Tonight I watched the film above, The Future of Food. You can watch the whole thing, for free, on Hulu. (Or here on my blog if you so chose) You can learn more about how corporations are trying to run [ruin] the food supply at The Future of Food website.
Another great movie covering more of the food supply is Food, Inc.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But in my lifetime I’ve witnessed major food related issues among so many people I know. Too many. For years I’ve heard about this stuff and thought– what a bunch of whacko’s. But the more you learn, the more those whacko’s make sense.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Kristen and I are making a serious commitment to change both the food we eat and the way we get it. Our hope is to reduce our food waste by 25% by composting, buy most of our vegetables and fruit locally buy belonging to a CSA and shopping at a farmers market, and planting our own organic garden. (see the pictures of our garden)
So far, we’ve kept those commitments. And it hasn’t been hard at all. We’ve enjoyed tons of our own fruit from the yard and last week we started an abundant harvest of fresh lettuce. Today, Paul and I went out and bought a few more veggies, so we have tomatoes, herbs, and jalepenos coming in the next couple months. (And our compost worms are hard at work 24 hours a day eating our food waste!)
Our next steps involve increasing the percentage of food we buy from local producers, working out a local free range source of meats and fish, and finding a local bakery who is committed to non-GMO grains.
Maybe this all sounds a bit nuts? The truth is, it’s a lot of fun! We love starting a garden. We love the discipline of spending less at the monster mega-supermarket. And we love seeing what sorts of crazy things appear in our CSA box each week. Even more crazy is that I don’t think its costing us any more money per month.
There’s something so enjoyable about developing a more intimate connection between what we eat and the people who produce it.
Oh faithful reader: What are steps you are taking to be more socially responsible about the food you eat?
One of our family goals this year was to make some changes to how we consumed the world’s resources. Some of it is a desire to live more simply and some of it is just a realization that the stuff our little family does, when added up with millions of other families, really impacts our planet. So while we’ve been at it for a month, this is the first time I’ve talked about it on the blog. Simply put, I wanted to make sure we were actually doing stuff before I said we were going to be doing stuff!
Here are a few things we’re doing so far this year:
3 weekends ago we planted a little garden. We know it’ll take a couple seasons to truly get it productive, but we wanted to get something going. As the seasons go on we plan on expanding the garden. We definitely have the space in the yard. We just need to build up the beds.
We joined a CSA to support locally grown, organic produce. We picked up our first box this week, this is big change in how we spend money on groceries.
We are installing a drip system for watering outdoor plants. San Diego is a coastal desert. That means that we only get a little bit of rain each year and watering plants in the garden is a big deal. This will help us waste less water as well as hopefully make the garden grow a little better. The people from Drip Depot have some sweet stuff, can’t wait to see how it works.
Get serious about waste! Kristen asked for, and got, a worm composting system for Christmas. While it isn’t a huge impact, we want to reduce our food waste that goes in the garbage by at least 25%. We’re also trying to be more conscious about buying things we can re-use and recycle.
Still rocking the trolley when I can. We’re in a bit of a funk with this because of my travel schedule and the weather. But I’m doing my best to eliminate the need for a second car (we only have one) by taking the trolley to and from work. We eliminate the need for a second car by keeping our work schedules flexible as well as being quick to rent a car when needed.
We’ve tossed around, but not acted on, some other ideas. More on this as the year goes on.
