Most of us eat blindly. On a late Tuesday night, sitting in our college apartments with “Girls” on the laptop and hunger pangs setting in, the majority of us are not looking to make a commentary on modern day commodity food culture.
Dinner comes down to “Where do you want to eat?” and the inevitable reply, “I dunno. Where do you?”
But times are changing.
Health food movements in recent years have already begun to increase transparency and force us to consider what makes up what we eat.
The fact is, most of us have no idea where the food on our plates actually comes from and how it was produced.
Many people are so far removed from the process of food production that they have little to no knowledge of the efforts required to harvest and transport these goods halfway around the world and into our shopping carts, much less the environmental and social implications. If you don’t know that a french fry comes from a tuber grown in the ground, it’s a good bet that the tons of fossil fuel it takes to produce, process and refrigerate those potatoes isn’t crossing your mind either.
The average food item on a supermarket shelf in this country has traveled farther than the average family goes on a yearly vacation. But it’s not just the travel time — there are a myriad of fundamental problems that come with our industrialized agricultural system.
The mechanization of farming has increased yields tremendously but not without a cost: The introduction of ecologically harmful synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and the use of monoculture and heavy irrigation has transformed farming into a corporate production system and has uprooted us from familiarity and contact with our food.
Many activists call for the scaling down of our agricultural system and an emphasis on locally sourced goods and services. Local food movements in Gainesville are aplenty and growing fast.
Many groups, such as Slow Food Gainesville, Grow Gainesville and Florida Organic Growers have dedicated followings and are represented every week at the downtown farmer’s market, along with local farms in the area, including Swallowtail Farm, and Kurtz and Sons Dairy.
Groups such as these are working tirelessly within the community to increase awareness and access to sustainable food. However, efforts pushing for a focus on local sources have yet to gain large-scale acceptance and support and are still somewhat marginalized movements.
Recently, I went to a graduation dinner of a friend held at the Jones B-side, an offshoot of the popular Eastside eatery that specializes in sustainable, locally grown food. An acquaintance of mine was loudly surveying the menu, announcing that “this organic crap” was garbage and that he was “going to Checkers after this to get some real food.”
The apathy of our generation is a serious problem. To blithely know nothing about the way the world works and, furthermore, to rally behind simply not caring, is an excuse to not take on responsibility for our own lives and the choices we make.
Local food is more than the caricature of a seminal (and hilarious) “Portlandia” episode. It calls into the forefront the integrity of our national agricultural system and the level of involvement we have in how our food is produced.
It would do us all good to start the thinking process and begin to confront the food on our plates.
It is “food,” not the dying-out cry of “YOLO,” which should become the buzzword of our generation.
Elena Thomas is a UF student. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
