Ready for a Revolution? Food as a Machine Gun
Our food system is killing us.
That sounds dire, and nobody needs more dire right now. We’re all a little preoccupied with a pandemic that is really dire. But Covid-19 has helped to crystalize the urgency I feel about the way our health is compromised by those who determine what we eat. We can’t build the healthy immunity we need to resist Covid-19 or recover from it if we continue to eat food designed to kill us.
So we’re going to need to take on Big Food and Big Ag and demand a food system that works for the environment and for our health. But how do I get that message across to as many people as possible?
Fortunately, Chuck D of Public Enemy decided to do it for me! He dropped a new song, inspired by my book Formerly Known as Food, on April 1st. He gets right to the point:
Sugar Sugar I know you move me
I know you wanna drink me
You in everything not just candy
Worse than a POW POW shoot em up
Kill em up movie
You can listen to the song here. Chuck asked me to send him concepts that he then turned into his powerful lyrics.
I have spent more than a decade researching food, health, and nutrition, not only as a nutrition educator but also as an investigative journalist working strictly on food. Every year I interview dozens of biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and microbiologists doing groundbreaking research on the biological effects of the foods and chemicals that go into our bodies every day.
I am alarmed.
I am alarmed when I go into people’s homes and see the foods they are feeding their families. I’ve come to realize that we can’t blame the eaters or even most of the doctors who mean well and are repeating official nutrition information from public health agencies and government dietary guidelines.
But it is time to realize what our radically altered eating habits have done to our health. In just one hundred years a diet of packaged, processed, unhealthy food has become the norm for most of us. And even those of us who think we eat well are dining on fresh fruits and vegetables grown in depleted soils, often sprayed with pesticides, packaged in plastic that contaminates them, transported across great distances, and stored for weeks or months, all the while losing nutrients.
Because we have become reliant on these industrialized foods, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out, from the development of the fetus in the womb to the drastic changes in our microbiota— the trillions of bacterial cells that reside in and on us and are essential for good health.
In less than one century, the industrialization of our food supply has completely changed
nearly everything about the food we eat— and, by extension, our bodies. In just a few generations we have managed to upend thousands of years of traditional knowledge about food, health, and nutrition.
We are all test subjects in a massive experiment, the outcome of which we are not likely to
know for generations to come. We don’t know the full extent of the damage, but what we do know is terrifying: Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and well, now a pandemic.
I am no longer willing to let my family be test subjects. And I don’t want yours to be either. This is why we have to reject Big Ag and Big Food together, please join me!
HOW? Repost this blog. Invite your friends to subscribe. Spread the information that we can eat to save our lives and our planet. '
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Are you interested in a deep dive class on eating to save our lives and our planet? Here’s the details on my next online course:
Join us for a special session of The Whole Egg, starting next Tuesday.
In our new four-week course co-taught by Kristin Lawless, Nutrition Educator and author of Formerly Known as Food, and Mary Esther Malloy, Birth and Parenting Educator and owner of Mindful Birth NY, we focus on nutritional wellness for you and your family.
Together, we dive into the importance of building and repairing gut health and strengthening your immune system.
Our goal is to help you discern fact from fiction when it comes to food marketing and inspire you to incorporate new whole foods and DIY projects into daily life, with specific attention to life at home during lockdown. The Whole Egg will help you protect and nurture your health and your family's health, especially during this uncertain time.Dates: Tuesdays April 21, April 28, May 5, May 12
Time: 12:30-1:30 pm Eastern
Fee: $130
Via Zoom
Kids in the background are most welcome!!
REGISTER HERE: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScjvQUrw24J0EpYygykzhjSwqNJv33A0jGWAZpIbghZ-Z_6aw/viewform