I think food was one of the easier bars for me to see, once I actually started looking at it.
For a long time, the supermarket was just where food came from. It was convenient. Everything was there. Walk in. Buy what I needed. Take it home. I didn't think much about what happened before it reached me.
Then I watched a documentary about packaged food. And I remember thinking, oh my god, what are we doing to ourselves? More importantly, what am I doing to myself and my family? That sent me down another rabbit hole. I started looking more into gut health, and the relationship between gut health and mental health. I live with anxiety, and the more I read, the more uncomfortable I became. I didn't know who had grown most of the food I was eating. I didn't know where it had come from. Some of it had traveled enormous distances. I didn't know how many people had handled it, or what had been done to it before it reached me. And that felt like a real bar.
Not just the supermarket itself, but how easy it had become to just know almost nothing about one of the most basic things keeping me alive. So I started trying to take some of that back, not all at once.
I started growing what vegetables I could. I started learning how to make more of my own food. Things like yogurt, kefir, kombucha, bread. Some of those skills are bloody hard. There's a reason it's easier to just buy a loaf.
But slowly, I'm getting there. I also started thinking differently about meat. I don't eat chicken anymore. I eat wallaby, venison, kangaroo, and fish. Where I can, I buy through the local co-op. And I got my firearms license so that I could hunt wallaby myself.
As an Aboriginal person today, if I want to access that food, I have to do it within the systems that currently exist. That means using a firearm and getting the required permits.
So this isn't a neat story about escaping the system completely. I'm still buying food, I'm still using shops, still relying on systems and regulations. But I'm less disconnected than I was. And for now, I think that's the point. Not perfect self-sufficiency. Just becoming less disconnected from the things that keep me alive.
Food seemed like a pretty obvious place to start.