Scaling-up food: The dark side of standardization
Food Alchemist Reflections #4. Past, present, and future of food processing
In a world that has been built by words and words that have been created by humans, where does nature take the lead? It is time for a change, re-think what has been already established by our words, and create a new paradigm that includes us as part of nature. How? Through Food. Food is our common treasure, the best indicator of our planet’s health. These words represent an out-loud thought from The Food Alchemist Lab that endeavors to take you on a trip around general and specific food topics → proposing solutions, destroying myths, and waking up your interest through impactful recipes. Because your curiosity is our trigger and, once you’ve shot us, nothing will stop us from bringing a better food system, the one that listens to nature’s voice.
- FIRST THINGS FIRST
We eat, we impact
How many times have you listened to the affirmation: we are what we eat? I guess more than once, and in my opinion, it is very true. We are what we eat and what we eat creates an impact on the environment around us, the economy that builds our society, and the society that supports our economy. Imagine life, and consequently, humans as a cocktail of molecules that are in a disorganized orderliness because life is chaos and the only way we achieve perfect orderliness is upon death, basically, all these concepts are explained by Syntropy, the unit of measurement of disorder within alive systems (Di Corpo, U., 2013). Then, after understanding these concepts, it stands to reason that healthy food must be as imperfect, disorganized, and heterogeneous as nature and life. Therefore, anything that comes from life but becomes standardized through a copy-paste methodology is far from what we should consider healthy, in fact, it is the opposite. This is why what we eat generates an impact, there are too many humans on this planet and the majority are currently hungry or making the wrong food choices = negative impact. Food is life and life is imperfect, so please, do not expect to find a perfect carrot that looks like all the others, and if you do, maybe it is not a carrot but something that we invented.
Scaling-up food does not mean standardization
Keep the example of carrots in mind because there is a lot to talk about them. Beginning with the fact that originally they were not orange but white or pale yellow but for sure not orange. I leave you here the reference where you can read more about this fact but now let’s move forward (Carrot, W., 2011). This example is not more important than others, again, as humans we’ve been shaping and modifying nature to benefit us without considering the consequences, carrots are simply another victim. I do not intend for this message to be pessimistic or apocalyptic, but an impactful reflection that creates consciousness, and consequently capability of choice equal to freedom.
Consider that the reason why we are currently facing the problems related to our planet’s health is just because of the aggregation of all these tiny examples, like the carrots, even if it sounds minuscule and stupid, the summation of several stupid actions are equal to a huge stupid action. Over the past few years, knowledge has evolved but so has our population, and we’ve been using all that knowledge within the food industry in order to scale up = make food accessible to those who pay. This is the wrong action though, scaling up means, or it should mean, that food is accessible for everyone, not just developed countries, but let’s leave this discussion for another day. There is one thing that I’m 100% sure of, scaling up does not mean standardization.
2. THE DARK SIDE OF STANDARDIZATION
Can you imagine yourself having children that are exact replicas of yourself? I do not know what you think about it, but it would scare me a lot. I think just one José is enough. But also because variety is what creates the chance to be adapted to the environment in case it drastically changes (Moret, M. A. et al., 2012). Standardization kills biodiversity and consequently natural selection, that is why I want my future children to be as different as possible. I want them to be diverse and hopefully, if the circumstances are beneficial, that diversification will make them better. Do not forget that two factors make things better or worse: our subjective opinion or if that thing survives a long time. Ok, so now apply all this reflection to the food we eat, what’s the result? Look around you, we have been selecting the “food-children’’ from “mother earth” as we like, based on colors, shapes, nutritional profile, dimension… and then replicating our favorites. How scary is that?
Take a minute, close your eyes, and think of a supermarket. Now take another minute, close your eyes and think of a market garden. Did you find any similarities between them? One is organized, full of colors, labels, and advertisements… the other disorganized, full of seasonal colors (in autumn the colors are red, brown, yellowish…) and for sure you’d find some dirtiness, soil, insects, and even worms. This last one is real, it is the one we should ingest to absorb all that chaos that we call life, the imperfect one.
3. RECIPE IN A NUTSHELL
Perfectly Imperfect
The Food Alchemist Team is currently based in Bologna, Italy. Bologna is a cosmopolitan city and, as typical of important cities, you might get a bit far from nature, it is up to you. We have been experimenting and growing different kinds of vegetables, fruits, and aromatic herbs in our hydroponic and aquaponics devices. Doing this helped us understand how difficult it is to grow enough food to feed people 3-times a day. If we had to feed a typical family with the resources we grow, they would be depleted in just one day — even just one meal. Currently, we are in love with what we grow, just because we put our intentions and efforts on them, so we do not pretend to shape them in the way we want but let them shape us in the way they grow. My colleague Leire Mazo is going to caress some of the beauties we have in our lab, showing you how imperfection and biodiversity not only make you feel better but also make things funnier.
4. REFERENCES
Online:
- October 19, 2020 Brendan A. Niemira Ph.D. / https://www.food-safety.com/articles/6805-recent-advances-in-food-processing
Papers:
- Di Corpo, U. (2013, August). Life energy, syntropy, complementarity and resonance. In first international conference on “Life Energy, Syntropy and Resonance,” Viterbo, Italy (pp. 4–8).
- Carrot, W. (2011). Carrot: history and iconography. Chronica, 51(2), 13.
- Moret, M. A., Pereira, H. D. B., Monteiro, S. L., & Galeão, A. C. (2012). Evolution of species from Darwin theory: A simple model. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 391(8), 2803–2806.
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