Food Information vs Food Knowledge (What do you know?)
It's time to uplevel what you know about food
There are a LOT of new readers and followers right now and I wanted to say hello and welcome! The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection. I encourage you to subscribe and become part of a like-minded community of people interested in creating health and wellness in an ever-more complex and distressing world. I seek out the latest research, and translate that into actions we can each take to improve our food, our health, and our planet.
There is no question we live in the Information Age. Google was already a powerful search engine giving us access to information from around the world. AI is now poised to power that up even further, although the degree of accuracy in what it spits out is questionable since it can only recombine existing information (much of which is false on the internet).
When it comes to food, you can find most of what you want to know with a few simple searches. Nutrient content, growing conditions, global market data, and recipes are all at your finger tips for every food item known to man, and all the ones being invented as we speak.
But food knowledge is something a little bit different.
Information vs Knowledge
Information is, as I have mentioned, the facts and figures related to a topic. For information to become knowledge you have to internalize it, personalize it. We have to think about those facts and figures and then determine what makes sense for us to act on. And once we do act on that information, we have to learn through personal experience what works.
So while there may be 7500 varieties of apples in the world, there may be less than 50 that grow in your particular area (and that number gets lower the colder you go). Information, personalized, becomes knowledge.
What is Food Knowledge?
Food knowledge is what you know about food through your own experience of obtaining, preparing, eating, storing, growing, and recycling food.
When you first start “studying” food, you can take many different approaches. We often first learn about food by grocery shopping with our parents, or cooking meals in the kitchen. We learn what we like and don’t like. We learn which brands we prefer. We learn how to make our food dollars last. And hopefully, we’ve all learned ways to reduce food waste.
This process can go further when we decide to grow some food too. You learn the steps of preparing soil, selecting and planting seeds, and keeping the plants growing until harvest (check out the Get-Started Garden mini-course). What starts out as basic gardening information becomes knowledge as you make it work in your particular soil and climate.
But Covid and supply chain disruptions got me to thinking about another level of food knowledge.
When there is suddenly not enough food on the store shelves, where will your food come from and how much food to you actually need?
Food Knowledge and the Climate Crisis
Our food systems are under threats on every level. Climate chaos is changing the rules by which food can be produced all over the world. Droughts, floods, wildfires, superstorms, and microclimate shifts are already taking their toll. These changes affect huge tracts of agricultural land, but there are other smaller, but serious, impacts as well.
Where I live, we had an incredibly strange November in 2022 that stayed warm far too long and then snapped into cold, resulting in deciduous trees holding their leaves through the entire winter (a sight I have never seen before!). Then came spring (Many trees with leaves still on?? They did not dry up and blow off?). Many of the plants flushed with new growth and then suddenly collapsed! (This was not a late frost – THAT would have killed everything).
Most notably, the impacts took out plants that have lived on this farm for decades. Well-established plants like the grape, a huge elderberry, a tree rose, my best wild rose for rosehips, the tulip magnolia, a peach, a cherry, all suffered catastrophic and near catastrophic impacts from this strange winter. Of the ones still trying to hang on (with a second spring flush of some scattered leaves) it’s hard to know if they will recover enough before winter sets in again or if they are now too weak to survive.
These are the unexpected consequences of climate shifts on plants, something we are neither tracking well nor talking about enough! The ramifications for food production will be felt quite quickly, but the overall growing potential loss will only become clear over time. We’ve been sold a bill of goods that says climate change will result in a nice northernly progression of warmer growing climates (plants will shift north), but that is unlikely to be true. We are facing chaotic conditions for food plants and growing zones.
Add to this picture, the already degraded state of much of the world’s agricultural soil thanks to the destructive practices of too much tilling, over fertilizing and the dependence on pesticides and herbicides. Soil conservation isn’t happening fast enough, and the uptake of regenerative farming practices is still slow.
Add to that the contamination of the planet’s fresh water. Run-off of chemical fertilizers (notably nitrogen and phosphorus) is creating dead zones in water bodies that kill off aquatic life. Further damaging the ecosystems we depend on.
All the while for-profit food systems are generating tons of foods that contribute to the global health crisis and support massive levels of food waste. (I’ve written more about this in Eye of the Beholder -part 2).
THIS is the system in which you need to find food.
This is a system in danger of collapse.
So not to be a doomer here, but this begs for the develop of a next-level kind of food knowledge: Where is your food coming from and how much do you need?
Where does your food come from?
Now is the perfect time to truly start taking stock of where in the world your food is coming from. The intensive globalization of food supplies in the 1990’s is hard to reverse. We’ve become highly dependent on cheap imported foods.
But this is not just a matter of asking what foods are being produced that work for me. It’s more personal than that. It’s time to truly take stock of the country of origin on the foods you are eating. Are there local sources instead? Are there local foods you substitute for some of the imports you are buying?
Why local?
Because in the face of another shut down, supply chain disruption or catastrophe, local sources may be all you have. And if you don’t actively support those local growers and producers right now, then they will not be there when the crisis hits. Farm to table is the shortest supply chain possible next to growing food yourself.
The last few years have made me question why anyone would farm – ever. Between the rising costs of everything from fuel to seeds to livestock feed to hired help, and the absolutely insane levels of bureaucracy and micro-management (at least in Canada) – small farms are dropping like beleaguered pollinators and even larger farms are at the brink. What happens then?
We are killing our food producers? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
If you don’t take your food dollars and make them count locally right now . . . the prospects of waiting in line for food deliveries are in your future. . . . coming soon during your next crisis.
How much food do you need?
As with where your food comes from, taking a good long look at what you need in a month, and in a year, is more important than ever. It’s time to take stock and think beyond today’s grocery store list.
How much food do you keep on hand? What makes sense to stock up on? Do you have a pantry with staples? Do you have a way of cooking that food if your power goes out?
Where I live in British Columbia, we’ve been through a long string of serious events: Covid-19, massive wildfires disrupting entire summers, huge atmospheric river events that took out the major highways, and unusual seasonal patterns of heat and snow. I can tell you, it’s time to take your food knowledge to the next level!
Your Next Level of Food Knowledge
None of us have the luxury of taking the food supply for granted anymore. It’s time to become deeply familiar with YOUR food supply system so that you can pivot quickly and effectively to keep food on your table.
It is easy enough to start tracking this – use your food receipts for a typical month (and x12 for a year):
- What types of food are you buying?
- How much of it is available locally or regionally?
- How much whole foods vs ultra processed foods do you buy? Can you learn to make more of foods at home and skip the pre-made stuff?
- How much of it could you grow yourself with a little ingenuity or by cooperating with someone?
Then take action:
- Make sure you have at least a week’s supply of food in your pantry, but preferably staples that can carry you much further than that.
- Make sure you can cook or prepare those foods in a state of emergency.
- Grow everything you can yourself.
- Source as much as you can locally and regionally because this may be the only available food during a crisis.
- Vote with your food dollars – make sure you are not only buying food to support yourself, but that you are supporting businesses that are working to ensure a quality food supply. Co-ops can be great places to do this. (check out the Food Co-op Finder apps).
- Develop skills or items for barter.
Knowledge is information in action
You’ve heard the saying that knowledge is power. In the case of food knowledge, food knowledge is life and survival. Knowing your food needs on a deeper monthly and annual level will let you better think through your food choices and let you invest your time and money in systems that are working for you.
Acting now gives you time to get the details right. Every step towards food knowledge counts.
Stay tuned here at The Naturalized Human for more on ways to grow food, and on how food affects your Mind-Body connection. Paid subscribers get access to exclusive content including the Successful Seed Saving Program 101 rolling out in 2024.
I like the distinction you make between information vs knowledge. We get filled with info all the time but how much do we, or even should we, make into our own knowledge?