Food in Grand Rapids

Culture is such a defining feature in the lives of everyone regardless of whether we know or care.  With shifting cultures of new generations, people seem to be yet again redefining where they stand in relation to their food.  I have taken a strange path over the past few years going from eating triple cheese burgers and large pizzas as my diet to now being vegan and searching out every edible locally sourced food procurable.  

What is our story? How did we get so detached from our food? Why do we need a local food movement? Why are local residents fighting for their rights to own chickens? Most importantly though is what are we eating?

What is our story? A short answer is that most of us are products of our culture and our apathetic nature as animals, only ever wanting to take the easiest path.  A longer answer though is a look into the American spirit.  The saying 'you are what you eat' could not be more fitting.  The local food movements are getting away from the mechanization of our diets and factory system of devalued people and product, and is stretching it self to the other end of the scale to the hard meaningful labor we all know to be who we are and what we stand for.  We are not just a price tag or a source of income for some multinational corporation. We live locally, we eat at local restaurants, we even have the majority of our friends locally. The mass production of food, paid for by subsidies, distributed, devalued and dangerously easy to ignore are the subconscious projections of our own inability to tell people what we really want vs. what we need.  There is a separation of our inherent morals and our manufactured desires created by ad agencies.

How did we get so detached from our food? Realistically, no one wants to be told what to do.  This was set forth by the founding fathers of the United States.  It doesn't matter your political persuasion, everyone likes the option of choice over the lack thereof.  Why is it so often that we let fast-food joints tell us what we want to eat? And why would we not question what it is that we truly need vs want? It was only a generation ago, my fathers generation that had pigs behind their barn and house as well as chickens, rows of fruits and vegetables, and more often than not a plethora of canned foods to last multiple families through the winters.  Today, I often peer into the refrigerators of the world and see only the disposable temporary unrealistic notions of what food is thought to be.  Steak does not look like a cow.  Green peas do not grow in a can.  Corn syrup is man made.  We became detached from our food by just a few lies and it happens to be unrealistic that we subject ourselves to it all.  It is easier to be ignorant than it is to engage ourselves. 

Local food means local, not a factory farm.  We are talking about raising chickens for eggs and ultimately maybe some soup and dinner at the end of a very fruitful life, right? Why is it that city councils can tell you that you have to be unconnected from your food? This is the first time in all history that we are not allowed to know where our food comes from.  So if we are not allowed to know where our food comes from, how can we expect to know what our food truly is? Does anyone truly know what they eat anymore? I am positive that the average consumer could not imagine what is put into their food and by default into their bodies.