What Meat Eats???

‘You are what you eat’ is a common expression when we speak about food. But let me open your eyes to a new way of thinking about it. You are what you eat, but that is determined by what it ate… Confused?

Ok here’s a better explanation. When we eat meat, for example – what and how the meat itself was fed and raised determines its nutritional content. We can only take what we can get meaning the chain of eating can be more important then what we’re eating itself.

Instead of looking at choice of food as a way of communicating ones status and culture, as the quote suggests, its time we get down into the nitty-gritty of the authenticity of food and how that can determine how nutritionally sound our diets are. For no food is the same, every carrot carrying with it a different amount of carotene, every piece of meat a different degree of iron due to what and how its been raised and what it was feeding on.

A term known as ‘terroir’, suggests that a sense of place can be tasted and sensed in food, the overall environment playing a key role in how it tastes. These days, the homogenized flavour of our fresh produce means we’ve lost this sense of place in food, the sense of knowing where it came from. Like wine tasting, it’s lost its legs.

Now the emphasis on food is about the exclusion of hormones, preservatives and/or additives but it’s time we think more about what it’s actually eating. An example pushed by many food enthusiasts about beef. Cows are meant to eat grass, there’s no denying that. So why then, is it so amazing to be eating grain-fed beef? What’s grain got over grass?

A recent push of organic farming has highlighted just how industrialized our food industry is. An industry that uses antibiotics on everything to make a higher return in profit. I’m all for the Aussie farmer, but not so much for the big companies that are taking over our farmers’ right to grow what they want and in a biodynamic way, free from GM and pesticides.

When we go into a supermarket and buy our $1.99 carrots, what are we buying? There are ingredients labels on everything else in the store so where’s the one for fresh produce like fruit and veg, meats and poultry?

Food authenticity is a very political issue but I think it needs to be addressed. ‘We are what we eat’, so if our carrots are not given their natural life span, food and sun requirements we are ingesting an inferior product that isn’t exactly what we assumed it was.

I wanna know what I’m eating ate!

By Samantha Coutts
Photo Fickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davedehetre/5086951828/sizes/l/in/photostream/