Eating for life

Food justice begins for many of us with understanding, or re-understanding, our own relationship with food: where does it come from? Who grew it? How did it reach our tables? What is in it as well as its advertised content? Was any damage done to land, animals or people on its way to the kitchen? What was its ‘carbon footprint’ as it travelled from its place of origin to the point where I bought it?

For buy it I usually do, from a supermarket or less commonly from a local shop. Rarely have I been involved in growing it, tending to it or harvesting it. At home in Japan I have long been aware of these issues in a general sense and whenever possible have bought from farmers’ markets or from ‘natural’ foods stores. But the very fact that we call some foods or food sources ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ immediately alerts us to the frightening fact that a lot of it isn’t: instead it’s grown with chemical fertilisers, sprayed with pesticides, possibly watered with polluted water, and contains any number of additives, colourants, preservatives, synthetic vitamins, “taste enhancers” and, in the case of meats, hormones and antibiotics that have been fed to animals to either “improve” the quality of the meat or to protect them from disease.

“Food justice” should take all these factors into account – not only issues of availability to those deprived of adequate nutrition, and of fair trade prices and conditions for those who grow it, but its relationship equally to soil, the well-being of animals and to the bodies of us as we consume, as we must do to stay alive.

All this became very real to me as I began to frequent and work in the university allotment – actually tending to the growing plants, watering them with water from a stream rather than a tap, weeding (although as I have learnt from my fellow gardeners that a “weed” is just a plant that we have not yet found a way of utilising as food, compost or protection for other plants with its naturally occurring pesticide qualities), and then being able to take home and eat the very produce that I have tended. This has revolutionised my thinking about food in both subjective and objective ways. I have realised how disconnected many of us are from the ways in which our food grows and is nurtured and how satisfying it is to not be merely a consumer of supermarket bought produce of unknown origin and unknown quality, but in a small way to be involved with its actual genesis and care.

Reading about such issues as “Deep Ecology” I have discovered, important as it is, that it is not the same as recognising a real reciprocity between myself as a consumer and the very real, organic plants that I am taking care of, in doing so becoming much more attuned to quite basic, everyday but often forgotten aspects of the natural environment such as soil, weather, wind and water. Gardening has reconnected me to ecology, and I have even come to appreciate such things as earthworms, from which I would have once recoiled. It has taught me that food is not just an anonymous “commodity” but really is the basis of life.

The result has been that I can now in very concrete ways understand the true meaning of “sustainability”. By recognising that an “extractivist” economy and agriculture that simply takes without replenishing can never be sustainable, I have come to appreciate the idea of “Permaculture” – the forms of food production that are permanent because they return what they take out, do not abuse the soil from which everything grows, and recognises a holism in which plants, micro-organisms, water, bees and other elements of nature – which includes us! – are all inter-related.

There is a Buddhist saying that “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”. For me that teacher has been the allotment and its fellow carers, which have given me the experience of not just thinking about food, but understanding how being involved in its production can transform one’s relationship to it.