It's time to wake up and smell the coffee!! Smell the sweat rolling off the hot over-worked, under-paid coffee bean pickers, smell the pesticides and chemical fertilisers sprayed from the helicopters thundering past, smell the petrol fumes they leave behind. Something is going on that is not so hot and it seems that by just being consumers we are a part of it all.

It's only been in the last four decades that an increasing number of foods are being subject to processing. Our weekly shopping comes home canned, frozen, dehydrated (here's an instant sauce, just add water to our mix of MSG and artificial flavourings to brighten up your "square" meal) and we feed our children the latest in breakfast cereals (comes in all colours and shapes, loads of sugar, pour on the milk and listen to it fizz, fizz). Not only have these so called "foods" been deprived of their vitamins , minerals and trace nutrients in the process but a whole range of synthetic colourings and flavourings, tenderisers, stabilisers and preservatives have been added in order to make the already gross food even more gross.

At the moment there are more than 4,000 additives which can find their way in to our food, many of which have never been adequately tested for toxicity singly, let alone in the combinations likely to occur in the average supermarket "meal". Along with the unnatural processing of our food, there's been an increase in the use of chemicals in agriculture: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides are being sprayed on the land, the break down of these is slow, resulting in a build up of levels in the soil from year to year.

In the face of these facts it seems clear that diet must have a part to play in the increasing number of diseases and general ill-health experienced all over the world. We are eating ourselves to death.

In the midst of all this global poisoning there is a quiet revolution going on.

Little organic farms are budding and getting on nicely, thank you. Consumers are starting to read the labels and question whats in the food. People are even refusing plastic bags!! We can't expect to eat food from the Earth and smother it in plastic at the same time! We are of the Earth. Everything we eat is from the Earth. When the Earth is dying then so too are we.

Many of us are changing the way we eat, as part of an overall change in our lifestyles. We are recognising the link between Earth, food and people. We are picking up on a new philosophy of life that means adapting to a new diet that is simple, yet wholesome, cheap, yet in harmony with nature and non-destructive to other creatures, to other humans and to our Mother Earth.We are beginning to smell the true smell of the coffee and somehow despite the sugar it don't smell so sweet.

Anna.

 

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