I love this time of year.
Looking across the landscape means seeing the dust from a combine in the air. Driving down the road means seeing row-after-row of wheat swaths. Running or biking down an old dirt road means a treat to the senses with the smell of harvest in the air.
We see these signs all of September. These signs mean the production of food. We know the farmers that produce this food as our neighbours. But how often do we actually think about the fact that the field next door produces an ingredient that is used to make for our bread? How often do we actually think about where our food comes from?
For those individuals from the farm, you know all too well how milk is produced, where the beef in the freezer at the grocery store comes from or the road the chicken took to get onto your plate. For those that have weeded a garden, you know all too well where the corn on the cob grilling on your barbecue comes from, or where the potato in the oven comes from. I mean it comes from the farm, right?
Talk to any senior citizen and they will tell you that the majority of what they ate growing up was produced on their farm. The milk they drank in the morning made the trip from the barn to the fridge and the apples, strawberries and raspberries were picked from the fruit bushes in the backyard. Unfortunately, that is not the case anymore. The 100-mile diet is a fad that some aspire towards, not a commonality throughout the prairies.
When you poured your bowl of cereal this morning for breakfast, had your cup of yogurt for a snack or grabbed your granola bar on the way out the door, did you pause to think of where the ingredients came from?
In an increasingly health conscious society, food packaging seems inundated with pictures of fresh blueberries, strawberries, raspberries or other berries. Three times the fruit is often a tag line on the packaging of yogurts. But have you ever flipped that box over? Have you ever really taken a look at the ingredients of the food that you eat? Do you really know what is in your blueberry muffins?
Chances are that blueberries are the last thing you will see on the ingredient list. Instead, the list is filled with sugars, oils and artificial colors derived from petro-chemicals.
Take Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheat cereal for example. Blueberries are displayed on the front of the box meaning that there are blueberries on the ingredient list, right? So, what are the ingredients? Well, they definitely are not blueberries. But rather, they are "blueberry flavoured crunchlets". Well, at least they are still blueberries you would think. But alas, you would be wrong. The "Blueberry flavoured crunchlets" are actually "sugar/glucose-fructose, corn cereal, modified corn starch, natural and artificial flavour, vegetable oil, glycerin, [and] colour" to be exact.
So, with blueberry flavoured crunchlets taking the centre stage over real blueberries, what is the consumer to do? Flip the box over and take a look at the ingredients. Not only are we increasingly disconnected from where our food actually comes from, we don't even know what is really in it most of the time.
And while we can't always know where our food comes from, we most definitely have the ability to know what is in it. And if that label reeks of artificial ingredients and flavours, do yourself and your family a favour and pick up the box where the blueberries are real. Because if you don't know what is in your blueberry muffins, then they probably aren't worth eating.
