006

Eating Simply

One thing I've noticed wth regard to trying to live simply is how much of my thought and practice of simple living revolves around food. For other things I consume, there are few choices. For travel, I can only go on foot, by bike or public transport (I don't know how to drive in any case). For clothes, I generally try to get as much as possible second hand and avoid cheap clothes from chain stores. Books, I try to always buy second hand too. I've gotten my electricity switched over to eco-friendly sources and am working on getting my house better insulated and energy efficient. All of these things are relatively easy and actually cost less than the full-fat alternatives.

Food, however, is a different matter. I reckon I spend more on food than I ever have before. Granted I have been a veggie for many years and so spent less on food than full-blown carnivores but my insistence on trying to eat organic, avoiding supermarkets and processed food is costing more. But that is as it should be. We should spend more on food. Especially in the UK, we care in general less about the quality of our food than in continental Europe. Consequently we have the highest obesity rate in Europe. In some towns in Northern England one third of adults are obese and overall the figure is one quarter. We could be looking in the coming decades at the first decrease in life expentancy in 200 years!

Changing peoples attitude to food I think would go a long way to creating a shift in other areas that we need to make if we are going to survive global warming and alleviate global poverty. The topic of food impacts in so many ways: personal and public health, the environment, animal rights, social justice. Even without adopting a vegan diet as (arguably) an optimum diet for healthy and ethical living people should at least care about the quality of the food they eat. Factory-farmed food is poor-quality food. Convenience ready-meals are also generally made from poor-quality ingredients. Processed food stuffs are generally not made from the best ingredients - or why would you need to process them?

Cookery programmes are common fare on our TVs but it is usually mostly just gastro-porn - like consumers of pornography, people who watch it just like watching it but rarely get to do it for real themselves. Maybe one of these campaigning celebrity cooks like Jamie Oliver or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall should take up the cause of the horrendous eating habits we indulge in and the terrible consequences for it. Not many supermarket product spin-offs though in that.

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