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| Village Along A River by Joos de Momper |
"Imagine a village along a river. One day, the residents of this village notice increasing numbers of drowning people caught in the river's swift current. Soon there are so many struggling individuals that the villagers begin developing elaborate technologies in order to revive them. The villagers are so preoccupied with rescue and treatment that they never think to look upstream, to see why the victims are caught in the river in the first place."
The quote above illustrates what the current industrialised healthcare model has become. The top two killers by far in the United States today are heart disease and cancer, claiming the lives of a higher percentage of the total population than did the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Half of people age 65 and older have two or more chronic diseases. By 2050, the healthcare required to manage chronic diseases will cost over a trillion dollars per year, and by 2080, it will consume half of our GDP.
And what's happening upstream - what we're completely ignoring - is our food system and corresponding diet. It's also our environmental problems such as climate change, toxins, and other various forms of pollution.
Our food system is broken. Every two seconds, a child dies of hunger, at the same time as the weight-loss industry is generating upwards of $200 billion a year. Forty percent of food produced is thrown out at the same time as food production accounts for half of greenhouse gas emissions around the world.
What do all these stats look like in real life? It looks like the majority of seniors living out their final years in nursing homes. It looks like one in two men and one in three women developing cancer in his or her lifetime in the United States. It looks like obesity as a signifier of poverty in some countries, and starvation as a signifier in others. It looks like eating disorders and women and girls hating their bodies across the globe. It looks like the fact that some children are now born with type 2 diabetes.
This is NOT our (consumers' ) fault. This is not about willpower or not working hard enough or even being a good samaritan and giving back (though that last one is pretty important no matter what system we have). The point is, hunger and obesity both affect populations with far too much regularity, in far too many different settings, for either to be the result of some personal failing.
It is about creating a new food system where the cheapest, most convenient, and in every way BEST choice is also the healthy one. Everywhere.
By 2050, there will be around 10 billion humans inhabiting earth. All of them need to be nourished, and it must be done without completely destroying the planet. This is literally not possible in the system we have now. Either we in the industrialised world will continue to get chronically sick far too early in our lives and the additional three billion will be starving, or we change our system as soon as we possibly can.
But developing countries are moving towards the American food system. Fast food and other American diet ideals are taking over like wildfire. This is no good.
The solution? We all need to live longer.
Say what? I know what you're thinking. How will living longer solve anything? Wouldn't that just mean more people on the earth that need to be fed?
Yes. But if we lived longer, we would be healthier. If we lived longer, we wouldn't have to worry about chronic diseases cutting them short. We wouldn't need nursing homes, because we would still be active and healthy until the day we die. And health starts with food. If we had a food system that didn't make us all sick, it would also, by default, not make the environment sick. That means a lower carbon footprint. Which means that everyone can be fed sustainably. It means communities that can feed themselves. It's about more than sustainability: it's about thriving. Living each of our only lives to its fullest potential. Every. Single. One of us.
The places I'm going are longevity hotspots, where people live longer than anywhere else on earth, often past one hundred. People do not fear growing older here. There is a fraction of the rate of chronic diseases, and the concept of nursing homes etc. doesn't exist. People look forward to growing older, knowing they will be healthy, vital, and respected.
In the early 1970's, National Geographic magazine sought out the world-renowned physician Alexander Leaf, asking him to explore the world's healthiest and longest-living people. Not to find some mystical fountain of youth, but to find where people actually are healthiest and have remarkable lifespans. He found four: the Abkhasians in the Caucasus Mountains south of Russia; the Vilcabambans in the South American Andes in Ecuador; the Hunzans in the Central Asian Himalayas in Pakistan; and the people from the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa.
Then, in 2003, National Geographic explorer Dan Buettner built on this research to find new places around the world where people live the longest. He identified Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Okinawa, Japan. He called them "Blue Zones." I will be going to all of them (except Ecuador and Abkhazia for accessibility and safety reasons), plus more that I have found through my own research.
In these places, people live longer than anywhere else on earth, and it's not because of elaborate technology, incredible healthcare treatments, or magic super-pills. They don't get sick in the first place. There's no need to save them downstream because they never fell into the river. They are extraordinarily healthy, and their quality of life and lifespan both go way up because of it.
In nature, animals are supposed to live about five times as long as it takes them to reach maturity. So a horse reaches maturity around the age of 4, and will easily live to 20. Humans reach maturity - meaning somewhere around full-grown - at about 20 or 21. Some could even say 22 or 23. That means humans should easily live to 100, and maybe a good amount of years beyond that.
So these places aren't even that special. They're just the ones who have stayed with what nature intended. But the world doesn't look like nature anymore, which for a lot of reasons, is a great thing. So the challenge is implementing those same health benefits as nature intended, with nature very much in mind as we do it, into the modern world. And it's also about bringing the rest of the world - the parts that don't have enough food - up to that level.
I will be going to all of these places with the overarching goal in mind of creating a new food system. One where no one is hungry, nothing is wasted, there are no adverse health effects, and the environment thrives. Using these hotspots as the baseline and visiting food forests, farms, ultra-green hospitals, healthcare systems, NGOs and non-profits along the way, I will design a new food system that will allow us and our planet to flourish.
At the end of the year, I hope to have a detailed, realistic, and ambitious plan of how that food system will work. I plan to spend the rest of my life implementing it in the real world, on a political, economic, and social level, in every way I possibly can. Whether that requires a law degree, starting an NGO, writing a book, etc., I am ready.
Lots of people have talked about what's wrong with our food system. An equal number of people have lectured us on what we should eat if we want to be healthy. But not many have written about how these two can be combined. The Watson will allow me to go visit the places with food systems that are prospering, so that I can chase my dream of filling that gap: of creating a food system that is healthy. Where the new baseline, requirement, and number one priority is health, for everyone and the earth.
This year will serve as the foundation for the rest of my life.
This doesn't mean ruling out capitalism (in fact I'm already pretty sure it shouldn't) and it doesn't mean no more delicious food (that would be awful).
Changing the deeply embedded food system is a gigantic ambition that is not possible to achieve in one lifetime. But one of my favourite thinkers, Parker J. Palmer, once said:
I probably won't be able to declare victory either, but I also know that sometimes all it takes is persistence. And that I have.
The way I see it, there are two directions we can take: further into the current paradigm (which for about half of the new inhabitants of earth by 2050 means starvation), or we can move towards the longevity hotspots' way of doing things. I am going to fight like hell to make sure we do the latter.
It is wrong to say that not everyone can have the 'luxuries' we enjoy in the Western world. That people in the developing world should be the ones to mitigate climate change by not developing at all. But maybe it's time to realise that what we have created in terms of food isn't all that luxurious and that there are other ways of doing things that can just as easily become the new normal, the new familiar, the new comfort. Ways that don't jeopardise our health or the environment or our children's future.
From my previous travels to New Zealand, India, Belgium, Panama, and all over the United States to investigate food and environmental issues, I feel ready to conquer this year around the world. But it will still be the craziest thing I've ever done. There will be laughs, tears, incredible days and awful days. There will be lots of discomfort and immense literal and metaphorical mountains I'll have to get over.
- Sandra Steingraber, from her 2010 documentary Living Downstream
The quote above illustrates what the current industrialised healthcare model has become. The top two killers by far in the United States today are heart disease and cancer, claiming the lives of a higher percentage of the total population than did the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Half of people age 65 and older have two or more chronic diseases. By 2050, the healthcare required to manage chronic diseases will cost over a trillion dollars per year, and by 2080, it will consume half of our GDP.
And what's happening upstream - what we're completely ignoring - is our food system and corresponding diet. It's also our environmental problems such as climate change, toxins, and other various forms of pollution.
Our food system is broken. Every two seconds, a child dies of hunger, at the same time as the weight-loss industry is generating upwards of $200 billion a year. Forty percent of food produced is thrown out at the same time as food production accounts for half of greenhouse gas emissions around the world.
What do all these stats look like in real life? It looks like the majority of seniors living out their final years in nursing homes. It looks like one in two men and one in three women developing cancer in his or her lifetime in the United States. It looks like obesity as a signifier of poverty in some countries, and starvation as a signifier in others. It looks like eating disorders and women and girls hating their bodies across the globe. It looks like the fact that some children are now born with type 2 diabetes.
This is NOT our (consumers' ) fault. This is not about willpower or not working hard enough or even being a good samaritan and giving back (though that last one is pretty important no matter what system we have). The point is, hunger and obesity both affect populations with far too much regularity, in far too many different settings, for either to be the result of some personal failing.
It is about creating a new food system where the cheapest, most convenient, and in every way BEST choice is also the healthy one. Everywhere.
By 2050, there will be around 10 billion humans inhabiting earth. All of them need to be nourished, and it must be done without completely destroying the planet. This is literally not possible in the system we have now. Either we in the industrialised world will continue to get chronically sick far too early in our lives and the additional three billion will be starving, or we change our system as soon as we possibly can.
But developing countries are moving towards the American food system. Fast food and other American diet ideals are taking over like wildfire. This is no good.
The solution? We all need to live longer.
Say what? I know what you're thinking. How will living longer solve anything? Wouldn't that just mean more people on the earth that need to be fed?
Yes. But if we lived longer, we would be healthier. If we lived longer, we wouldn't have to worry about chronic diseases cutting them short. We wouldn't need nursing homes, because we would still be active and healthy until the day we die. And health starts with food. If we had a food system that didn't make us all sick, it would also, by default, not make the environment sick. That means a lower carbon footprint. Which means that everyone can be fed sustainably. It means communities that can feed themselves. It's about more than sustainability: it's about thriving. Living each of our only lives to its fullest potential. Every. Single. One of us.
The places I'm going are longevity hotspots, where people live longer than anywhere else on earth, often past one hundred. People do not fear growing older here. There is a fraction of the rate of chronic diseases, and the concept of nursing homes etc. doesn't exist. People look forward to growing older, knowing they will be healthy, vital, and respected.
In the early 1970's, National Geographic magazine sought out the world-renowned physician Alexander Leaf, asking him to explore the world's healthiest and longest-living people. Not to find some mystical fountain of youth, but to find where people actually are healthiest and have remarkable lifespans. He found four: the Abkhasians in the Caucasus Mountains south of Russia; the Vilcabambans in the South American Andes in Ecuador; the Hunzans in the Central Asian Himalayas in Pakistan; and the people from the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa.
 |
| Alexander Leaf's National Geographic cover |
Then, in 2003, National Geographic explorer Dan Buettner built on this research to find new places around the world where people live the longest. He identified Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Okinawa, Japan. He called them "Blue Zones." I will be going to all of them (except Ecuador and Abkhazia for accessibility and safety reasons), plus more that I have found through my own research.
In these places, people live longer than anywhere else on earth, and it's not because of elaborate technology, incredible healthcare treatments, or magic super-pills. They don't get sick in the first place. There's no need to save them downstream because they never fell into the river. They are extraordinarily healthy, and their quality of life and lifespan both go way up because of it.
In nature, animals are supposed to live about five times as long as it takes them to reach maturity. So a horse reaches maturity around the age of 4, and will easily live to 20. Humans reach maturity - meaning somewhere around full-grown - at about 20 or 21. Some could even say 22 or 23. That means humans should easily live to 100, and maybe a good amount of years beyond that.
So these places aren't even that special. They're just the ones who have stayed with what nature intended. But the world doesn't look like nature anymore, which for a lot of reasons, is a great thing. So the challenge is implementing those same health benefits as nature intended, with nature very much in mind as we do it, into the modern world. And it's also about bringing the rest of the world - the parts that don't have enough food - up to that level.
I will be going to all of these places with the overarching goal in mind of creating a new food system. One where no one is hungry, nothing is wasted, there are no adverse health effects, and the environment thrives. Using these hotspots as the baseline and visiting food forests, farms, ultra-green hospitals, healthcare systems, NGOs and non-profits along the way, I will design a new food system that will allow us and our planet to flourish.
At the end of the year, I hope to have a detailed, realistic, and ambitious plan of how that food system will work. I plan to spend the rest of my life implementing it in the real world, on a political, economic, and social level, in every way I possibly can. Whether that requires a law degree, starting an NGO, writing a book, etc., I am ready.
Lots of people have talked about what's wrong with our food system. An equal number of people have lectured us on what we should eat if we want to be healthy. But not many have written about how these two can be combined. The Watson will allow me to go visit the places with food systems that are prospering, so that I can chase my dream of filling that gap: of creating a food system that is healthy. Where the new baseline, requirement, and number one priority is health, for everyone and the earth.
This year will serve as the foundation for the rest of my life.
This doesn't mean ruling out capitalism (in fact I'm already pretty sure it shouldn't) and it doesn't mean no more delicious food (that would be awful).
Changing the deeply embedded food system is a gigantic ambition that is not possible to achieve in one lifetime. But one of my favourite thinkers, Parker J. Palmer, once said:
"Just because something's impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Ask yourself where we would be if people throughout history hadn't taken on 'the impossible' time and time again. While it's important to be as effective as we possibly can in doing vital tasks, when effectiveness is our only norm, we will take on smaller and smaller tasks, because they're the only ones with which we can be effective. No one who has stood for high values has died being able to declare victory, once and for all. If we want to embrace high values, we must find some way to hang in for the long haul."
I probably won't be able to declare victory either, but I also know that sometimes all it takes is persistence. And that I have.
The way I see it, there are two directions we can take: further into the current paradigm (which for about half of the new inhabitants of earth by 2050 means starvation), or we can move towards the longevity hotspots' way of doing things. I am going to fight like hell to make sure we do the latter.
It is wrong to say that not everyone can have the 'luxuries' we enjoy in the Western world. That people in the developing world should be the ones to mitigate climate change by not developing at all. But maybe it's time to realise that what we have created in terms of food isn't all that luxurious and that there are other ways of doing things that can just as easily become the new normal, the new familiar, the new comfort. Ways that don't jeopardise our health or the environment or our children's future.
From my previous travels to New Zealand, India, Belgium, Panama, and all over the United States to investigate food and environmental issues, I feel ready to conquer this year around the world. But it will still be the craziest thing I've ever done. There will be laughs, tears, incredible days and awful days. There will be lots of discomfort and immense literal and metaphorical mountains I'll have to get over.
But I need to do this. My life - and many other peoples' - depends on it.
Thanks for following along!
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"If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the field to produce more [food]; otherwise there will be no peace."
- Norman Borlaug
"It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely. And half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Mongolia or wherever you're melodious life takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful. It will open up your life."
- Sugar (Cheryl Strayed)
"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."
- Louis L'Amour
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