I’ve been what we call an activist all my life. I wouldn’t necessarily use that word to describe myself but it’s the mainstream word we have that translates best. Since I was small, I’ve been involved in actively and consciously turning the wheel of life towards collective wellbeing. I have taken action, drawn attention, fostered conversations.
Food is a very perfect place to start if you want to make change in the world because it is connected to everything, and everyone needs it, and we need to engage with it multiple times per day. Plus, most people enjoy it. It gets into our bodies (literally and figuratively) and supports the changes we want to see in the world.
We, in this household, have eaten a very conscientious diet of mostly whole, organic, local foods since we established ourselves as a family. We also do not have any forbidden foods (even those that cause reactions are not forbidden). Thing is, most processed foods just don’t taste very good if you have been eating fresh and lovingly prepared food. Love, it’s an important part of diet. Care, is important. It’s an important part of the health of our food.
Over the years, I’ve driven across state lines to buy organic grains from farmers struggling to survive because their product was so expensive. People couldn’t understand why it was necessary to pay more. Now, lots of people do understand. And still, lots of people don’t. Our food budget has always been small, and our other budgets tight as well. But food needed to be purchased, and how we spent our money on food was something we could control. While our physical health is impacted by the food we ingest, our collective ecological,social, spiritual, and economic health is also impacted by our food choices. These impacts are even more pervasive to our overall wellbeing.
I’ve never needed to force anyone to eat the way we do, and yet, through relationship (and eating together) we have influenced lots of people’s engagement with food systems over the years.
Healing our world has a lot more to do with learning to engage differently than it does with forcing specific actions. Force, is the mainstream familiar way of accomplishing a goal. So, no matter what we accomplish through force- we’ve have not succeeded in deeper change. A peaceful and well world is only available through relationship. With ourselves, each other, Earth, and whatever we consider sacred.
Power-with, everything together.