Well, technology and its innovations are now the order of the day. It has basically taken over all the fields and industries and now, while it has made life easier, it doesn’t exactly make life safer. It seems that the more advanced technology gets, the more fragile things become. Despite the amount of things that they can do.
Devices, vehicles, and gadgets today come with so many features that make using them fun and seamless, but then, it also poses major problems. Because they require more maintenance, they spoil more quickly and as such need more spending in the fixing. They’re also expensive as hell!
So, it’s no different when it comes to the agricultural sector. It has been taken over by technology and today, farmers use machines and all forms of heavy equipment to grow food. They add chemicals to the soils so they can get a particular breed of produce, they use fertilizer to increase their yield, and they add preservatives and chemicals to make sure that the produce doesn’t spoil before it gets to the consumers.
All these end up having severe effects on the nutritional value of the food. Taking it down by a lot! And today, we see it in the food that we eat. They don’t slap as hard as they used to in the past. I remember in the past making eba was quite easy. All you had to do was boil water and then pour in the garri before you stirred it. Simple, you had your eba. However, that’s not the case today. It requires a degree just to make eba.
You have to know the kind of garri that it is, that will determine if you’ll let the water boil fully or not. If it does boil fully, you might have to dilute it with cold water, or the garri would be soaked and ruined. Sometimes, you’ll make garri, and after turning it, when eating it will be breaking away in your hand. You’ll be eating fufu and all you can find are lumps after lumps.
But then, what about our local pap? In the past, making it was as simple as boiling water and pouring it into the ground mixture of corn, sugar, and warm water. When you poured in the boiling water, it thickened automatically, and if you poured too much, you would ruin it. Putting the actual pap on fire was always by choice, for those who wanted to make sure all germs were taken care of.
However, today, you must put it on fire! You pour in the boiling water, and there will be no change. You’d have to put it on fire for it to thicken, and many times, you could end up putting in too much. I could go on and on about how all these are affecting the food we eat. It is what happens when food is produced in mass quantities.
These days, if you go to the village and eat food prepared in local farms, you’ll want to live there. All the while I was in school, I was getting all my garri and corn from my village and they were always perfect. Exactly how they should be. Because they were all locally made. However, buying them outside, the difference was always clear.
I’m not saying that these innovations should stop, that’s impossible. At the rate the population is growing, we need faster and more efficient ways to produce our food. Sadly, this will only reduce the nutritional content even further. I’m sure that more research is being conducted to know how farmers can get more yield with as few seedlings as possible, or how one fowl can lay dozens of eggs within the shortest possible time.
That’s why these days, you’ll see animals that are bloated and look big, but when you prepare them to eat, there’s almost no flesh. They’re not sweet and they just seem way off. Honestly, the only way I think we can get out of this mess is by supplements. There are supplements for just about every nutritional content out there, and since your food is most likely not giving it, you might have to get it yourself.
It’s sad really, we’re most likely the generation that would end up colonizing Mars, but we can’t take our food back to the way it used to be. Despite all this technology. Just too bad!
