Ep. 1359: Local Versus Natural

The Food Chain Radio Podcast

Fred Provenza, Emeritus Professor of Behavioral Ecology, Utah State University & Author of Nourishment: What animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom

(Food Nutrition and Labeling)

The supply chain that feeds our food chain now extends across the country and around the world. Given what we see happening across our country, and around the world, we simply must ask:

Can we go back home again with food?

I just returned from attending Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, which bills itself as the having the largest collection of natural, organic and conscious food products available anywhere.

It took me 6 hours to hike the 7 or 8 football field-sized exhibition rooms filled with various foods and supplements. Most all of the foods were available for tasting, and the 60,000 foodies in attendance were eating away at them.

But I was on a mission and so did not stop to taste many of those samples – only a few. The first was some granola infused with Earl Gray Tea. I guess the idea was to wake myself up and get fed in one bite!

My mission at the Natural Foods Expo, was to find natural foods that had a good story to tell. Though I did find a few good stories, I did not find many natural foods. What I did find were what seemed to be thousands of ultra-processed foods in brightly colored packages.

Michael Olson’s “natural” foods are the plants one forages or the animals one hunts in nature. Next in line are the real foods, grown from real soil, by real farmers. Last in line are ultra-processed foods grown with the industrial technologies of energy-intensive agriculture – and they are the foods that come with in brightly-colored packages with lots of promises.

Given that the supply chain that now feeds our food chain extends across the country and around the world, and given what we see in the news of our country and the world, we simply must pause to ask:

Can we go back home again with food?

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