I believe food is more than just food in our belly. That access to healthy, sustainable food is vital for our physical and mental health as a species.
I think we are losing the understanding of the miracle that is plant life – the process by which these amazing things take sun, rain and soil and create the basis for life. Everything that we survive on comes back to plants taking energy from the sun – no matter how much we process and package it.
In 2008 I travelled working as a volunteer in communities and farms across the world. I saw many countries where the peoples’ right and ability to feed themselves and their families has been lost or taken away. Where people are starving because access to food has been put under lock and key.
And in my country of birth, the UK, I can see that here too we are dying and malnourished because we have become disconnected with ways of sustainably feeding ourselves.
We urgently need to consider how our food systems will cope in the coming years. How can we work with nature and biological cycles to improve our horticultural production? And how do we do it without increasing environmental degradation, climate change or consumption of finite resources.
I believe that we are at a crossroads. If you look to one side there are many horrifying things, factory farming, monocoulture, companies literally trying to patent and own life and on the other side there are there are many amazing people, communites and projects, community supported agriculture, permaculture, biodynamic farming.
I'm trying to be part of that growing number of people who are trying to follow the best path at the crossroads.
