Sustainability

Food matters. It matters because the food choices each individual makes have enormous consequences for the environmental future of the earth, for our personal and public health, and for the integrity of our cultures and traditions.

Eating patterns in developed countries are, generally speaking, at odds with scientific and medical recommendations. Consumers have not responded significantly to repeated public policy recommendations that urge major shifts in the way people eat. Eating patterns, the result of individual and collective food choices, are part of the seamless web of agriculture, human behavior, history, tradition, culture, health, trade, finance, and politics. With this complexity in mind, we launched our first long-term educational program, Cultural Models for Healthy Eating, in Los Angeles in September 1991.

With a return to relevant old ways, the perceived need for laboratory-engineered solutions and widespread use of agricultural chemicals will be diminished.

Oldways wants to encourage people to change their food choices by basing them on a triangular concept that integrates health, cultural traditions, and the environment. We must encourage a sharper focus on the value of the world’s food-related cultural traditions, since the loss of agricultural, culinary, and dietary diversity is symbolic of a greater loss of cultural diversity.

The World Commission on Environment and Development, Rio Summit in 1992 gave us a definition of sustainability: "The capacity to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Although the Environmental Revolution has been described here largely in environmental and economic terms, it is in the most fundamental sense a social revolution: the product of changing values, of seeing ourselves again as a part of nature rather than apart from nature, or recognizing our dependence on the earth’s natural ecosystems and resources and on the goods and services they provide.

Eating is an agricultural act. Most eaters think of food as an agricultural product, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. Eating fresh, unprocessed fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is the best thing you can do to lower your risk of several types of cancer and heart disease. Buying locally or organically grown fresh fruits and vegetables may also be the best food choice you can make for the environment.