Some time ago when I started watching The Walking Dead, I wondered what it would be like to live in a post apocalyptic world or at least one in which those things (that give order to our daily lives) disappeared. However, in times like COVID-19, I have noticed a number of things:
Even something that has affected the whole world, affects different people in very different ways. The less fortunate are immediately threatened by economic and health chaos. And, however subjective the reality of each one, there are causes (and solutions) for individual and collective problems.
I have had the opportunity to live in different socio-economic regimes, I understand how each one advocates for different natural principles of human behavior. So I have come to understand how the over-exploitation of resources is intrinsic to human behavior and not a result of one system or another.
The principle of the human being to maximize the profit of his labor by one system or the other does not solve the problem, it only increases the rate with which they transform resources into a revenue that promises to satisfy their physical and intellectual needs, often to the detriment of natural resources.
It is enough to read a summary of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and go through instagram for 1 second to confirm that we are far from a society with the self-knowledge necessary to regulate itself.
While we all try to put bread on the table and, at the end of the day, watch a show, we work quickly to meet needs (basic and not so basic). Thus we maximize looking for the lowest prices (economic and rarely environmental) and thus, without realizing, more countries join the list of those in ecological overdraft: Those that have ended up with the natural resources that they could consume, in a sustainable way, a given year.
Chile, every year enters the list on an earlier date. Chile is an agricultural powerhouse and the leading economy in South America, where our startup, Fotortec, is currently part of StartUp Chile, an accelerator of ventures of the Government of Chile that has bet on Fotortec in increasing added value economic and environmental aspects of the agricultural and food industry in Chile.
At Fotortec we achieve this by transforming plant waste into edible mushrooms, from which we extract high quality vegan protein ingredients. Thus, we offer food manufacturers an input whose production does not require sunlight or fertile soil and, better still, grows by neutralizing a plant waste. Fotortec makes it possible to attack the ecological overdraft at both ends by providing a prosperous alternative for both industry, society and Nature.
Our obsession to generate a true sustainable change surely stems from our apathy for highly emotional advertising on the networks; the kind that is probably well-intentioned but often falls into questionable misinformation, creating more divisions between us. For example, animal feed may not be sustainable and, consequently, cow’s milk should not be sustainable either, but what is sustainable about almond milk if it costs 12 liters of water to produce an almond? Why do we sell almond shells as dairy cow feed? I hope these questions bring more concerns than answers, because it is through questioning that we destroy the idea that things are «just like that.»
I want a world where doing the right thing doesn’t cost you your lifestyle or your savings, a world with plenty of food for everyone, where people wonder if the food they are buying, really nourishes them and if our futures generations will have to undergo a COVID-2000 to restore the ozone layer (as just happened).
I not only want, I really believe that such a new world is possible and I am not just me. We are Fotortec, of whom you are also part, you who believe that we can do better.
Suddenly, I think of the common things between your subjectivity and mine and the landscape lights up; please never stop being part of it.
