Alternative Food Essay

Interest in alternative food options is spreading rapidly throughout America. With readily available information about the health concerns surrounding processed foods, people are returning to organic and locally grown foods as well as other means of attaining more health conscious foods. But that isn’t the only reason for the growth of interest in this area. With growing problems like climate change and deforestation, people are looking for new and better ways to reverse these issues and create sustainable ways to move forward. Something that is not widely known is that most of the plants along trail sides and even in backyards have some medicinal or nutritional value. These plants include those that are familiar, such as dandelions, violets, and plantains, but include hundreds …show more content…
This means that we are currently utilizing less than 0.2% of our available food sources (Füleky). The lack of use is also leading us to forget about the many other species which are rapidly going extinct due to deforestation and neglect. Thus, by becoming a wild edible gatherer, you learn about the variety of flavors and textures that are missing from our diets while helping spread this information. This knowledge is leading people to choose harvesting wild edibles over other, more conventional, methods of getting foods. There are many advantages to gathering wild edibles, including health benefits, environmental reasons, and economic interests.
One of the biggest reasons that people are moving away from store-bought produce to home-grown or wild foods is the health benefits. Food that comes from a supermarket has generally been covered in a combination of insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. One example of this is the corn crops that we see every day. Then the food is processed, shipped, handled and are subject to infection by many types of diseases and viruses, such as Salmonella (“The Food Production