Society and nature are getting more and more disconnected and this tendency has serious consequences in today’s food culture, argues Michel Poulsen who wants to remind us, that we are perfectly capable of taking some responsibility as consumers if we want to. Today, he is telling his story of how he is contributing to re-connecting the broken food system in this article from the Danish online newspaper Zetland.
We share Michel’s vision of re-connecting the broken food system, which is the main reason we started Plant Jammer. The modern agriculture has been commercialized, which means that we get farther away from the food we eat. This is becoming a serious problem as it affects not only our own health, but also the environment.
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that through cooking, humans are processing nature into culture. This simplified statement reminds us that cooking can delineate an entire society, because with cooking, we are creating culture – and thereby society – when we over time develop common methods, rules and ideas about how to boil a potato.
With that in mind, we should also remind ourselves that it has serious consequences if we stop cooking and outsource all tasks related to food. Today, we rely blindly on the “best before” labels on our food, we eat too much processed food and if we cook, we use recipes and get disappointed if the cooking result turns out differently than shown on the recipe picture. In other words, we tend to pacify ourselves when it comes to food – mostly because that is the most convenient thing to do.
But we forget that a carrot is not just a carrot. We forget that we have several senses that are superior to the labels and the amounts in a recipe – they are just guidelines, they are not meant to exempt us from taking a position.
With Plant Jammer, we want to empower you to take that position in order for you to get closer to food. We want to give you the tools that enable you to discover and trust your senses and make that a convenient solution.