Supermarket Food is Like a Tiger in a Zoo

No matter how good zoos get, a tiger is no longer a wild tiger when it’s in a zoo. It’s like a tiger, and it’s better than no tiger at all, but it’s just a copy of the real thing as it was when it was part of the wilderness.

As it is with tigers, so it is with food.

Let me explain.

I'll start by defining some different categories of food - real wild food, real domesticated food, and zoo food.

(I first wrote about these categories of food in the post "Weeds: Real Nutrition For Free," which I'll link to again at the bottom in case you don't want to be distracted from this post for right now.)

Real wild food

One example of real wild food would be edible weeds, which pulse with vigour and tenacity. (I wrote more about this, and named some very common edible weeds, in "Weeds – Deep, Wild Nutrition And Medicine," which again I'll link to at the bottom.)

Edible weeds can be very easy to find and gather in small amounts, and the reward in terms of nutrition and satisfaction is out of all proportion to the size of the serving.

Wild food serves up communion with nature, bruises, scrapes, general discomfort, and sometimes a dash of backbone strengthening disappointment, along with the thrill of the search and the treasure in the harvest basket.

And when you get your harvest to the kitchen table, you find that it's more tough, tart, bitter, astringent, and/or fibrous than we supermarket eaters are accustomed to. It has more oomph and is less apologetic, dumbed down, or compliant, than the stuff in the packets.

Because of all this, wild food nourishes us in ways that no other kind of food can.

Real domesticated food

Real domestic food is the kind that grows in gardens and on farms.

It's better behaved, more abundant, and less demanding than wild food, for which we are thankful. 

But it remembers how it was to be wild and it still teems with life and interconnectedness, because it's grown in ways that consider the health of the eater, the growers, and the growing place. 

You still have to pick out the caterpillars and shake off the spiders, and you have to eat or process it quickly before it spoils.

When you eat it, you do so knowing that every forkful supports a farmer or gardener who cares about communities, soil, water, and air.

Zoo food

Zoo food is the stuff produced by the industrial food system. It's an anonymous commodity that's had all the life processed out of it. 

Procuring real food requires us to engage in life-enhancing exchanges where seller and buyer (or forager) all have obligations to fulfill. 

A zoo food purchase, on the other hand, is just a transaction. It's hollow. After the transaction you walk away untethered, with no ongoing connection or obligation to the sources of the food. 

Instead of being about relationships, zoo food is about convenience for the consumer and profit for big industrialized food corporations. 

I could complicate things and arrange zoo food on a spectrum from "still resembles real food a little bit" to "no longer resembles real food at all," but that would be fiddly so I wont do that. 

Real food enriches our lives; supermarket food reduces us to looking for the specials

Real food (wild or domesticated) is a complex, multi-faceted, and central part of life that reaches into and interconnects with every other part of life. It not only feeds the stomach but also the relationships between the people working together in food related roles, and the relationships between people and the land and animals that gift us the food.

One of the ways you know it's real food is that it nourishes connections and diversity. It can feed something inside of you that might have gone dormant -- perhaps the part of you that would be thrilled to glimpse a real, wild tiger.

Real food connects people to each other, to the earth and the seasons, and to plants and animals in ways that sustain people’s health on physical, social, and spiritual levels while also sustaining the health of our environment and the web of life we are part of.

Industrialized "zoo food," on the other hand, is something we make choices about based on price and convenience. 

Related posts and sources 

Take action - a series of posts on gradually building healthier supermarket habits , or "moving away from zoo food and towards real food":

• Spend Less and Tread Lighter by Examining Your Supermarket Habits
• Raising a Family in the Age of Supermarkets
• What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?
• Wise Use of Whole Foods

Read more - other related posts on A Real Green Life:

• "Solving Our Food Crises Calls For More Hands in the Soil, Not More Technology"
  
• Weeds: Real Nutrition For Free
• Weeds – Deep, Wild Nutrition And Medicine
• Regenerative Food Systems vs Industrial Agriculture: Why We Need More Hands in the Soil
• on Urban Foraging, by guest author Chelsey Reis
• The Real Value of a Chicken

Some wild food information sources:

• Many, many posts and books by Susun Weed. Check out her 2 minute post Wild, which describes why our bodies need wild food.
• Deigo Bonetto