Ethical Eating: A Complete Guide to Sustainable Food
About this ebook
Global food is not a nice business. It is controlled by a small cartel of unscrupulous, profit-grubbing multinationals with little or no regard for the consumer, their workers or the planet. It is an industry riddled by safety scandals, the nutritional quality of our food is in free-fall and diet related illness has now become epidemic. Intensive agriculture is steadily destroying the planet, contaminating water and air with artificial fertilisers and pesticides, degrading farmland, causing deforestation and pumping out greenhouse gases faster than the world's entire transport system. Meanwhile Big Food's rapacious appetite for profit knows no limits as it bribes its way through the 3rd world in a huge land grab, dumping untested GM seed on a new generation of farmer-slaves. But all is not lost! A new movement of real, organic and ethical food is on the brink of a renaissance. Read on to understand how Big Food really works and how to reclaim control over our own food once again.
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About the author
Malcolm Coxall, the author, is the proprietor of the family's 110 acre farm in the Axarquía of southern Andalusia in Spain. The farm has been certified as organic since 1999 and produces olives, almonds and culinary herbs. Malcolm also provides business, marketing and IT consultancy to other organic food producers in the region. He has published many articles and several books on sustainable agriculture, organic food production, forest biodiversity, environmental protection and environmental economics. He is active in the European food and environmental movement, and has taken several successful legal actions in defence of European environmental standards in the European Court of Justice. Malcolm is passionate about food sovereignty and the maintenance of local food production at fair prices. He believes that culinary diversity, agricultural sustainability and traditional gastronomy have much to teach a generation that has basically forgotten how food is grown and prepared. "Truly good food is local, ethical, organic and slow. How and what we eat defines who we are as a society. Societies that knowingly eat chemically adulterated junk foods, produced in heartless factory farms, reveal an intrinsic social, political and health malaise. They reveal their lack of sustainability, an inherent insecurity and a disconnection from their natural and social context. Contrast this care-less mentality with those societies which treasure their land, their natural environment, their people, their traditional cuisine and the quality and purity of their food. Then explain to me again why we need fast food and how "factory agriculture" fits in with human and environmental well-being and sustainability. To be sustainable, what we really need to do is to start to understand food again - beginning with the basics - both on the farm and in the kitchen. We could do worse than to try to understand our own local gastronomic heritage again. Not only is this worthwhile and important, but it is also great fun to discover how to make and enjoy real food again.
