Our Mission: We are igniting a movement that inspires parents to protect young children from harmful chemicals. Donate ยป
Charity Navigator 4 Star CharityBlog
I am sending this note to every parent who wants a healthier world and desires to have a healthy child as part of that world.
This is not a list of quick reference for what is considered in current understanding as what is OK, or approved by some group, to feed your child. That list seems to change too often these days. It is a note to encourage us to come out of a web of denial about our food systems; a web that we have permitted and those we allow persisting by how we spend our food dollars. It is a contract of trust that has been broken by systems that seem beyond our control. We must take back that control and the very definitions of trustworthiness for our children, their world, and ourselves.
Every parent everywhere I know has the same challenge. At some point your child will have to leave your protection and you will have to give them your heart-felt instruction regarding how to face the world, on what to trust.
Ultimately, every parent knows at a deeper level that there is little that can be said; the child will have learned from you what to trust, and what not to trust. That child has been watching your every step, every choice, every cautious or instinctive move in ways neither of you could fully know how to express. You know your child, and your child knows from you how they are to judge what the world puts before them.
In the food we eat, all of us take so much for granted. There are times, especially around pregnancy, or perhaps in preparing for an identified athletic challenge, that we tend to put more focus on our bodies, our health, and what we eat. It is when we think of our physical health that we come to remind ourselves of what we truly already know all too well: We are what we eat…and what we think… and what we invite into our lives.
Too often in today’s world, we allow ourselves the luxury of forgetting. We tell ourselves that, as if we need a break from taking responsibility for our world, that (whatever action you want to fill in, starting with eating some random fast-food meal), it doesn’t matter so much, really. So, we indulge a bit here. Have an unconsidered quick-fix-on-the-go meal, there. And, as we seem to survive it, we move on as if it did not really matter much.
That sense of ‘forgetting’ becomes, over time and with daily repetition, closely tied to what might better be called denial. We, for example, forget the sources of our food until, little by little, we literally cast outside of our awareness that this milk comes not from a carton in a store, but from a farmer’s efforts with a real cow. We see packaged, prepared, frozen fish sticks for our kids so often, we cast out of our mental awareness the connections between this package and the state of the oceans, the environmental collapse of ecosystems that we read of in the reports of conservation science that occasionally make their way into the day’s mainstream news. Sadly, much of our commercial food economy is based on the continuation, even the encouragement of this denial.
Today, as those moments of parental (dare we say responsible) awareness about food become more a point of focus: what is a parent, or parent to be, to do? First, loose your willingness to forget; come out of denial and learn about the sources of your food – seafood and all the food you seek. Do not allow a packaged food to come into your home that you have not read and scrutinized for its benefits. Think wholesome. Think nurturance. Think of the ecology of your child: beginning with your body, your home, and the living, loving networks that form of your community of choice. Bring your best sense of health, even of blessing, into every thing you put into your child’s eco-system.
Now from this point of view, consider the noted benefits of eating good, clean, well-prepared fish. There are many benefits, some of which are just beginning to be fully recognized. Take a walk in nature, if possible by a body of water. If you are able to get to a beach by an ocean, take a walk along the shore and note the power and energy of waves on sand, or rocks. There is a sense of life there that will not quit.
Take a walk along a river, and sense the hypnotic nature of watching a running stream, of water rushing over rocks. If you are lucky enough to have access to a waterfall of any size, you get that unquestioned quality of power, of life, of what the living waters of the natural world offers to us. This is the home of fish that you are taking in and appreciating. This is the natural habitat for healthy fish.
In the natural setting of fish live nutrient rich and nutritious algae, solar enriched vitamins and minerals, essentially vital oils and proteins that we now know are essential for our bodies, brains, and heart. Humans have lived well on the benefits of what we know, now, as Omega-3 fatty acids, essential enzymes that help unlock free radicals and beneficial antioxidant interactions in our blood, in our brain cells, in rebuilding healthy immune responses. Fish from natural lakes and streams as well as from our vast oceans have been good, clean, trustworthy sources of vital nutrition from time beyond recorded history.
Yet, today, basically as a result of misuse of our ecological abundance, eating fish and seafood has become a cause of concern. Notably as an edible source of truly dangerous mercury and other industrial chemicals that have built up from our lack of responsible containment, if not creation of such negative chemical releases into our ecologies. There is much to be concerned about in this. Industrial paths taken over the last 100 or so years permitted harmful chemical releases into our common environment as if in total denial of the fact that these unhealthy elements would every come back to us. Because we considered chemical and industrial wastes as elements we could safely throw away, dump in landfills, cast off by overloaded barges into the sea. Again, we see actions taken within this forgetful strange notion that there is a place that can be called “away” from which we will never again be encountering the full consequences of our actions. This is a result of an historically temporary rationalization of convenience has served to form yet another inconvenient truth: there is no away, anywhere. Everything is connected. Our efforts to permit a forgetting of the effects of industrial waste are a conceptual luxury we cannot afford. That luxury of ‘forgetting’, of denial, is now coming back in our food chains. That place we called ‘away’ is the home of the fish we now need to eat for our sustenance. We have met the enemy of our bodies and our children’s health…and it is us.
Indeed, this thought form, taken from wrong-headed industrial denial, that there are actions from which there are no full consequences – or that there are commercial actions for which we must endure unhealthy consequences as a trade-off – are points that bring to our awareness the kind of steps we can, now consciously, continue to choose to either support, or choose to end. It is we who have benefited from these industrial choices, we are told. We are told that these commercial consequences are the results of our consumer demands, that the industrial production of harmful chemicals were made possible by our funding these practices through our purchases of products that caused the releases as by-products.
So, now that we know this, we can make better choices. In our food systems we can choose not to purchase foods from industrial scale producers who treat animals and food products as if they were part of the industrial, commercial systems of our food economy. We can choose to demand better designs of our industrial corporations so that there are no harmful releases of elements that can damage our air, water, earth, bodies and our children.
Our choices have allowed industrial designs of animals-for-food factories turn out horrific tales of caged cows, chickens, or hogs who cannot move, or live anything we would recognize as a natural life; but only eat industrial feeds, grow to a pre-determined manner, be shipped to feed lots and slaughtered in a manner that would, unless we would remain in denial of these practices, completely eliminate our appetite for them.
The issues with fish are not very different. We, custodians of the future called parents, can choose to support practices that support health and nutrition rather than damaging chemical waste in our seafood, but it will take very thoughtful approaches that are more sophisticated and knowledgeable than the patterns of ‘forgetting’ that we have been encouraged to support in the recent past. We must, therefore, take a giant step forward into our longer-term past. We want to support practices that we come to trust because we have chosen to know more, not less, about the food we eat and serve to our children.
The mercury levels from industrial waste that now is showing up in seafood, requires that we all, for a period of time, move away from eating some of the larger wild fish we have favored in the past. Simply put, fish that are large accumulate more harmful chemicals in their bodies and will pass on those unhealthy aspects to us if we continue to eat them. For a period of time, we should move away from commercial production products of tuna, swordfish, and processed fish that cannot account for the conditions of how or where the fish were caught.
Harmful industrial pollutants PCBs, outlawed relatively recently, must be kept as far from our food sources as possible. This will also take time. The systems of nature will grow over and move these harmful chemicals further from our food systems, if we choose to reward those food practices that encourage healthy use of soil, of seas, of waterways. Nature if allowed to perform her magic has ways of removing exposure to these chemicals. It is a process of healthy evolving systems, like the natural cycles we know as the successive stages of how a forest grows. From level plains to rich, lush green productive forest, the land, sun, and water systems of the natural services machine we know as nature turns, buries and eliminates from our exposure those elements that do not promote health. That is part of the services contract that is designed into the connections we can recreate in learning to design with nature as conscious stewards, not work as if against natural, wild areas we feel compelled to conquer rather than learn to understand and appreciate.
Learning to appreciate those who work with natural systems as stewards is what is essential in our food choices. How are we to do that?
Let’s focus on things we can trust. A food growing farm, operating at a ‘family farm’ scale, whether it is raising chickens, pork, beef, or fish is more likely to care about the ecosystem in which it works and the consequences of its actions, because it will have to live with those consequences in its defined farm community of self-interest; than will a large multinational corporation, owned and operated with relative disinterest in the effects of its actions in any one location specifically because its resources and more narrowly defined bottom line values will see no problems in moving away from any ill effects it should cause in any one location, and replace it like any other problem of machinery efficiency, with another. This is not a social or political characterization from some radical theory or ideology, but an observable fact of the food systems we have come to permit in our commercial food economy.
So, that means you must come to know about the sources of your fish. Initially, your seafood counter fishmonger may well not know. Yet, if you ask repeatedly, and if you even choose not to buy any fish item that cannot be answered by the simple question -- Where is this fish from? -- Only then will the wheels of change begin to turn toward fish you can trust. The nutrition you want, and that your body and your children’s healthy development need, deserve this level of vigilant protection.
Taking care to learn about what matters, what you put into your body and the eco-system of our child, is what is required of today’s parents. Yes, there are benefits to eating fish that make this effort more than worthwhile. Indeed, elements of oils, of Omega-3’s, of heart and brain-healthy food are what is at stake in this. Parents need to take control of those systems and practices to which they give their precious resources of food dollars. The power of voting with your fork, and with your food dollars is a lever for change that cannot be overestimated. Indeed, parents will be the drivers for the vital changes of food commerce. They care for the health of their child, and the world in which that child will continue to live. In this, the organization Healthy Child, Healthy World, is a rallying point for major change. It is just surprising to most of us that for all the social and political change we might wish for, such change can be brought about with such a direct simple effort. Simply join in this movement for a healthier world by choosing better food sources for your children.
Mothers have always sensed this power, I suspect. Perhaps they have always just indulged men into thinking that their big business actions were really what progress and change was all about. In the mean time, the mothers nursed their children and formed bonds of natural connection that celebrated enduring values of life in the most natural and graceful manner, much the way nature does. Perhaps this is yet another form of denial that we can no longer afford. Learn the sources for all your food, including seafood. Learn to give the support of your dollars to those chefs, markets, fishmongers who come to learn more precisely about trustworthy sources they put up for sale because you keep asking them to do so.
Yes, you, parents. You, custodians of the future: Find fish you can trust, by supporting those human systems that bring you such fish. You who choose to feed your child ways to enhance their health and the health of their world, it is you who co-create that very world. Because in learning and supporting more trustworthy sources of seafood and all the food you seek, you are co-producers of that very food in our world. Just as you co-create with your child their sense of what to trust, you will provide the determining power for a new marketplace in which their future choices will be better because of the choices you make for them, now.
Image Courtesy of Quinet.
