Unraveling or embracing complexities?
The proof that contemporary society has been gradually dissociating from the complexities of life is right in front of us. The advancement of resource commodification, marketization of every dimension of existence, oversimplification, blind overexploitation, and the progressive diminishing of diversity have pushed the world towards the edge of a breakdown.
Food, which was once the result of a plurality of pieces perfectly balanced and in harmony with each other, now embodies the dysfunctions and leaks of a siloed system.
At the community level, the side effects of industrialization have spread unhealthy general patterns, like massive consumption of ultra-processed foods, minimal nutritional levels, sedentariness, monoculture, and waste. These are the causes that have made our Planet increasingly impoverished, stressed, and polluted.
We are now at the point that these complexities have come back to us and against us: because we pollute by eating but we also eat what we pollute. We standardize methods but we are losing our cultural and culinary heritage. With it, all the majesty, traditional knowledge, local crops, and endemic forms of biodiversity have been fading, those that ensure precious ecosystem services.