Our Daily Bread
We stopped
buying bread at the supermarket and then stopped going to the supermarket
altogether. I had been reading Felicity Lawrence´s book Not on the Label:
What Really Goes into the Food on your Plate (2004) and then the book which
accompanies the documentary “Food, Inc.” called Food, Inc. A Participant
Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer – And What
You Can Do About It edited by Karl Weber (2009) and concluded that the best
protest I could make to the international food industry is to not support the
ubiquitous supermarket chains which are mafia-style conglomerates and the
gate-keepers to the world food supply. The supermarkets dictate food pricing,
what is available and when regardless of local, seasonal offering, and thrive
on a culture of compulsive consumerism in their psychologically manipulative
displays of processed foods, all requiring enormous energy inefficiencies in
food transportation, perfections in food production only available through
petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified crops, and
the global need for low-cost, slave-wage laborers available 24-hours a day. In
every aspect on every level of our modern, convenience-based food industry we
are poisoning the land, air, water, and the lives of desperate laborers and
struggling farmers. In addition, the food available to us from such a system is
toxically contaminated with hidden fats recycled from a whole industry of fat
residues, repackaged with salt or sugar as processed cereals, chips, cookies,
crackers, frozen meals, and bread. These recycled fats are known carcinogens
and are associated with heart diseases. The pesticide residues on supermarket
fruits and vegetables and their legally required washing solutions are filled
with neurologically damaging substances. The workers exposed to these chemicals
experience all sorts of under-documented ailments permissible because of their
unprotected status as undocumented laborers, many times immigrants or refugees
intentionally kept ignorant to labor laws and their human rights.
Every
problem in the food industry is known, published, investigated and yet we
willingly turn a blind eye because we all need to eat and convenience for our
daily bread rules us emotionally. Our daily bread, dear Father give us today
our daily bread, despite the fact that it is mostly inflated air held together
in a chemically perfected web of those toxic, recycled fats with flour so
finely ground that it is literally absent of nutrition on the molecular level,
requiring vitamin additives, additional transportation shipments and
contaminated inefficiencies.
We had long
ago abandoned the vegetable and fruit section of the supermarkets, acquiring
such items directly from our gardens or the farmers´ markets available
year-round in most of Chile. Cheeses and butter and beans also began to be more
readily available at the farmers´ market once we started going regularly and
getting to know the schedules of which vendors had what available when. For our
dry goods we found a local, family-owned business in Valdivia called Ordenes
(@Bueras 1902) where we acquire packaged pasta, rice, cooking oil, salt, and
sacks of flour as well as grains for the chickens, and dried fruits like raisins
and nuts and household items like matches and toilet paper all for better
prices than the area supermarkets and more directly distributed. Plus we form
relationships with these vendors, social interactions that bring the business
of food acquisition back to a more human scale. They remember us, remember that
we bring our own canvas bas when we shop, and respond when we request a natural
brand of cooking oil or larger portions of popping corn by stocking them on
their shelves. Through our contacts and friendships in other bio-regions of
Chile we have found direct sources for bulk purchases of olive oil, sacks of
whole oats, brown rice, and a small-scale mill for whole wheat flour just east
of us in the Andean foothills.
Thus armed
with less processed, locally available grains which we can stock-pile all year,
we abandoned the last connection we had to the supermarkets: the Chilean
tradition of buying bags of white bread rolls and buns from the supermarkets
every couple of days, or daily for urban dwellers, for evening tea and
breakfast. Instead we quickly learned how to mix up flat bread dough and cook
it directly on the wood-fired stove-top; evening tea and morning breakfast
staples prepared in about 30-minutes of good rolling and flipping exercise. Or prepare
rising dough ahead of time for the clay oven or make quick batters of drop
biscuits or pancakes or just eat a bowl of hot porridge instead of bread, or
bake granola for morning cereal with our own honey and local butter for added
fat that we can source and control the content of.
All of this
transition took investigation, footwork and synchronicity to seek out local,
non-supermarket sources for our food and household items. And it required
leaning how to cook and make many of our own once-processed food items like
bread and cereal. We studied recipes and talked to people, exchanged ideas,
listened to other generations, remembered how people ate prior to the arrival
of the supermarkets, and then dedicated ourselves to the acquisition of food
stuffs without the bright lights and marketing traps of the modern
supermarkets. In Chile, where farmers´ markets are still a large part of most
urban landscapes, I see no real reason besides ignorance and apathy that young
urban dwellers do not better support these good, non-supermarket sources for
food. There is a claim that the supermarkets are more convenient, but the
fluorescent lights reveal tired faces standing in long lines paying for
over-priced shadows of the food they may have eaten in their childhoods.
Give us
today our daily bread and let it not only nourish our bodies, but also our
local communities and the environment in which family farms can actually thrive
on sustainable practices. Amen.