Contemporary eating - impact

What is going wrong with the way we eat nowadays?

No one likes to be judged about their personal eating habits, and that is definitely one of the reasons why so many healthy eating initiatives and diets fail to succeed.

Most of the foods that we feel the biggest emotional connection to are the ones that not only destroy our own health, but at the same time also destroy our planet. Many poor diets, you can also call it “junk food” play a major part in our western world's disease pictures and death causes.

The rise of obesity, diabetes, heart problems and many other diet related diseases go hand in hand with the marketing of “fast foods” like snacks, sugary beverages, processed foods and processed proteins delivered to us by a profit oriented industry that is still growing in our western society. The rise in healthy food with the vegan and vegetarian upcoming is increasing, but in the meantime in poor countries around the world, where people are not educated similarly and food plays a much bigger part just to survive, these industries are still rapidly increasing with cheap mass produced processed foods.

The production process for these foods are using far too many global resources and knowing that the overall population, especially in these countries keep growing, we are destroying our planet with the increasing possibility of not being able to feed all people on our planet anymore in 2050.

70% of all global "fast food" industry originate from the USA, in the top 20 there are 17 American companies and in the top 10 there are only American companies. This shows us that in our western world the problem of unhealthy "fast food" is definitely still all around, Especially the very successful marketing strategies of many of those global industry players is what still influences most of our personal food choices going the wrong way.

I'm not blaming america for this problem, but the “american way of live” and everything that goes with that, is still what many of us see as a perfect image

Our food choices are very often driven by the marketing strategies of the global food industry with very convincing stories, around easy, time consuming cooking methods, with bringing healthiness into processed foods and with very convincing prices.

This leads to the fact that in our western world the average spending on daily food is around 10-15%, leaving a lot more of our income for our so called “work live balance”, to spend more money for luxury or unnecessary products, hobbies and interests that additionally are often not healthy for us or for our planet.

On the other hand the extravagance wastage of resources, for many of those unhealthy foods is not only bad for our personal health, but also one of the reasons for our rapidly increasing climate change, and climate change is undeniably visible all around the world.

So to say it short, many of our personal food choices are therefore a major cause of our climate change, and our contemporary way of eating is not sustainable at all.

Another huge impact of this very clever advertising of the food industry is the fact that these marketing strategies encourage us to buy more food then we actually need, which results in an increasing food waste all around the world. At the moment 30% of all produced foods in the world are being wasted, and the amount of resources used to produce this food waste is therefore also wasted. So we are producing 30% of our global food to then throw it away, when on the other side of the world still millions and millions of people and children are dying of starvation. Can this be right?

The use of plastic in our modern food industry is an additional huge problem in our modern times. We all know that plastic is a global problem, but still we use it excessively and our so called clever food industry has not come up with solutions to solve this.

Here a number that will hopefully make you think, globally 1 Million plastic beverage bottles are sold every minute, yes you hear it correct every minute, and if we continue this, in 2050 there will be more plastic in tall he oceans than fish.

Today 450 million tons of plastic are produced per year, and 150 million tons are only used for packaging, and a huge amount of these 150 million tons go to the food industry.

Plastic therefore plays also a big part in climate change and downfall of our planet, especially knowing how long it takes for plastic to dissolve

Of these tons of plastic waste generated globally in the food industry, about 9 percent is recycled, 12 percent is incinerated, and 79 percent is landfilled or disposed of in the environment. so also here our contemporary food habits, with our personal food choices contribute a major part to climate change

On top of all this, at the moment we are running into a global crisis, and an economical situation that will challenge us even more. Energy is becoming more and more scarce, difficult to obtain and increasing in price, and the industry can only follow this with increasing their prices for products which will hit a very big amount of the global population very hard in the months and years to come

Maybe this is finally what we need to make us wake up and start thinking, by only buying what we really need and reducing our food waste, also by spending our money more consciously , especially on healthy food and less packaged food.

We still have the chance to decrease the need for plastic, to reduce food waste and to start a contemporary eating habit, that is better for our health and at the same time also better for our planet. Lets start asap..........