By Get Lifted
As I was reading the newspaper and enjoying a great vegan meal at one of Chicago’s vegan friendly restaurants I stumbled across an article about the outsourcing of jobs. I could not help but to ask myself, have we outsourced our eating too? In this day and age, we have adopted the mentality of outsourcing the things that are too time consuming to perform or not cost effective to perform on our own. We see it with companies, businesses, and now we see it in our personal lives. But have we outsourced one of the most important things in our lives, our food choices? Have we completely given up the power to understand what we are putting into our bodies?
My family is in the process of making dinner plans to celebrate my Grandmother’s 81st birthday and we made the decision to use a catering service. She was not happy to hear about this decision. She likes her sweet potatoes made the way she likes them. She enjoys her cornbread with the exact proportion of ingredients she is used to putting and let’s not even discuss her signature dish; peach cobbler. My Grandmother is not a vegan in any way shape or form of the word, but we can learn a lot from her attitude about her cooking. She has, had, and always will have control over what goes in her body. She was insulted that we decided to completely outsource in what to her was one of the most important things about the celebration, the food.
We cook a lot in our house, and always have, only because I grew up with two southern style Grandma’s who could “throw down”, as they would say. My eating has evolved to making more conscious choices than what they put on my plate as a child, but I know exactly what is going in my food and into my body. I believe that is the theory here, whether vegan, vegetarian, or just a conscious eater, knowing exactly what is on your plate is powerful. It is a decision that should probably not be completely outsourced. If you do rely on the cooking of others, you should still take ownership and understand what you are eating. You should eat from restaurants and food establishments that share your thoughts on responsible eating. Chicago has plenty.
Be well, be conscious and be smart about what goes on your plate. And happy birthday to Grandma, and thank you for the life lessons to the world.
About the author: Get Lifted is a Chicago area yoga instructor with ten years of background and experience in both practicing and teaching yoga. He has traveled the world practicing and studying with teachers deeply rooted in the ancient forms of the art, philosophy and science of the practice. His over 1,000 hours of yoga teacher training has been with instructors with combined yoga teaching experience of over 100 years; passing down the tradition of kriya, puja, pranayama, mantra, samyama, yoganidra and asana.
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One Comment on "Outsourcing our Eating Choices"
yeah, i must be very slow but it just dawned on me that mega corporations like CONAGRA might outsource overseas the production, preparation, production and packaging our food using foeign ingredients. if there aren’t tough laws and effective regulations they will do just that and i will worry about what’s in my frozen dinner and where the ingredients came from.
we need a line in the sand–usa food made in the usa by usa workers using usa ingredients. PERIOD. it needs to be the law and the law needs to be enforced