This was the title of my presentation last night for the Scarsdale Middle School community. The conversation around food is changing and fast. While the food industry has pledged to cut 1 trillion calories by 2015 in response to the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, I explained to my audience last night that those calories don’t really count! Changing portion sizes and creating “better for you” packaged processed foods is simply a ponzi scheme that keeps everyone from realizing the big picture. Calorie cuts won’t solve the obesity crisis, but it will continue to create profit for the food industry.
Fortunately, the health teacher in the Scarsdale Middle School teaches systems thinking. This perspective helps students look at the big picture of food. Where it comes from, how many resources are used to produce those “low calorie” edible foodlike substances, what the real costs are to our health, our wallets and our environment. When you look beyond the fat grams and the calorie counts, you see a food system that is broken beyond repair.
Right now, 10 calories of fossil fuel are required to make every 1 calorie of industrialized food. Considering we now consume 6 barrels of oil for every 1 we discover, we need to understand that we’ve got to create ways to produce food using less oil. The underwater oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is a grim reminder that the era of easy oil is over.
I left the parents with 3 books to read and 3 movies to see. If you read these books and watch these movies, you too can learn to see beyond the fat and calories. Here’s the list:
Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Food Rules by Michael Pollan
Eaarth by Bill McKibben
Read them, watch them, let me know what you think!
