#22

Just like every other food-lover out there, I thrive off finding new places to eat, or seeking comfort in a favourite meal. Not to mention it's way easier to have everything laid out, so all you have to do is pick from a menu and the restaurant takes care of the rest. While there's nothing wrong with this, lately I've been thinking about what "the rest" really means.

Day by day I've been more discontent with my eating habits, and often the impact they have on my energy levels. For simplicity, let's just say the same goes for at-home meals. Everything I buy and eat is based off of how conveniently it fits with my lifestyle, and you can probably see where this is going — I usually ignore nutrition labels, ingredients lists, and where the item is even sourced from. It also doesn't help that I have a family medical history that doesn't look too great. My dad has diabetes, and cancer runs in my mom's side of the family. It's easy enough to say a healthy diet can help in boosting energy or preventing health problems, but where do you even start?

Coincidently I was just gifted Terry Walters' Clean Food cook book, and it's been so refreshing to peek into the inspiring backstory behind making food choices that are sustainable: for both personal health and the environment. It mirrors my thoughts exactly in that there is something inherently wrong with our food systems — that almost everything travels thousands of miles to get to our plates, and there are just as many unknowns with what's lined up on our grocery shelves (think pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and chemical additives).

"The further we remove ourselves from the source of our food, the less we are able to maintain physical and emotional balance. Our processed food diets are so lacking in nutrition that we require coffee to wake up, sugar to get through the day, television to calm down. Have we become a society that is so artificially sustained?" - Terry Walters

And while this is separate from the book, I recently also had a massive attitude shift towards eating meat. It sounds completely insane coming from a person like me, but it's definitely a personal choice that I'm serious about and have already started to explore!

I don't care much for labels, and I'm not sure what exactly this will mean right now, but this does go hand in hand with my goal to eat only ethically and locally-produced food in the future.

So I guess the real question is: when did today's regular food choices stop being real food? For me, it's today.