What's in Your Belly? Sustainability in a Fast Food Nation

There is a movement brewing in the United States-A new awareness of food and where it comes from. It's a grass-roots agricultural revolution. This photo essay would document a new way to look at the food we eat and where it comes from.

With problems of Obesity and rising health care costs and ever increasing food prices, Americans are looking for alternatives to the processed and mega-farmed foods they've been lured to in recent decades.

I see the change happening all around me, in restaurants with local menu offerings, the "Slow Food Movement", the return of the home garden plot, organic offerings in the supermarket, the resurgance of the farm market, community supported agriculture and the food co-op, the basket of fresh local produce and fresh baked bread at the small town gas station, the availability of local foods at Walmart, the emergence of small, local, grass-fed livestock operations.

All around us, people are beginning to think again about what they put in their mouth and in their belly; what they feed to their children and even to their animals.

A photo essay has the power to change perception and that is what I see in this project. I envision a stark contrast between what is and what could be...

I am often struck by the idea that we as individuals and then as a group have the power to change big things. In this case, the market provides us with the food we choose. If we make healthier choices, then the market will follow.

And so, I see this photo essay as an exposition of the choices we have when it comes to food and sustainable agriculture, shown alongside the bad choices so many of us have made for so long in this country.

I think this essay could also show that this movement promotes so much more than a healthy diet. It promotes a sense of community, of belonging, of ownership. It brings communities together in the garden, it brings families together in the kithen and at the table and it brings us all a little closer in touch with Mother Nature and the relationship we must have with the Earth as related to the food we eat.

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