Where Is Your Food From? And Where Is It Going?
Knowing where your food comes from sounds like a simple concept. You go to the store and buy things to eat. People who grow and make food, sell the food to the store. Right? But do you really know where your chicken eggs come from? Do you know if they were washed in bleach water before being placed in the egg carton? Do you know how many days ago they were laid? We use eggs for lots of things, not just breakfast, scrambled or fried, but in pancakes, cakes and cookies, cornbread, lasagna, fried rice, and probably lots of other things! We don’t really think about the egg when we cook or bake, because we just pull it out the fridge and use it.
I think about eggs a lot. I collect them every day! It’s the best farm chore. I am so grateful to be able to do this! We feed and water the chickens in the mornings when we let them out of their coop. Later in the day, I bring whatever kitchen scraps we have for them, and check for eggs. I also pick them up and snuggle with them for a minutes because our sweet, goofy birds love to be held! And especially since they keep laying us eggs, I’ll happily trade them food, scraps, and hugs!
Best homestead chore
Now, our eggs sometimes have some chicken poop on them. That’s normal. Those eggs we rinse off, in only water, and place them in the fridge. Washing the eggs removes the protective “bloom” encasement that the chickens naturally produce, and compromises the seal of the egg’s shell. Not quite like laminating an important document you want to protect, but along those lines. If there’s no poop, we leave them on the counter in an egg crate. The bloom keeps working to keep the egg sealed up and protected against any bacterial invaders. Eggs that you buy at the store are refrigerated to help preserve the egg in the compromised egg shell (because of the washing), but we don’t have to worry about that for our unwashed eggs!
We also don’t have to worry about bleach. When you mass-produce something, it makes sense to want to keep your operation as clean and sterile as possible. Unless, in my opinion, you’re talking about the food I’m to put into my body. I want living, nutrient dense food, full of healthful elements. Not a sterilized, dead something. I can understand why chicken egg operations would wash all of their eggs, rather than some, as a defensive, just in case position. It would also be easier from a systems aspect to wash all of them, or none of them. But I can’t wrap my mind around it being a good idea to add bleach to that wash, when thinking about what this might do to the supposedly edible egg within that compromised egg shell.
Unless the water isn’t being changed out much. If you’re running hundreds of eggs through the same poopy water, bleach would probably sound like a great idea.
But it might not sound like such a great idea as you go to crack open one of those store eggs and fry it up for your breakfast. At least you know it’s been sterilized…?
Did you know, that USDA-certified eggs on the store shelves couldn’t be sold in the UK, or anywhere in the EU, because of the washing with detergent mandate? And that because the UK doesn’t wash their eggs (to preserve the bloom and prove the chickens are well-treated in a clean environment), they couldn’t be sold here in the US?
And this is just the chicken egg example! We eat many, many more food items than just eggs! When you stop and think about food items produced at scale… it suddenly doesn’t sound too much like food. Think about how many sprays were applied, either to the crop itself, the harvested item, the packaging for the item, and all of the steps in between.
This affects us all
So much of our “food system” is commercialized. Shopping at the farmer’s market feels more like an outing or event, compared to running to the grocery store. Shopping for real food seems like a novelty, compared to the boxed, just add water options we might find in the middle aisles of the store. Because these sprays, chemicals, and other mystery ingredients are so pervasive, it’s an incredible undertaking to avoid consuming these “additives.”
In a recent article, Non-Food in Our Food, we talked about a staggering statistic: Americans, on average, consume 14 pounds of non-food additives, every year. 14 lbs of pesticides, dyes, preservatives, chemicals, etc. 14 POUNDS!
“Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests.”
Where is all of this coming from?
The use of chemicals in our agriculture system became commonplace after WWII. The military industrial complex needed a market for all that they had just engineered. Joel Salatin talks about this in his book Folks, This Ain’t Normal, and is so commonplace of factoid that Huff Post article from above doesn’t cite this reference. Seems crazy to think that we Americans became the literal consumer of these war materials… but decades later, it’s the norm!
Kind of explains why folks are so interested in organics these days, even if they are expensive. Might be worth the cost of avoiding exposure to some of these mystery ingredients.
However, because we don’t really know where our food is coming from, as in the farm where it was grown, or the bakery/cannery where it turned from raw ingredients into a packable item, or factory, to be more frank… we don’t realize how much exposure to different processes, chemicals, sprays, etc, our food “collects” along the way. We don’t think about what might be leaching from the plastic wrapping into our food. Everything comes that way, with the USDA stamp, so it must be fine… right?
Sure. One of the reasons our food is “fine” is because of the processing that’s required by the USDA to kill our food dead. See the example above about our eggs vs. Europe’s. These processes are deemed necessary because of how our food is shipped and transported: to increase shelf-life for the consumer. You know, to give us more chances to buy and eat the food.
Knowing is half the battle
Back to our food. Once you know where you food comes from, you are connected to the story. You understand the level of care and effort it takes to grow an enormous garden, let alone harvest, wash, prep, and put up the food for the rest of the year. Or, maybe you met the farmer who “grows” your eggs and milk, and you enjoy chatting with him or her for a few minutes every week when you pick up more goodies at the farm stand.
Isn’t it funny that once we find something that tastes sooo good, we want to share it with our friends and family? “Oh my gosh, this is amazing, have you tried it yet? You’ve got to try it, here, just have a little piece…” We rave about restaurants with a great dish for this same reason. We want to to share the joy of great food with the ones we love and care about, so that they might have some joy, too!
A good, quality meal is one of life’s greatest treasures. If you only procure good, quality ingredients for your home, then you’ll enjoy these ingredients as treasured meals! A big part of that joy, beyond great quality and taste, comes from knowing exactly how your food was grown, and where. Connection gives us greater meaning, whether it’s friends, family, a movement, or food!
The further removed we are from the source, the more esoteric the ideas become. Guatemalan coffee sounds great… but can you point to where on the map your beans came from, and trace them along their route to your coffee grinder? I’m not saying you don’t enjoy your coffee. I’m saying that having an appreciation for the family that grew them, and understanding how they got from A to B will change your level of appreciation. You might be inclined to order a few extra bags as Christmas gifts for your loved ones, especially if you know that the farmer grew too many beans, and has a surplus he’s looking to offload to avoid wasting any of his hard work. Kroger wouldn’t tell you this, even if the beans are labeled Fair Trade, Organic, and something about sustainably/responsibly/selectively sourced.
Where’s it been… and where it’s going…
Another funny thing happens once you’ve collected all of these amazing ingredients for you and your family/friends to enjoy, beyond wanting to share them. The more we appreciate something, the more we want to prevent it from going to waste, from being lost.
Thank goodness. There is an incredible amount of food waste across this great country of ours.
The EPA estimates 338 pounds of wasted food, per US household in 2018. Can you picture that? How many shopping carts does that equal? Or wheelbarrows? That weight is equal to 8.5 40# bags of dog food! That’s a trunk full!
66% of household food waste goes to the landfills.
15% is burned, and another 15% flushed down a drain for our water treatment systems to process.
Only 3% of our food waste is composted. 97% is trashed.
WHAT!
I grew up composting kitchen scraps. (Mom also built our home a small recycling center tower so we could haul recyclables to the collection site—long before curbside recycling collection existed!) We washed all the tin cans, removed the tops and bottoms, because there was no point in “recycling” if you didn’t—they’d throw the items away if they weren’t ready-to-recycle. We reduced and reused as much as we could. Leaves and grass clippings? Recycle! Hole in your jeans! Sew a patch! Fridge full of assorted containers with the week’s leftovers? Fend-for-yourself/leftover night!
My mom is the world’s best. There’s no debating that. I know this, and so therefore I don’t expect everyone to know what she taught as “normal.”
But it sure could be!! We control what we do in our households. We decide whether to compost the tops of our bell peppers when we chop them up, or whether we trash them. We decide whether we feed leftovers to our chickens, or if we compost them, or if we trash them.
Some of you might be saying… but I live in an apartment. Guess what. I had a composting tote, within a tote, on my apartment balcony. Some area park trees benefited from the composted material. (Not food scraps, I didn’t want to worry about someone claiming I was dumping!) It was a little odd/gross, but I felt better about it, so I did it!
We can make some choices with our dollars in to influence things beyond our homes, but our real power and influence is at home. The EPA estimates that in 2018, approximately 103 million tons of wasted food were generated in total, across our food system. That’s not a number I can convert to dog food bags and still comprehend. That’s a staggering statistic. And, to be honest, it makes my heart hurt wondering how hunger is still such an issue, here and abroad.
I doubt this has changed much since 1995
Waste not, want not
But that doesn’t slow them down from producing more and more food than we in America need.
In 2010, the US food supply had 4,000 calories a day available for each person, according to this fact sheet compiled by the University of Michigan (that might blow your mind).
Call me crazy, but it looks like our food’s “mystery ingredients” are so we can be sold more food, and thus more mystery ingredients. Despite the efforts to sell us more and more… Spoiler alert: (no pun intended) this “food” system has a lot of waste.
Not only does it possibly lay waste to our health (those mystery ingredients are chemicals after all), and our wallets trying to remedy our health… but this “food” system is very inefficient. We spend 10 calories of energy to create 1 calorie of food. That Michigan sheet said 13:1, making the math even worse!
Why is this number so high? Did you know, on average, your food travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, according to The Natural Resources Defense Council, as cited by many organizations, even by BuzzFeed.
One study calculated that if we stopped wasting our food, we could save 2% of the US’s total energy consumption in one year. Sounds small, until you convert that to barrels of oil. That’s about 350 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL. That we trash. From excess or spoiled food stuffs. Every year.
I am a very frugal person. I’d rather not spend money, and I hate to see things go to waste. The opportunity cost alone gives me FOMO—I might be able to put that $$ to better use in the future, but if I spend it today, it’s gone forever! But to see this very preventable waste… knowing 1 in 8 Americans struggle to put food on the table… (before COVID-19—I’m sure this is only exacerbated now!) We know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. Thankfully we’ve made choices and opportunities to climb out of that way of life. The frugal skills of limiting waste and reusing things where can still serves us very well as we grow on our campFIRE journey.
Crazy idea
For your CampFIRE Crazies out there… let’s try this wild idea on for size. Let’s investigate where our food comes from, and see if we can find locally sourced options. Let’s see if we can connect with the nutrients that sustain our bodies via the food we eat. Let’s see if we can enjoy all of our food, and reduce our waste. And if we do have waste, let’s see if we can compost it, or donate the food scraps to someone with chickens or a compost bin. Chickens turn your scraps into eggs! Compost turns your scraps super soil! Hard to call this waste, from my perspective.
Let’s connect with our food. Let’s enjoy all of it. And let’s compost what we can.
For 2021, I’m going to weigh our food waste before I place it in the trash. The chickens get first dibs, and we’ll compost the rest if we can. I’ll post a monthly update on Instagram and our Facebook page. Who is willing to walk this walk with us? Let’s start practicing this, right now, to make appreciating our good food “normal.”
What if we actually did waste less food than average? Are you up for the challenge of eating all your leftovers? And composting what does spoil (if compostable)?
