Locavor-The Next Revolution

The Next Revolution?

Accepting mans’ imperfect humanness, everyone struggles letting go of deep-seated rituals. At the grocery, we instinctively reach for expedient sources of food because life’s too busy to cook. Given we’re a malleable bunch; Americans have become reliant on Big Food to prepare their meals. Consequently we’ve morphed into an aggressive species due to their deviant food-like substances.

For this opulence, there’s a somber mind / body tradeoff. Before Fat Cats created the ethically malnourished Industrial Revolution, American communities, bartered, shared, canned fresh food, constructing supportive, peaceful communities centered on local family farms bursting with sustainable sun-blessed produce, dairy farmers, bee keepers, and livestock fed the preordained celestial menu designed by the generous Universe. Eating food fare shipped from a source 2000 miles away was unthinkable.

One-hundred years ago everyone knew local farmers by their first name, shaking their calloused milking hand as they greeted. An ecologically centered community which knitted itself together with threads of peace and friendship through the sharing of home-made foods simmered with loving energy. There is a full-blown movement in NYC of diverse artisans organizing, sharing, and returning to a pre-industrial revolution mentality. It’s truly rooting here in Indiana; a total disconnect from Big Food and Factory Farms where animals are treated inhumanely, vegetarian cows are turned into cannibals, and food is genetically altered into unholy nothingness.

For millennia, man has contemplated and practiced changing his self-defeating eating patterns, yet sustainment has proved elusive. To transcend today’s food zeitgeist, we’ll need to establish new peaceful relationships with food and eating; learn intuitive eating skills for long term results; results that encourage emotional, spiritual, and physical well being; the root of earthly peace. An unconnected, malnourished mind and sickly body is not the best place to cultivate a peaceful heart. Although most Americans believe the steady diet of violence in the media is leading to a more violent world, in reality it’s the steady diet of heavy metals, food colorings, animal husbandry chemicals, and pesticides that send bullying bosses and wilding teens over the edge.

Because anxious families have discovered how the food they eat was grown, home food preservation is experiencing a genuine revival. Were the barn yard animals handled humanely? Were vegetables genetically altered by a chemist? Discouraged by proliferating dead foods, the energy crises, and a growing awareness of environmental and social impacts of industrial agriculture and the globalization of food production, home gardeners are returning to the sacred traditions of the ancestors, growing, canning and sharing their own food fare. The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in Earth’s ecology and humans’ relationship with the earth’s environment, dramatically changing all facets of lifestyles from human development, resource wars, food purity, health, longevity, and social conveniences. Like ripples in the proverbial pond, its destructive impact would not hit the shore of the nation’s collective psyche pond until the 1960s counter culture movement.

Change in the way we eat cause changes in others. Without doubt, the sustainable seed of green, Locavorism and a peace-filled community has been re-planted. Over the coming years, Americans will transcend misguided eating behaviors and enter a new era of lucid sustainability and a nonviolent world.