Tuesday, July 15, 2025

From Survival to Struggle

🍲 From Survival to Struggle: Why We Need to Talk About Food, History, and Health in BC

By Tina Winterlik / Zipolita

There’s something really wrong with the way we eat — and even more wrong with the way we think about food.

Today, kids don’t know where their food comes from. Some think milk comes from a carton, eggs from a fridge, and dinner from Uber Eats. Many have never seen their moms cook a real homemade meal. Whole generations are growing up eating out of plastic boxes while watching AI cake videos on their phones. Everything is fast, flashy, branded, and delivered. And somehow — even with more “choices” than ever — we’re all getting sicker, more disconnected, and more dependent on a broken system.

This didn’t happen by accident.

I’m writing this series to tell the truth. As someone with both Indigenous and European settler ancestry, I’ve seen how colonization destroyed traditional food systems and replaced them with control, cruelty, and confusion. I’ve read the stories and talked to the people who lived them. Kids in residential schools were starved on purpose. Some were experimented on in Indian hospitals — their bodies treated like test subjects for pharmaceutical research. If they survived, they were sent back to the very systems that made them sick in the first place.

Doctors from Nazi Germany came to learn from what Canada was doing in these institutions — and what they learned, they took back to their concentration camps. That’s a truth many people don’t want to talk about.

Now fast forward to today — and what do we see?

Food trucks charging $14 for fancy trends. Kids raised on McDonald’s and marketed veganism. A health care system that patches us up with pills after years of eating food that was never meant to nourish us. It’s a system designed to keep us dependent — feed us garbage, get us sick, treat us with drugs, and send us home to repeat the cycle.

This isn’t just about food. It’s about control. It’s about survival. It’s about how we got here — and how we reclaim our health, our knowledge, and our dignity.

So this is the beginning of a series. We’ll talk about:

  • How Indigenous people in BC lived in balance with the land
  • What happened in residential schools and Indian hospitals
  • How industrial food systems replaced knowledge with packaging
  • Why so many people are sick — and what we can do about it
  • And how we can reconnect to something real: land, food, healing, and each other

If you’ve ever felt like something is deeply wrong with the way we eat, live, and survive in this system — you’re not alone. Let’s talk about it.

Stay tuned. This is just the beginning.

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