I Moved Across the World for Safer Food. Then the Rules Changed.

Hi to everyone in our Kitchen Community,

If you have been following our journey here, you know that our mission is rooted in transparency, health, and protecting what goes onto our tables. Lately, I have been having some deeply eye-opening conversations about what is quietly slipping into our “Unlabelled Kitchens”, not just locally, but on a global scale.

In exploring these vital issues, I’ve had the absolute privilege of connecting with a remarkable woman who has become an integral part of our community: Emily Francis.

Emily is an American author, journalist, and health advocate who has written extensively on the body, wellness, and local food culture. Six years ago, she did what many of us only dream of doing: she packed up her family and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a dedicated pursuit of clean, safe, and trustworthy food. Settling on the Mediterranean island of Malta, she has spent her days working directly with local farmers, filming traditional producers, and championing the European precautionary principles that many of us took for granted.

But as the landscape of food policy shifts across Europe, Emily is helping us sound the alarm on recent corporate and legislative changes, specifically surrounding New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) and the deregulation of food labelling, that threaten the very transparency we rely on.

Below, Emily shares her deeply personal, powerful story of moving from the United States to the EU in search of food trust, the unsettling shift happening right now under our noses, and why the fight for our kitchens is only just beginning.

Six years ago, I packed up my life and crossed an ocean. The decision wasn’t impulsive. It wasn’t about chasing adventure or collecting passport stamps. It was about the safety of our food.

Walking through grocery stores in the United States often felt like being forced to choose between affordability and health. There were effectively two versions of everything: the conventionally grown produce most families could afford, and the organic produce that frequently cost two or three times as much. Clean food wasn’t inaccessible because it didn’t exist. It was inaccessible because it had become a luxury product.

Then came the discoveries that changed everything for me. At one of the largest grocery chains in America, one we had trusted for years, we learned that the produce being misted throughout the day wasn’t always receiving the harmless spray of water shoppers assumed it was. The reality was far more complicated and unsettling. The deeper we dug into industrial agriculture, chemical inputs, food additives, and regulatory loopholes, the more it felt as though we had opened a Pandora’s box we could never close again.

Every answer led to another question.

Every question led to another uncomfortable truth.

The sense of betrayal was overwhelming. Not because these practices were hidden, but because they were often happening in full view of the public while most of us were too busy raising families, paying bills, and surviving everyday life to realise what we were looking at.

For years, I had trusted the system to do what it claimed to do: protect consumers. Protect families. Protect children.

Then I had a family of my own and I found myself questioning almost everything. What am I supposed to be feeding them? What items are healthy and what are secretly formulated with toxic chemicals? Even our health care products purchased from our health food stores had slowly, one by one, begun changing their ingredients, being bought out by large corporate chains that took our once trusted products and filled them with harsh dyes, petroleum, and other ingredients that were never there before. It was a constant cat and mouse game of chasing these companies to find out who bought them out and what changes were made.

The more I learned, the more determined I became to find another way.

That search eventually led me to Europe, and ultimately to the Mediterranean island of Malta, a place that still highly valued food traditions, local agriculture, and stronger protections for consumers. It felt like a refuge from the very systems that had shattered my trust back home.

For six years, I found exactly that.

Did you know that the standard American potato goes through five rounds of bleaching before it hits your plate? The soil is bleached, the seeds are bleached, the potatoes are sprayed. It goes on and on, and for no other reason than this is how the system was built. It’s a circle: make people sick, then give them the pharmaceuticals to make them better. In America, every commercial break on television is to promote some new pill, and then the side effects are sped through - and they are truly scary. Those types of commercials are banned across Europe. If you have never lived in or visited America, you have no idea what I’m referring to, but it is constant propaganda in the pharmaceutical sector. That is what I left in pursuit of not having to carefully read every label and scan every barcode on the produce.

My children knew the butterfly label, the signature mark of the Non-GMO Verified Project, before they could formulate full sentences. Like many Americans who have become disillusioned with the industrialisation of food, I wasn’t chasing sunshine, tax incentives, or an Instagram lifestyle in coming to Malta. I was chasing trust.

It was the very first thing I looked up when we were offered the opportunity to move here.

“Hey Google: Is Malta GMO Free?”

The answer came back with a resounding yes. Malta was the first country in the EU to place a full ban on genetically modified foods. That was it. That was the moment where my love affair began.

I wanted to raise my children somewhere that still treated food as something more than a commodity. Somewhere where farmers mattered. Somewhere where precaution still carried weight. Somewhere that public health stood ahead of corporate influence.

For years, I celebrated everything I found here. I wrote extensively about Malta’s agricultural traditions. I interviewed farmers for the local tourism magazine. I filmed local producers. I published a book on it back in the states. I championed the island’s food culture and spoke proudly about Europe’s reputation for stronger protections, stricter standards, and greater transparency than the systems I had left behind in the United States.

What I discovered among Malta’s farmers was something increasingly rare in the modern world: people who still viewed agriculture as stewardship. None of these farms were corporate operators. They were families. Generations working the same land. People who knew their customers. People who understood that farming is not merely an economic activity but a relationship between land, food, and community.

As one of my farmers told me: “You don’t become a farmer. You are born a farmer.”

I knew what I was getting because I knew from where I was getting it. That level of trust and transparency is holy. It is pure and just. I was so grateful to experience this level of food sovereignty.

Those farmers became some of the people I trusted most. I still trust them the most. I still champion them every chance I get. They are among the most highly regarded people in my new life here.

The trust I carried for Malta and for the entirety of the European Union is precisely why recent developments surrounding New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) have been so deeply unsettling.

Regardless of where one stands in the scientific debate surrounding gene editing, one fact should concern everyone: I could not find a single farmer who was consulted on this new legislation. Everyone I spoke with had no awareness that these policy discussions were taking place. They immediately got to work picking up the phone and scheduling meetings, trying to get their parliament members to opt out.

So with that said, I have some questions.

Why were the farmers not included?

Who did the research for such data? Who hired those researchers?

There is a credibility issue going to these companies, given that with their GMOs they released substantial research indicating that the sprays were safe, then walked it back years later when people started getting sick. You cannot only offer up scientific data from in-house sources. Regulatory decisions should rely on independent science rather than industry-generated evidence alone.

Why is it that I have found not a single farmer who agrees with this science? That is the bigger question, because I have certainly asked it. Not a single person in farming has made it make sense to me. No one has justified this decision except for the ones voting on it - and the most I’ve gotten from them is that they are following the science.

Again. Which science?

The people expected to live with these consequences often seemed to be among the last to hear about them. That should alarm all of us. Because this story is not simply about biotechnology.

It is about transparency.

Why must you remove the labels?

Is it because you know that we, as informed consumers, would skip that product and choose something we know we can trust? That would be the only reason I can see that would make you choose to take away our ability to choose.

When I first arrived in Europe, I believed I was entering a system built on a different set of priorities. I saw ingredient labels that looked different from those back home. I saw stronger restrictions on additives. I saw precautionary approaches that reflected a simple principle: when uncertainty exists, public health should come first.

I saw cookies coloured pink through real beet powder and not Red Dye 40.

I relished what I found in the stores here, and in every other European country I visited. I have never felt this safe in what I was eating and serving my family. Do you know how extraordinary that feels when you come from the land of GMOs, heavy dyes, and chemical exposure you are not even warned about? It was like heaven on earth.

This was everything to me. These things mattered enough that I left behind lifelong friendships, family relationships, career opportunities, and the familiar comfort of home. Like many parents, I was willing to sacrifice almost anything if it meant giving my children a healthier future. Food was never a small issue in that decision. It was central.

Across Europe, food quality has long been part of a larger cultural identity. Markets, farmers, local production, regional traditions, and consumer protections helped create a sense that food remained connected to people rather than solely to global corporations. That connection is fragile.

Once trust is broken, it is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.

Today, many citizens across Europe are asking questions that deserve serious answers.

Who benefits most from these changes?
How will small farmers be affected?
Will consumers continue to have meaningful transparency?
What safeguards remain in place?
And perhaps most importantly, why do so many ordinary people feel they are hearing about these changes only after critical decisions have already been made?

These are not anti-science questions.

They are democratic questions.

Throughout my years in Malta, I have met farmers who care deeply about biodiversity, soil health, seed preservation, and community resilience. I have met people whose livelihoods depend on maintaining trust with consumers.

The farmers are not the villains in this story.

If anything, they may become some of its most important voices.

The farmers never failed us.

The concern many people share is that systems increasingly designed around scale, efficiency, patents, and global corporate interests may leave farmers with fewer choices while leaving consumers with less information. Whether those fears ultimately prove justified remains to be seen.

But the fears themselves are real. Dismissing them only deepens the divide.

For me, this debate carries uniquely personal weight. I did not simply read about food policy from afar. I reorganised my entire life around it. I crossed continents because I believed places still existed where precaution mattered more than profit. I believed there were societies willing to draw a line and say that some things should not be negotiated away.

Perhaps that belief was idealistic. Perhaps it still is. But I know I am not alone.

Across Europe, parents, farmers, health advocates, and ordinary citizens are asking difficult questions about the future of their food system. They are asking whether transparency remains a fundamental right. They are asking whether local agriculture can survive increasing corporate concentration. They are asking who gets to decide what enters our fields and ultimately our bodies.

Those questions deserve better than dismissal.

They deserve debate.

They deserve scrutiny.

And they deserve answers.

Because food is never just food.

Food is health.

Food is culture.

Food is sovereignty.

Food is trust.

The challenge now is whether the institutions making these decisions understand it as well.

That conversation is not over. In many ways, it is only just beginning.

- Emily Francis

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