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Hi There!
Well, they tell me it's spring, but to look out the window at the grey, rainy day...again...as I sit here typing as I shiver in my winter sweater, I wonder.
All I can say is these April showers had best yield some slam-bang May flowers!
All kidding aside, I write this after just watching a brilliant video about what's wrong with the way we eat...and how our food choices are killing us and the planet. The speaker was Mark Bittman, food writer for the New York Times and self-proclaimed foodie. He had his own epiphany about food several years ago when he went through a health scare and was introduced to the concept of ‘lifestyle diseases.' Prior to his own crisis, he says he went happily along, eating unconsciously and not giving a thought to the impact his choices were making on his own health...and the planet.
Since then, his writing has become more Michael Pollan-esque, with the focus on eating more plants and less animal food; choosing organic and local when possible; choosing animal products that are produced naturally. In short, he has become an advocate for eating real food, not the junk marketed to us 24/7.
It's interesting to me to see everyone having this same epiphany. Okay, not everyone, but I am an optimist! It seems that more and more people are looking at the food they eat in a new light and demanding that the food they consume actually be real food, reading labels, asking questions, expecting safe, natural food.
Eating well has its critics though, that small band of people who accuse of being elitist and arrogant because we want the food we eat to be the ingredient, instead of having as list of ingredients in it. Well, as Alice Waters says, ‘Eating well is a right, not a privilege.'
It's time. It's time to step up and collectively say ‘Enough!' It's time to demand better...better quality, better regulations, better prices. It's time to vote with our dollar and tell all the purveyors of the kinds of garbage that is making is us sick and fat, killing our kids and destroying our planet that we are through with the lousy products and with them.
When we say no to ‘Panormous' pizza, 1700-calorie burgers, 920-calories lattes and demand real food, with real ingredients and real benefits to our health; when we demand that the food that is produced for us is produced in a way the sustains the planet and doesn't destroy it...then and only then can we take back control of our health, our children...our future.
It's time to do more than talk about the planet and its health. It's time to do more than talk about our physical health. it's time to face the most inconvenient truth of all...that change only comes when we actually change. Enough with the cute t-shirts about being the change you want to be in the world.
Change already!
Love,
Christina
Christina Pirello, 
This Crazy Vegan Life, 
vegan, 
whole foods, 
Penguin Books
