Thoughts on Food

So I've been thinking on food a lot lately. Reading things about healthy eating, about what our ancestors ate, and what we eat now and why. And I suppose it's finally been brought home to me yet again exactly what we've been doing to our planet.

I've heard it said since I was a teenager that modern farming practices deplete the soil. I never realized what that means. Well, with what I've been reading lately, I finally realize.

Simply put, what it means is this: using currents farming practices, worldwide we have only about 80 to 100 years left of viable topsoil. In only 80 to 100 years, the land that is being used to produce food will no longer be able to do so. At all. And then we'll start to have quite the issues with feeding our population.
And my own sense of personal responsibility says that if I eat foods grown in a way that depletes the soil, then I am responsible for depleting the soil just as much, if not more so than the farmer who grew it.

Even organic food growing depletes the soil faster than nature replenishes it. So the real question is: what do we need to do to change this?

Luckily, the articles and books and documentaries I've been reading and watching/listening are not just spouting off about what's wrong with the world. They look at what can be done as well. It's not all simple, but it really is in line with what I've been searching towards - when I think about how I want a garden, it's not flowers, it's vegetables and herbs that I think of. I love the idea of growing things (although my forays into balcony gardening so far have all been disappointing), but I want to grow useful things. There is no place in my garden for plants that do not serve a use, either through creating compost to replenish the garden, food, medicine, or attracting pollinators to the more useful plants.

And if you don't have enough space for a garden of your own, there are now organizations of something called 'CSA'. Community Sustained Agriculture. I think it's a step in the right direction - moving closer to growing enough food to sustain yourself. Basically you buy a share in the farm in exchange for a percentage of the harvest (and with most of them, you can offer to come help out if you want the experience of gardening/farming without doing it all yourself to start out with).

I often thought about how people seem to be happier in places where life is harder, where they have less. All evidence points to growing your own food being harder than the life I lead now where all I have to do is work for money and buy it. But for some reason the difficulty of it doesn't seem to matter when I think about wanting to do this - I have a feeling the sense of accomplishment attached to it is worth more than all the extra time I have for other things.

The satisfaction of being able to grow enough food to be self-sufficient and sustainable is worth more to me than any amount of stuff I could ever buy.