Localizing Food to Restore Human Health
As culturally-unique flavors and locally-grown seasonal ingredients disappear while morbidity and obesity rates rise, we face a need for innovation in food like never before; the “scientific” advancements of agriculture in the last hundred years have at best increased yield but at the cost of massive environmental and public health damage; much of what it produces barely qualifies as food.
Yet food exists at the intersection of want and need like nothing else in human nature, and is in a way at the heart of culture, an element that brings us together to connect and exchange ideas. Here, we will discuss the democratization of access to the pure, clean food and flavors of our ancestors, bringing culture back to our tables, habits back to our cooking, and health back to humanity, through a combination of increasingly popular methods that are both old and new.