There’s nothing like a well-make bruschetta, those hand-held bites of toasted bread piled with tomatoes and basil.   Everybody loves this Italian appetizer, which is easy to make.

The bread can be almost any type that can be cut into small rounds or squares.  Toast the bread.  Then pile with the following topping, to make perhaps 10 individual bruschetta.  Topping: 2-3 tomatoes chopped into tiny pieces, half a tsp of chopped garlic, 1 tsp dried basil, lots of fresh basil, a little salt and pepper, 2-3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, 2-3 tablespoons good quality olive oil.   Pile the topping onto the toasted bread bits, and serve.

This dish has a history, of course, and afficionados have strong opinions about the details.  Some people feel you should rub garlic onto the toast before adding topping.     Others use hearty bread, untoasted.  And there are loads of other variations.  Have fun with it.

We all care about community.  We are about our geographical, cultural, and social connections to neighbours, friends, and others.  So how can we support that in our food choices?

One way is to eat locally made, organic food from small-scale producers.

Another is to cut down on processed, highly packaged foods, most of which come from industrial factory operations controlled from afar.

Another is to eat less meat, and consume animal products that are sustainably and compassionately made.

Additionally, we can support groups that work toward local, community control of food systems, that work toward a world in which small-scale farmers can make a good living, and that are designing policy to take back rural communities from agribusiness.  Such groups include the BC Food Systems Network, Food Secure Canada, Beyond Factory Farming, and others.   Their web addresses are on this site.

Supporting community through our food choices addresses the last of the Five Key Challenges for Food Systems that I outlined previously:

• To feed a large and growing world population
• To produce food ecologically
• To consume food for human health
• To act compassionately toward all living beings
• To support community well-being.

Thanks for being with me on this brief series of posts.    Please let us know about your own food experiences and thoughts.

While the number of farms has declined in Canada, the size of remaining farms has climbed. We need to create conditions in which small farms can survive and thrive.

These pigs are sentient.  They experience emotion and feel pleasure and pain.  That’s been well documented by scientists, and is intuitively true for almost anyone who has had a pet.  Yet around the globe we are locking up millions of pigs, and chickens, and cows in industrial factory farms, to make excessive amounts of meat, eggs, and milk. 

I hold the belief that human beings have the moral right to use non-human animals for some purposes.  I may be wrong on this, and God’s not talking.   But I also believe we have a responsibility to treat animals as well as possible and not to inflict suffering.  This is hardly a radical idea.  Yet most of us continue to support factory farming by buying cheap chicken and conventional milk and eggs, bacon from mass producers, and beef from cattle feedlots.

This touches on the fourth of the Five Key Challenges for Food Systems that I outlined previously:

• To feed a large and growing world population
• To produce food ecologically
• To consume food for human health
• To act compassionately toward all living beings
• To support community well-being.

We can make food choices that are kind and compassionate toward livestock.  We can do this by refusing to support factory farming.  We can do it by buying animal products that were made in small-scale, natural environments where the animals lived decent lives stewarded by people who recognized their physical, emotional, and social needs.

Having written extensively on the scientific evidence for animal sentience, based on my background in neuroscience, psychology, and food policy, I feel strongly on this topic.  You can read one of my articles on it, commissioned by Compassion in World Farming, at: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/animal_sentience/science/guest_articles/default.aspx. I welcome your comments.

The way we eat affects our health.   The way our societies allow and encourage food to be produced affects human well-being.  That’s why our health is intimately intertwined with our food, illustrating another of the Five Key Challenges for Food Systems that I outlined previously:

• To feed a large and growing world population
• To produce food ecologically
• To consume food for human health
• To act compassionately toward all living beings
• To support community well-being.

In our grandparents’ day, people who died young generally succumbed to infectious diseases such as flus and tuberculosis.  Today those who die young fall prey mostly to heart disease, cancers, and stroke.   Human ingenuity came up with antibiotics to fight infectious disease.  But meanwhile we’ve acted in ways that have increased our vulnerability to illnesses of our time.

Almost all disease is multifactorial, meaning that pathology has multiple causes.   The sole exceptions are clearly-genetic conditions such as Huntington’s Disease.  Almost all others  have many contributions — a little genetic predisposition, but also environmental factors  including everything from exposure to toxins in our childhood neighbourhoods, to too much intake of high-fat or pesticide-laced foods.

The fact that food choices play a role in health and disease gives us three or more opportunities a day to do the right thing for our bodies.   I’ll quote Michael Pollan’s wonderful dictum:  ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.’   In the last post I showed an image of the ingredient list from a jar of ‘gourmet’ antipasto.  It takes effort to learn that foods with such labels aren’t necessarily healthy, but they’re not.   Let’s eat real food.  If you have additional specific ideas on how we can do so, please comment.

That we should also eat ‘not too much,’ as Michael Pollan advises, is difficult but essential.  Our evolutionary brains aren’t wired to cope with the excessive amounts of food available, and many of us are overweight or even obese.  My elderly father made a fascinating observation recently. Almost 90 years old, he has all his cognitive faculties and also gets out of the home, drives, and walks, most days.   A big fan of eating sparingly, my father has observed that:  “There are no overweight men over 80.”  By and large, they’re gone.  Some women seem to be able to carry a few extra pounds and still live into their 80s, but anecdotal evidence suggests that men, at least, cannot.

Industrial agriculture, with its pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, also undermine human health.  So does factory farming with its heavy use of antibiotics — which has been demonstrated as the likely main cause of antibiotic-resistant disease today.   Food systems are challenged to contribute to human health.  The fact that those systems are producing edible substances isn’t  enough.  We need better production priorities, and better food choices, for health.  For example, if you need a snack this afternoon, consider an organic apple.   This hasn’t been easy for me.  As a salt-and-sugar enthusiast, I had to work hard over time to choose fresh fruit instead of cookies.  But now apples and me are an item.  Join me in eating for health.