Blog Challenge

I don't believe I can call myself a blogger, as you can see I don't have many posts over the last 6 years. I have decided to take on a blog challenge through Live Your Legend. I've been journaling through their resources and have found it life altering. It has provided so much clarity in my life's goals as well as a self awareness for some of my passion and talent that I was not clearly aware of 6 months ago.

Today's blog challenge is talking about something that really makes me angry in the world. It's difficult to pick just one but here it goes:

Accessibility to good wholesome food.

Although I have not been keeping up with my food politics, it is something which I feel deeply about. I actually stopped researching and reading about it because I reached a point where I felt defeated. I would get so worked up and angry talking about it. I found I became the fired up preachy person, a quality which I disliked greatly in others as well as myself. I had to take a step back. Chill out.

Food accessibility is a massive issue globally as well as locally, for time sake I am going to brush the topic of local food access, specifically within the school systems. While I was growing up, I don't remember there being any shortage of cookies, fries and gravy, bagels with bacon and cheese (how I loved those breakfast treats...) and a large array of other deep fried items in the school cafeteria. I don't remember if there were vegetables, what teen would? With so many options of junk and a full life of making up for all the crap you consume as a teen, you could worry about that later... This was normal. At any given lunch period you could look around the cafeteria and see pubescent teens huddled around large plates of fries soaked in a pool of gravy. The fries and gravy cost $4 from what I remember.

Why on earth would any caretaker of young people have this on the list of options for the teens to choose from? Our junk food loving, zero control, and general lack of food education set us up for complete failure.  I did it every day I could afford it. I loved every minute of it.

What I didn't love was the insatiable hunger that I got about an hour after lunch because the food I had consumed did not feed me in the holistic sense of the word. The simple carbs, starch and sodium tricked my body into thinking I was full and then it wanted to binge on those half baked doughy caf' cookies all afternoon. I also didn't love the lack of energy, focus, and overall health. I didn't love that I had a really hard time in school.

I would laugh off my lack of focus and chalk it up to ADD and boredom. I would quietly tell myself it was because I wasn't smart enough. I would go home defeated and ignore homework for all the same reasons I didn't do well in class. I'm not blaming all of my school issues on the cafeteria's food selection and my poor adolescent food choices however I do believe that they had a great impact on my success (or lack thereof) in school.

If there was food education in schools and access to healthy food, cooked well, school would have probably been an entirely different experience for me. It took me years to unlearn a lot of those habits and I still struggle.

Schools need to have better health and food education from a young age. Teach about the beauty of seasonality, the nuances of delicious seasonal veg, and how to prepare it in a way that is delicious and exciting, not 'lets just steam the s**t out of it and hope they eat it'. Teach them about animals, connect them to the land again. Help instil a sense of respect and connection to the food and land and the hands that raise it. We need to alter how we relate to food. We need to teach our children how beautiful real food is and why it is so important to the integrity of their growth and success.