Food Should Feed You

We started Forest City Microgreens in 2020 for one simple reason: to put clean, nutrient-dense food on people’s plates. Not food engineered to sit on a shelf for months. Food grown close to home, harvested fresh, and packed with what your body actually needs.

That idea didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from years of watching what happens to people when their food stops working for them.

What I Saw on the Treatment Table

Before I was a grower, I was a Registered Massage Therapist. For more than a decade, I treated people every day, and over those years a pattern became impossible to ignore.

More and more of my clients were coming in with pain rooted in inflammation. Stiff joints, aching muscles, flare-ups that kept coming back no matter how much hands-on work we did. I could ease the symptoms for a while, but I couldn’t change what was driving them.

When we talked about their daily lives, the same thing kept coming up: what they were eating. Diets heavy in sugar and processed foods kept showing up alongside chronic inflammation. Massage could help someone feel better for a week. Their food was shaping how they felt every single day.

The science backs up what I saw. In 2019, a team of researchers from Stanford, Harvard, the U.S. National Institute on Aging and others published a major review in Nature Medicine. They identified poor diet as one of the lifestyle factors that drives chronic, body-wide inflammation, the kind linked to heart disease, diabetes and many of today’s leading causes of disability (Furman et al., 2019).

The good news is that it works in reverse, too. In a two-year randomized trial published in JAMA, people who switched to a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts and olive oil had significantly lower blood markers of inflammation than those on a standard diet (Esposito et al., 2004). Change the food, and the inflammation changes with it.

What’s Really on the Shelf

Walk down the centre aisles of any grocery store and read a few labels. You’ll find added sugars hiding in bread, sauces and “healthy” snacks. You’ll find additives for colour and texture, preservatives to stretch shelf life, and, in some animal products, hormones used to speed up growth.

None of that is there to nourish you. It’s there to make food cheaper to produce, easier to ship and longer-lasting on the shelf. Somewhere along the way, convenience became the priority and nutrition became an afterthought.

The fresh produce isn’t always much better. Much of it is picked early and trucked thousands of kilometres, losing flavour and nutrients with every day it spends in transit.

How I Grew Up Eating

I grew up in Colombia in the late ’70s and early ’80s, before my family moved to Canada. Back then, nobody talked about “clean eating.” It was simply how we ate.

Our food came from nearby farms and the local market. Fruit and vegetables were picked ripe and eaten within days. Meat and eggs came from animals raised the way they always had been. Nothing needed a long list of ingredients, because there was nothing to add.

I didn’t appreciate how rare that was until I saw how differently food is produced here. That contrast, between the food I grew up on and the pain I saw in my clients, is what Forest City Microgreens is built on.

Why You Won’t Hear Us Say “Organic”

You may notice we describe our food as clean, local and natural, not “organic.” That’s on purpose.

The food I grew up eating was never labelled organic. It didn’t need to be. Growing food without synthetic chemicals was just normal. Today, “organic” has become a marketing term, a premium label that sets apart food grown without the chemicals that became standard everywhere else.

Think about what that says. Food grown the way it always was now needs a special label and a higher price, while food produced with chemical inputs gets to be called “regular.” We think that’s backwards. Clean food shouldn’t be the exception you pay extra for. It should be the default.

That’s the change we want to see in the food industry, and it’s how we run our own farm.

What We Grow, and Why It Matters

Microgreens are one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat. Harvested just days after sprouting, these young greens pack concentrated vitamins, minerals and antioxidants into every handful. We grow them right here in London, Ontario, in a clean indoor vertical farm, and get them to you within days of harvest.

No long-haul trucking. No preservatives. No shortcuts. Just real food, grown close to home, the way food used to be.

This blog is where we’ll share more of that story: how we grow, what’s in season, recipes from our kitchen and the ideas that keep us going. Thanks for being part of it.

Ready to taste the difference? Explore our microgreens, or build your own subscription box and get fresh greens delivered to your door.

Sources

Furman D, Campisi J, Verdin E, et al. Chronic inflammation in the etiology of disease across the life span. Nature Medicine. 2019;25(12):1822–1832.
Esposito K, Marfella R, Ciotola M, et al. Effect of a Mediterranean-style diet on endothelial dysfunction and markers of vascular inflammation in the metabolic syndrome: a randomized trial. JAMA. 2004;292(12):1440–1446.