by Carl Johns, LMT, Mountain Medicine Integrative Wellness Center
“The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day.
Every one of them has the potential to change the world.”
—Michael Pollan
I was born into the mid-20th century revolution of fast, convenient food that people of the time were caught up in and did not question.
My first awareness of food as a potential health hazard was in the early ‘90s around GMOs, which I started to avoid after reading Jeffrey Smith’s Seeds of Deception. Over the next few years, I moved away from fast food and started loving good food from many cultures — but still was not truly aware of all the details of the highly processed ingredients that went into the food I was eating.
Then came Gina, my wife, my love and my partner in everything food. This took me away from a world of eating out into a world of cooking in. Gina is half Japanese, half Sicilian and is steeped in the food culture from both places.
Her mom, born in early 20th century Tokyo, understood real food, real ingredients and always advised Gina to pay now for good ingredients rather than pay the health care system later for poor health. She could not have been more right.
Weston A. Price was an early 20th century dentist who traveled the world researching the health of people who ate traditional diets. No matter what the traditional diet was, he found these people to be in exceptionally good health.
When he returned to these places after they had been exposed to industrialized food, he found deteriorating health within one generation.
A traditional diet consists of meats, grains, fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables from the local region; fresh and unprocessed. This is farm-to-table — local, real food.
The chemical farming and manufactured food industry is the No. 1 thing destroying our planet. According to Vandana Shiva, Indian scholar and environmental activist,
our soil is interacting with our atmosphere, and properly tended soil will pull countless giga-tons of carbon out of the atmosphere.
The answer is not eating less meat or more bugs, or this or that kind of fake hyper-processed chemical food substances. The answer is to do what Gina and I do every day. Pay attention to every ingredient that goes into your food, prepare it well and eat it with joy. Buon Appetito!