Awareness of Foods We Can Trust is important Today, so that We can All Eat them Tomorrow

A Quick Note from Adam

Over recent months I have been migrating key works across from my Foods We Can Trust site, to share here on my main Blogsite.

The Importance of Foods We Can Trust Awareness is now joining the other FWCT and wider farming and food related works that I have published at www.adamtugwell.blog in July 2026, but was originally published on 28 April 2025.

As such some of the language and terms used may reflect that time rather than the time of republication.

Introduction

In recent days, I had a conversation about what Foods We Can Trust can actually mean to different people.

It’s important to recognise that what Foods We Can Trust are, is a subject that can mean different things everyone at first glance.

It does so, because we all think about Food in ways that can be very divisive. Depending on what role Food already plays for us, in our lives.

However, Food really shouldn’t ever be divisive. Because whatever may or may not be important to us when we think about the types of food we Eat and why we do or do not Eat them, we should all be able to make the choice of what We Eat at every mealtime from Foods We Can Trust.

Once we’ve got through all of the questions, objections and every other form of barrier that stop people from being able to choose every meal from Foods We Can Trust today, there are very good reasons why each of us should be thinking a lot more carefully and consciously about the Food we consume and why.

The Human Body is a brilliant, natural machine that can only work at its very best when we consume the right fuels and lubricants

Changing the way that we think about Food is the biggest question to answer, as we consider the Foods We Can Trust.

We take Food for granted in just about every conceivable way.

But perhaps the worst and potentially most harmful way we overlook what we are Eating, for us personally and as far as our bodies are concerned, is our failure to always consider the nutritional value and what the Food we consume contains, at the point that it enters our bodies.

Please don’t be under any illusion. We all do it – Because that’s how life currently works. And that’s a real problem for us all!

We don’t need to be doctors, scientists, nutritionists or dieticians to understand the basic principle or equation that tells us what we put into our bodies will have a direct effect on what we get out.

The Food we consume impacts us all in terms of our physical health, mental health, energy levels, wellbeing, hormonal balances, how we feel at any particular time and yes, the list goes on.

But most of us also take this for granted too. And most worryingly, we don’t really think about any of it until whatever we are eating too much or not enough of, shows up by affecting us personally, in some uncomfortable way.

Sadly, even then we may not feel able to do anything about it because of the relationship we have with Food.

Put enough Goodness in and a lot more Goodness usually Shines out

The Human Body is a miraculous biological machine.

It has all sorts of weird and wonderful mechanisms, chemical processes and even physical filtering systems, that can deal with small amounts of things which aren’t actually all that good for us.

However, small really does mean small, in terms of anything that the Human body needs and really doesn’t need to consume.

The amounts of anything within what we Eat that can make a difference, either positively or negatively can be ridiculously small. Even in terms of the amount of the good things that we require each day for our bodies to function at their very best.

So small amounts of anything that we consume regularly that isn’t good for us can soon start to become a problem over time, because the body cannot keep removing the things we don’t need and so it can build up, causing a cumulative effect.

The difficult thing for us to get our heads around is that consuming small amounts of the wrong things doesn’t appear to have any direct relationship with what we Eat. Because we rarely have immediate reactions to bad things at the same moment that we eat it, and we would all typically spit it out or would soon be sick when we do.

This indirect relationship means that we easily overlook foods and ingredients that aren’t good for us at the moment we eat them. Especially when there is some reason that makes those foods very appealing to eat – and perhaps addictive or habit forming when we put them in our mouths. Such as the way that they taste.

Masking

The appeal of the Foods that we typically eat today isn’t as simple as all it might seem. Because the companies that make massive profits out of ‘making’ or manufacturing foods that can do us harm when we repeatedly Eat them over a period of time, are only really able to do what they do by using and abusing the knowledge of how our bodies work.

Many of the Foods we eat today are actually designed and then manufactured to fool our bodies into believing that we are only eating things that are actually good for us.

So, when it comes to the taste of the Food we eat, ‘good’ is no guarantee that what we are eating is good for us and can actually mean that its very bad!

Masking is a process where Food or ingredients that are artificial, have been modified or processed in ways that will often mean they will become harmful to our bodies when we keep consuming them over a period of time, are hidden by adding other ingredients that quite literally confuse our bodies and ‘mask’ our taste receptors, so our bodies natural responses are confused and unable to respond to whatever the food we are eating really is.

If we eat more of anything than we need or try to eat anything that isn’t going to be good for us that is naturally produced, a healthy body will usually tell us that we should stop eating.

Narratives, Technology and Medicine

Regrettably, because we are living through and experiencing an age where so much is available to us at the press of a button, whilst we are at the receiving end of a constant flow of information suggesting there isn’t much that technology cannot fix, it is very easy to think about happiness and pleasure being all about the moment and the now

Many of us don’t believe there is any downside to what we eat and that the consequences – if any really exist – are something we can deal with whenever and if ever we have to, if and when that day comes. (And let’s face it – few of us see anything ‘bad’ hiding between the adverts, narratives and marketing we constantly receive…)

We also fall into the rather large trap of accepting that anything that comes to us through digital devices, through TV, Radio, adverts, sponsorship, influencers, big brands and public figures of any kind can automatically be trusted – whatever it might be.

The phrase ‘Beware of distant elephants’ is very appropriate when it comes to our relationship with Food and what we actually eat. Because when the problems do arrive – which for many they certainly will, those problems will arrive all at once and we will feel like we are being trampled by an elephant when we do.

The role of opposing beliefs in remembering the shared Importance of Food

Let’s get one controversial bit out of the way in terms of how we think about our ‘bodies’. Because the real distant elephant in the ‘what we are eating room’, is this:

What our bodies are, and what the systems of the Human Body can do, is very much at odds with what most of the Food that is accessible and affordable to everyone today already suggests and would make anyone think.

The Human Body isn’t designed or built to work well using the fuel that the Food Chain typically brings to us.

Modern Food Production processes cannot emulate, replace or meet the completely natural set of nutritional requirements that the Human Body has. No matter how good manufacturing processes and the addition of different artificial ingredients can make unhealthy Food taste.

Our bodies have not, will not and cannot evolve to run effectively as they should and thrive when we constantly consume the Foods that the Food Chain and those benefitting from every part of it today would like us to. No matter what the narratives and even the politicians might say.

Facing up to Bodily Realities

In terms of where the Human Body came from or how our bodies ‘evolved’, most of us believe in one of two ‘histories’.

The Human Body was either:

Divinely created, or
Evolved ‘naturally’

If our bodies were divinely created, we can be reasonably sure that whoever or whatever created them intended that we fuel them with the foods that are readily available to us. Whether they are grown, harvested or caught.

If our bodies evolved in a way that theories such as Darwinism would indicate could only have only taken place over a period of many thousands if not millions of years in time, we can be just as sure that the Human Body cannot and will not adapt to any kinds of Foods or ingredients that they haven’t been exposed to for pretty much the same period of time.

For anyone who sits outside of these two possible pathways of human history and believes that we are either in a hologram or something that our dreams have made, either or both of the above will almost certainly be just as true. Because they don’t need to be mutually exclusive, and either way, this life as we know it is the experience that we are living, and these two models are basically the software options that we have to choose from!

Wishful Thinking that gambles with our lives

No matter how much we might love the lifestyle and ‘opportunities’ we have today and can overlook everything that is going on around us in so many different ways, the body is the centre of everyone’s private universe.

If we don’t look after our body and give it the right fuels and lubricants, we will soon be required to focus on the reality that it’s the only one that we have got.

However, it’s just as important to recognise that eating well and eating simply – without all the processes and processing where all the money is there to be made, doesn’t sit well with the way that our culture and economies currently work.

Words can and are being used to convince us of anything we can be led to believe. If the stories and narratives they form will lead to profit, influence and control for the people who run everything.

Food is a key essential for daily life that we all need to have brought to us in the world as we know it, today.

So, controlling the processes and the ingredients that govern and support the Food Chain, so that they appear unavoidably difficult and uncontrollably expensive, is how people who need to eat regularly are increasingly being controlled and massive profits can also be made.

The Foods We Need

The Foods that our bodies need are not expensive. Or rather they wouldn’t be, IF we were growing them ourselves. Or they were being grown, harvested, produced and traditionally processed locally by small businesses and limited-sized supply chains, run and managed by people we know, who have very similar if not the same needs and ourselves.

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the Foods We Need are too expensive and therefore are increasingly impractical.

We have also been carefully guided or conditioned to believe that we need a much greater variety of Foods to choose from than we do.

To top all of that, we are also being led to believe that the creation and manufacturing of Food is something that normal people and small independent businesses such as farms, growers, bakers, butchers, fishers and fishmongers, and dairies can no longer efficiently do properly, or that any of us can do so in the quantities that the world now needs.

The fight over our Food and what we eat is therefore a fight over control. Because as long as we have control over what we eat and how we produce it, we also have control over our own lives.

Regrettably, if we do not refocus and place our shared need for Foods We Can Trust, right back at the centre of our lives, we will soon lose that control.

With it will go the ability to create the Foods that our bodies need to be healthy and to ensure that happy, healthy and good lives can be experienced and maintained.

Progress is not always linear

Before we finish discussing our own personal needs and requirements for Foods We Can Trust, it is important to begin the task of addressing the many reasons that will be given that suggest we can no longer expect to have open access to the Foods We Can Trust in the way that we always should have.

If you follow current affairs closely and have been watching the impact that the new Trump Presidency has had through Trade Tariffs, you may also be able to see that there is a much bigger problem beginning to surface with the way that the Global Economy works.

The funny thing is that the Global Economy and the way that economics affects everything – not least of all Food, has always been flawed.

But the problems that it has steadily been creating for decades have been hidden by the way that everything has worked.

The problem with addressing the real problem – and this is especially the case when it comes to how we grow and produce our Food, is that those with real influence over the Food Chain as we know it, don’t prioritise Food, and therefore all of us in the way that they should be doing.

Ask them for their opinion or view, and the only thing that you will get back is the suggestion that technological advances in production and efficiencies can only go forward. With the inherent suggestion that everything that we do with Food Production today or that we have already done is archaic and therefore should be treated as if it is already in the past.

Most sovereign states around the world were themselves Agricultural Economies for what were sometimes substantial epochs of Human History.

The Agricultural Age was no accident. Because Food and the need for Food was historically and rightly considered to be the centre of whatever we would now recognise as the equivalent of the economy therefore had Food Production right at its very heart.

There is nothing good about the way we are being taken in respect of our relationships with Food, simply because of the way that money, economics and finance are worshipped and revered by the ruling classes above all things. Not least of all because of the impact that the deference to money, influence and control is already having on our Food Security and Food Supply – even BEFORE we give any thought to the Foods We Can Trust.

Food Production and Farming are already heading in the wrong direction

Right now, the way that our Farming Industry produces Food isn’t generally good for us.

Many Farmers are reliant on chemicals, maintaining levels of production that are impossible to maintain, and the farming methods that the Food Chain requires inflicts a cost on soil and the environment which is genuinely real, but instead of being helpful to Foods We Can Trust, is absurdly playing into the hands and narratives of those who wish to end traditional farming in every sense.

Moving towards factory farming and Foods that are heavily synthesized and contain many processed and manufactured ingredients – not least of all so they seem tasty enough to eat, is not progress.

Becoming reliant upon heavily processed and artificially constructed Foods that contain a majority of ingredients that we wouldn’t choose to eat is the route to a very bad outcome for us all that is itself littered with health and degenerating living standards, where many people will suffer and fall along the way.

Genuine progress in Food Production, from where Food Production is today, will be to return to traditional forms of Farming and the localised economics that thrive around it.

This is how everything should and would be now, if there wasn’t any self-interest, greed or an obsession with money around.

Moving back towards more simplified methods of Food Production, where technology is used to improve, rather than take over what we do, isn’t going backwards for anyone. Unless you are one of those worried about losing control or how your future profits are going to be made.

On the basis of what we know and what anyone can see about Food Production, the Food Chain and the many things that stand in the way of universal access to Foods We Can Trust today, backwards is most definitely the new forwards.

For humanity and for all of us, this focus on Food Production is how real progress into our future will be made.

Adam’s Food and Farming Portfolio: A Guide to Books, Blogs and Solutions

The Importance of Foods We Can Trust Awareness 28Apr25 PDF_Vers2_10Jul26 Download

Fresh Food is the foundation of a happy, healthy and productive life. So why would anyone think humanity can survive by leaving the basic building blocks of good living behind?

There is nothing in life that everyone shares the same need for, whilst having such individual, specific or idiosyncratic approaches to, as food and what we eat.

Minded that to be healthy, we should all have access to at least 2 nutritious meals per day, it is amazing that so many of us think so little about the food that we eat. Where it comes from. What it consists of. And whether the food we are eating is actually benefiting or harming us, despite the fact that eating continues to be a socially shared activity, and what we put in our mouths is just as important as the air that we breathe.

The lack of interest or ‘taking food for granted’ of those who aren’t really thinking about the food that they eat, regrettably makes the issues that surround food and how it can be used to further the interests of those who are aware of that disconnect, very easy to exploit.

In times like those we are experiencing and with the very uncertain future that we currently have, this means we are quite literally in a situation where food cannot only be used to control us. Food can also be used as a way to hurt us both physically and emotionally, whilst Food Security and access to the supply of food is and can continue to become less safe, as it is progressively taken away from us as consumers and from the people who grow and produce it.

Food Complacency

On the face of it, too many of us are happy to accept the idea that if we have eaten and therefore, we are not hungry, it doesn’t matter what we actually eat.

Take that one step forward again. Many have an increasingly restricted choice about what they eat, because the priority of what they eat isn’t based on a decision between what might be on offer. It is based solely upon what the person or family can afford.

Whilst there are many who would happily debate the questions of whether food is a fundamental right or whether food is a public good, the fact is that we are only in a position where we can even have such a debate or that it is possible for these questions to exist, because there are other cultural, legal, ethical and many other manmade ‘rights’ that place some of us in a position where we can control what anyone or indeed any living thing on the planet can have access to.

Meanwhile, the questions that we should be asking but are not is whether it is right and proper within any part of Food Production and the supply chains around food, that any parts of it can or should be privately owned, and where they are, what those interests should allow them to do to food and how we access it.

The absence of ethics in profit-driven Food Production and Supply

Food is a basic requirement for life that we all share. Yet the processes, issues of ownership and what food can be used to achieve for anyone with the power to do so, have now become all that food is really about.

The entire food supply now revolves a global system that quickly moved way beyond improved methods for feeding larger numbers of people and became all about the money that can be made by those who are in control instead.

The creation of large food chains, where so little can be seen has meant that the real truths that have increasingly underpinned all parts of food production for so long can easily be hidden.

When so much of the food chain processes has been hidden and maximised for the profit that it can provide to vested interests, the next step for those who are driven by greed is to then manipulate and change the content of food so that every bit of profit that it contains from every ingredient that can be added, can then be exploited and profited from just the same.

Food in its most basic or natural forms is the healthiest for all of us that it is possible for it to be

Whilst basic processes such as milling, pasteurisation, cheesemaking, baking, hanging, smoking and all those things that are ancestors have been doing to store, preserve and create meals from basic, natural ingredients have done for centuries, it stands to reason that adding anything to food that isn’t readily available to us in some natural or hand-processed way, isn’t going to help anyone who eats it, because our digestion is designed to work naturally with foods that we eat in natural forms.

It’s an equation that doesn’t require us to understand science for us to make sense of. Because it really is common sense that we all eat food in its most basic or unadulterated forms.

The Taste Trap

Before reaching any conclusions, it’s also important to understand the role that sugar and salt, and more recently, anything that appears to improve the taste or feeling that we have from eating food that contains it has had, and the genuine take-away that we should be having from it.

It is thought that sugar was first recognised for its sweet properties around 8000 years ago. However, sugar didn’t come to Western attention until the time of The Crusades in the 11^th century, and even then was a luxury until at least the 16^th century when the first industrialised sugar processing began.

Although it ultimately comes from natural source, Sugar must be processed to be used in the way that we use it as a food ingredient and in the refined forms that we add it to drinks like coffee and tea.

Sugar in its modified or rather in its changed form is highly addictive. And if you understand the role that excess sugar plays in health-related conditions such as diabetes and obesity, it is also much easier to see the relationship that exists between eating any kind of food or ingredient that doesn’t resemble its original or natural form, and the impact that it can have on the human body.

The body is effectively tricked by unnatural ingredients and responds in what often end up being very destructive ways when those harmful ingredients are consumed regularly or in quantities that are simply too much for the very clever system that our bodies have to deal with.

In these modified forms, these artificial ingredients are no better than being a poison that becomes more and more dangerous in its cumulative forms.

In respect of the ingredients that are added to foods to enhance the taste and hide many other ingredients within processed foods and the UPFs that we wouldn’t otherwise consider eating, the line in the Savage Garden hit song ‘Affirmation’ – “junk food tastes so good, because it’s bad for you” is absolutely correct.

We are being conned into eating foods that we shouldn’t, so that those who make and sell them can continue to make a profit – with the true cost always being at the expense of our own health and wellbeing.

Whether we like it or not; whether we believe we have a choice of what we eat or not, as a nation, the UK is addicted to foods that are actually harming and, in some respects, killing us.

The people who are pushing us in this direction and want us to become even more reliant on manufactured food, rather than the fresh food that can only come from a local garden, field or farm, are very happy to exploit that addiction so that they can keep benefitting. Whilst the whole process is doing each of us and the whole of the UK more and more harm.

The Ethics of Food are about Taste all the same

The odd thing about taste is that it manifests as both a physical sensation and also in the way that we think. That’s how addictions generally work, after all.

So, when anyone becomes obsessed by a particular way of eating, because of the way that they think, the rules of addiction – and the need to force others to join us in that same addiction so that they can share that particular form of guilt, inevitably also play out, no matter how clever or compelling their arguments might be.

When people are at peace with their eating habits or indeed anything else that defines them as the person or the individual that they are, they will not experience any need to force their own approach into the lives of anyone else, no matter what the habits of those other people are, or indeed, what it might be that they eat.

It really shouldn’t matter what anyone else eats. The only thing that we should all be concerned with is that each and every one of us has access to natural, healthy and fresh food in an adequate quantity from which we can then exercise any health-related, ethical or other form of choice that doesn’t impact upon the choices of anyone else.

The Food Hangover is just one way we know that the food we eat isn’t good for us

Whilst few who drink alcohol would relate their drinking habits to being an addiction at any level, it is unlikely that anyone who has ever had more than a few sips and done so on a regular basis, hasn’t had a hangover at some point afterwards. Before they find themselves back in a place where they feel physically the same as they did previously.

Headaches, sickness, insomnia, feeling ‘groggy or lethargic’ or generally not feeling anything like ourselves, are typical post-alcohol reactions that we class as hangovers – because we have been drinking ethanol, which is a poison.

When we have been eating foods that are processed and are filled with many additives and manufactured ingredients, the results for any of us taking note, can be similar if not exactly the same.

Food that is natural or in forms that we can recognise in their original form when we eat them very rarely make us feel unwell. Unless we eat too much of them, or they haven’t been prepared in a way that removes any bacteria or anything else that can harm our bodies in some way.

The direction of UK Farming and Food Production is all about a greed-driven reliance upon manufactured food

It is at this point that it is time to recognise just how important the problem that UK Farmers are facing really is, for us all.

There isn’t some great conspiracy at work in the way that conspiracy theorists are increasingly presenting it.

However, there are people who for one reason or another have gained significant power and responsibility over the lives of others. They see it as being imperative that the whole world is changed so that everyone behaves in ways that they have decided that the world can sustain, which at the same time will coincidentally ensure that those same elites can continue making obscene profits, being quite literally ‘baked in’.

Everyone making money out of the masses eating manipulated ingredients that will cause increasing levels of health problems and in all probability lead to early deaths, isn’t worried about the nutritional value of the food that people eat.

The most important thing to all of them is ensuring that the masses can never make the argument that they are going hungry. In that way, no matter how bad the food may be for anyone, if its tasty and available, the elites will always remain in control.

Today, UK Farmers still have choices over what they grow and how they grow it. Even though many are tied into contracts that are ultimately controlled by a very small number of companies who control the food supply and whose longer-term profit-making interests will benefit if independent Farmers go out of business, so that they can control even more of the food supply.

Those with roles that are there to help, don’t help anyone at all

The useful idiots that we now have in government and running policy and services across the public sector don’t help matters at all.

Whilst very few can accept this truth at first glance, the reality is that decades of farm and food production related subsidies have only served to move more and more of the power that our Farmers and Food Producers once had towards the big companies that incentivise and control politicians.

Meanwhile, Agriculture has become more and more dependent upon the political lead. Whilst local infrastructure and everything that supports local and independent food production has been progressively destroyed, either legislatively or in direct physical form.

If we can accept this – and that’s by no means an easy thing to do, we can also then accept that UK Farming and Food Production needs to go in the completely opposite direction, embracing much more traditional methods of food production and returning Farms, Farming and Food Production so that they are providing everyone with the basic, natural, healthy, nutritious and fresh forms of foods that we all actually need.

For us all to have and benefit from this, means that Agriculture and growing food must be right at the heart of our communities once more.

Mindful eating

The battle to save natural food production in the UK (and in other areas of the world too), only exists today, because so many of us take for granted the lives that we have and the continued access to food and everything else that makes life seem so easy. All without being conscious of the real cost to us, or without recognising that we do have a choice.

Greedy profiteering companies only produce foods that can harm us on the scale that they do so, because we keep on buying and eating them, without ever giving any thought to anything that these companies and the people behind them are doing.

If we all began looking at the ingredients of foods and take note of where the food or where the ingredients actually come from, we would very quickly see the difference between ‘natural’ food that we can recognise because it usually resembles its original form, and everything else which doesn’t look like or resemble anything that we could recognise in nature.

This is a very quick and effective way of being able to tell if eating or drinking anything, is likely to end up harming us in some way.

Changing the way we eat is how we keep our freedom to be who we are

The harsh truth that we all need to face:

The control of food is power and the power behind food is a way that those dependent on someone else’s food supply be controlled.

Whilst the UK Farming and Food Producing communities now have a massive fight on their hands to regain control of their own destiny – not least of all within that community, the fact remains that we can all help change the direction of UK (and World) Food Production by changing the way that we approach the food that we eat.

By doing so, we will ultimately help ourselves.

The smallest steps are the biggest when it comes to change of this kind. And if we all start to do what we can to reject processed foods and UPFs wherever and in any way that we find them or that they come into our lives, the impact that we can collectively have upon the food chain and the way that food is produced would become meaningful in no time at all.

Changing the eating habits that we have is not easy for anyone. Not least of all, because our habits are the truth we have chosen to believe.

However, the truths that we believe about food today are not truths that we can call or should be prepared to accept as our own.

Good, healthy, nutritious, locally produced fresh food IS a public good and we all deserve to be able to access enough of it every day and at prices that we can all easily afford.

We can only make this possible if each and every one of us exercises what still remains of our freedom of choice to change the world for the better, one choice at a time.

Grow Your Own or ‘Home Growing’

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Foods We Can Trust: A Blueprint for Food Security and Community Resilience in the UK |Online Text

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