The Supermarket Deception: easy, cheap, convenient vs. our health and our future

Easy, cheap, convenient!

Supermarket propaganda keeps pushing this message and we’ve bought it! We are so used to it, and used to getting our food from these big box stores that we don’t even know to question it.

Fine!

Buy the mass-produced, long-distance, out of season produce, from mostly monoculture landscapes where farmers on big tractors fight nature with tankers of water infused with chemicals to poison the life they don’t want to see.

Easy, cheap, convenient is an illusion. An illusion that panders to our busy lives. “I’ll just duck down to the supermarket and get some….” problem solved and food on the table, for tonight.

But make no mistake, there’s a consequence to that choice!

Your health, the health of your family, and the future of your children’s children. Today’s children may not be living shorter life spans than their parents, but they are likely to have more health problems and be dying longer.

Easy, cheap, convenient simply means the costs are externalised into the environment (loss of life and diversity), the people (degraded health), the next generation (who get to clean up the mess).

That’s it!

Really. The experiment of industrial agriculture is done. We now know it’s destructive and dangerous. It might have seemed like a good idea at the start, but it turns out it wasn’t. There’s nothing more to be said. Now we are only left with the choice. Do we continue to support it, or do we forgive ourselves for the errors of our past and move on, and do something different? Which might require us to grow up and stop being satisfied with being a child, dependent on the parent (corporate food system) to feed us, while it kills us — directly and indirectly.

Over to you!

Small scale organic growers in your community are, most often struggling to make a go of it. Don’t assume they are going to be there forever, patiently waiting for us to realise the value they bring. They are overworked, tired and under appreciated, confronted with all manner of challenges. But they are there for you, not just for themselves.

So get in behind them! Go put in some effort. You won’t regret it. You’ll be rewarded with healthy, grounding activity that connects you to life (beyond asphalt and concrete, screens and artificial lights), with good company, and with food that you help nurture, and that nurtures you.

Supermarkets live in the comfort zone, not in the learning zone. Good food should be hard to get, else we’re stealing from the future.