Most of us buy our food products and ingredients at the local supermarket; have you ever given much thought to the processes, handling and transportation your food needed to go through before it ended up on your plate at home?

Once you begin to include more whole foods in your diet and read more nutrition labels on the food products and ingredients you purchase for your everyday use, we begin to be more selective with what we're eating. How much do you really know about where your food has come from?

Transportation & supply chain

Unless you're buying from farmer's markets or growing produce in your own garden, fruits and vegetables have often been on a decent journey before they make it back to your place!

Starting from being planted, grown and tended to. What country were they grown in? What pesticides and chemicals - if any - were used to protect the plants from bugs and fungal diseases. How they were harvested, whether they were washed, then perhaps stored before being transported to be sorted or packaged. Did they go by plane? Did they have to go through export radiation treatment? Could they be moved around at standard temperatures or did they require chilled transportation? How did they get to the store or supermarket you bought them from? How were they handled and stored once they arrived? How long did they sit on the shelf before you put them into your basket or trolley?

That's a lot to think about right?! But as you can see, sometimes products may have been through a lot - they don't just pop into existence at the supermarket.

Now... think about a packet of pre-packaged crackers in the same way and all the separate raw ingredients used to make them! Or a tray of chicken breasts. Or a packet of processed cheese slices.

Ethical origins & sustainability

Thinking next level from transportation and the supply chain, when it comes to animal products or animal by-products, do you have any concerns about how the animals have been treated? There are many supermarket products that are labelled in a seemingly positive way, but the positive marketing halo doesn't give the full story.

For example, chicken eggs may be labelled cage-free, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were raised in a grassy paddock with sun exposure. They may be shoulder to shoulder in a barn. Even if this doesn't concern you ethically, how do you think this might affect the quality and flavour of the chicken meat you're eating or the eggs they have produced? What happens to humans when we get zero exposure to natural light and fresh air?

What about plant-based products? Palm oil is the world's most widely consumed and produced vegetable oil. In some instances it's grown sustainably, however the vast majority of it comes from plants that have been cultivated on land that previously was rainforests and the home to countless endangered species.

Importing some of our foods such as cacao and chia seeds from overseas has led to the exploitation of foreign growers and cultures in some instances.

In 2013, it was reported that Western demand for quinoa meant prices for it had risen so high that Bolivians in poverty could no longer afford their staple grain and were resorting to eating cheaper, nutritionally inferior junk food instead.

As recently as June 2019, it has been reported that about two-thirds of the world's chocolate supply comes from West Africa and the odds are highly likely that any chocolate bar you eat has been created from cocoa gathered using child labour.

Thinking differently about food

This article has a lot of question marks, but when you start digging into where your food really comes from, this is what's going to come up! Thinking in this way may change how you're eating, or it may have no effect at all, but it's still good to bear all of this in mind when you're making food choices.

REFERENCES

• Stanford University - The Double-Edged Sword of Palm Oil (https://earth.stanford.edu/news/double-edged-sword-palm-oil#gs.lvhucb)

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