Dear Friends and Readers,
I hope you and your family are healthy and holding up well during these difficult days.
The last few weeks I’ve been watching as the food chain we all depend on begins to buckle and break under the pressure of the pandemic: we’re seeing empty shelves in grocery stores, an alarming number of food workers taking ill, meatpacking plants closing. In a new piece out yesterday in the New York Review of Books, “The Sickness in Our Food Supply,” I explore all that the novel coronavirus has revealed about our food system—and our diet.
That’s because the problems we’re seeing are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food—they also show up in our plates. There’s solid evidence now that three of the biggest risk factors for getting a serious case of Covid-19 are obesity, hypertension, and type-2 diabetes: the chronic diseases linked to an inflammatory Western diet. Even when the American food system is working normally, supplying the supermarkets and drive-thrus with abundant and cheap calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly at times like this.
The essay shows why the pandemic is, willy-nilly, making a strong case for decentralizing and de-industrializing the food system to the extent we can. For at the same time the industrial food chain is beginning to fail, local food economies are thriving, showing us the way.
I hope you’ll take a moment to read the piece and share your thoughts.
Be well,
Michael
The sickness in our food supply
On a mission to inspire healthy living around the world!
I can only hope that this is one of the lessons we actually learn and institute going forward.