Health must be priority #1
Our thoughts on the case for decentralized food
Feeling well starts with eating better food, but the entire system is stacked against us. Here is a point of view from the Senza health coaching team to start a conversation on why we need to build a decentralized food system - and what that new system should look like.
Most people don’t feel good.
Everywhere you go, people are overweight, diabetic, fighting chronic illness, anxious, depressed, and lonely. This pervasive “meh” feeling affects energy levels, mood, sleep, performance, relationships, financial wellbeing, and happiness. If we don’t solve this crisis, nothing else matters. Not climate, not environment, not education… Restoring human health has to come first.
Food is the root cause.
The current system is exceptionally good at producing food that makes us very sick. Supermarkets sell 40,000 different items in every store, almost all of them variations of cheap, processed carbs. These fake foods contain chemicals, fillers, additives, stabilizers, coloring, emulsifiers, and other harmful ingredients while lacking essential nutrients. Food on this scale is highly efficient, but it’s damaging to our bodies and vulnerable to disruption, as we’ve seen in recent years with unprecedented supply chain problems and shortages of basic goods.
The entire system is locked into the status quo.
Big Food consists of manufacturers, distributors, grocery stores, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, government, universities, and dietitians. Each has a role to play, and none can escape the paradigm once they’ve bought into it. It’s dangerous to outsource your health to this kind of system. The incentives will never be aligned.
It’s unfixable.
We can’t tweak our way out of this mess. If we stay in their game, we lose. It’s time for Game B. Do you want corporate food or community food? We need to create a new food model - one that’s resilient, not fragile and authentic, not fake.
100 real foods is all we need.
The good news is that we can create a parallel food system from combinations of simple, unprocessed foods like meat, seafood, eggs, dairy, greens, berries, and the like. We know this from five years of helping thousands of people take back their health through ketogenic, paleo, carnivore and other healing ways of eating. No human needs a grocery store full of 40,000 SKUs!
What if you could be your own grocer?
Imagine a decentralized food system that’s hyper-local, even peer-to-peer. It would be the exact opposite of chemically assisted monocrops destroying the land. Picture friends and neighbors raising animals and growing crops to exchange with each other. Someone has chickens, someone else does beef or wild game, others specialize in cheese, leafy greens, tomatoes, honey, olive oil, etc. The common thread is nutrient-density.
If you stayed out of the grocery store and sourced food this way, you’d feel connected to the places where your food grows, and to the people who harvest it for you. A decentralized approach to food removes chemicals, transportation miles, false advertising, and ultimately chronic illness from the system. It is inherently diverse and anti-fragile.
The journey to wellbeing is personal.
Each of us has taken a different route, but if you’ve found us here, you’ve likely discovered a thing or two about how food choices can help or hinder your efforts to feel better. And maybe you’re the kind of person who wants to do something more with this realization. Or perhaps you’ve hit a plateau and are looking for the next step to take. Whatever the circumstances that bring you to Fix the Food, we welcome your ideas and contributions as we try to shape this new world together.
Where should we begin?
You can get involved in several ways:
Join our tribe: If you’ve discovered us through this newsletter, you can join our Fix the Food tribe on Sphinx Chat to connect with others who share your passion for better food and optimal health. We chose this platform for our community because it is private, secure, free of ads, and uncensored.
Try Senza: Our tribe is integrated with the popular Senza app for those who want to monitor nutrition, fasting, sleep, exercise, and mood while tracking progress over time. Senza users earn points for activity in the app, which can be applied to meal planning services or converted to digital currency in Sphinx.
Tell a friend: Invite a friend to check out this weekly publication. It’s going to take a village worth of creativity, determination, and collective energy to solve this problem.