iFood won’t replace real food

Opinion by Michael Levenston
City Farmer
April 13, 2010

(Note: My wife thinks this is too obvious a point to make.)

City and country farmers, who produce our food, will never see their crops replaced by bits and bytes. Food has to be grown and delivered to our lips. The work of the farmer is as important now as it ever was.

CD’s can be downloaded in an instant, digitized movies are watchable on our phone screens, and now Kindles and iPads are selling fast, threatening the end of the paper book. However the peaches, fish and pasta we eat cannot be transformed into digital form.

We need the real thing; rice, vegetables, fruit, meat, and eggs won’t travel over broadband and nourish us when we want a snack, even though we are in the gadget-crazed 21st century.

Looking at glossy pictures of gourmet dishes or watching videos of farmer’s fields, supermarkets and restaurant menus is as close as we’ll ever get to consuming food digitally and those images won’t stop the hunger pangs just before meal time.

We still have to go out and toil in the old fashioned way to bring us our daily bread. And what a wonderful thing, to know that we don’t have to sit in front of our computers all the time. There’s a good reason to go outside, enjoy the sunshine and touch the soil.