If you started meal prepping in January with food from which you get the most calories every year, you'll get to July eating only three things: rice, wheat and corn.

Add in potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar, then as humans the entire world can get to October before eating anything else.

Dan Saladino wrote “Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them” to tell us why this is a problem. There's 2 big reasons.

First, food power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

• 4 corporations control most of the world's food seeds.
• 1 company provides the bacteria and enzymes for half of the world's cheese.
• 1 brewer brews a quarter of all the beer we drink.
• 2 companies control the genetics of most of the world’s commercial chickens.

Second, agriculture has become monoculture because of this power concentration. When we rely on fewer and fewer plant varieties to squeeze higher and higher yields, we build a global food supply with low genetic diversity, disease resistance, and drought tolerance.

An unsustainable cycle then started when climate change hit us: soil degradation, water scarcity, chemical pollution, deforestation, desertification, food insecurity, economic hardship, regional conflicts, climate migrations, refugee crises.

What's the solution?

Well some things need to change at the global level, like repurposing more than USD 1 Billion we give every day in agricultural subsidies that allow this system to persist, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

At the country level, Brazil has set an example by requiring that 30 percent of the ingredients for school meals in its National School Feeding Program be sourced from local, family farms.

At the personal level we can add variety to the fruits and vegetables we already eat, and choose less processed food. We can also support local farms like:

• 3rd generation regenerative agriculture Masumoto Family Farm in California's San Joaquin Valley,
• urban farm Braga Farms in Dallas Ft. Worth,
• organic farmers community network Tahoe Food Hub in Truckee, CA, and
• 52 seasons and counting, the largest and oldest produce market in Durham, NC, Black-owned Perkins Orchard.

Got any favorites? Suggest them to us here.

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