Real food is more expensive than supermarket food if you measure only in dollars. But here’s the thing: if you can measure its value in dollars, it’s not really real food.
The value of food was never meant to be measured. To measure something, you have to separate it out from the other things it’s connected to. As soon as you do that, it becomes a hollow copy of what it was before it was isolated.
No matter how good zoos get, a tiger is no longer a wild tiger when it’s in a zoo. It’s like a tiger, and it’s better than no tiger at all, but it’s just a copy of the real, wild thing as it was when it was part of the jungle.
So it is with food.
Industrialization reduced food to so many isolated, standardized, measurable units of commerce, instead of a complex, multi-faceted, and central part of life that reaches into and interconnects with every other part of life.
Real food not only feeds the stomach but also the relationships between the people working together in food related roles, and the relationships between people and the land and animals that gift us the food.
That’s how you know its real food: it builds connections and diversity, rather than destroying them.
Previously, real food connected people to each other, to the earth and the seasons, and to plants and animals in ways that sustained people’s health on physical, social, and spiritual levels while also sustaining the health of our environment and the web of life we are nested into.
Now, supermarket food is something you make choices about based on price.
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Kate writes at ARealGreenLife.com about thinking differently and living a more natural, connected, and sustainable life. Check out her free downloads page or her blog.
