Seek "real food" - don't eat up the Earth!

Text / Zhang Mingchun (Deputy Director, Taichung Branch, Homemakers United Foundation)

Book introduction to The Future Diet of a Feverish Planet / Published by Walkers Cultural Enterprise

When we are surrounded by multinational food corporations and agricultural biotechnology companies chasing limitless profit, by the politicians they influence with enormous sums of money and the bills those politicians draft, and by plausible-sounding but misleading arguments, where is our hope?

In the third part, "Organic Farming Brings Hope," Anna writes with rational prose full of feeling, describing how farmers who are friendly to the climate trust nature's own capacity for self-repair; by building an environment of diversified crop rotation, green energy, and organic production, they produce more abundant food and create surprisingly good profits. Anna goes further, contrasting the global chemical giant Syngenta's argument that "organic farming cannot feed the Earth" with the research of Bagley, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, and other scholars, to put forward the argument that "grains alone, if shifted to organic cultivation, could increase the global food supply by forty-five percent."

If you have read this far, it shows there is a very good chance you are already putting into practice the global movement for sustainable development of the Earth: "Eat real food, eat local, support organic, eat more vegetables and fruit, give up layer upon layer of packaging, and cook by hand." In the fourth part, "Action," Anna says that the diets we choose are enough to determine what gets sold and which companies can succeed, and can also encourage the food and agricultural policies most beneficial to the climate. We are not isolated consumers; through the collective power of green consumption, we all become members of the global movement for sustainable development.

One sentence in the book moved me deeply: "The ultimate goal of agriculture is to nourish the human soul." Emotion is the core of sustainable agriculture. Green consumption is not only for physical health; it is also a kind of love for the land and true love for the environment. When we are friendly to the environment, Heaven naturally bestows "health" on us as a gift. Sustainable agriculture and green consumption can be a healthy way of life, and we should keep working at it.