Food Day is a nationwide celebration and a movement toward more healthy, affordable, and sustainable food—sounds a lot like the Slow Food Movement to me.  Events are taking place across the nation to promote “eating real” food.  Go to thewebsite to find out about events in your area and to take their “real food” quiz to find out how your food intake measures up in terms of your health, environment, and animal welfare.  I fared pretty well on the quiz (I got an “A”), but I’m not sure I understood all of the reasoning behind their scoring system.

What I do like is their priorities:

• Promote safer, healthier diets
• Support sustainable and organic farms
• Reduce hunger
• Reform factory farms to protect the environment
• Support fair working conditions for food and farm workers

What’s not to like about those ideas?  With so much of our food supply being connected to the promotion of disease (e.g. obesity, heart disease, cancer), it’s no longer a good idea to be unconscious about what we’re eating and the impact it has on our own health as well as the health of the world around us.

Among other events hosted here at the University of Missouri in Columbia is a Campus Farmers Market and Fair Food Fair on Thursday, October 25, from 10 am to 2 pm. For more events go the Environmental Leadership Office website

How “real” can you make your food consumption?  Spend a little more time thinking about where your food comes from before you eat.  I even heard there is a month long challenge in October to eat only non-processed foods.  Since we are almost to the end of the month, maybe try it for the next week and see how you do.  Report back on what you discovered.