Food, inc. takes a fact-supported look at agribusiness. It’s not a pretty picture.

This book is a companion publication to the movie by the same name and includes much material and additional detail that simply could not be reasonably crammed, wedged, shoehorned or otherwise forced into the movie.

If, like me, you missed the movie, you want to get this book. Really … you want this book. If you saw the movie, you still want this book … because you’ve already forgotten most of the movie.

The impact of the food we eat on our health, the impact on those who produce it and the impact on our precious natural resources must be met by a personal determination to ‘do better’ with our food choices and practices.

Readers of this blog are already organic gardeners … and that’s the gold standard for a healthy diet and a healthy planet … but there are steps that even we can take to ‘do better’ – not the least of which is spreading this information as widely as it is in our power to do.

Most of us are still eating meat, for instance. We can have a tremendous impact on the health of the planet simply by eating ‘vegan’ (no meat or animal products at all) once a week. With our gardens starting to produce again, this should be fairly simple to accomplish. As I have gained experience with this diet, I have found it desirable to eat a diet that is predominantly ‘fruit/grain/vegetable’ with -tiny- amounts of cheese and butter. I reserve my meat eating for those rare occasions when I am a guest in a friend’s home or simply MUST eat at a fast-food establishment and simply cannot stomach yet another dry and unimaginative salad in a plastic tray.

That’s not perfection and it won’t meet PETA’s standards for food blessedness, but it works for me and it is a far cry from where I used to be.

I’m doing my part … care to join me?

This is not what being self-sufficient is all about.

With unemployment benefits running out for a staggeringly huge number of people in the United States and elsewhere, it looks to be a long, cold, winter. For many, it will be a hungry one, too.

But it didn’t have to be that way this year and it doesn’t have to be that way next year.

If you have a backyard, or just know of an undisturbed place in an alley or alongside the road, you can grow enough food to feed at least two people, probably more. If you add in the front yard, you can likely feed more people than you can house. If you live in the warmer parts of the world (roughly 40-45 deg. north and south latitude and some areas outside of that warmed by coastal currents or favorable winds) you can plant and harvest all year around. Sometimes seeds, sometimes bulbs, sometimes plants, depending on the local weather patterns. But you can plant. And, if you can plant, tend, reap and prepare, you can eat.

This is the first post of a multi-part series (with the first 8 parts essentially complete) and marks a new, more aggressive, editorial direction. For quite some time now I’ve not posted much of anything because I didn’t like the ‘me too’ direction I had started out in. I think I wrote a pretty good series about growing tomatoes – I certainly had fun doing the artwork – and my readers seemed to like the slug article, but there are tons of nearly identical ‘de rigueur’ articles on the internet. Until fresh research turns up something startling, there just isn’t anything left to write on these topics. (Read the slug article – I did stumble on something new that works surprisingly well.) Although I am not removing those posts and, indeed, I plan to add to them from time to time, I’m taking a new direction.

Gardening is often seen as this sort of passive thing that people who like vegetables or pansies do … a harmless pastime, like painting by number, for those with no real talent or drive.

I don’t think so … I never have thought so, but, like most gardeners, I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words before so I just put my passion into the soil. Well, as you’ll see by the writing that follows, I’ve found the words.

– Bill

You are probably here because you agree that organic food is a good idea. In that case, you might might be interested in this 5:47 radio link.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

You may also be interested in knowing that Ireland is now officially and completely GMO free. Even so-called ‘trial fields’ (which end up contaminating the surrounding fields as their pollen spreads) are no longer permitted. This is a HUGE victory … to have even ONE government stand up to big agri-business instead of cowering before it, as the US, Canadian and British governments have.

Obama betrayed us all in his appointment of a representative of big-ag as our nations ag representative … but what else are we to expect? The guy he appointed is associated with the agribusiness lobbying group that started the “groundswell” letter writing campaign against the Whitehouse organic garden. Obama is too much of a politician, and not enough of a man, to stand up to these folks … but it looks like the Irish are up to the task.

If you know what you are looking for, you can freely and safely harvest the places planted by nature and ignored, shunned or forgotten by man. It’s a disquieting thought to note that most major cities only have enough food reserves for 3-4 days. After that, the warehouses will be as empty as the store shelves. But, even in the winter, you can shift the odds of surviving in your favor just by knowing the difference between what will fill you and what will kill you.

To that end, my wife and I have begun taking classes in edible plant identification offered by the University of Michigan (USA) as part of their adult education program. We intend to learn food foraging.

Money is not the issue. Quite the contrary: for the moment, at least, we are able to buy enough to keep us fat and make us fatter. But it is possible that there may come a day when all the money in the world couldn’t buy a good, square, meal. Food politics and the trend toward specialization and industrialization have left many of us unable to fend for ourselves without an electric can opener and a microwave oven nearby. Yet, only a generation or two ago, these didn’t exist and mankind fed itself just fine without them.

The wild foods that fed our ancestors still grow wild … but most of us couldn’t identify enough of them to survive, much less thrive. 

You don’t have to become a Euell Gibbons, but you’ll be glad that someone did. Ever notice mushrooms popping up on the lawns you pass or maybe a little higher up on tree trunks? A lot of them are of the edible sort. While you definitely want to make certain you know  how to identify the edible varieties, in season (each has its own), they can often be had for no more effort than a casual walk around the block with a paper bag in your pocket.

Many, if not all, major cities have tangled back alleys and more vacant lots than occupied. Despite massive unemployment, no one, NO ONE, plants anything there. No one has put fertilizer there, ever. And no one bothers with weed killers, either. Whatever you find or grow there qualifies as ‘organic’. Think about that … if you don’t apply poisons to the food, there won’t be any. Some years ago my wife and I stopped at a motel near Manistee, MI on our way to camp at Sleeping Bear Dunes and see Grand Traverse Bay. Spying a restaurant not far away, we elected to walk to dinner. Our conversation had turned to foraging when, almost as if to make the point, we stumbled upon a stand of asparagus just a little past the cutting stage. It was maybe 5 feet off a busy highway and, had we arrived a few days earlier, would have provided more than enough for a meal for two.

I have a super-secret stash of dandelions that I discovered in my alley. They are in a shady spot and don’t seem to ever bloom. I’ve been eating from that stash for the past 9 years. Dandelions taste great and are full of the vitamins, minerals and fiber your body needs. Yet, most people just walk past them or, worse yet, spend good money and hard sweat to get rid of them. I just paid $1.09 yesterday for about a handful, grown in Mexico. This spring I’ll get them fresher and free. I’m not knocking Mexico or its hard-working citizens, and $1.09 seemed a reasonable price for what I got; but food shipped 3,000 miles can never be as fresh or inexpensive as food hand-carried 50 yards. Unless you grow your own food, you are forced to pay for your dinner to travel across entire continents, and even wing it over oceans just to arrive, somewhat the worse for wear, on your plate.

On a happier note: at least food doesn’t have to deal with a TSA pat-down.

Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.