“Laughter is brightest where food is best.”
— Irish proverb
FOOD: Nutritious. Delicious. Ambitious.
What is food?
Grilled cheese. Kale chips. Marshmallow fluff. Guacamole (Yes, I know it costs extra). Kraft Mac N’ Cheese. Dino-shaped chicken nuggets. Your mom’s Tikka Masala recipe. A fresh pot of homemade soup in the winter. The cake you baked for your best friend’s birthday. Strawberry jam. Vegan butter.
Food, food, food — what an unassuming word for such an expansive and meaningful part of our everyday experiences! Whether you approach the subject of food from a culinary, academic, biological, social, or environmental perspective, you cannot deny the many significant roles food plays in your own life. Moreover, food is the common denominator of the human experience. Every single person on earth needs food to live. As such, we all deserve to know what is in the food we are eating, where our next meal is coming from, and what happens to our wasted food after we’ve thrown it away.
The Future of Food
We all have a personal stake in the future of food.
Beyond acknowledging and celebrating what food already is, I am most excited to use this space to explore what I think food has the potential to become. With the ever-evolving scientific advances and socioeconomic circumstances of today’s global context, the future of food remains very uncertain. The bad news is that evidence suggests our local, national, and global communities will need to learn to navigate unprecedented difficulties with food production and food access in the relatively near future. The good news is that the future of food is still very much in our hands.
All hope is not lost. I believe there are three key characteristics that best describe a joyful understanding of and approach to the future of food.
In my opinion, the future of food should be:
Nutritious. The future of food should be healthy. Food should nourish the body and enable people to live long and happy lives. Food should be produced with the interests of the consumer in mind.
Delicious. The future of food should be joyful. Food is often associated with meaningful traditions, sensory memories, and much more. Thus, food should be fun to eat! Food should taste good, and the experience around eating food should feel good as well. Delicious food is a gift, and we should ensure that people can delight in their food as much as possible. And whenever relevant, access to food should be culturally meaningful for the consumer.
Ambitious. The future of food should be understood as an urgent human rights issue. Today, food is produced all over the world in ways that are unnecessarily costly, exclusionary, unsustainable, and unjust. Children go hungry. People get sick from the additives and preservatives poured into overly processed food items. Hundreds of millions of pounds of edible food end up in landfills in the U.S. everyday. All of these issues can and should be combatted with ambitious action on both the individual and systemic levels. The future of both food quality and food access should support an individual’s inherent human dignity.
So, what can we do about food right now?
Great news! There are many ways to positively affect the future of food. Even if you just make a handful of meaningful changes in your everyday life and food habits, you could join a larger, global effort to care more about food and food systems in general.
Hopefully, you discover that exploring this page is a good place to start your journey. I am deeply committed to keeping this blog gratitude-oriented, even as I attempt to tackle more difficult and complicated subjects, so I appreciate your patience and understanding as I navigate what balancing both joy and purpose might mean to me in this space. My hope is that this work will inspire people to get creative with their own relationships with food and encourage them to understand that other people also deserve to have a similar access to food that makes them feel great.
Happy eating!
photos (in circles) by Sophia Perida
