The Breakfast From The Grocer Problem: 5 Ways Our Food System Hurts Us
Aldo Leopold was a twentieth century conservationist and masterly writer of A Sand County Almanac, a book practically overflowing with thought provoking observations. One of his most well known quotes addresses the “spiritual (relating to or affecting the human spirit) dangers” of not owning a farm:
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
It is the first of these dangers I want to discuss today. A Sand County Almanac was written in a day when agriculture was peaking in the U.S. at 6.8 million farms - today, there are 1.9 million- 27% percent of the number in Leopold's day. With fewer local farms and more and larger grocery stores, this danger is certainly still alive and well in 2024.
But isn't it a good thing to be able to hop in the car, drive to a nearby supermarket, and choose between almost endless options to serve for dinner? What is so bad about not knowing where our food actually comes from? Below are five ways in which this spiritual and physical danger effects us today, and a few practical ways to combat what I will call the Breakfast From The Grocer Problem.
1. Spending Your Money on Nutritionally Meager Foods
Looking up “cereal in-store” on the website of my hometown Walmart yields 340 results. “Snack cakes” yields 294. Every time I step through the doors of the grocery store, I am presented with aisles and aisles of variety. The trend I've noticed lately is junk food flavored like other junk food; apparently they have run out new ideas for fake food and so had to resort to things like fruity cereal flavored candy bar and waffle flavored pop-tarts. And because Breakfast From The Grocer is not a new problem, there are generations of shoppers who truly know of no better way to eat than to fill a cart with overpriced, additive-laced convenience foods.
2. Buying Food That Has Traveled More Than You Have
Studies estimate that processed foods in the United States travel over 1,300 miles and fresh produce over 1,500 miles before being consumed. The number of steps, stops and transformations undergone make most grocery store offerings completely unrecognizable as anything that could have originated in nature, and significantly impacts the freshness of even minimally-processed foods.
If your neighbor to the east is a conventional farmer and your neighbor to the west is a grocer, the meat, eggs or produce the first grows may travel half way across the country to be processed, altered and packaged before making it back to the grocery store belonging to the other- if it makes it back at all. Your spinach doesn't want to see the world, and has likely lost many nutrients in its travels. The truth is, with Breakfast From The Grocer you don't know where your food came from or has been, or what kinds of waste and disregard for God's creation has been the result of these excessive food miles.
3. Reliance on Big, Distant Corporations for Food Security
In the U.S., the food industry is extremely concentrated, the majority of meat and dairy as well as other Breakfast From The Grocer commodities being controlled by just a few empire-like companies. This gives Americans the illusion of security and bounty, but it's built on an unsustainable foundation of underpaid laborers and waste, exploiting both the land and the people who work it. Centralized food systems also leave us with nowhere to turn when disruptions arise- as was clearly seen during the 2020 COVID scare. If that infamous year taught us anything, it is that the disproportionate reliance on a few big corporations can't continue indefinitely. Our grandparents were uniquely susceptible to the lies that brought us to where we are today, but the result fell far short of the promise and it is not a system that was built to last.
4. Putting Your $ Behind Values You Don't Agree With
When you buy food from the grocery store, every dollar you spend is divided countless ways. It is impossible to trace where all it goes, or what values and practices it is used to support. Were the animals raised humanely and processed with dignity? Were the crops grown with respect to the surrounding ecosystems? Are the multiple companies involved built on unethical and dishonest principles? Do they support legislation you would oppose? Was everyone involved fairly paid? If you don't know where your food came from, it is impossible to know the answer to whatever questions matter most to you.
5. Isolation and Lack of a Local Community
Everywhere I look it seems like there is a famine for a sense of place and belonging; we can connect with people on the other side of the world with the swipe of a thumb but hesitate to ask our next door neighbor their name. A long separation between source and destination of food feeds into the separation in our communities. Because your grocer neighbor does not knock on the door of your farmer neighbor to pick up the eggs he needs to sell each week, they may never meet. Because you go straight to dairy department and through the self check out, you may never meet either of them.
For as long as the world has existed, people have used food for celebration and fellowship, enjoying the God-given gift of being able to cook and appreciate good food, nourishing body and spirit. We can run in any of the five nearby grocery stores and buy breakfast, but does that compare to visiting a farmers market- or the farm itself- where you can know and be known, where satisfying a need common to humanity- food- can lead to satisfying another: the need for connection with the people around us?
How Can We Combat The Breakfast From The Grocer Problem?
I didn't set out to give all of the answers to this problem, but it would be discourteous of me to leave you bankrupt and lonely, eating Funyan flavored Lay's Potato Chips and feeling helpless. Discourteous- and dishonest. I don't believe we are helpless at all; as a matter of fact for me the future of local food is exciting and full of hope. The mess of our food system was not created overnight, and it will not be solved overnight- but the very ingrained, far-reaching nature of the problem provides us with an almost endless range for improvement. Maybe you don't own a farm, but you can find a local farmer to support. Maybe you can't afford to switch all or even most of your shopping from the chain grocery store all at once, but you can trade in just a few of your processed or unsustainably produced regular purchases for similarly priced (and much tastier!) Farmer's Market goods. You may not have space to grow all of your food, but you can go to a nursery, buy a pack of seeds, and plant them in a flower bed.
Balancing efficiency with sustainability will never be an easy task, and remembering that bigger is not always better leaves us unraveling a tangled web, trying not to miss the occasional instance when a little bigger actually would be better. But as we little by little work to build a better system, built on community, sustainability, and respect for creation, the path forward is bright and beautiful.