Why I Started Growing My Own Food

One of the things that stood out the most to me while I was travelling through Central and South America was how good the fruits and vegetables tasted. This is obviously what you’d expect being in a tropical region but I wasn’t really sure why. And this made me realize how little I knew about our food system. So I decided to do some research.

It turns out that because our produce has to navigate a complicated supply chain and travel thousands of miles to get to us, there are consequences to it’s taste and nutrition. Farmers have to select crops for hardiness instead of taste and nutrition, then the crops are picked well before they’re ripe so they can survive the trip, and then they’re refrigerated until they’re put on the shelves for sale. All of this results in produce that looks great but tastes essentially like nothing. And this is not even mentioning the emissions required for transport.

So it’s easy to just say, well I’ll eat local. And, in concept, this is fantastic, but once you start trying to do it you’ll realize how hard it is. Not only because trying to find local produce can be difficult, but it requires you to eat seasonally which, living in Canada, is essentially impossible.

But at least we produce things like strawberries and tomatoes in greenhouses in the winter, right? Well, yes, but the majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of food, and the reality is that it’s often better for the environment to import tomatoes from Mexico than produce them here during the winter.

So needless to say, it’s complicated. But I’m someone who likes to make informed decisions and likes to know the impact of their actions, so I decided to go a little deeper. I quickly realized that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our food system is a fucking mess.

After learning this little lesson about our fruits and vegetables, I took the logical turn to meat. Doing this made my research into reducing my environmental impact through fruits and vegetables seem completely trivial. By only shifting the consumption of one day of red meat per week over to vegetables, you have the same impact as buying all of your fruits and vegetables from local producers. Livestock and their byproducts are responsible for 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. To put this in perspective, transportation exhaust is at 13%. We hear so much about the benefit and need for hybrid and electric vehicles, yet it’s impact on the environment is a quarter of our livestock production, which we hear very little about. Weird eh?

Then comes the water consumption, the precious resource that we owe all of life on earth to. Agriculture is responsible for 80–90% of US water consumption, and a whopping 70% of this consumption is to grow feed crops for livestock. And the problem with this is that animals, especially cows, consume a huge amount of calories and protein to produce a small amount of calories and protein for our consumption. In other terms, animals are extremely inefficient meat machines. If we redirected some of this animal feed into human food, we would have more than enough to feed the almost 1 billion that are undernourished.

So world hunger has nothing to do with scarcity, but everything to do with poverty and inequality. We’re wealthy enough to be able to convert lots of calories and protein in the form of corn into a few calories and protein of animal meat, because we prefer it that way. It’s a nice position to be in but I think we can do better.

I’m sure the animals would be on board with a reduction in our meat consumption. I don’t want to get too much into the animal abuse that occurs in the industry, but trust me when I say that it’s widespread and extremely fucked up. If you’re interested in learning more about it, which you should be if you eat meat, read this book. Or head to youtube and look up factory farming. But I warn you, you’ll be wishing you didn’t.

But animal abuse is just the start of it. There is widespread use of antibiotics in livestock production which is threatening our ability to use them and is creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs. There is the spreading of contagious diseases because of livestock population densities at factory farms which are threatening our health. Air and drinking water is compromised in communities around the country due to pollution caused by poor manure control techniques. The issues go on and on.

I wish I could say that having everybody go vegetarian, or vegan, would solve all of our problems but that’s definitely not the case. It would be a significant improvement, but fruit and vegetable production also has some huge issues. Here are a few of them. Due to our use of monoculture (single crop) farming techniques, we are losing huge amounts of the topsoil we rely on for food. This results in us having to use increasingly more fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn further degrades the soil. This leaves us with crops that have half of the amount of micronutrients that they use to have, resulting in us having nutrient deficiencies that lead to a variety of health issues. And if that’s not enough, while the soil is being washed away it carries huge quantities of agrochemicals that pollute the drinking water of many communities around the country and is creating a huge dead-zone in the gulf of Mexico.

As well, massive deforestation, to the tune of 22 million hectares, is taking place in the Amazon and other South American ecosystems to make room for the production of soy. This is killing and displacing huge populations of wild animals and harming nearby communities. This was also the case with wheat production across the US and Canada, and is the same situation with many other crops around the world that we rely on.

So the earth and it’s ecosystem makes a huge sacrifice to feed our growing population and growing diets, yet we throw half of it away. Huh? Can you believe that close to half of all the food produced in the world is wasted? We go through all this trouble and destruction to produce food, and then we throw half of it away. That’s fucked up.

And this is honestly just the beginning. The consequences of our food system seem to continue infinitely. This is not sustainable. Feeding 7 billion people obviously isn’t an easy task, but if we don’t clean this up feeding 10 billion in a couple of decades will be an impossible one.

Yet for some reason we just don’t hear about these issues. Our food system is constantly ignored in talks about climate change. And that’s exactly the problem.

The only way this is going to change is through consumer awareness. We need to start demanding food that is free of toxic bacteria, drugs, and chemicals. We need to start demanding that livestock are treated ethically with attention to their well-being. We need to demand that plant breeding is done to improve taste and nutrition, instead of focusing on looks and hardiness. We need to start thinking about our food again.

We have become so disconnected with our food to the point where many see eating as something that gets in the way. It’s not something we think or care about like the previous generations. It almost seems like it competes with our other past times for attention. And as a result, is competing with our other purchases for our money.

North America spends the lowest percentage of their income on food of any other country in the world. It’s supposed to be one of the most important aspects of our lives and something we take great pleasure in, however, most of us head into the grocery store looking to spend as little money as possible. This started because of subsidies helping farmers produce calories as cheaply as possible, but it has become our expectation for food. It has made us think that food is food. If I can buy a frozen meal for $3, why should I cook a meal with raw ingredients for $5?

The problem is that these calories are terrible for us. The reason these foods are cheap, is because the costs are externalized. We’re paying for them in all the issues I described above, with the inclusion of diet-related chronic diseases and brutal labor conditions I failed to mention. This is the food system we get when we try to spend as little as possible.

All of this is why I opted-out and started producing some of my own food. I wanted to see if I could do it, and how much I could grow. I wanted to see whether relying on this system was the only option. I wanted to do it to teach people to think about what they’re eating and where it’s coming from, and to not take it for granted.

So I’ve built a hydroponic system (there will be a post coming about it) so I can grow some of my food year round in my Montreal apartment. It isn’t going to solve any of these problems, but it’s a commitment to being conscious about what I’m putting in my body and the impact that it’s having on the rest of the world.

It has also had some unintended consequences. I’ve always felt some kind of disconnect from nature while living in cities. However, I also love urban life and definitely don’t want to go back to living in the country. This has proved to be a great way to reconnect the dots.

This was just my foot into the door of the food system and I understand that it’s not for everyone. But there is something that everyone can do, and it’s so important. Shop at farmers markets if it’s possible and buy organic food if you have the means. But at the very least, avoid the middle aisle of the grocery store and cook your own food. Your body, mind, and the earth will thank you.