Watch what you eat!

By Jenny Cortés (undergraduate Accountancy student, level 4 English)

Throughout history, some changes have benefited mankind. They have made our lives easier, but at what cost? The eagerness to discover and change what we have has blinded us. We are not aware of the damage that we are causing to ourselves and to the environment.

It’s not hard to see that fruits are less natural than they used to be. Consumption and scarcity means that the market requires more and more merchandise to sell as fast as possible. This problem has resulted in the use of fertilisers and genetic modifications, and it’s difficult to know how these methods are applied to crop growth.

Nowadays, the fruit that we eat is not totally natural, as its structure is artificial and we have grown accustomed to the taste. In fact, we can probably no longer remember the real taste, and only our grandparents who came from the countryside can. The reality is that this change has happened because of the use of fertilisers. Some of these are natural, and some are artificial, but most farmers use artificial ones because these are the most effective to promote fast growth.

The market only cares about transactions and not about people’s health, and for this reason farmers use these fertilisers, or in so many current cases, genetic modification. We could say that, if the problem is caused by high demand for fruit, then why don’t we expand our fields and farms? The problem with this is that we don’t notice that we have damaged many possible fields. Our cities are full of buildings and houses and if we need more space, we take “a little bit” of nature, so there is less and less space for agriculture.

It is really hard to find a solution to this problem, but it is not impossible. I think that the first thing that we can do is to be aware of the damage caused by these changes, and do something in order to fix it. The second is to show this problem to other people, and the third could be to require a policy that puts our health over the market, as difficult as that might be. Other things that we can do are to grow our own food or do some research so we find information about the products we eat and where they come from.

We can also look to the past. The people then didn’t use these techniques and they got their food and the things that they needed because they learned to be patient and to love and value nature and this process. Nature is perfect, and it has given us all the things that we need, so why are we so ambitious and obstinate that we feel the need to change it?