“You can’t always get what you want”. You might immediately think of the famous Rolling Stones song (tell me your age without telling your age!).
It is also something my parents said when I was begging them to buy me the latest new gadget. A valuable lesson to teach me that what I want, is not necessarily what I (really) need and that sometimes it is better to hold on to your money to spend it on something that has greater value.
Most of us spend our lives wanting things. Even worse, we do not only continuously want things, but we want them better, faster, easier and for the lowest price possible. We no longer take pleasure in buying something of value, after months, sometimes years, of saving. Nowadays, we seek instant satisfaction and the faster and cheaper we get it, the bigger our satisfaction seems to be. We do not think about the real price of our desires; we simply want it. Now. Not rarely with a dose of entitlement.
Unfortunately, there are hidden costs behind always getting what we want:
- a degraded environment because of ever-growing waste piles of stuff that we hardly used and discarded without a care
- poor health caused by cheaply produced food (perfectly shaped & faster grown with help of pesticides and chemical fertilizers)
- depletion of natural resources because we exploited them without thinking beyond our lifetime
- constant stress because our employer has slowly increased the workload without hiring more people to keep costs low (that’s how you keep products cheap!)
- wars, when some country uses a pretext to invade another because the invaded country has something it wants
- and the list goes on.
The Dutch poet Lucebert wrote the famous phrase “Alles van waarde is weerloos” which can be translated as “All things of value are defenseless”. We cannot expect to have good health, a liveable planet, and the enjoyment of peace without actively protecting it.
“But the economy?!”, you might ask. “If people do not spend, no money is being made, the economy will suffer!” That might be true, but we can choose how to run our economy. Either we keep running this “economy of more” or we switch to an “economy of enough”. Meaning, as a consumer we can either continue to buy cheap things plentiful (which we also discard plentiful) or we can choose to buy less and only things we truly value whilst paying a price that truly reflects the costs. Short-term pleasure vs long-term enjoyment.
Like with anything else you buy, when you buy food, you are not just paying for that salad head or bunch of carrots, you are also paying for the people who grew it, the time and skill that was invested in it, along with the cost of materials and supplies.
Due to the never-ending thirst for cheaper, faster and longer shelf-lives of our food, the agro-industry has been looking for ways to respond to that desire and did so successfully. It found ways to shortcut the natural way of growing our food, which was a great short-term solution to manage the growing world population and its hungry mouths. But, it also cut short the nutrient value of the food and in the long term deteriorated the health of our soil.
At Just Natural we made the conscious choice to grow food organically, regenerate our soil and grow crops that correspond to our climate. We also want to pay our personnel decent wages. If you value this too, then show your support. Look for similar farms in your neighbourhood (we are not the only ones and are hopefully growing in number!). Visit them, buy from them. Your tastebuds and the rest of your body will thank you!
