It doesn’t have to be this way!
This line keeps going through my head today.
I just saw on Twitter that there is a national cream cheese shortage.
You can imagine the factors that are at play that are leading to this.
- Shortage in milk supply (doubtful)
- Logistical difficulty getting milk from farm to processing facility (likely)
- Big dairy companies are not willing to pay more for milk that they have already committed to with their dairy farmers.even though the price of feed has gone up (highly likely)
- Processing facilities unable to staff enough people to make the processed products like cream cheese (likely)
- Logistical difficulty getting the finished product out to stores/distributors so that it can get all the way to the customers shopping carts (likely)
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happening here. The curtain has been pulled back. Cream cheese is a great metaphor for all of society right now.
We have been duped for decades into thinking that the powers that were consolidating behind our backs still had our best interests in mind. That even though there were rumors of monopolies and big money from special interest groups at play, in the end, it would never trickle all the way down to the end of the food chain…in this case, a customer standing in a grocery store, staring at an empty shelf that only hours before was stocked full of cream cheese.
The world we live in now, for good or for bad, is very hard to keep secrets in. Info that once was locked in corporate offices in tall towers, is now literally in our pockets with a click or two down the right internet search. There are fewer and fewer places to hide….which is bad news for people trying to hide, but good news for people that are trying to live honest and restorative lives.
So here we are. We KNOW the truth. We can see all the way back up the food chain to the source. We KNOW who is pulling the strings and why things are the way they are.
What are we going to do about it?
Again, it doesn’t have to be this way!
Remember, we can shrink our foodshed. That geographic region from whence our food is grown, produced, shipped, and delivered.
We don’t need milk from a plant in some other state, that is consolidating milk from thousands of miles around it, to make products on a scale that can land cheaply on a shelf at your nearest big box store…along the way sacrificing flavor, health of the animal, health of the land, health of the farmer trying to meet these demands, health of the human consuming it, and most of all flavor.
**SIDE NOTE ON FLAVOR: When you read the ingredients list on the box, you can see quickly that in order to pull this lengthy production process off, you have to inject the product with 2 things it doesn’t really need.
- Stabilizers - to keep the shelf life long enough to be able to even get to market at some store thousands of miles from where it was produced
- Flavoring - news flash, natural flavors are NOT good…nice try whoever decided to include the word “natural”. This is done to make it ACTUALLY taste any where even close to it’s intended flavor
So back to the lecture at hand…It doesn’t have to be this way.
If we are willing to not only find out the facts, but also make personal decisions based on those facts, change can happen.
I know it sounds dumb to say this, but, I know where there is cream cheese! It’s such a simple statement but in keeping with this metaphor, think about what that really means.
I know a farm where they are raising their animals to eat exactly what they should be eating (grass), to give the earth exactly what she needs in order to flourish (regeneration), to give the animal exactly with it needs to produce the best milk possible (health of every eco system involved including the human gut from the person consuming). That milk stays on the farm it was taken from, put through a processing facility (honorable labor) that can make as much cream cheese as it has milk for (sustainable). That facility is less than 60 miles from our warehouse (low carbon footprint).
Folks, it doesn’t have to be this way. The reason that it IS this way, is because when we couldn’t see behind the curtain, we were complicit in a strategy that was built to divorce all those processes mentioned above from the communities in which they were meant to serve. They were built to make food
- Fast
- Convenient
- Cheap
- Homogenous
- Easy to produce
- Easy to control
- Easy to transport
- Easy to market (let’s show some pictures of a cow in the pasture licking a baby and we will sell these by the millions!)(in reality, those cows used to mass produce milk are standing in their own feces, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other animals doing the same thing, miles from anything resembling grass). *See CAFO
We CAN change the way we consume. We CAN shrink our foodshed. We CAN make meaningful changes to our environment, to the families that produce our food, to the microbiome within ourselves that literally controls the way we think, feel, and act.
We CAN do these things by changing where we buy our food from.
We ARE the foodshed.
#wearethefoodshed
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