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This is the first generation of children that will not be as healthy as their parents. Obesity, cancer, diabetes, all on the rise.  Studies have suggested that ‘environmental factors’ are often the cause – and the kind of chemicals that go into food production contribute heavily to those environmental factors.

According to Food Beware, cancer has become almost like a new plague in France; most people have been directly affected by more than one person falling to cancer, and most of the farmers experience everyone in their family being affected.  As a result, the country has begun looking into alternatives, and one town’s school has decided to go totally organic. It’s a lovely image, really, the children sitting in the lunchroom, all sharing the same food “family style”, made from nearby farms (or school gardens) which grow everything without synthetic chemicals. So it’s not just about being organic, but also about being local – given that transporting food across hundreds or even thousands of miles is responsible for a significant percentage of air and water pollution.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s really surprising that we went down this road to begin with:  weed killers.  Chemicals that kill, because they’re poison. How did we have the arrogance to presume that weeds would be the only things killed by these chemicals? Birds, bees, anything that interacts directly with the plants reap immediate consequences.  Many farmers use between 15 and 25 different chemicals on their land. These chemicals don’t just vanish once they’ve done their jobs; residues leach into the produce, and runoff into the water. Water which flows into the nearby cities’ faucets.  A Brita is great, but do you have one for your shower?

Food Beware raises another very interesting, and important, question: We’re told that on average, the lifespan of an individual in a developed country is increasing significantly over those of previous generations, so what’s wrong with how we’re living? But those studies, about those lengthening lifespans, are focused on people who were born before the end of WWII; who spent the first several years of their lives without these chemicals, but who did receive some of the first real, consistent healthcare and diet. But for Gen-X and Y, who grew up with “refined” ingredients and chemically-treated produce, the odds are not as good.

The UN has declared that if all food on the planet were grown organically, all of humankind could be fed. There are also a lot of studies that suggest that our economy, our health, and our educational system would all improve enormously by making the relatively small step of building community and school gardens grown without chemicals, and grown with an eye to produce that works best for the region. People get a sense of empowerment, understanding more about how food is grown; our minds and bodies work better, having real food as fuel (as opposed to synthetics). In very real way, we could “unpave paradise.”

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