It's National Nutrition Month. This year’s theme focuses on how "Food Connects Us." Between holiday meals and community events, we hear lots about how food connects us, but have you ever wondered what connects food? The answer is the food system: a complex network of people, places and processes working behind the scenes to produce the food on your table.
By the time our food reaches us, we are nearing the end of its journey. To better understand this journey, let’s retrace the steps of a blueberry muffin, a product that has taken a journey across the world to get to your kitchen. Let’s begin one step from the end.
You may have purchased your pack of muffins from the grocery store. The grocery store waited for its arrival from a delivery truck driving across the states bringing the muffins from a packaging facility. This facility followed strict food safety rules after getting the fresh baked muffins from the bakery where it was made.
The baker mixed eggs, blueberries, sugar, flour and butter or oil to create your muffin weeks earlier. Each of these ingredients came from packagers and processors in factories who cleaned the eggs, sorted the blueberries, refined the sugar, milled the flour and churned the butter or pressed the oil. These factories ordered the raw ingredients from farms, where thousands of hands planted, cared for and harvested their products. These farms can be as far away as Indonesia (in the case of palm oil) or from across the United States, though they're not usually in Nevada.
Usually, the more far-reaching the journey our food takes through the food system, the more it contributes to the cost of groceries in having to pay more for goods that were produced farther away. These goods are not as fresh, meaning they are less nutritious, have a decreased shelf life and can lead to worsened food security. We end up spending more money on goods making a larger, negative impact on our environment.
The more expensive our food is, the more difficult it is for folks to make ends meet, all for a choice of food that ends up less nutritious and more harmful to the environment. According to the federal government’s Joint Economic Committee, Nevada households already spend $87 more on average each month to maintain the same standard of living as the rest of the country.
So, what can we do about this? We can support our local growers and makers! We have the power to make informed decisions and buy more locally made products, which supports these items becoming more readily available. One option to get better quality, more nutritious and longer lasting food is to seek out farms, producers and restaurants that create and use locally grown products.
On the , you can find local farms and selling amazing products grown in Nevada for Nevadans. Doing this helps solve the problems that our community faces: food insecurity, increased prices, farmer insecurity and climate change. We can better connect ourselves to our food by connecting it to the land and hands that grew it.
This article was written by CJ Kelley, s Healthy Food Systems project officer. It was first published in Extension's .
Extension is a unit of the University's College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources engaged in Nevada communities, presenting research-based knowledge to address critical community needs. It is a county-state-federal partnership providing practical education to people, businesses and communities.
