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?

I’ve just been reading “Soil Science Simplified” by Kohnke & Franzmeier and that reminded me of some insight that I now take for granted, but which was originally one of those ‘blinding flash of light’ moments for me.

On the second page, they point out that “A green plant is made up of about 80% water and 20% dry matter. The largest part of the dry matter is composed of the elements hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen which occur in air and water, while the rest consists of a great variety of elements that originate in the soil. In spite of the small amounts of these components, they are absolutely essential and the complete absence of only one of them makes plant growth impossible.” (emphasis added)

Buried in that paragraph is a nugget of information that is vital to the organic grower: the essential nature of trace minerals.

Lowly compost does the heavy lifting in my garden

Trees, like any other plant, generally take up only the nutrients they can use and they do so in the precise ratios needed for growth. The proof of this is that these ratios DID result in growth.

Tree leaves are abundant now in many locations around the world and they represent an incredible storehouse of those trace minerals brought from deep below ground in an easy to collect and use form. This isn’t rocket science, folks, the trace minerals have already been mixed and proportioned and packaged for you. The brain part is done: now all that is needed is a little grunt work.

Although there are a number of subtle shadings about how to use them, let’s look at just a couple: decomposition in situ and decomposing before incorporation.

Firstly, let’s tackle ‘in situ’. All this means is to mulch the leaves directly into your lawn, to dig them into your garden or to layer them on top of the soil so as to provide a blanket over it. This will use a goodly number of leaves and is a recommended practice. A mulching mower set to a low cutting height is ideal for the task of mulching leaves into the sod, as the grass should in any case be cut short this time of year to avoid fungal diseases over the winter. The less green you see, the fewer sugars to tempt snow mold and other fungi.

The second general manner of using tree leaves is to decompose them somewhere other than the point of final use. You might want to finish off a compost pile begun earlier in the year by turning leaves in to it, mixing them thoroughly as you do to prevent them from forming a water-shedding layer. You might also take a tip from others and, after shredding them somewhat with a mower, stack them against a fence or other structure to allow them to begin decomposing there. To the extent that weather permits, earthworms will gladly turn the bottom layers into something called “leaf mold”, which makes an excellent mulch or soil amendment in the spring. Also, in the spring, you can use the dried top layers as the initial ‘browns’ charge for a fresh compost pile.

Fall is also important because soil amendments applied now … lime, bone meal, sulphur, green sand, compost and so on, will have time to be incorporated into the root zone before spring planting. This allows the moderating influences of chemistry (organic chemistry can be gosh-awful slow) and microbiota to be felt, leaving the soil in a more ‘settled’ state. For instance, adding lime or sulphur will change the soil pH (that’s generally WHY they are added) and that will cause distress for the biota that thrived at one extreme or the other. Having winter to work in allows the other biota favoring the new pH to re-establish themselves. You want your soil fully populated by the time it is warm enough to plant. Applying amendments in the fall assists in that goal.

Now is the time to discard leftover plant parts. If the plant simply died because of the cold, it can be sent to the compost. If it died because of disease, send it straight to the trash hopper. Compost cures a lot of stuff but if you add diseased plant material to a late-fall pile, it may never get hot enough long enough to sterilize the pathogens. In that case, you need to allow the pile at least one, and preferably two, years to sit and mature.

Unless beans, peas or other legumes died from disease, do not pull them up by the roots. Rather, cut them off at the soil surface so as to leave their rhizomes in the ground. A quick flick with a sharp hoe will do the trick as will running over them with the mower if you have planted alfalfa or buckwheat and intend to use the top portions as green manure.

Look for some quotes from Kohnke & Franzmeier’s book in the sidebar. I’m liking what I see.

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.

Drawing: Texas A & M Univ. by T. Kohlleppel and D. Lineberger

Like their cousins, potatoes, tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family native to South America and were once thought to be poisonous. Their genus name means, literally, “wolf peach” … peach for their shape and size and wolf for their (presumed) poisonous characteristic.

This post starts off a 6-part cultivation fact sheet. Over time, as revisions are suggested, it will grow into a one-size fits all resource that you can refer others to with confidence.

Genus: Lycopersicum esculentum

Variety: all

Broad types:

Generally speaking, tomatoes are classified as either determinate or indeterminate. Determinate tomatoes bear flowers at the top of the main stem, indeterminate tomatoes will use that stem for further growing (I have known 3 lb. ripe fruit at the 11′ mark on ‘Mortgage Lifter’ tomatoes grown on a 10′ tall trellis.) and, instead, set their flowers and fruit on the stalks growing off to the side for that purpose. To halt the upward growth of indeterminate tomatoes, pinch out the growing tip. The terms “high acid” and “low acid” are misnomers. They should be ‘”low sugar” and “high sugar”, respectively. The acid content remains relatively stable across all varieties of tomatoes, but can be masked by variations in the level of sugars. The terms “potato leafed” and “non-potato leafed” are principally useful in identifying heirloom varieties and there only as a general rule. The “potato leafed” varieties are more likely to be heirloom than the “non-potato leafed” … but there can be no certainty in the matter based on leaf shape alone.

Annual / Perennial:

Technically, tomatoes are a perennial, but in Michigan they are not expected to survive our winters. If protected from last and first frosts, experience shows that the season may be extended by a month or more at each end of the growing season for a total of as much as 10 months. This is due to the fact that first and last frosts are often isolated events with good growing weather before the first frost and after the first one. Planting before the soil has warmed will not result in an earlier yield but may result in a sturdier, better rooted, plant. In a backyard garden, it is nearly impossible to quantify the benefits of such pre-season growth but experience has shown that planting tomatoes deep and early leads to reliably good yields. The key is to accelerate the warming of the soil before planting. Raised beds, clear plastic sheeting, high unfinished organic content, wind-sheltered location and east-west orientation of the beds all speed the warming. Clear plastic or glass cloches applied after planting further accelerate this process. If un-vented, be careful to remove the cloches on sunny days to prevent over-heating. The overheating is an invitation to fast-growing weak plants and fungal diseases. If using plastic bottles such as gallon milk jugs or 2-liter (or bigger) soda bottles, either remove the entire bottle during the day or at least remove the cap.

Propagation:

While young tomato plants are available in local nurseries, there are over 200 varieties to choose from in the seed catalogs. Most nurseries will have only the same 5-6 hybrids plus maybe one or two heirloom varieties. Because of this, and because it is simple to do, many gardeners will choose to start their own plants indoors. Plant indoors, 6-8 weeks (March 15 – April 1) before average last frost date (May 15 in USDA zone 5, adjust these dates to your local conditions) in peat pots, cell packs, paper / Styrofoam cups (poke hole in bottom for drainage) or homemade newsprint cells. Choose a good planting media without fertilizer and add up to 50% perlite. When the plants sprout, begin misting with a light application of fish-based fertilizer.