When we first came to Belize, 10 years ago, we had decided that we wanted to eat all our own food off the farm ie. become totally self-sustainable.  We have planted all manner of food plants including root vegetables, greens and fruit trees.  Everything is bearing and we have loads of fresh food to feed ourselves with.

The start of this year has indeed been a time of great contemplation for me as I step into the kitchen and I am confronted by all this processed, packeted and shop-bought food (all imported, no less!):

Looking at all this made me realise that I was not living my philosophy and I have allowed the insidiousness of convenience to edge into my life.  Don’t get me wrong…we do eat mostly our fresh food but I use packet  food as a “back-up” when I don’t feel like getting out and digging something up (when it is raining or it is bug-ridden).  We would like to get completely self-reliant and not feel that we even need a weekly trip into town to buy food (at this point our grocery bill only amounts to about BZD$30 (USD$15) a week so we are not doing too badly.

We would like to live our philosophy so we are going to address this habitual need to buy products.  We have decided to finish off every single packeted food in the house until there are none and we are not going to buy anymore products from the shops.  Once we polish off every single packet, we are going to switch over to farm food only.  This will lead to an even healthier lifestyle with continual planting, digging, harvesting and preparation of enough food to feed us 365 days of the year.  And of course we will save money from not needing to buy any groceries from the super-market.

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