Hi Everyone,

For a long time, I’ve been concerned about Food Security, The Food Chain and the way that the role of Food seems to have been deliberately dismissed, as if Food is not something that is essential for everyone to consume, each and every day.

I wasn’t aware that a common theme was emerging as I began writing a series of eBooks that started with Levelling Level in early 2022, and has now spanned 8 or 9 different books, essays, and blogs.

Food is so much more than being about what it costs. Even though our culture expects and encourages us to think about Food that way.

However, Food isn’t all about Farms, Food Production and the Economy either. And I have been saddened as I have watched the growing issues surrounding UK Food Production and specifically the UK Farming industry. Not because I don’t agree that our Farmers need help. But because none of the issues surrounding Food are as they appear, but everyone continues to believe that treating them as if they are, is how all our Food-related problems will be solved.

The Food Chain should be at the centre of everything. And if we were treating the importance of what we eat in the way that we should be, the way that we live and the way that we experience life would be much better than what we are living through right now.

The Growing Food Crisis

Farmers, like many others with absolutely nothing to do with Food Production who will read this, are victims of a growing Food crisis that many of us don’t even realise exists.

Everyone is being affected in different ways.

This growing Food crisis isn’t directly to do with Farmers Inheritance Tax, building on green belt land, covering productive agricultural land with solar farms, any one of the seemingly endless issues in the News causing upset, or anything you are likely to find from an internet search around foods, farms, climate change or the environment. Although it will certainly flag all sorts of stories that will be viewed by different people, differently.

These Food-related issues are all important in very specific or subjective ways.

But there is a much bigger issue at the heart of all of this that we need to consider carefully before any of the solutions that we can come up with can really work.

The real crisis about our Food and what we eat each and every day, is this:

We take Food for granted.

We take Food for granted. Not just in terms of the supply of our Food and the misplaced confidence we all seem to have that Food will always be there, on a supermarket shelf or ready to be delivered. But more significantly, because we rarely, if ever, give real thought or think consciously about what it is that we actually eat and what the ‘food’ we treat as being a normal part of our lives contains.

Yes, you may have immediately thought something like ‘It’s not that I don’t think about it. It’s just not worth it because what I eat is always about what it costs.’ And you certainly wouldn’t be alone if you did think this.

However, this and the many other thoughts and different perspectives that might be triggered by touching on this question certainly reveal or open the door to a rather uncomfortable truth: We have all allowed or just accepted that the food we consume is not as important to everyone as it should be.

The importance of The Food We Eat

Let’s be clear. Food is as important as the Air that we breathe and the Water that we drink.

Yet because the results of eating food that isn’t good for us aren’t in any way as immediate as they are if we breathe bad (or oxygen deficient) Air, or drink Water that is contaminated in some way, we really have become dangerously indifferent about the Foods that we eat.

Perhaps the easiest reason to be dismissive (or excuse not thinking consciously about our Food) is the idea that as long as we are not feeling hungry, nothing else matters when it comes to what we eat.

Yes, people do eat whatever food is available, that is accessible and fits with their lifestyle and think that if it has all been financially affordable, then as far as what they eat is concerned, that really is all there is to worry about.

We cannot and should not blame anyone for feeling that way. They are supposed to.

Regrettably, accepting the status quo and all the messaging that goes with it, without question can have and for some already has had life-changing consequences.

Mental health issues, physical health problems, obesity, compromised longevity and the many offshoots that shoot out in every direction of life are just the issues already affecting millions of lives because of the Food that we eat. And that’s before we begin to consider what our relationship with Food should really be because of the impact that it has or will have in so many other ways across our lives too.

Changing Minds Changes Lives

The importance of the Food we eat is something that we all have in common – whether we like it or not.

Once politics, idealism, religion, profiteering and other agendas and self-serving ideas are removed from the Food Chain, We are all the same. We all have the same essential needs.

We are all human beings with the same need to consume Foods at every mealtime that are genuinely good for us.

Eating properly and eating well should be normal for all of us. Just as it once was, before an endless list of apparently compelling reasons began to grow, peddling what sound like compelling stories like the one that says, ‘Good Food is too expensive to eat’.

The reason stories like these become the accepted truth is because Good Food being expensive to buy IS the experience that some people genuinely have. An apparent problem that someone else always seems happy to provide a solution to that only really benefits them in some way.

If the idea that we cannot afford good food, as opposed to the reality that we cannot afford the cost of not eating well in so many ways sounds conflicted to you, you are certainly not alone. And thinking differently about ALL of the Food that crosses our lips and that we consume at every mealtime really is the start of a Food Journey that has the ability to fix so many different things that aren’t working well for us today.

Please join me on the Foods We Can Trust Food Journey

I’m writing about this today, because I have just launched a new website and social media channels to begin a discussion, information sharing, signposting and awareness raising ‘Food Journey’ that I have called Foods We Can Trust.

Foods We Can Trust really should be a name that immediately speaks for itself – and it does.

But ‘Foods We Can Trust’ also triggers many different thoughts, feelings and suggestions that always being able to eat the right Food for us is no longer something that the world we live in today can enable us to do.

I’m about to begin posting about Foods We Can Trust, and I hope that as someone who eats Food every day, you will join me along the way.

If once you’ve visited www.foodswecantrust.org, you’ve had a look around and you feel there is something more you could share that might help others – even if its just a recipe for making a great meal out of Foods We Can Trust, or tips on how and when to Grow Your Own, please do get in touch.

Let’s all share this genuinely important Food Journey together, as it may give us an opportunity to help everyone else who values Foods We Can Trust too.

Best wishes and thank you for your support.

Adam

http://www.foodswecantrust.org