Most of the earth’s usable energy comes from the sun. The very act of reading this article is requiring you as a human organism to expend energy that came from the sun. That energy was most likely brought into your body through a process known as eating which most of us do without giving it a second thought at least a couple times a day. Let’s give it a second thought…
Are the raw materials (food) that you consumed today enabling you to be the very best version of yourself? There are a number of things that we can do to make ourselves feel better: exercising, listening to podcasts, sleeping, meditating, reading, breathing better, taking vacations, working harder. However, if the substances that contains the ACTUAL energy that we burn for fuel is not good, does the rest of it matter? It’s like driving a new car off the lot and then pouring skittles into the gas tank and hoping that it runs at maximum performance and gets the best mpg’s advertised.
Many of us are now wishing we had a bag of skittles to feed that craving we spontaneously developed for something sweet, but is that really the best way to fuel our bodies? Most of us know that skittles would give us energy in a short burst that might produce a very productive 15 minutes. Unfortunately, we also know that in the intermediate, it would cause a crash and in the long run, it would cause diabetes. The organism that is our flesh and blood was not meant to operate on junk.
So what is the best way to fuel our bodies? What contains the most good/real/sustainable energy? In reality, how do we get the most bang for our buck out of the sun? Most of us now know that it begins with a plant based diet. If we want to be omnivorous then it’s best to eat meats that were raised on pasture (high protein grass/plant mixtures that are at their core the largest solar panel that exists). After all, “You are what you eat”, or in some cases, “You are what your animals eat.”
If we truly believed that the sun was our energy source, and that as humans it might be a good idea to try our best to create a way to capture that energy, then wouldn’t we demand that our land be turned into the biggest pasture and veggie farm that money could buy? Wouldn’t we want to know how our fuel source was being grown? Wouldn’t we stop at nothing to make sure that what we were putting into our pie holes was, in fact, the very best fuel for our bodies to use? We are the pinnacle of creation: millions of cells, miles of veins, organs, bones, brains, opposable thumbs for pity’s sake. Yet we act like we can go on eating stuff that is pretending to be real food and everything will go on hunky dory into perpetuity. Stop it.
Everything Matters — the soil the food was grown in, the variety of plant chosen, the person committed to growing the best food in the best way, the weather, the chemicals, the water, the oil used to transport it, the wage paid or withheld from the laborer that picked it. We are consuming meat at a breakneck pace and we don’t even know where it comes from. How were those animals bred, raised, medicated, and fed? Most of the chicken eaten at any restaurant (not just fast food), never saw the light of day. Let’s do the math: if our energy comes from the sun, and that bird never saw the sun, how much usable, healthy energy can it offer us without ever having eaten a single blade of grass. That’s not even accounting for the medications required to keep it alive and genetically modified corn and soy it is fed to encourage it to gain as much weight as possible as fast as possible.
Here’s the issue. We aren’t willing to change. We know the facts, none of this stuff is new. If it is not fast, easy, comfortable, homogenized, western, consistent, equal, cheap, quick, and predictable then who cares? We will keep whitewashing our food system to make it seem like what we are getting is a good option, is healthy, is helping the small farmer, is taking care of the soil and the animals when we really know deep down it is probably not doing those things but who has time to deal with it?
Until the person who is growing the food becomes the rock star, until we care about what they are being paid and how they are stewarding the land and animals that we consume every day, then change will not happen. There are too many people telling us how to be healthier because it is good business. Let’s start listening to people that are actually harvesting the energy from the sun that we need survive. What good does it do us to harness the sun to run our cars if the people that are driving those cars are running on fumes?
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Columbus Underground is celebrating healthy living habits to help you kick off the new year right! Check out all of our Health & Wellness 2016 articles by CLICKING HERE.
