I Know What I Eat

Mr Cuketka, who runs the popular blog cuketka.cz, had his doubts about the way foods are grown and sold today. He wanted to know whether you could live solely on foods not processed by mass manufacturers. This is his report on that experiment, conducted earlier this year. His conclusion: Life's possible without the supermarket.



It's Friday afternoon, and I'm standing with a full basket at the supermarket checkout. The line of anxious people is especially long today. I'm looking at the goods in my basket and can't shed the sense that something's wrong. After a while, the penny drops. This food has something in common with the synthesised pop that's blaring all around us. Looking down at this sliced meat packed into super-fine plastic, I can't imagine the animal it came from or the place that creature lived. These fruits and vegetables have travelled farther than I ever have. And how can there be tomatoes growing in the Netherlands when it's snowing right now outside?



Every single item in my basket seems to present a sort of pop quiz. You need to decode what's actually inside – which parts are food and which are the chemical substances that keep our products "fresh" on the shelves for weeks. Very often, only the slightest flavour remains of what was meant to be a key ingredient. This is what I…