As is true about every other matter, food is complicated by being caught up in systems. Many small decisions form patterns that shape real estate equity, the carbon crisis, population health and so much more.

For example: over ⅓ of vegetables in the U.S. and ¾ of the nuts and fruit in the U.S. are grown in California. This is a fun fact to bring up at parties. This fact becomes less fun when we contemplate that all this food has to be transported (and powered) by fossil fuels, several times, before it ends up on our plates. Because we take our stewardship responsibilities seriously, we need to steward our carbon footprint seriously. Our meals can be plain or extravagant, but in either case all of the ingredients that find their way into our cupboards are tied up in a carbon-powered transport system.

“Carbon-powered transport system” is quite stiff. It’s vague and faceless and impersonal. Thankfully, that makes one of the best solutions the exact opposite: specific and having a face and personal. So, know your growers. Meet the people growing food around you and buy from them directly.

Our meals are also caught up in the system of agribusiness. Agribusiness impacts who owns land, how growers are treated and compensated and what practices are used to grow plants. Agricultural land ownership is a big deal. As more small farms dissolve, fail or get sold, the large corporations gain power to abuse workers and the land. Mom and Pop farmers are becoming rarer and rarer. Human scale growers take care to ensure soil health and pay attention to detail on crops. This allows the growers to harvest crops at peak nutrient density.

Nutrient density? Here we go onto another system! Our bodies and digestion are complex. Hormones, life, genetics, activity and diet interplay deeply with each other. What we eat affects our gut health and broader health in dramatic ways. I’ll spare you the biochemistry, but “eat food, mostly plants,” move your body every day in ways that make you happy and take care of your social and personal needs.

Systems are complicated. Prayer and meditation can impact how well your body accesses nutrients. Playing a rousing game of Dutch Blitz can change what you crave. Everything feeds into another feedback loop. Everything is made of cycles. Everything is meant to be the foundation of something else.

Did you guess the next system? It’s soil. (Look, I want to thank you for letting me get to my second blog post before ya made me talk about soil and compost.) We’re running out of arable land. Estimates say at the current rate of soil loss and the rate of population increase, we have between and 20-40 years until there is not enough fertile land to grow the food we need for every human.

Part of the problem is large corporations. Large monocrop operations — think corn as far as the eye can see — deplete the soil, and it simply washes away. These operations are only practical with heavy carbon-powered machinery. Operations at the human scale don’t have these drawbacks and are more likely to be concerned about their soil washing away.

But then there’s us — and our food waste. Making sure to compost our food waste means that we put our organic matter into the cycle. It literally changes the trajectory of our waste.

Our plates are a thread in a tapestry, even several tapestries, bigger than any of us. That much is not up to us. What is up to us is how we navigate the fact that we’re caught up in these systems.

Eating to change the world

• To impact the carbon-powered supply chain: On Wednesdays, cook with ingredients that come from two different places within driving distance. Bonus points if you know the name of the grower.
• To impact agribusiness: Go to your farmers market. Find five stands. Learn about each one and learn the name of at least one person involved. Do not leave until you have five names.
• To impact gut health: Make sure to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.
• To impact the solid waste from your food:
  • Look up local composting resources or plan your own composting practice.
  • Chat with at least one neighbor and invite that neighbor to join in composting.
• Bonus challenge: All of these ideas are about the physical food. Food is always personal and cultural. Invite someone who doesn’t usually eat with you to join you for dinner.