Much of the southern United States is parched. Food prices are rising due to shortages caused by unusual and devastating weather conditions. The sirens are getting louder.
Are the current, unusual weather patterns warnings or flukes? Have humans become Earth's terminators? Can we continue to satisfy the energy requirements of our desires? Might we leave our descendents a ruined planet?
Worldwide, a myriad of hydroelectric dams were constructed to produce energy but at a great cost to the environment and people. Coincidently, as the planet warms, worldwide droughts are sucking the water out of those dams, reducing production.
The 'Arab Spring" has and will continue to affect oil production in the Middle East. Failed nuclear plants in earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan once again bring into question the safety of this odd, enriched uranium nuclear reactor design when there are known safer nuclear alternatives such as Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) . The easy oil is diminishing fast leaving only the difficult and expensive to acquire shale oil deposits. Deposits that require excessive blasting, water and infusion of toxic chemicals that ultimately contaminate drinking water in a process called hydrofracking, a process that negatively affects surrounding populations both environmentally and seismically.
Coal, renamed "Clean Coal" to disguise a venomous product, is falsely advertised as cheap energy. The public chooses not to acknowledge coal's devastation of people's lives and health or the impoverished local economies that killer coal causes. From mineshafts to cities and coal buring energy plants, coal kills and sickens. Coal is not an answer but a terrible corporate swindle of the public. Air borne particulates and poisonous coal ash spills intoxicate communities. Coal lobbyists have successfully thwarted EPA testing and regulation of radiation and other toxic gases released into the atmosphere through mining operations. The public accepts coal's advertising of such myths as safety and job creation because their own desire for cheap energy outweighs their sense of right and wrong.
The climate sirens are getting louder. What will it take to slow the out of control, energy-train wreck that is rushing toward an expiration date in history? Will the US join the world's response and end the irresponsible Climate Change Denial facade perpetrated by American corporate interests. The worldwide Occupy Movement seems to have placed its boot on the corporate neck of the issue and demands the media and leadership hear the message and respond accordingly.
Nothing is won without risk and inaction carries the greatest potential for failure. In the matter of existence, failure is not an option.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Food, Farming and Environment - A Human Connection.
A ragtag group of neighbors recently had a conversation about how farmers get more nitrogen into the soil. The conclusion, gathered from collective memories of childhood, was a rotation of soybean or alfalfa crops, which boosts nitrogen in the soil and eliminates the need for manure, particularly near water sources.
It turns out that, over the past fifty years, the chemical farming industry has thwarted such tried and true farming methods. The chemical companies and their seed divisions cannot make profits if farmers work their fields naturally.
Gardeners know that rotating vegetable plots, helps maintain healthy plants and adds nutrition to the harvested vegetables and fruits. Monocultures, one crop grown repeatedly, deplete the soils nutrient content, particularly nitrogen, and thus, the vitamin content of the crop. Repeated chemical spraying to kill pests or to add lost nitrogen, also kills the microbes, needed to create nutrient rich soil. Crops that will survive being sprayed by weed killer, also must be genetically modified to withstand the plant killing (weeds only, hopefully) chemical. In fact, new weeds are immerging, "super weeds," weeds resistant to many weed-killing chemicals. This is evidence that nature learns from the environment.
If you see the link between today's farming methods, chemical corporations, your food and your health, then you are peaking under the mysterious blanket, which most consumers ignore. Costs (chemicals, seeds, packaging, and advertising) increasingly go up, but government subsidies, which the tax-payer/consumer underwrites, off-set some production costs. Thus, the same tax-payer/consumer is fooled and believes food is less expensive that it really is. When prices increase, they rarely reflect the true value of the food, even for the nutrient-void processed foods and meats from CFO's (Confined Feed Operation). Consumers pay more realistic food prices in the fresh food departments. Mind you, unless the fresh food purchased is "organically grown" the chemical corporations have a fingerprint there as well.
Fish, another one our foods, need oxygen, as we do, in order to live. While nitrogen is good for plants, too much nitrogen in water sucks the oxygen out of the water. When excess nitrogen, sprayed onto mono-crops along the great Mississippi River, and its tributaries in neighboring states, washes into the rivers it collectively flows into the Gulf of Mexico and creates "dead zones" of oxygen-void water. This is another way that chemical farming affects our food source, ultimately decreasing the fish populations and affecting the price of our food. We should remember that the same oil that pollutes the Gulf of Mexico is the basis for creation of chemicals used in many areas, including farming.
It is easy to forget that we are not alone, that we are connected through our food, to each other and to our environment. What we eat, affects many more people other than ourselves. How our food producers treat our land and water, our animals and our environment, directly affects our food and our lives. We need to care and be aware.
Reports indicate there are benefits in today's growing Farmer's Markets. This is evidence that people learn from their environment as well as plants.
It turns out that, over the past fifty years, the chemical farming industry has thwarted such tried and true farming methods. The chemical companies and their seed divisions cannot make profits if farmers work their fields naturally.
Gardeners know that rotating vegetable plots, helps maintain healthy plants and adds nutrition to the harvested vegetables and fruits. Monocultures, one crop grown repeatedly, deplete the soils nutrient content, particularly nitrogen, and thus, the vitamin content of the crop. Repeated chemical spraying to kill pests or to add lost nitrogen, also kills the microbes, needed to create nutrient rich soil. Crops that will survive being sprayed by weed killer, also must be genetically modified to withstand the plant killing (weeds only, hopefully) chemical. In fact, new weeds are immerging, "super weeds," weeds resistant to many weed-killing chemicals. This is evidence that nature learns from the environment.
If you see the link between today's farming methods, chemical corporations, your food and your health, then you are peaking under the mysterious blanket, which most consumers ignore. Costs (chemicals, seeds, packaging, and advertising) increasingly go up, but government subsidies, which the tax-payer/consumer underwrites, off-set some production costs. Thus, the same tax-payer/consumer is fooled and believes food is less expensive that it really is. When prices increase, they rarely reflect the true value of the food, even for the nutrient-void processed foods and meats from CFO's (Confined Feed Operation). Consumers pay more realistic food prices in the fresh food departments. Mind you, unless the fresh food purchased is "organically grown" the chemical corporations have a fingerprint there as well.
Fish, another one our foods, need oxygen, as we do, in order to live. While nitrogen is good for plants, too much nitrogen in water sucks the oxygen out of the water. When excess nitrogen, sprayed onto mono-crops along the great Mississippi River, and its tributaries in neighboring states, washes into the rivers it collectively flows into the Gulf of Mexico and creates "dead zones" of oxygen-void water. This is another way that chemical farming affects our food source, ultimately decreasing the fish populations and affecting the price of our food. We should remember that the same oil that pollutes the Gulf of Mexico is the basis for creation of chemicals used in many areas, including farming.
It is easy to forget that we are not alone, that we are connected through our food, to each other and to our environment. What we eat, affects many more people other than ourselves. How our food producers treat our land and water, our animals and our environment, directly affects our food and our lives. We need to care and be aware.
Reports indicate there are benefits in today's growing Farmer's Markets. This is evidence that people learn from their environment as well as plants.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Coupons - The Food Industry's Gerbil Wheel
From a recovering coupon clipper, to all those who have yet to see the light, listen up.
Extreme coupon cutters save cash. They have their own lingo, such as "stacking", "catalinas", "blinkies" and "peelies", depicting various sources and uses of coupons. They have web sites designed for coupon clipping groupies. They even have a reality TV show for the junkies of advertised specials who spend hours flipping through newspapers and magazines with scissors in hand, clipping coupons and cataloging them like treasures. They are industrious and creative as they pounce on a coupon sale, like a fish to a lure. However, are they really victims of a manipulative and corrupt industrial food system?
Some coupon clippers keep photos, on their Smartphone's, to view inventory and judge remaining storage space. They evaluate what already lines every horizontal surface in their homes for possible places to stash more food. Highly processed chemical compounds, sold as food today, line their children's closet shelves in the form of hundreds of boxes of cereal, macaroni & cheese, cookies, and other such concoctions. The pantry and, if available, the basement has been fitted with additional shelving specifically built to store their booty. Closets and cubbies are crammed with food that does not rot and cannot spoil because, it has been produced chemically, and it lasts forever. Some call it "frankenfood" and many avoid it because it has so little nutritional value in relation to its volume.
Also stashed are national brand cleaning, preserving, wrapping and storing products. Not to be missed are the soaps and personal care products that overwhelm the Sunday newspaper's ad section, and which, by the way, by sheer volume, out weights the news! Many of the nationally advertised products often rank high on the EWG (Environmental Working Group) toxic product lists as well.
On a gambler's high, the adrenaline kicks in as cashiers ring up their huge grocery bills. Then, ka-ching, ka-ching, the coupon deductions begin. They stack coupons, using more than one on the same item or on a configuration of items such as the "two for's" and the "buy four and get two free," etc. They make sure to alert clerks to the "peelies", which are to be peeled from packages, and they carefully grab up all the "blinkies", blinking and popping out at them from movement sensor machines, as they cruse store aisles.
Madness you say. Frugal they would retort. Look at the savings! Hundreds of dollars of what the food industry advertises as food, with industry coupons, is reduced to its true value, pennies.
Anyone who believes that they can feed a healthy diet to their family, using coupons, is evidence of the grand brainwashing scheme of the American industrial food industry, perpetrated on the public since World War II.
Finding coupons for organic products, real food, and products that, when used to clean or beautify, do not pollute or contaminate our bodies or our environment would be an extraordinary find. This is due to their lack of government subsidies. It is not possible to humanely raise a chicken, cow or pig, with access to natural and healthy species appropriate food for the prices that Americas industrial food industry does it. Sliced ham cannot be produced from animals humanely raised, without high blood pressure causing chemicals, and sold in a quick-lunch snack-pack for just one dollar per pack. Reality should warn us that something is not right.
Few consumers give thought to the care or work required to produce quality, real food, or the true cost of producing and delivering real food. For this reason, major brand producers are rarely held to account for their inhumane treatment of food animals or the purity of their product ingredients. Many of the foods eaten today include ingredients that have been genetically modified.
In America, GM foods have yet to be tested for their long-term affects in human consumption nor are they labeled for easy detection. However, tests by the EU (European Union) have resulted in the EU refusing to allow GM foods to be sold in member countries. This has resulted in many American chain restaurant operations having to procure different ingredients for products sold in Europe than those sold in America.
The American, production oriented, food producers squeeze profits out of every product. CFOs (Confined Feedlot Operations) are profit boosters. In CFOs, animals are compacted in inhumane confinements and fed industrially produced grains, rather than pasture grazing. The result is that the animals require antibiotics because of their adverse reaction to confinement stress and poor diets. Another tool of the industry is package downsizing or weight downsizing without, at least in the beginning, increasing prices, which would be the real attention getter. Anyone who bakes cookies from old recipes knows sixteen-ounce packages of chocolate chips are a thing of the past. Other profit producers are chemical additives used for taste and texture, which replace real ingredients. Then, of course, there are coupons.
Millions of coupons, issued to reduce prices, lure clippers and savers to buy nationally advertised industrial food products instead of real food. The lower prices and coupons are the result of the many subsidies paid to industrial producers. Ultimately, coupon clippers and other unconscious consumers who buy these products, pay twice. They pay once at the cash register, and once as taxpayers supporting corporate subsidies.
The motto "pay me now AND pay me later," surely must have been coined by an industrial food producer at the same time that the grand scheme of coupons was developed.
Those who feel like a gerbil on the industrial food system's wheel can analyze their family's real food needs and source food locally. There are many products, for both home and personal care, which are good for the environment and your health. Then, they can enjoy the extra space now taken by boxes of pretend food. Families can eat and be healthier, help the environment, and refuse the manipulation by America's industrial food system, all at the same time when they become conscious consumers rather than compulsive coupon victims.
Extreme coupon cutters save cash. They have their own lingo, such as "stacking", "catalinas", "blinkies" and "peelies", depicting various sources and uses of coupons. They have web sites designed for coupon clipping groupies. They even have a reality TV show for the junkies of advertised specials who spend hours flipping through newspapers and magazines with scissors in hand, clipping coupons and cataloging them like treasures. They are industrious and creative as they pounce on a coupon sale, like a fish to a lure. However, are they really victims of a manipulative and corrupt industrial food system?
Some coupon clippers keep photos, on their Smartphone's, to view inventory and judge remaining storage space. They evaluate what already lines every horizontal surface in their homes for possible places to stash more food. Highly processed chemical compounds, sold as food today, line their children's closet shelves in the form of hundreds of boxes of cereal, macaroni & cheese, cookies, and other such concoctions. The pantry and, if available, the basement has been fitted with additional shelving specifically built to store their booty. Closets and cubbies are crammed with food that does not rot and cannot spoil because, it has been produced chemically, and it lasts forever. Some call it "frankenfood" and many avoid it because it has so little nutritional value in relation to its volume.
Also stashed are national brand cleaning, preserving, wrapping and storing products. Not to be missed are the soaps and personal care products that overwhelm the Sunday newspaper's ad section, and which, by the way, by sheer volume, out weights the news! Many of the nationally advertised products often rank high on the EWG (Environmental Working Group) toxic product lists as well.
On a gambler's high, the adrenaline kicks in as cashiers ring up their huge grocery bills. Then, ka-ching, ka-ching, the coupon deductions begin. They stack coupons, using more than one on the same item or on a configuration of items such as the "two for's" and the "buy four and get two free," etc. They make sure to alert clerks to the "peelies", which are to be peeled from packages, and they carefully grab up all the "blinkies", blinking and popping out at them from movement sensor machines, as they cruse store aisles.
Madness you say. Frugal they would retort. Look at the savings! Hundreds of dollars of what the food industry advertises as food, with industry coupons, is reduced to its true value, pennies.
Anyone who believes that they can feed a healthy diet to their family, using coupons, is evidence of the grand brainwashing scheme of the American industrial food industry, perpetrated on the public since World War II.
Finding coupons for organic products, real food, and products that, when used to clean or beautify, do not pollute or contaminate our bodies or our environment would be an extraordinary find. This is due to their lack of government subsidies. It is not possible to humanely raise a chicken, cow or pig, with access to natural and healthy species appropriate food for the prices that Americas industrial food industry does it. Sliced ham cannot be produced from animals humanely raised, without high blood pressure causing chemicals, and sold in a quick-lunch snack-pack for just one dollar per pack. Reality should warn us that something is not right.
Few consumers give thought to the care or work required to produce quality, real food, or the true cost of producing and delivering real food. For this reason, major brand producers are rarely held to account for their inhumane treatment of food animals or the purity of their product ingredients. Many of the foods eaten today include ingredients that have been genetically modified.
In America, GM foods have yet to be tested for their long-term affects in human consumption nor are they labeled for easy detection. However, tests by the EU (European Union) have resulted in the EU refusing to allow GM foods to be sold in member countries. This has resulted in many American chain restaurant operations having to procure different ingredients for products sold in Europe than those sold in America.
The American, production oriented, food producers squeeze profits out of every product. CFOs (Confined Feedlot Operations) are profit boosters. In CFOs, animals are compacted in inhumane confinements and fed industrially produced grains, rather than pasture grazing. The result is that the animals require antibiotics because of their adverse reaction to confinement stress and poor diets. Another tool of the industry is package downsizing or weight downsizing without, at least in the beginning, increasing prices, which would be the real attention getter. Anyone who bakes cookies from old recipes knows sixteen-ounce packages of chocolate chips are a thing of the past. Other profit producers are chemical additives used for taste and texture, which replace real ingredients. Then, of course, there are coupons.
Millions of coupons, issued to reduce prices, lure clippers and savers to buy nationally advertised industrial food products instead of real food. The lower prices and coupons are the result of the many subsidies paid to industrial producers. Ultimately, coupon clippers and other unconscious consumers who buy these products, pay twice. They pay once at the cash register, and once as taxpayers supporting corporate subsidies.
The motto "pay me now AND pay me later," surely must have been coined by an industrial food producer at the same time that the grand scheme of coupons was developed.
Those who feel like a gerbil on the industrial food system's wheel can analyze their family's real food needs and source food locally. There are many products, for both home and personal care, which are good for the environment and your health. Then, they can enjoy the extra space now taken by boxes of pretend food. Families can eat and be healthier, help the environment, and refuse the manipulation by America's industrial food system, all at the same time when they become conscious consumers rather than compulsive coupon victims.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
The Omnivore's Responsibility
Remember the famous granny who demanded, "Where's the beef?" She should have asked, "Who packs the beef?" We should all ask who is packing our beef, pork, or the chicken. It is amazing that in one generation a nation that once thought chicken was a Sunday dinner fit for guests, has grow such an oversized desire for cheap red meats. Also of interest is how such desire translated into a multi-corporate gang focused on gratifying and encouraging that desire.
For most meat eaters, how their meat gets from hoof to grille is of little concern. They worry more about getting large amounts, from hand to mouth, as fast as possible. What gets their attention is when a favorite grille cut is sold out, burger prices increase, or the fast food window is closed for repairs.
Even those outside of Chicago cannot forget the meatpacker's story, told in the 1906 by Upton Sinclair in his novel, "The Jungle." Meatpacking, like most industries then, overworked their people. Meatpackers worked with poor sanitation and the danger of injury. In many cases today, that has not changed.
Sinclair exposed the underbelly of meatpacking and focused lawmakers' attention as the workers, usually new immigrants and African Americans, organized. Today, the meatpacking industry no longer feels compelled to operate near rail hubs or large cities. As they relocate closer to ranchers and farmers in more rural locations, some protections of the union organizations have weakened. Today, the meatpacking industry is, once again, operating almost unfettered by regulation. See Smithfield workers seek justice.
Another casualty, in the loosely regulated meatpacking industry, is the animals. As the industry developed multimillion-dollar operations, they began gobbling up producers. The result is that the condition in which an animal lives is of little importance as reflected in the industry's inhumane confinements and treatment of livestock. Once livestock was categorized as production units, their lives changed in the cruelest of ways. In America, production became another name for greed and the animal/human relationship, which honored the well-being of the animal soon to give its life for human consumption, was lost. How we treat our animals speaks to who we are as a society.
In the past 120 years, the meatpacking industry marketers have successfully developed strong appetites in the public for meat and an even stronger desire for it to be cheap. They encourage eating fast, making real taste irrelevant. Filler and chemicals are added to make less genuine product look good and voluminous and, voila, you have the modern Western Diet and sick, fat Americans. Increased production and taxpayer subsidies have resulted in increased meat production and the product sold artificially cheap. As the industrial animal operations grow, greater profit is achieved at the cost of the short-lived miserable reality of the animals. See Smithfield's pig operation.
Coincidently, in the past 120 years, the numbers of major meatpackers has dwindled, or more precisely processors have been gobbled up so that there are now just four; Tyson, Cargill, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef. These four represent 80 percent of the U.S. beef market, Smithfield Foods is the largest pork producer/processor and Tyson remains the largest chicken meatpacker. This consolidation has more than doubled the meatpacker's power and is slowly putting the small and middle-sized ranchers out of business. See Ranchers petiton for enforcement of the 1921 Packers and Stock Yard Act - Feb. 2011
How does fewer meat packers and inhumane treatment of livestock affect the omnivore with spatula in hand, wearing the grille apron? When fewer meatpackers control production and packing, choices are limited and broad scale contamination risks are more likely. Omnivores who oppose inhumane treatment of animals, want to know what meatpacker's brands to avoid. When spending precious food dollars, responsible omnivores want all the nutrition available, in reasonable amounts, at fair prices.
This month it was reported that over half of all grocery market meats were contaminated with drug resistant bacteria. Another good reason to try to buy local. Many small farmers humanly raise livestock and are open to the public. Some deliver into larger metropolitan areas and participate in neighborhood Farmer's Markets. Many have eggs and chickens available as well.
For most meat eaters, how their meat gets from hoof to grille is of little concern. They worry more about getting large amounts, from hand to mouth, as fast as possible. What gets their attention is when a favorite grille cut is sold out, burger prices increase, or the fast food window is closed for repairs.
Even those outside of Chicago cannot forget the meatpacker's story, told in the 1906 by Upton Sinclair in his novel, "The Jungle." Meatpacking, like most industries then, overworked their people. Meatpackers worked with poor sanitation and the danger of injury. In many cases today, that has not changed.
Sinclair exposed the underbelly of meatpacking and focused lawmakers' attention as the workers, usually new immigrants and African Americans, organized. Today, the meatpacking industry no longer feels compelled to operate near rail hubs or large cities. As they relocate closer to ranchers and farmers in more rural locations, some protections of the union organizations have weakened. Today, the meatpacking industry is, once again, operating almost unfettered by regulation. See Smithfield workers seek justice.
Another casualty, in the loosely regulated meatpacking industry, is the animals. As the industry developed multimillion-dollar operations, they began gobbling up producers. The result is that the condition in which an animal lives is of little importance as reflected in the industry's inhumane confinements and treatment of livestock. Once livestock was categorized as production units, their lives changed in the cruelest of ways. In America, production became another name for greed and the animal/human relationship, which honored the well-being of the animal soon to give its life for human consumption, was lost. How we treat our animals speaks to who we are as a society.
In the past 120 years, the meatpacking industry marketers have successfully developed strong appetites in the public for meat and an even stronger desire for it to be cheap. They encourage eating fast, making real taste irrelevant. Filler and chemicals are added to make less genuine product look good and voluminous and, voila, you have the modern Western Diet and sick, fat Americans. Increased production and taxpayer subsidies have resulted in increased meat production and the product sold artificially cheap. As the industrial animal operations grow, greater profit is achieved at the cost of the short-lived miserable reality of the animals. See Smithfield's pig operation.
Coincidently, in the past 120 years, the numbers of major meatpackers has dwindled, or more precisely processors have been gobbled up so that there are now just four; Tyson, Cargill, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef. These four represent 80 percent of the U.S. beef market, Smithfield Foods is the largest pork producer/processor and Tyson remains the largest chicken meatpacker. This consolidation has more than doubled the meatpacker's power and is slowly putting the small and middle-sized ranchers out of business. See Ranchers petiton for enforcement of the 1921 Packers and Stock Yard Act - Feb. 2011
How does fewer meat packers and inhumane treatment of livestock affect the omnivore with spatula in hand, wearing the grille apron? When fewer meatpackers control production and packing, choices are limited and broad scale contamination risks are more likely. Omnivores who oppose inhumane treatment of animals, want to know what meatpacker's brands to avoid. When spending precious food dollars, responsible omnivores want all the nutrition available, in reasonable amounts, at fair prices.
This month it was reported that over half of all grocery market meats were contaminated with drug resistant bacteria. Another good reason to try to buy local. Many small farmers humanly raise livestock and are open to the public. Some deliver into larger metropolitan areas and participate in neighborhood Farmer's Markets. Many have eggs and chickens available as well.
Education and responsible consuming are the best defenses for protecting you and your family's well-being.
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