Environmental Stewardship

The typical American diet is high in refined grains, added sugars and fat. This has contributed to an increased risk of chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Meat and poultry are major sources of saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels and increases the risk of heart disease. The fat increases the buildup of plaque in veins, which stresses the heart as it has to work harder to circulate blood. When eventually blood cannot flow through damaged veins, bypass surgery is needed to bypass those veins.

Sweets and soda have become two of the top five sources of calories in the American diet. Decreasing the intake of these two foods, along with exercise, can help individuals maintain healthier weights.

For most of us I expect, our relationship to meat and its relationship to us was fairly elemental growing up in the Midwest. Farmers raised it, and we ate it. We weren’t likely to ask probing questions such as what the livestock ate, what the conditions were on the farms they inhabited, or how they were slaughtered. We certainly weren’t interested in the water, energy and other resources that were required to sustain these livestock. In fact, even with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the associated mounting pressure to develop a higher consciousness around the widespread application of toxic herbicides and insecticides such as DDT, most of us didn’t make – or maybe didn’t want to make – the systemic connection between poisoning the land and its creatures and poisoning ourselves.

Growing Awareness of Connection Between Us and “Livestock”

This clear connection between poisoning our food sources and poisoning ourselves seems elemental in hindsight of course, but the 60s and 70s were a window of great tumult in the country, and it seemed that many of the strongest voices of protest were being spent on pressuring our leaders to withdraw from the Vietnam War, or to address the persistent racial/cultural and gender divides that plagued the nation, and many would say, plague it to this day. Perhaps we had too many societal challenges to canvas to have given our food supply and our shifting relationship to its production and consumption the attention it deserved.

Timmy (The name means one who honors God) traces his genealogy back to the Andes Mountains of Peru, South America. Timmy’s ancestors’ last name was originally Tomatl, which meant round and plump to the Aztecs. In the 16th Century, Spanish conquistadores took the tomatoes back to Europe with them. In the 18th Century, tomatoes were brought to Quebec and Louisiana by the French. Now the tomato is the most widely grown fruit (Yes, technically Timmy is a fruit.) in the Americas.

Timmy and his relatives suffer and die if the weather is too cold. For Timmy to fulfill his career objective of being a food relished by others and eaten as part of the earth’s ecosystem, he must be grown in a warm climate. Some of Timmy’s second cousins are grown in local greenhouses, and spend much more of their life in the warm confines of their home than on the road. However, Timmy, a Better Boy tomato, was conceived in California and transported to Chicago to fulfill his career objective. In fact, 40% of the world’s tomatoes are grown in California. At first, Timmy thought travel would be great. Then Timmy learned that to prepare for the trip he would have to be washed in chlorinated water, then dried with blasts of warm air and covered with wax. Timmy also learned about the large negative environmental impact this travel has on the earth and he became sad and no longer ripe for use. In particular, long-distance transportation of many of his Tomato family is contributing greatly to greenhouse gas emissions, air acidification, and smog. For example, global warming pollution for food transported by airplane is 500 times greater than pollution from transportation of locally grown foods!