We have always been taught that history is the key to the future. That we must look to the past to learn from our mistakes or our successes; and I believe we are currently making one of these mistakes. We are currently making a mistake that we will one day in the future look back on and hopefully learn from. Today we live in a world where the food system has come to controls our lives. Many of us are no longer connected to the food we consume. Children grow up in life not knowing where their foods are coming from and not know what it took to create those foods. The system has come to be controlled by a few large corporations whose focus is producing the most food for the least cost. The health of our nation has been overtaken by a greed for money. We cannot go on with this food system for much longer, it must be changed.
If we look to our past we can see it did not used to be like this. We were once connected to our foods. We knew where they came from and we knew how they were produced. The process of hunting and gathering food was a sacred act that connected one to Mother Nature (Burke, 32). Many in today’s world have lost this connection to food and our earth. In order to regain this connection I propose we look to the past. We must strive for a new food system. We must find a way to reconnect with the land and the food that we are putting into our bodies. We must look to the past to make this a reality.
It is not possible to completely return to the food system of the indigenous people. We have greatly populated our world, and a food system of only hunting and gathering will not support all 7 billion of us, but ideals shared between the indigenous peoples can provide goals for our future food system to reach for. Erik P. Burke, in his thesis on the food systems of the Mary’s River region, discusses the idea of influencing but not diminishing the environment. The native Kalapuyans manipulated and altered ecosystems to increase the production of certain plants and animals (Burke, 30), but did not diminish the environments around them. They ate the foods locally available to them and worked to keep those foods plentiful. On the other hand, our food today generally comes from all around the world. Great efforts have been made in recent years to eat locally grown foods. I propose that this be taken a step further to eat native foods to the area. Food that the indigenous people once ate and thrived on. For example here in the Willamette valley those foods would include items such as camas, acorns, and wapatos. This will help us to become connected once again with the lands that we live on. We would once again learn to appreciate the food we are putting into our bodies and Mother Nature that gave it to us.
Knowledge of food and the food system should be shared universally. Everyone should have the ability to be involved in one way or another with the food system. Without knowledge of food we lose the ability to connect to our food. It simply becomes a burden to afford and eat. Lack of food security is a big problem that we face in our food system today. Food and the knowledge surrounding food is not equally available to everyone. If we look to our past this is not something that occurred regularly. Indigenous people, such as the Karuks of California, had a diverse availability of native food resources that provided food security or a safety net (Norgaard). This safety net is lost when we lose the connection to the native lands. Most everyone in a tribe was involved in one way or another with the food system, whether that be gathering or hunting or processing the food. They had knowledge of how to look for and encourage the growth of food. This is the ideal we must strive for. Many people today do not know how food is grown. By learning these skills and gaining a connection to the land I believe we can decreases the amount of food insecurity in the world today.
In the future, I hope that we can accomplish a world once again connected to Mother Nature and the food she provides us with. This connection is more important than most people realize. It is because of this lost connection that the food system has become the mess it is today. We have allowed others to have control over what we eat and how it is produced. I hope that we can recognize the mistakes we are making in the food system today and I hope we are able to find this missing connection once again.