You’re late from work and realise you’re out of groceries. Making a dash to the supermarket, you stock up on some big, shiny vegetables and some “healthy” labelled ready-to-eat meals for a quick dinner for your family. However, did you know that these big, shiny vegetables and “healthy” ready mix foods are just an empty promise of nutrition packaged beautifully? And that they’re just a recipe for lifestyle diseases like obesity, blood pressure and diabetes for you and your family?

As our lives became ‘fast’-paced, our food choices did too. Seeing this, the food industry pushed us towards everything bigger, better and quicker. Large profit-driven corporations made farmers resort to mono cropping, pumping crops with artificial fertilizers to make them bigger and enhancing harvest with harmful preservatives to increase their shelf life. They also started using industrial processing methods for quick outputs and changing the way we consumed food by luring us into the trap of instant gratification – getting us to stack our shelves with microwaveable recipes to match with our fast lifestyle.

And while they gained profits, we lost the rich biodiversity of our soils that our farmers tended to day and night, we lost the purity and nutrition of each ingredient and we lost our ancestral methods of food preparation. More importantly, we lost the freedom of choice. We lost the freedom to choose what was good for our bodies. We lost the freedom to pick, prepare and savour food how we wanted to.