09/11/2026
From the Cereal Aisle to the Compost Heap
For over a third of my life, I was a vegetarian. "Meatless" felt like the whole story. I didn't ask where anything came from, how it got there, or what was actually in it. I just trusted the label and moved on.
Then I got curious — and curiosity turned into obsession. I started pulling on the thread of our food system: how it's grown, who controls it, what "natural" even means on a package.
The average piece of produce in the U.S. travels roughly 1,500 miles from farm to plate, with some imported items traveling over 3,000 miles — a figure that's been cited so often since the late '90s that it's become a cliché, but the implication underneath it rarely gets said out loud: those miles are days during which nutrients degrade, pathogens can multiply, and traceability breaks down.
The degradation is measurable, not theoretical. A Penn State study found that spinach stored at 39°F retains only 53 percent of its folate content after eight days — and at 68°F, it loses that ground in just four. Separate research on vegetable storage found vitamin C losses at 39°F over a week ranging from 15 percent in green peas to 77 percent in green beans. By the time a "fresh" vegetable reaches a plate — picked, trucked, shelved, refrigerated for days — it is a diminished version of what it was the day it came out of the ground.
Meanwhile, the food actually reaching most American plates isn't raw produce at all. Per the CDC's most recent NHANES data (2021–2023), Americans get 55 percent of their total calories from ultra-processed foods — 53 percent for adults, and nearly 62 percent for children.
This is the system I stopped trusting by default: one where distance degrades what little nutrition arrives, and where more than half the calories in the average diet were never really food to begin with — they were formulated.
Growing my own answer to that didn't require abandoning modern medicine or subscribing to a purity movement. I'm fully vaccinated. I have no interest in mythology. What I wanted was simpler and less ideological: food with zero miles between soil and table, grown in conditions I control, eaten before any of that degradation has a chance to happen.
That's the case for a market garden, a flock, a compost system — not sentiment, but arithmetic. Every mile and every day between harvest and your plate is a mile and a day of nutrition lost. The closer you can pull that loop, the more of the actual food survives to reach you.
That's why we've built our own plastic-free coffee and tea brand, brought home a backyard flock to process our scraps into composted plant nutrients, started sourcing locally raised beef and poultry, built our own compost bins, and this year grown a market garden of over fifty heirloom tomato plants.
We have been so blessed this year.
I share this not to brag or fear-monger, but to inspire others to take back control — and power — over their own food supply. It's not a luxury; it's a necessity. I never thought I'd be considered a farmer. But apparently, that's what I am now.
This has been a two-year journey for us. If you're not so far along, you can start with a simple trip to your local farmer's market and support the growers just down the road.
Sources: Gardyn (farm-to-plate mileage); Pandrangi & LaBorde, Journal of Food Science, 2004 (spinach folate); Growing Spaces, citing vegetable storage research (vitamin C loss); CDC/NCHS Data Brief No. 536, August 2025 (ultra-processed calorie share).
