Category: Advice

How Do We Make Our Food System Healthy And Sustainable?

America’s food system is centered neither on health nor sustainability. It is not organized around providing people with healthy food grown in living soil or produced on well-managed pasture.

Much of what fills grocery store shelves today would be unrecognizable to our great-great-grandparents. Thousands of available products are less whole foods than engineered food-like substances, containing preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial flavorings, coloring agents, stabilizers, and even so-called “food glues” used to bind processed meats together. On average, food travels roughly 1,500 miles from farm to consumer.

At the same time, an enormous portion of our food is never eaten at all. The USDA and EPA estimate that 30–40% of America’s food supply is wasted, with approximately $161 billion worth of food ending up in landfills each year. This waste is especially tragic given that millions of people in the United States and around the world continue to experience hunger or chronic undernourishment.

Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that 55% of harvested U.S. cropland is devoted to growing animal feed crops such as corn, soy, and alfalfa, a very inefficient use of land to feed humans in need of healthy food.

Too often, the true costs of our food system are externalized onto the soil, water, air, farm workers, rural communities, public health systems, and future generations. Within a genuinely holistic system, those costs cannot simply be pushed out of sight or absorbed by others.

This raises difficult but necessary questions.

Should truly nourishing food be priced in ways that fully reflects its real costs, even if that makes it more expensive? If so, should subsidies be redirected away from large industrial producers and toward low-income households to ensure access to healthy food?

Or should cheap, highly subsidized food-like products continue to dominate grocery store shelves while their real costs remain hidden in our environmental, economic, and public health systems? What other options are there?

How can we change our current food system so that it is both more healthy, and also sustainable in the long term?

Related questions: How do you stay healthy? What is keeping us from sustaining the planet? Do you garden? What is the greatest problem facing humanity?

How Do We Show People They Matter?

It is all too easy to think that what you do in life doesn’t really matter. After all, when you are just one person out of 8 billion, that seems pretty insignificant.

Moreover, the picture gets even more narrow if we expand the scope. Reading history, there are only a few people who have shaped the course of human history. Of all the people who have ever lived, we only know the names of a precious few. Those few have led armies, made breakthroughs, or influenced millions.

But the vast majority of people just live their lives. They are content making their small contribution to the greater whole. But do their lives matter?

This raises an important point: what does it mean for a life to matter? In order for a life to have meaning, what needs to happen?

Meaning doesn’t just come from changing the world. You don’t need to be an Alexander the Great or an Albert Einstein to be important. You just need to have an impact on the people around you — your family, your friends, your coworkers, and so on.

That’s the lesson of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, that even when you feel that your life doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme, the world would be a different place if you didn’t exist. You can’t help but matter, because your very existence has changed the world.

So how can we convey that to others? How can we tell people around us that they mean something? Something to us, something to their community? How can we show people they matter?

Related questions: How could you show your appreciation for others more? How does your identity matter? How much power does an individual have? What gives a person value?

How Do You Handle Life’s Curveballs?

Life can be unpredictable. How do you respond when the unexpected happens, when life throws you a curveball?

For the most part, we like to live neat, orderly lives. We fill our closet with clothes we like to wear, stock our fridge or pantry with food options. We keep calendars with our schedules, so we know exactly what each day entails.

But life has a way defying expectations.  Each day, hundreds of things happen that you didn’t plan for, that you didn’t see coming. Some might be good, like unexpected opportunities. And some might be bad, like accidents or emergencies.

With so many curveballs each day, developing a strategy to deal with them, if possible, is a good idea.  Sticking with a plan has advantages, but so does being flexible. Striking the right balance between the two can be crucial.

How do you deal with the unexpected? Are you good at rolling with the punches, or do you try to plan for every possible outcome? How do you handle it when you are thrown a curveball?

Related questions: How do you plan for the future? Do you keep a to-do list? Planning or spontaneity? How has luck shaped your life?

What Does This Situation Need?

This question comes to us from the TV show Ted Lasso. In the context of the show, it is a strategy in football (soccer), but like many lessons from the show, it is applicable in every part of life.

When a situation develops and you find yourself struggling to take action, this presents a simple plan for handling it. Take a step back and think: what is needed at this moment in time? What is lacking that I can provide? What would make things better?

A key part of this advice is to just stop for a moment to assess. Oftentimes, particularly in a crisis, it feels like there is no time to think, only to act. In reality, though, the right action is much more effective than the wrong action, and taking a pause to consider may be the most important thing you can do.

Also important is determining the proper course of action. If the right action is significantly better than the wrong one, how can we determine what is right? How can we evaluate all the actions we might take to determine the optimal one?

This philosophy suggests thinking about what is missing. This can be challenging because every situation is different. And while at times what is missing is obvious, in others it can be hidden.

Maybe what is missing is communication — two people are both trying to achieve the same goal, but are going about it differently and aren’t working together. Or maybe there aren’t enough helping hands, so you might need to recruit some people to help out. Sometimes you just need some financial resources to add to the mix.

Of course, even if you can identify what is lacking, it’s not always possible to supply it. It is just important to recognize that, however, and look for other ways to address the lack. If you can’t provide what is missing, maybe you can provide someone else who can.

All of this relies on situational awareness and analysis. Being able to accurately figure out what is going on, determining why things are happening, and theorizing how things could be different with different actions taken is important. That takes practice.

Chances are there are areas in your life that could benefit from this way of thinking right now. Can you think of any? How can you test out this approach?

Related questions: How do you need help? How do you define success? When have you made good from a bad situation?

 

Can You Change Your Default Happiness?

If you rank your normal level of happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, can you increase that number? Can you change your default happiness?

If you think about the people you know, you can probably divide them into the camp of “happy people” or “unhappy people”. That is, people who naturally tend to be happy, regardless of what is going on around them. Or those who seem grumpy as a default setting.

Sure, everybody goes through roller-coasters of emotion, when good things or bad things happen. And of course, the mood someone has on any particular day is subject to events in their life. However, there are some people that seem to naturally have a smile, while others naturally have a scowl.

And you might even feel this way about yourself. You might think that life is good, or you might feel like you can never catch a break. And, of course, how you feel about yourself may or may not match up with how others see you.

So then the question becomes: can this aspect of your personality change? If life always gets you down, can you exercise some sort of emotional muscle to improve the amount of happiness you experience? If one bad thing after another happens, can a naturally cheerful person become a grump?

If change is possible, then what can we do to make that change happen for the better? What can we do in our everyday life to increase how happy we tend to be?

Related questions: Is happiness the most important purpose in life? Why do we put up with unhappiness? How does technology influence your emotions? What is the right amount of emotion?