Community through GOOD Food
I'd
like to use this article as an opportunity to discuss the ongoing food
revolution that seems set to storm the world yet has not quite just taken off.
The revolution fuelled by organic farmers, celebrity chefs, restaurateurs,
nutritionists and dieticians across the world and ambassadors who have been the
revolution's beneficiaries.
To
highlight the problem, I must bring up another one. "Food shortage"
and malnutrition. Statistics tell us that the world's net production of food,
regardless of population explosion, is keeping up and is in fact in surplus!
surprising isn't it?
With
all the talk about feeding so many people around the world and here I am
telling you we have the stock to offer! This can be explained by quite a few
things.
a.
Net production is in surplus but uneven
in distribution. This leads to
various countries with different capacities experiencing different situations
(aside from distribution, situations like poverty).
b.
Food wastage. It is nothing new to
the ear when I say that most of us, starting from homes to food chains and
other restaurants, often end up throwing tonnes of what is still edible tasty
food into the dumpster. Yes. There are many sincere pockets of people that
don't but that just isn't going to cut it. This has become a global problem
which requires to be innovation driven to divert our aversion to "second
hand" food.
c.
Finally and most importantly, food
nutrition. With a majority of the urban working population relying on cheap
industrialized food that have compromises in nutritional content and quality at
literally every level (compared to what "real food" can be) , it is
not surprising that we consume large portions of food to drive us purely
because it takes that large a portion to derive necessary nutrition (the rest
of us are just binge eaters!). A small amount of well balanced healthy salads
and fruits could power you just as well. All it takes is a good understanding
of what you are eating and its source. It is this revolution that I am going to
elaborate on in this article.
As
always, I will be using a case study to showcase the different aspects of this
food revolution and how all these components are working together. There are
many initiatives that are noteworthy to this cause but I shall be discussing
"The Kitchen Community" , founded by Kimbal Musk and Hugo Matheson
(https://thekitchencommunity.org/). They think there is a simple 3-angle
approach to not managing, but SOLVING this problem. Here are the 3 approaches:
a.
Opening affordable Farm to table restaurants
that engage local farmers selling Non-GMO organic crops.
To
this end, they have opened multiple branches and currently heading towards
opening in Memphis, the Obesity Capital of the US. The concept is pretty
simple. Source locally. Eat around community tables and break the ice while
eating healthy. The profits of this venture then fuels the next approach.
b.
Learning Gardens in Schools. When a
kid grows up in good company, he knows what bad company is. This is the
objective of this approach. Often mass produced food being the easy way out, is
usually what is preferred by many families across the globe as a staple. Home
cooked food with fresh ingredients from your nearby farmer's market is a luxury
many can't afford today. Not because of money, but habit. The learning gardens
are garden spaces that are adopted by schools in order to expose kids to
growing/maintaining/harvesting their own herbs, vegetables and fruits. This
early exposure allows them to developmentally prefer nutritious food over everything
else. School teachers are given one-one training and are equipped with
knowledge to guide the kids during this process.
c.
Urban Farming innovations. It's not
what you think. This is literally farming produce in urban areas. How? With
lack of land, space constraints, and scarcity of resources often being the
common barriers to growing produce, the founders of Kitchen Community have
started an Urban Farming accelerator called "Square roots" (quite a
clever name!). This accelerator identifies Food entrepreneurs that innovate to
break those constraints and gives them the tools to help scale produce in urban
spaces and distribute to clients locally. To get a better idea of what square
roots does, check out the link below!!
When you look at these three approaches as a
whole, they accomplish a couple of things like: raising awareness, investing in
the next generations health and scaling GOOD food driven by rigorous
innovation. It is quite an elegant solution but like most, for it to work well,
it needs people to understand that not only is nutrition packed food easy to
grow, but it is no more an option but a necessity to drive down health issues
and enhance our body's abilities. Big things come in small packages. I think
the same can be said of food grown right. Stop relying on high calorie meals
but high nutrition meals. That way, maybe we can give ourselves and the next
generation a chance at a more wholesome life.
Sanjay
Narayanaswamy
Picture
sources used:
1.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html
2.
https://thekitchencommunity.org/what-is-a-learning-garden/
3. http://thekitchen.com/restaurants
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