Small farmers, the heroes of our time

The task that I really like doing at home is cooking. I feel lucky that I am the one responsible for buying our food, chosing the menu and make it happen. It is a moment to relax, create and give something to my love ones, somewhat hard in a world when we seem to need so little from others...

Cooking starts by going to the grocery store. I really like the options I have in Germany, as it is very easy to eat local, bio and very healthy options. Bread is precious, not necessary expensive but as good as I recall it from my childhood. But do not get me wrong, most of people do not buy like I do.

First of all, when you are lining up for paying and the food is display in the black lane, you can spot something. My shooping is a colorful set up : paprika, apples, mushrooms, berries, lemons, ginger, onions...flow around like a rainbow, free from packaging and plastic. The packaging is limited to milk (oat based from germany) and yoghurt (oat based as well), some species and sauce.

My shopping neighbors have a different selection of packages for multiple dairy, cheap meat and sugar/salty bombs (coke,pringles, cookies ...). I look at them with mercy, not anger, since they are not only destroying the world, but their lifes too... Under the top 10 reasons to die nowadays  7 are lifestyle and food related, and what this people are eating are putting them towards a life of disease...

Most of the space dedicated in the supermarket is dedicated to food that is not healthy nor nutritious, and all is heavily packaged in plastic. I simply think that we should consider going at all, as 95% of the offer will make us sick, fat, and is a key part of the climate crisis.

Thankfully all over the world there are alternatives to this : that is to consume directly from local farmers! Most of the food we eat at home come from local cooperatives that send us every week seasonal veggies. Every thursday we got a box full of unpackaged vegetables of different colors and real smells. Some of them I have not seen it in my life, so I need to search how to cook them or use them at all, which is quite funny. The time where my yellow trash bag is full in one day with plastic is gone, and I got rid of the monotonous all year run vegetable offer from supermarket.

It is not more expensive, but even if it were, I would still do it, reasons being:

• local farming make my community more resilient to climate change
• local farming protect the very heroes of our food chain, those who create healthy foods and keep the soil and diversity at the core.
• local farming did not travel thounsands of miles to bring food full of chemicals, saturated fats...
• local farming tastes better
• I love my partner and myself enough to eat the best I can

In times where it seems impossible to fix the climate crisis, we can act towars 70% of the problem: industrial agriculture and farming. Those that produce food with destroying means pollute several times more than the locally bio options needs to stop.

We need to lobby and stop buying products that are not good to us and that are erasing the soil, the biodiversity and using too much land. Before you think that this would lead to a food crisis keep in mind that small farmers are creating more than 2/3 of what we eat, although their share of land, energy use or emissions is less than 1/3 of the sector *.

The industrial model of agriculture/farming is intensive in chemicals that kill the other critical living beings in the soild and land (bees,worms, insects...),  are giving a misserable amount of profit to the farmer (in many cases below 15% of what we pay), and not even succeding to feed the world ( as one billion people starves and another will die for eating too much of the bad foods).

It is time to see our local small farmers as the heroes, those whose lifestyle and job are giving us the most precious thing, nutritious food, while respecting the biodiversity and the soil.  We give little credit to what they do, but they are the heroes of our time. The problem is that being a local farmer is getting harder and harder, as some regulations and lobbies are making their lifestyle harder and harder. 

We need to support their job by directly buying their products. In doing so we are doing a favor to our communities, to our world and to ourselves.

Chaging the way we eat we fix 70% of the problem. Is it not worthy?


*https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536677/who-really-feeds-the-world-by-vandana-shiva/