Who am I?

Hi, my name is Leonard Stevenson. I currently live in Louisville, KY but will be moving to rural south west Minnesota in August of 2021. My primary job is being a stay at home Dad to my son Jonathan.

The journey I have gone on to bring me to the point where I am writing this blog has been a long and circuitous one. For much of my life I more or less kept my head down, did my own thing and ignored the broader world. Then, a few years ago the cultural polarization finally became great enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

That started me on a self led, meandering intellectual journey. I started reading books about history, philosophy, psychology etc. Whatever felt like the next book I needed to read, I read. Eventually, I found my entire world view being shaken up and reformed. I was paying attention to deeper cultural trends and beginning to understand the importance of them to me personally. These are some of the problems I began to appreciate:

1. Health: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure etc. These are diseases that arise out of abundance and wealth. During the 20th century, they went from being rare to extremely common and expensive, especially for the poorest people.
2. Farming: Modern farming practices have drastically depleted the health of topsoil. As a result, farmland is gradually becoming scarcer. Meat production is done in ways that keep most cows sick a lot of the time and further depletes the soil.
3. Environment: We have tended to use resources up and dump the waste rather than cycling things around. Nature almost always cycles things around: the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle etc. The modern world has a large enough scale that we are starting to throw monkey wrenches into the machinery of nature.

I now believe that one of the fundamental underlying problems is that we have gotten so good at building technology that separates us from nature, that we have forgotten that we are an important part of it. The consequences of ignoring nature are becoming clearer. For example, we were so confident in our ability to make baby formula in the 1950s that many parents simply decided not to breastfeed their children. While there are certainly times when it is appropriate to avoid breastfeeding, we now realize that it is the best option for most people most of the time.

Similarly, I believe we need to realign our lives and our societies in ways that show a much more fundamental respect for nature. While these approaches will not always be appropriate for everyone all the time, they will be the best option most of the time.

One of the easiest places to start is the food we eat. But, learning how to do this, how to eat better, requires a lot of information that most of us don’t have the time to collect and evaluate. I have created this channel in the hopes that I can provide some people with better information. I hope that you will find the information on this channel useful for moving towards better eating habits and towards food that is healthier for us, the plants and animals we eat and for the environment that we all share.