The Past is Prologue. Courtesy of a Molé Mama podcast that aired June 28, 2019, this episode of The Food Disruptors continues our two-part look at how the history of our food system informs our food ways today, and points to where we are going.

Consider these progressions, each phase the result of a food system disruption:

1) From local butchering to industrialized meat processing to refrigerated dressed meat to Confined Animal Feeding Operations to alternative protein.

2) From a USDA-sanctioned increase in carbohydrate consumption to a sharp rise in obesity and Type II Diabetes to consumer demand for less added sugar and more transparent food labeling.

3) From industrialized Big Ag and the prevalence of mono-cropping to an outcry against environmental degradation on land AND sea, and demands for a lower carbon footprint, fewer chemical inputs, and more diversity in our food supply.

We learn from the past. We learn from the decisions taken by Food Disruptors of the past -- both the right ones and, especially, those that turned out wrong for our society and our environment.

Our food system mess today is based largely in individual initiatives to accumulate personal wealth combined with a societal failure to identify and redress unintended consequences. However, United States food history is also rich with amazing technological advances that in their day promised better lives for more people.

Looking forward, we hope our market system, and the initiatives taken by future food disruptors, will bring us out of the unjust, environmentally damaging industrialized food system of the past. The capitalist system can work. But its outcomes and collateral effects are up to us. We have a much better chance of seeing where we are going with our food system if we heed how capitalism has intersected with our food culture in the past.

So please listen to The Food Disruptors, and send us your comments and suggestions for future topics! 

Here are two interesting food podcasts -- each presents an opposite side of the meat v alternative protein controversy:

https://sustainabledish.com/podcasts/

https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/what-doesnt-kill-you/

Also, for great recipes, cultural insights, and wonderful interviews with amazing entrepreneurs who start out small in the food space but who have scalable potential:

https://www.molemama.com/mole-mama-cooking-with-love-podcast

And if you want to access easy, delicious Mexican-American cooking, check out:

https://www.molemama.com/all-cooking-videos