Food Democracy

You have got to see this! It’s good. It’s true. We are a society that is obsessed with stuff. The average Amercian consumes twice as much as we did 50 years ago. We have less than 5% of the world’s poplulation yet we use 30% of the world’s resources. If everyone in the world consumed at US rates we would need five planets to house our goods and trash. How did this happen? Well it wasn’t by accident. Check out the 20-minute video at www.storyofstuff.com.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/263

Many types of food can legally be irradiated and sold in the U.S., including beef, poultry, pork, eggs, shellfish, juice and  spices. Yet beef is the only labeled irradiated food currently known to be sold in U.S. grocery stores today, and this in only a few states.

“As stores and restaurants around the country pull tomatoes from shelves and menus in response to the recent salmonella outbreak, American tomato farmers are poised to lose their livelihoods and the food irradiation industry sees dollar signs. So says Wenonah Hauter, Executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the new book Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food.  Read the rest of this entry »

Excerpt from The Hundred Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald:

…a representative sampling of the findings collected from reputable sources about what really is in our food, water, vitamins, prescription drugs, childhood vaccines, cosmetics, and in our homes.

• When you read ‘made with natural flavors” on a food label, you are probably being deceived, because natural flavors and artificial flavors usually contain the same synthetic chemicals.
• In large feedlots, 100 percent of the cattle are fed five or more sex hormones, such as progesterone and testosterone, to accelerate weight gain, and these hormones are known to cause reproductive dysfunction and cancers in humans.
• Many of our commercial dairy and meat products come from animals that consumed livestock feed made from the remains of tens of millions of dogs and cats that were  killed with euthanasia drigs at animal shelters and veterinary clinics.
• Medical evidence is emerging that suggests that the artificial sweeteners in diet soft drinks may cause brain tumors and neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The occurance of these diseases has risen dramatically, in proportion with the expanded use of synthetic sweeteners.

Read the rest of this entry »

The French documentary titled “The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that Americans won’t ever see,” is evidently living up to its name. When we first posted a link, the video was widely available on Google and a variety of web video sources. A couple of weeks later, it mysteriously disappeared. From everywhere!

Barbara Peterson at OpEdNews says:

“If Google Video has removed this documentary in acquiescence to the U.S. government or Monsanto, then that is testimony to the power and corruption behind the massive corporate movement to wage war on the environment and all living things in the pursuit of profit and power, the people be damned.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilema,” has a great article in the New York Times on climate change and the virtues of growing your own food. Check it out at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=2&ei=5087&em=&en=d8cc9200fb79ea20&ex=1209009600&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Check local listings at:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/guide.html

Overview:
Behind America’s dollar hamburgers and 72-ounce sodas is a key ingredient that quietly fuels our fast-food nation: corn. In KING CORN, recent college graduates Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis leave the east coast for rural Iowa, where they decide to grow an acre of the nation’s most powerful crop.

Alarmed by signs of America’s bulging waistlines, the filmmakers arrive in the Midwest enthusiastic about their new endeavor. For their farm-to-be, they choose tiny Greene, Iowa—a place that, coincidentally, both Ian and Curt’s great-grandfathers called home three generations ago. They lease an acre of land from a skeptical landlord, fill out a pile of paperwork to sign up for subsidies and discover the U.S. government will pay them 28 dollars for their acre. Ian and Curt start the spring by injecting ammonia fertilizer, which promises to increase crop production four-fold. Then it’s planting time. With a rented high-tech tractor, they set 31,000 seeds in the ground in just 18 minutes. Their corn has also been genetically modified for another yield-increasing characteristic, herbicide resistance. When the seedlings sprout from Iowa’s black dirt, Ian and Curt apply a powerful herbicide to ensure that only their corn will thrive on their acre. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Felicity Lawrence, author of the book, Not On The Label, bread making changed in the Sixties when scientists discovered how to make a loaf quickly and bulk it up with water.

“Instead of allowing two to three days fermentation they found that air and water could be incorporated into dough if it was mixed at high speeds,” she says.

“Double the quantity of yeast was needed to make it rise, chemical oxidants were essential to get the gas in and hardened fat had to be added to provide structure. The process gave a much higher yield of bread from each sack of flour because the dough absorbed so much water.” The added fat, often in the form of unhealthy hydrogenated fat, helps today’s bread look firm and spongy. It is often included as a part of the ambiguous-sounding “flour treatment agent” usually found listed in the ingredients.

Many people picture cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens as friendly creatures who live happily within the confines of a peaceful family farm, arriving as food for humans only at the end of their sun-drenched lives. That’s what Gene Baur had been told — but when he first visited a stockyard he realized that this rosy depiction couldn’t be more inaccurate.

Amid the stench, noise, and filth, his attention was drawn in particular to one sheep who had been cast aside for dead. But as Baur walked by, the sheep raised her head and looked right at him. She was still alive, and the one thing Baur knew for sure that day was that he had to get her to safety. Hilda, as she was later named, was nursed back to health and soon became the first resident of Farm Sanctuary — an organization dedicated to the rescue, care, and protection of farm animals. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a couple of fun, uplifting, worthwhile things to do?

Rent the movie, “Across the Universe.” It’s brilliantly written, has a great cast, and the soundtrack incorporates 34 compositions written by the Beatles and masterfully done by a variety of talented unknown artists. We all LOVED it!

Speaking of the Beatles, can you guess who said the following, “I’m not really a career person. I’m a gardener, basically.” It was George Harrison!

And now is the time to start thinking about your own garden.

There is no act more gratifying, more basic, more liberating, than to coax food from the earth. The smell of dirt, the crunch of a freshly picked cucumber, the juiciness of a homegrown tomato, it just doesn’t get any better. And it’s not as complicated as you might think. If you have access to a deck, a roof, a patch of ground no larger than a flower bed, or far more space, you can grow your own.

Never done it before? Don’t know where to begin? Not a problem. Read the rest of this entry »