The Food We Eat

“We dig our grave with our knives and forks.” French proverb

No one needs to be told the extent to which our lives have been upended over recent years with Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and social upheaval. Technological innovations like lightning speed internet and cloud computing have dramatically changed the way we work, allowing roughly half of all office workers to avoid the daily commute, resulting in ~ a billion square feet of vacant office space.

But today I would like to draw your attention to changes in our food, nutrition, and eating habits with the consequent effects on our health, as I invite you to consider the following data points:

— The caloric content for each dollar spent yields 1,200 calories at the snack aisle versus a mere 250 calories at the produce section; as a nation, we subsidize sugar, a leading contributor to obesity, and then spend billions on “free” healthcare for the poor; we eat food sprayed with Glyphosate (Roundup) and wonder why cancer is so prevalent.

— The working poor, often living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little time to shop and prepare, are relegated to calorie delivery corporate entities like TacoBell and McDonalds who have mastered speedy delivery of maximum calories for a minimum price, however deadly.

— Meanwhile, a typical two-income middle class earner shops for food at Costco which draws in customers with loss leader items like their annual $40 million loss on rotisserie chickens (~76 million sold at $4.99). These customers might have the income but not the time to prepare healthy fresh food.

— All in all, the year 2015 marked the first time during which Americans spent more money eating at a restaurant than they did at the grocery store, figuring that once they factor in their time, it is cheaper than shopping, preparing, serving, and cleaning at home.

— There were 37.9 million one-person American households, representing 29% of all households in 2022; think of that when you consider that loneliness is, itself, deemed a pandemic and a diet of subprime food consumed alone a virtual death sentence.

I am bringing all this up because it speaks to the underlying value of what we strive to provide at the Highland, which we claim offers the healthiest food at the best value in Boulder. We use fresh organic ingredients, the best oils, and real salt to assure that our members are served the best food, custom cooked for their enjoyment when and where they want it.

When we finally start using food as medicine to stay healthy, we will no longer need expensive pharmaceutical medications with various side effects. The food we eat and with whom we share it makes us who we are. Think of Highland’s kitchen as a Kibbutz, Ashram, or College Campus mess hall serving abundant gourmet food, at good value, consumed communally. 

— Sina.