What is healthy food? Some time ago, not too long ago, my grandmother would go to her backyard, get a chicken, twist its neck, pull out its feathers and it would be dead. She would open this chicken, remove all her insides, clean it, cut it to pieces and cook it.
Part of it became chicken and polenta, and the rest was put in the refrigerator, but not for too long, because it could not be preserved. Some time later, my mother would go to the store, and pick out a live chicken from the cage. The store owner would take this chicken and kill it.
Then, he would give it to my mother, clean and in pieces. My mother would go home and cook the chicken. A few years later, my mother no longer went to that place.
She went to the grocery store, bought the chicken that was already dead and on a tray. Now, I go to the supermarket and find something inside a box that says chicken, but I'm not sure whether there is actually a chicken inside. This is our summarized history.
If you look at the history of this chicken over the years, it's the story of how our food has been transformed. On how we were guaranteed on what we ate and had total, total control over what we ate in comparison to how we have practically no control over it nowadays. The Alliance for Adequate and Healthy Food wants to make every one of us, our society, our countries and our planet, regain control of our food.
We need to ensure that we know where our food comes from. So that we may step on the earth and reap, that we may rescue our stories and express our truths through what is on our plate. This is not quite that easy.
It's fundamental, but it's not easy at all. Today, the chickens, the seeds, our soils, the supermarket shelves are in the hands of a few. Very few accumulate too much wealth, accumulate too much power.
Meanwhile we keep on losing health, our traditions, our well-being and sovereignty. The Alliance exists so that we can recover all that. So that we realize that this simple act, so basic of life, is the expression of how the world organizes itself.
The Alliance exists to help the world organize itself in the name of equity, well-being and life.
