About
My name is Sandy and I’ve worked in the food service industry for many years. I’ve been a caterer and a chef specializing in pastries, healthy, and ethnic foods for private clients as well as the general public. I’ve worked as a private chef and a chef in retail establishments as well as corporate kitchens. I’ve traded the life of actively preparing, cooking, and serving foods to writing about foods, and other things, instead.
People often ask me why does food have to be so expensive. I’ve tried explaining that the average food item on the American dinner table travels 1,500 miles before reaching the plate. That’s a lot of increasingly expensive fuel for transportation and a lot of expensive time in transit. Somebody has to cover the cost of those expenses and it’s usually the end user (or diner) who foots the bill.
Several years ago, I worked up a chart that listed natural catastrophes and how they impact the availability of food, especially when our food comes from all corners of the globe these days. It helped slow the questions and it sparked a lot of interesting conversation. I was working in a scientific environment, where the average co-worker was highly educated. I was surprised to have so many people tell me they had no idea of the very real connection between global events and the foods we expect to eat every day. For example, there were three hurricanes in Florida that destroyed the citrus crop, bringing more expensive oranges, grapefruits, and their juices for the following year. There were floods in the Midwest and droughts in California, all bringing devastation to some major food crops. My chart listed some of the foods we rely on these regions to grow and ship to us.
When the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December of that year, my chart of food origins and influences was, quite literally, blown out of the water. Yes, the disaster was on the other side of the world but we here in the United States were very much affected by the devastation, in spite of the distance.
I love all things related to food - cooking it, growing it, studying it, sharing it, and eating it, too. I’m also an avid bookworm and reading about foods is one of my favorite ways to spend a day. In the last few years, I’ve read the words written by a large number of food writers. Many of them express the same dismay that I do about the average person’s perception of the origin of our foods. Yes, we get our foods from stores and restaurants but they don’t originate there.
Food comes first from the land. Land everywhere. Events happening everywhere affect what arrives on our dinner tables every day, even when we don’t really know its original starting point. And events at those starting points can affect the availability of what we eat here, and how much we pay for it. Events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, flooding, even war and political actions affect the foods we eat.
My mission for this blog is to bring the starting point back into focus. I hope to identify some of the global events that influence what we eat and why we must pay so much for the choices we make. There’ll be some good news but there’s likely to be some bad news, too. Weighing the good and the bad brings awareness and allows for more intelligent choices.
I hope you will keep me informed, too. Please let me know if you have issues of particular concern or would like to see additional food-related topics included. And please feel free to post any comments to any of the news stories I post here. My posts should be considered nothing more than food for thought and I look forwarding to reading about what you are thinking.
Thanks!