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How modern culture convinced us to abandon the source of all life.
The Theft No One Named
There is something extraordinary happening in plain sight, and we've grown so accustomed to it that most of us no longer see it.
The most essential resource for human survival — food, the soil it grows from, the hands and knowledge required to tend it — is the least protected thing we have. It is treated as a commodity that can be traded, disrupted, or allowed to fail like any other market sector. And while we've built sophisticated systems to protect our data, our energy grids, our financial markets, the infrastructure beneath every meal has been left largely unexamined and underdefended.
This didn't happen overnight. It was a slow heist. And we were the unwitting participants.
A Generation Educated Away from Their Source
We are living through what may be the most educated era in human history. Universities are full. Literacy rates have climbed. Young people can navigate global supply chains, master digital platforms, and discourse fluently on economics and policy.
And yet, a growing body of research documents something striking: this same generation has near-zero practical connection to where their food comes from.
The Global Hunger Index's 2023 report found that indigenous and local farming and knowledge systems are under widespread threat — sidelined in research and policy as young people's participation in food systems alongside elders has decreased. The Sustainable Agriculture Network states it plainly: agriculture is aging. Across regions, the average farmer is growing older while fewer young people see a viable future in farming. This trend is not merely demographic — it is structural.
In Europe, only 5.6% of farms are managed by farmers under 35. Over 31% are managed by farmers over 65. The generational pipeline is not slow — it is broken.
The Shame of the Soil
What makes this a heist rather than just a demographic shift is the mechanism: shame.
Research published in peer-reviewed journals documents that farmers globally report hiding their profession in public to avoid stigma. Finnish farmers list the treatment of farmers in society and the media as one of their most common sources of stress. A study of Canadian farmers found that they have experienced stigmatization at the individual, social, and institutional level — causing them to hide their profession, isolate with other farmers, or feel unhappy about potential consequences.
Studies from South India found that rural youth view farming as the last option, if all other possibilities failed. A Frontiers journal review found that youth have pessimistic perceptions about agriculture's capability of improving their living standards — not because the land isn't productive, but because the culture surrounding farming has been systematically devalued.
And nowhere is this devaluation more insidious than in the education system. Modern Farmer's investigation into agricultural education found that enrollment in undergraduate agriculture programs plummeted 30 percent as farming became socially synonymous with failure. Farmers themselves stopped encouraging their children to follow in their footsteps. A research study on urban college farms documented institutional messaging that literally framed farm work as punitive — something students were assigned to, not aspired to.
The Commodity Lie
Underlying all of this is a single, extraordinarily effective idea: that food is a commodity.
"Over time, food has evolved from a local resource held in common into a private, transnational commodity. This process of commodification has deprived food of all its non-economic attributes. The value of food is no longer based on the many dimensions that bring us security and health." — UN University, Our World
When food becomes a commodity, farms become businesses that can succeed or fail. When farms become businesses, farmers become entrepreneurs who bear individual market risk for a systemic resource. When farmers bear that risk alone, and culture teaches the next generation that the work is beneath them, the infrastructure that sustains life quietly hollows out from within.
We Mean Business Coalition put it starkly in their review of global agriculture: the transactional relationship with farmers has reinforced a misguided notion that farmers — and the way they steward land — are interchangeable and of little consequence.
But they are not interchangeable. They are not incidental. They are infrastructure.
Food Sovereignty Is National Security
This is not merely a cultural or ecological problem. It is increasingly being named as a security problem.
A 2026 Policy Options commentary on Canada found that the national Defence Industrial Strategy omitted food sovereignty entirely — leaving what the authors called the most vital supply chain we have unexamined and unprotected. The Sustainable Agriculture Network is direct: food systems are often treated as sectors alongside energy, transport, or health. In reality, they function as critical infrastructure. They sustain life, underpin social stability, and connect economies across borders. When food systems fail, the consequences ripple instantly through societies.
We protect electricity grids. We fund cyber defence. We build intelligence agencies to protect our borders.
But the soil? The seed knowledge? The generational farmers who have stewarded land across centuries?
We let that be a business decision.
Naming the Heist
At Zawadi Farm, this is the work we inhabit every day — not as metaphor but as practice. Growing food on land in North York. Training the next generation of farmers. Building food systems infrastructure through Zawadi Connections that treats food sovereignty not as an aspiration but as a right.
We use the word "heist" deliberately. Because heists have perpetrators, not just outcomes. The commodification of food was not accidental — it was chosen, legislated, subsidized, and culturally reinforced over generations. The devaluation of farmers was not natural — it was taught, in curricula and in culture, in policy and in media.
And what is stolen can be reclaimed.
That reclamation begins with naming what happened. With insisting that the knowledge of how to grow food is as fundamental as the ability to read. With building institutions that treat farmers as the infrastructure stewards they are, not the market participants we've reduced them to. With raising a generation that knows where their food comes from — and takes fierce, informed pride in it.
The greatest psychological heist of our time was convincing an entire civilization that the source of all life was ordinary. It wasn't an accident. And undoing it is the work of our generation.
Much love and light,
Jess Njau
Founder & Executive Director, Zawadi Farm & Zawadi Connections
