September 27, 2011

What Are You Eating?

Do you know what steps it takes for your food to get from the farm to your plate? Many of us don’t, but there is a growing community of people who want to know where their food is grown and are willing to travel to farms and farmer’s markets to find out.

Recently, eating locally has become a major trend amongst greenies, with the diet relying on less transportation emissions and use of natural resources. The bestselling book The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating written by Canadian couple Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, and subsequent show The 100 Mile Challenge, brought the diet into the forefront, showing that while difficult, following a local-based diet is possible and helps locavores forge a stronger relationship to nature.

However, eating locally one hundred percent of the time may not be possible for every girl on the go. But programs that electronically show us where our food comes from can help us feel more secure about the safety of what we’re eating and feeding our families.

Although Canada and the United States don’t have laws enforcing companies to always provide that information, there are companies that use traceability as a way to separate themselves from competitors. Retailers like American grocery chain Kroger have tried to capitalize on the idea, developing smartphone apps and barcode-like stickers that reveal the history of a product with just one scan. While no Canadian grocery stores have taken up the same idea yet, others like California-based HarvestMark are slowly moving into our market, labeling many products at select grocery stores and Costco’s with a coded sticker that can be input into a computer to find out the safety status of the item.

Celeb chefs such as Canada’s Michael Smith and the UK’s Jamie Oliver (aka The Naked Chef) are all for this kind of accountability. On Smith’s show Chef At Home, he often uses ingredients from his home province of Prince Edward Island and makes his own condiments, with the belief that where food comes from is as important as how it tastes. Oliver also believes that people care (or need to care) about the quality of their food. The Naked Chef is on a fight against obesity, starting The Food Revolution, a call for people to stop buying processed foods loaded with preservatives and sodium and “go back to basics” by making nutritious, home-cooked meals, like his own easy-to-follow recipes, for their families. Clearly, fans are willing to support the cause, with the charming British chef boasting hundreds of thousands of fans who signed his petition, subscribe to his newsletter, and follow him on Twitter.

While some critics believe that food transparency and tracking is useful for educated food and safety personnel, but only serves to instill fear and confusion in the average person, these systems allow consumers to make their own decisions and truly know what they are eating.

By: Fatima Reyes, LifestyleBOOST Editorial Intern

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