The Occupy Movement, fueled by the indignation of vast numbers of people who are increasingly disenfranchised and displaced by the modern marketplace economy, recognizes the primacy of place in social change that moves us toward a just and sustainable future. This aspect of the movement is articulated by the physical occupation of public spaces, and more recently of homes that have been foreclosed with their occupants evicted by a corrupt banking system.

The primacy of place in the movement reminds us that when people are denied access to the primary productivity of the land and the seas, they are relegated to a status of enforced dependency on an abstract marketplace primarily constructed to serve the interests of the rich and the powerful. The Movement’s emphasis on space also reminds us that we cannot live entirely within the realm of the abstract idea of the marketplace. We need real food, non-virtual water, wearable clothing, and shelter — all made available to us through the natural processes of the earth, captured and molded by human effort.

In what is perhaps a first step in (re)connecting with place in a world where the fantasy of an endlessly growing and satisfying marketplace is crumbling, the Occupy Movement articulates vital needs for human dignity: the need for efficacy — to be heard and to have one’s welfare and voice taken seriously within collective processes of decision making and action — and the need for dignified and adequate means to obtain physical sustenance to satisfy one’s basic needs. Both of these needs converge in the concept and construct of place.

Reviving place as a focal point of human life and community is essential to social justice and sustainability. When I invoke place in this context, I conceptualize it as a nexus of physical space (both the natural world and the built environment) and community life (that includes economic activity, interpersonal relationships between people and between people and environments, cultural identity and expression, and governance processes). We make our places, and our places make us. Place is a reciprocal relationship that continually emerges through the forces of nature and human activity.

In the techno-world of modern industrial societies, many of us have lost sight of place as an organizing principle in our lives. We find that virtual spaces may indeed satisfy many of our needs as environments for building social bonds and friendships and for purchasing just about anything we might need or want (as long as we have the money to do so, of course), but we still rely physically upon tangible places that provide the necessities of life, even if our needs are mediated and obscured by the modern phenomenon of the marketplace.

Whether we recognize it or not, we are intimately connected to places, though in the globalized world, the reciprocal bonds between people and place, once paramount to the processes of community prosperity and health, have largely been broken. We abuse the land and the sea, sometimes without even knowing it, but because we need nature, we cannot completely sever our ties to places.

Take, for example, our water. It comes to us through processes of the earth that occur in some particular place, even though most of us know little of the detail of how water appears in our taps. Food offers another example. Since we, as yet, only metaphorically eat words, our food must be raised, cultivated, hunted, or gathered from particular places with particular environmental characteristics, and most often it must be cared for and harvested by people living in those environments. Both food and water derive from particular social and ecological contexts. They are not abstractions, and their concreteness bonds us with natural and social processes that are hidden behind the facades of grocery store shelves and Internet shopping malls — the “places” where we make the purchases that support the way we live and provide the things we need to stay alive.

We live a paradox in which intimate physical relationships to nature and social processes of production are juxtaposed with ignorance and neglect of the places and people who sustain us. Our very lives are in the hands of people and ecologies that may be entirely foreign to us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. We may never see the face of one person who has picked the bananas we eat throughout our lives, but we are connected to the banana pickers and to the ecology of the banana fields from which the fruit comes. Through our bodily existence and our own internal ecologies, we are connected to others and nature. In many ways, we are others and nature, for without them we would cease to exist.

And as human-caused depletion and damage of the natural world continues, the threat has become ever present: we may indeed cease to exist without a radical (re)conceptualization of, and (re)connection to, place.

Many indigenous societies have conceptualized the fundamental relationship between humans and nature as reciprocal, believing that people must respect and care for nature if nature is to provide for people. We cannot allow the continued plunder of the land and the sea to take place in our name, masked behind images of clean and orderly grocery store shelves, spotless storefront windows, and online shopping centers. I’m also convinced that we won’t protect that which we don’t know, and consequently don’t value. It takes years of paying attention and continual, mutual interaction to know a place, both the human community that is part of the place and the natural world within which that community is embedded. Growing into a place is a long term process of relationship building, and to do it well, we will need to learn to stay in place. In a world where careerists are rewarded for their willingness to relocate, this is no small challenge.

But we will have to stay put if we are to learn what we need to know to live sustainably on the land. To recover the health of our damaged places, we will need to learn what can and can’t be done sustainably within particular environments, and we will have to end the process of robbing that which we need from other places because as we deplete distant places, we threaten the survival of other people and the health of the biosphere — we behave as tyrants, and we threaten both nature and our own existence. We will need to (re)learn the art of neighborliness and of working together in spite of our differences, and we will need to make decisions embedded in a context of our love for each other and for place — and rooted in a desire to sustain that which we love beyond our short lifetimes. It’s time to rejoin the community of life, to belong in mutually sustaining ways. We need to (re)construct places in ways that bring to an end this era of loneliness.

The process will not be easy, especially because so much social power has been concentrated for so long in so few hands. But at least people around the world are recognizing this reality and working to change it. People are seeing the concentration of power and wealth itself as perhaps the central driver for social injustice in the globalized world. This recognition is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also important to recognize that virtually all of the processes that contribute to (re)building healthy places also serve to devolve social power to local contexts.

The (re)conceptualization and (re)construction of place can be both challenging and exhilarating. It’s an endeavor that can take many forms that coalesce in a long term process of articulating who we are in place — community gardens; potluck dinners with neighbors; bioregional resource management; reading, study, and discussion circles; governance work in local politics or in community organizations; farmers markets; community art and theater projects, formal and informal education; developing and using local currencies; localized production, retail, and banking; localized renewable energy generation; and simply authentic listening among friends and neighbors – any activity that helps to build a sense of community and to increase the provision of basic needs from localized sources. Community building and (re)localization of our economies will help us build the resiliency that we will need to weather the converging crises of climate change, peak oil production, and economic instability.

The Occupy Movement may well be the introduction to a new story about who we are in place. The plot line for this story will be grounded in communities and bioregions, not in the marketplace. And it’s a story for which there is no final draft. Chapters will be written and rewritten over time, and if we can write them in ways that continually deepen our efficacy, improve the health of our environment, and strengthen reciprocal ties between ourselves and our places, we just might come to occupy a place called home.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

Bouldergrass had begun his health crusade more than a decade ago when he began reading more than the sports pages of his local newspaper, subscribed to his first magazine, and decided TV news could be informative if it didn’t mention anything about wars, famines, and poverty.

Based on what he read and saw in the media, Bouldergrass moved from smog-bound Los Angeles to a rural community in scenic green Vermont, gave up alcohol and a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and was immediately hospitalized for having too much oxygen in his body.

To burn off some of that oxygen, he joined America’s “beautiful people” on the jogging paths where the media helped him believe he was sweating out the bad karma. In less than a year, the karma left his body which was now coexisting with leg cramps, fallen arches, and several compressed disks. But at least he was as healthy as all the ads told him he could be.

To make sure he didn’t get skin cancer from being in the sun too long, he slathered four pounds of No. 35 sun block on his body every time he ran, and went to suntan parlors twice a week to get that “healthy glow” advertisers told him he needed. He stopped blocking when he learned that suntan parlors weren’t good for your health, and that the ingredients in the lotions could cause cancer. So, he wore a jogging suit that covered more skin than an Arab woman’s black chador with veil—and developed a severe case of heat exhaustion.

From ultrathin models and billions of dollars in weight-reducing advertising that told him “thin was in,” he began a series of crash diets. When he was down to 107 pounds, advertising told him he needed to “bulk up” to be a “real man.” So, he began lifting weights and playing racquetball three hours a day. Four groin pulls and seven back injuries later, he had just 6 percent body fat, and a revolving charge account with his local orthopedist.

Several years earlier, Bouldergrass had stopped eating veal as part of a protest of America’s inhumane treatment of animals destined for supermarkets. Now, in an “enlightened” age of health, he gave up all meat, not because of mankind’s cruelty to animals, but because the media revealed that vascular surgeons owned stock in meat packing companies. Besides, it was the “healthy” thing to do.

He gave up pasta when he saw a TV report about the microscopic creepy crawlers that infest most dough.

He gave up drinking soda and began drinking juice, until he read a report that said apple juice had higher than normal levels of arsenic.

He ate soup because it was healthy and so Mmm Mmm Good, until he learned that soup had more salt than Lot’s wife. When he found low-salt soup, he again had a cup a day—until last month when he gave it up because a Harvard study revealed that soup cans contained significant amounts of Bisphenol-A-, which can lead to cancer and heart disease.

For a couple of years, lured by a multi-million dollar ad campaign and innumerable articles in the supermarket tabloids, Bouldergrass ate only oat bran muffins for breakfast and a diet of beta carotenes for lunch, until he found himself spending more time in the bathroom than at work. He eliminated the muffins entirely after reading an article that told him eating oatmeal, bran, and hood ornaments from Buick Roadsters were bad for your health.

Bouldergrass gave up milk when he learned that acid rain fell on to pastures and was eaten by cows. When he learned that industrial conglomerates had dumped everything from drinking water to radioactive waste into streams and rivers, he stopped eating fish. For a while, based upon conflicting reports in the media, he juggled low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carbohydrate diets until his body systems dropped into the low end of inertia.

At the movies, he smuggled in packets of oleo to squeeze onto plain popcorn until he was bombarded by news stories that revealed oleo was as bad as butter and that most theatrical popcorn was worse than an all-day diet of sirloin.

When he learned that coffee and chocolate were unhealthy, he gave up an addiction to getting high from caffeine and sugar, and was now forced to work 12-hour days without any stimulants other than the fear of what his children were doing while he was at work.

Unfortunately, he soon had to give up decaffeinated coffee and sugarless candy with cyclamates since both caused laboratory mice to develop an incurable yen to listen to music from the Grand Funk Railroad.

He gave up pizza when the media reported that certain “health care investigators” claimed pizza was little more than junk food. But, he began eating several slices a day to improve his health when Congress, fattened by lobbyists campaigns, last month declared frozen pizza was a vegetable. He figured it made sense, since three decades earlier the Reagan administration had declared catsup to be a vegetable, and five years ago the Department of Agriculture decided butter-coated french fries were a vegetable.

Left with a diet of fruits and vegetables, he was lean and trim. Until he accidentally stumbled across a protest by an environmental group which complained that the use of pesticides on farm crops was a greater health hazard than the bugs the pesticides were supposed to kill. Even the city’s polluted water couldn’t clean off all the pesticides. That’s also when he stopped taking showers, and merely poured a gallon of distilled water over his head every morning.

For weeks, he survived on buckets of vitamins because the magazines told him that’s what he should do. Then, after reading an article that artificial vitamins shaped like the Flintstones caused dinosaur rot, he also gave them up.

The last time I saw Bouldergrass, he was in a hospital room claiming to see visions of monster genetic tomatoes squishing their way toward him. He was mumbling something about cholesterol and high density lipoproteins. Tubes were sticking out of every opening in his emaciated body, as well as a couple of openings that hadn’t been there when he first checked in.

In one last attempt to regain his health, Bouldergrass enlisted in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move army. But the only movement he was doing was when the nurses flipped him so he wouldn’t get bed sores.

Shortly before he died, he pulled me near him, asked that I write his obit, and in a throaty whisper begged, “Make sure you tell them that thanks to what I learned from the media, I died healthy.”

While the 1% has trillions of dollars — more wealth than the bottom 90%! — the 99% struggles to get by with massive debt, high unemployment, mounting foreclosures, costly and deadly wars, declining social services, threats against Social Security, relentless bills, regressive taxation, crumbling infrastructure, rising tuition, crowded classrooms, predatory banks, an anemic democracy, and chronic anxiety. This level of gross inequality is patently unfair and must be remedied.

Wall Street is everywhere. Where are you?

In San Francisco, there is a bakery called Arizmendi, named after the founder of the Mondragón cooperative movement in the Basque region of Spain. It is a worker-owned collective, so instead of the profit being sucked out by someone of the 1% who doesn’t work there, the workers are paid well, have good benefits, treat themselves kindly, money is reinvested in the business, food is donated to shelters, and the workers make their own collective decisions, while producing high-quality vegetarian food, so there is no exploitation and no sense of alienation. Arizmendi is an anomaly, but it doesn’t have to be.

While average real wages are essentially flat and top marginal tax rates for people and corporations way down over the past couple of generations, there have been increases in hours worked, worker productivity, corporate profits, CEO salaries, financial speculation, the stock market, millionaires and billionaires, international free trade agreements, foreign investment, outsourcing, military spending, U.S. foreign military bases, imprisonment, debt, tuition, health care
costs, rent, homelessness, depression, and anxiety.

So, although the causes and demands of the Occupy Movement seem to vary, they all cluster around a core principle: support the need of the 99%, not the greed of the 1%.

Especially in this richest country in the world:

If we had economic policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have poverty, deprivation, and many of the social problems associated with poverty and deprivation.

If we had tax policies for the 99%, we would have steeply progressive taxation, as we did in the 1950s, to create a fairer, more stable, middle-class society without the extremes of obscene wealth and obscene poverty. Further, we would tax destructive activities the most, while lessening or eliminating taxes on necessities and productive goods and services. It is simply unjust that GE, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Boeing, Bank of America, Verizon, Citi, Goldman Sachs, FedEx, and about two-thirds of corporations paid less federal taxes — zero! — than any individual taxpayer in recent years.

If we had jobs policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have unemployment, there wouldn’t be involuntary underemployment, and we’d have many more meaningful jobs with living wages and safe working conditions. There is always much work to be done and many people who want to work, yet jobs are often scarce.

If we had housing policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have homelessness, unaffordable housing, and inadequate housing, while the elite have mansions and multiple houses. As with food, water, clothing, and other necessities of life, housing is a human right (UNHR, Art. 25), yet we treat it as just another commodity sold for profit.

If we had property policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have absentee ownership. Additionally, we would break up monopolies and oligopolies, disallow corporations that are too big to fail, revoke corporate personhood, and better devise and regulate corporate charters, while encouraging employee ownership, cooperatives, collectives, and communes. We would also have various lending libraries, not just for books, but also for tools, toys, and many other items that are either used
temporarily or infrequently.

If we had healthcare policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have 50 million Americans without health insurance, millions more underinsured, high monthly premiums, high co-payments, overpriced procedures and medicines, overcrowded emergency rooms, and people going bankrupt due to huge medical expenses. We would have high-quality universal single-payer healthcare.

If we had education policies for the 99%, we’d have free public education from preschool through graduate school for all who qualify and we would pay teachers more than stock brokers. Student loans would be less necessary, but would accrue at lower interest rates and could be repaid with various forms of community service. Further, education wouldn’t simply be geared toward tests, but would be oriented toward basic skills as well as critical thinking, problem solving, creative expression, sustainability, social movements and societal improvement,
people’s history, educational holism, and a whole range of relevant people’s education that focuses on the needs and interests of the 99%.

If we had energy policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have oil and coal companies making hundreds of billions in profits, while polluting the world and increasing global warming, or tax-subsidized, uninsurable nuclear plants that threaten health and safety, but would instead support an array of decentralized safe and renewable energies, including solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydrogen, biomass, hydroelectric, and others. We would also focus much more on conservation and efficiency.

If we had environmental policies for the 99%, we would clean up the plethora of Superfund sites, get dangerous chemicals out of foods and toys, minimize chemicals in our society, eliminate carcinogenic products, discourage carbon and methane emissions that increase global warming, raise efficiency standards for vehicles, appliances, and electronics, protect our air and water, restore forests and wetlands, encourage local, organic, and vegetarian eating (LOVE), institute the
Precautionary Principle, and ensure environmental justice.

If we had transportation policies for the 99%, we would support and subsidize many forms of public transportation and expand it, including high speed rail, as well as facilitating bicycle use, electric car sharing, and walkability.

If we had trade policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have so-called free trade agreements that facilitate the investments and capital transfers of multi-billion dollar transnational corporations, but instead would have fair trade agreements that mutually benefit workers, producers, consumers, and the environment. We would also substantially reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.

If we had legal policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t imprison people for non-violent offenses, would expand local and specialized courts, mediation, collaborative justice, alternative sentencing, restitution, community service, and would seek social policies, including all of the above, to prevent crime more than punish it. Legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, marijuana and hemp would be an important step as would strengthening and enforcing laws against corporate and environmental crimes.

If we had entitlement programs for the 99%, we would be preserving, strengthening, and expanding the very successful Social Security and Medicare, removing contribution caps for high income earners, with the 1% paying their fair share.

If we had investment policies for the 99%, there would be a tax on speculative investments, as the U.S. once had (perhaps 1%), and further disincentives for speculating in food, water, housing, healthcare, education, energy, and other necessities of life.

If we had banking policies for the 99%, there would be high capital reserve requirements, disincentives for banks to speculate, and incentives to lend money in local communities for local needs. States and other jurisdictions would have their own banks. There would be preferential treatment for non-profit credit unions.

If we had agricultural policies for the 99%, we would support small farmers, farmers’ markets, organic agriculture, and industrial hemp, instead of giant agri-business, the chemical industry, the livestock industry, the sugar industry, the corn ethanol industry, the cotton industry, and the tobacco industry.

If we had food policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have hunger, crappy school lunches, and genetically engineered food. We also wouldn’t have fast food and processed food products that are cheaper than real foods and chemicalized produce that is cheaper than organic fruits and vegetables. Dangerous chemicals shouldn’t be sprayed on our farms and animals shouldn’t be tortured and killed to produce unhealthy food for profit. Healthy, compassionate, environmentally-sustainable food should be the norm, but it’s apparently not as profitable for the 1%. We would change that.

If we had electoral policies for the 99%, we would have one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote with the millions and millions of people’s voices much more influential than the thousands of highly-paid corporate lobbyists. Further, we would reduce barriers to voting and for third parties, while incorporating democratizing schemes, such as ranked choice, instant run off, none of the above, and proportional representation.

If we had foreign policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t be fighting oil wars costing trillions of dollars and way too many lives, maintaining a thousand foreign military bases, supporting foreign militaries and dictatorships, but instead would be supporting democracies, democratic movements, and sustainable development around the world. Helping to clean up the world’s water, for example, would cost a fraction of the bloated U.S. military budget, yet would provide much more hope to
hundreds of millions of people around the world, while providing substantially better national security for all. Likewise with building schools, hospitals, and clinics.

While this declaration is not comprehensive, it is a good start, though it needs you.

Like modern day Marie Antoinettes, the 1% tell us to go shopping and eat cake, while they continue to privatize massive profits and socialize exorbitant costs. We the 99% no longer want their bread and cake crumbs; now we have our sights set on the bakery. Our society can be modeled after Arizmendi Bakery with its democratic and participatory structure, which is a microcosm of how the 99% can become the 100%, how we can control our destiny and live more secure, fair, and meaningful lives.

If we had social policies for the 99%, we would support need not greed, people before profits and corporations, and we would get money out of politics, reclaim our democracy, reduce racism and sexism as well as other oppressive social divisions, and promote social justice with every policy and program from the local to the global and from the personal to the political.

I support the need of the 99%, not the greed of the 1%. Which side are you on?

A leading figure in the sustainable agriculture movement, Jackson has been pursuing the science and tweaking the strategy for more than three decades, building an impressive body of knowledge with his colleagues at “The Land,” as it’s known to everyone there. (The group also has produced an impressive full-bodied bread that was on the dinner table during the festival, made from an intermediate wheatgrass grain they’ve developed and dubbed “Kernza.”)

But, perhaps ironically, my faith in Jackson’s vision deepens not when he speaks from the depth of his knowledge (or when people happily bite into the bread) but when he emphasizes the uncertainty of what he knows. More on that, after some background.

Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento, believes that shifting from fragile annual monocultures to more hearty perennial grains grown in a mixture of plants (polycultures) is the key to a truly sustainable agriculture. Instead of a brittle industrial agriculture dependent on fossil fuels, Jackson’s research team is working to build a resilient agriculture modeled on natural ecosystems.

A plant geneticist who grew up farming, Jackson’s experiences in the fields and the laboratory give him the credentials to talk authoritatively about how to develop agricultural practices capable of producing healthful food without the soil erosion and contamination that comes with today’s highly toxic conventional agriculture. Delivering that message with a style that hybridizes the prairie pulpit and the graduate seminar, Jackson inspired the Prairie Festival audience in Salina, KS, with his sketch of the next step — taking The Land’s work international in the coming decades.

When he gets revved up in front of an audience, Jackson is eager to share all that he knows, but one of the things he knows is the danger that comes with being sure you have the answers.

After the festival ended, Jackson made the rounds of the lunch tables to chat up folks informally. Leaning into one group, the topic turned to the problem of arrogance and certainty, and Jackson suggested an important first step to solving big problems such as agriculture is recognizing that sometimes “we’ve got to give up on what we know.”

If there was one sign he could hang above everyone’s desk, Jackson said, it would be this daily affirmation: “This day I will do everything I can to fight the problem of reassertion.” Reasserting, over and over again, what we think we know is trouble, especially in the sciences, he said.

Don’t mistake Jackson’s warning for the anti-science, know-nothing rhetoric that is popular in some conservative circles. He’s trying to bolster, not undermine, faith in science by encouraging scientists not to get stuck in comfortable approaches. In agriculture, such inertia has led researchers to assume that the so-called “Green Revolution” emphasis on chemicals is the only way to maintain high yields. Research in initiatives such as perennial polyculture grains, Jackson argues, may well reveal the conventional wisdom to be conventional foolhardiness.

With the health of our soils and our own bodies at stake, Jackson says, we can’t afford to assume old approaches can cope with coming crises. Because humans like to resolve ambiguity, we reward researchers who appear to do that within existing systems — such research may be right but irrelevant, if the real problem is at the level of the whole system. Solving individual problems within a system that can’t be sustained actually creates problems.

Jackson believes that’s the trap of much of contemporary research into agriculture, and that’s why he’s hoping to find support for an ambitious program to fund new research into The Land Institute’s approach to sustainability in partnership with other researchers and institutions around the world. He’s confident in the basics but recognizes how much work in the lab and the research plots remains.

He also recognizes that science alone won’t solve the problem; serious changes are necessary in economic, political, and social systems. He diagnoses a large part of the problem of those systems to be their love of abstraction. In contemporary financial capitalism, for example, countless decisions about money are based on abstraction, not on the reality of economics rooted in ecosystems.

“Milton and Blake both acknowledged that the demonic is the abstraction without the particular,” said Jackson, who’s as likely to quote poets and philosophers as scientists.

The particular is the reality, and science helps us understand it only when it remains rooted in that particularity. Farmers work the land in a specific place within a specific ecosystem, where they must attend to the uniqueness of place, Jackson said. That means an idea such as perennial polycultures is valuable not as a monolithic answer in the abstract, but as an idea tested out in specific places, whether that be wheat fields in Kansas or rice paddies in the Philippines. Jackson is not out to make The Land Institute the center of sustainable agriculture, but instead wants to see the ideas developed in as many places as it is sensible.

Jackson also cautions that our specific places must be understood as part of larger systems. To experience our place in that larger living world, sometimes we have to step outside of science.

Jackson offered an example. We know the earth revolves around the sun, but our daily experience is of standing on ground that doesn’t move. To correct that, he said we should take the time to feel the earth move. Jackson was off and running:

“I have actually felt the earth turn. I can tell you how to do that. I’ve gone out there and laid down on the hill when the moon is full, and if you will look when the moon is coming up in the east and the sun is setting in the west — you’ve got to live in Kansas to do that, or Nebraska, someplace flat — and you can actually feel the earth turn. Do that sometime. It’s a great moment. You’ve got to do that extra exercise to experience reality. Otherwise we live with the illusion,” Jackson said, pausing before adding, “which is fun enough.”

Jackson took a moment to delight both in his memory of the experience and the smiles on the faces of the people at the table. Then he smiled and, before moving on to the next table, said, “I suppose that in order to experience reality, you have to be a mystic.”

Ours is a truly complex world — with interlocking systems of finance and debt, globalized supply chains for commodities and products, highly specialized social roles and professions, and multiple technologies that tightly interface with and depend upon one another. For people living in modern societies, there is virtually no escape from dependency — technology dependency, food dependency, oil dependency — you name it. What’s more, we actively participate in maintaining and expanding social systems that circumscribe our potential. These systems limit our autonomy, our choices, our development, and our authentic engagement with others and the world.

So what is this dependency that is enforced upon us, and who is doing the enforcing?

Let’s start with the first part of the question. At the heart of the issue is the fact that huge numbers of us globally no longer have direct access to the earth’s productive capacities in ways that would allow us to meet our essential needs in localized, self governed ways as families and communities. We don’t have the land and the water to grow our own food, and if we do, we probably don’t have the knowledge to earn our entire living directly from the land. Virtually all of us are heavily dependent on earning wages as a means to provide ourselves and our loved ones with what we need to live.

We also can’t fix most of the machines upon which we rely. We need computers to build the computers that we use at work and in our day-to-day lives. We require the services of lawyers who defend our legal interests and speak for us amid the complex web of laws that surround our business relationships, our physical and spiritual unions — and the dissolution of these unions.

We need specialists of all kinds to do complex work for us, and many of us have undergone extensive training in order to perform highly complex work for others. While learning and doing this complex work, we often don’t have time to care for our own children, let alone grow gardens and care for farm animals.

But, you might ask, haven’t people always depended on one another? Yes, of course. In fact, our social nature has been an essential factor in our ability to live in diverse, challenging environments, and most of us would agree that relationships with those we count on are at the heart of the joy of being human through love and friendship.

And, you might ask, doesn’t our ability to specialize form a foundation for technological advancement? Absolutely. But as we all know, technological advancement isn’t an unqualified good. It has its costs. We all can think of some of these costs to our health, to nature, and to our relationships.

The point I am making is that most of us are almost entirely dependent on the money system for our very survival, and this dependence has proven to be extremely profitable for industries of all kinds.

Take the food industry for example. If you can, through economic and land policy, effectively remove vast numbers of money-poor but mostly self-sufficient subsistence farmers from the land and make them dependent upon purchased food — even if their purchases are small on an individual basis — the sum of these millions of new food consumers presents a huge opportunity for money making in agribusiness. Similarly, if you can privatize and monopolize the water supply and force everyone including the poor to purchase their water — even if each pays very little — again, you’ve created a huge money making opportunity for water services corporations.

Dependency feeds the money-based economic system. Self-sufficiency does not. Therefore, creating dependency quite literally pays — at least for some — and those in a position to create money making opportunities by enforcing dependency use their economic and political influence to do so. Their actions dispossess vast numbers of people worldwide and simultaneously concentrate global wealth and power. Here we also see part of the answer to the question of who is enforcing dependency.

Debt as Enforced Dependency

Debt also enforces subservience and dependence. Anyone who has struggled to service credit card debt or make a regular car or house payment knows this. When you’re in debt, your time is not your own. You must sell your time in the wage marketplace so that you can service your debts. Debt, in fact, is one of the foremost mechanisms for enforcing the dependency of both individuals and entire nations.

Debt is also the very currency of our economic system. The money that we struggle to earn comes into existence through debt. Commercial banks create money out of nothing when they credit the account of an individual or business with borrowed money. Only a small portion of the lent money came to the bank through deposits. Without debt, money would not exist in its current form. And so, as we create the substance that sustains us in the globalized, industrial world, we simultaneously create the conditions for our own enslavement. It’s important to understand, though, that money can be created in other ways besides through debt. That just isn’t done now in the current economic system. Having the power to create money out of nothing and the right to confiscate real property (collateral) in the case of a debt default gives banks an incredible amount of power in modern economies and societies.

In taking out a loan, a business, an individual, or a nation also expresses faith in a growing economy — more products and services sold to more people at prices that allow repayment of the debt plus the interest incurred. This faith has been well placed in many cases in a world with plenty of energy in the form of fossil fuels, but global oil supplies appear to have peaked, and fossil fueled economic growth is coming to an end.

For many nations in the Global South, however, due to a combination of factors, their bets on future economic growth didn’t work out so well with regard to repayment of their external debts. Globally, debt has enforced the subservience of economically and politically weak nations to relatively powerful industrialized nations, foremost among these being the United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.

One problem debtor nations in the Global South face is that their debts are often dollar-denominated. They can’t be repaid in their national currency, so in order to repay, debtor nations must export raw materials and other products to earn the dollars needed to service their debts.

Furthermore, following the oil price shocks in the 1970s and much as a result of the declining value of the dollar at that same time, interest rates were raised sharply in the United States. A global recession ensued, and the adjustable rate loans of debtor nations in the Global South ratcheted up sharply, precipitating a debt crisis.

As a result of the defaults, the International Monetary Fund required structural adjustment programs (SAPs) as a condition for the reorganization of external debt in the Global South. The austerity measures and free trade regimes of SAPs tended to open up domestic markets to outside competition. Banks, farms, businesses of all kinds often found that they could not survive in steep competition with large and sophisticated global corporations, and many folded. Furthermore, taxes that might have been collected from domestic businesses were lost as the profits of global corporations were repatriated abroad.

Furthermore, as part of an SAP, a country was usually required by the IMF to raise its domestic interest rates far above those of banks located in more stable economies. This meant that people trying to start businesses, purchase homes, or borrow money for any other purpose within their own nations in the Global South were placed at a distinct disadvantage to those able to borrow money elsewhere in order to bring their business into a new market. Global corporations found great money making opportunities in these debt-ridden countries. They could expand their global market share while domestic economies faltered.

To make matters even worse for the Global South, they have to deal with the petrodollar standard. Most people in the U.S. know nothing about this standard, but it has a huge effect globally. Every individual, company, or nation wanting to purchase oil from OPEC must do so using U.S. dollars. This standard heightens demand for the dollar and, therefore, supports its value. It also means that all nations who import oil from OPEC nations must export commodities and products to the U.S. in order to obtain the dollars needed for these purchases.

SAPs and the petrodollar standard virtually ensure that nations in the Global South will export their natural wealth in the form of trees, minerals, agricultural products, and more. It’s basically colonialism all over again, but without the need for dominant nations to plant any flags.

Recognizing Enforced Dependency: A Starting Point for a Better Future

Those of us in the industrialized world, in many cases, would rather not know the extent to which we, too, have been colonized. We want to feel like our future is bright and we’re in charge of our own destiny. And we’ve assimilated cultural myths that support this notion into the very fiber of our being. One such myth is the notion of progress — the idea that we in industrialized societies have more choices and more opportunities than people of any other civilization or “primitive” society, past or present. If this story is true, it follows that we have little to complain about.

We’re also told that the cream always rises to the top, an explanation of the world as we experience it that diffuses resistance to hierarchical control in schools, the workplace, political structures — everywhere. This myth also provides a convenient explanation for the relative dominance of industrialized countries in the world economy and the inability of the Global South to solve its vast social problems.

We might be more comfortable, in a sense, limiting our vision to internalized myths. Seeing past these myths requires us to apply our energies to learning about systemic biases built into the global economy. It also requires us to develop empathy for others caught in the webs of global economic and political structures. Perhaps the part that is most difficult, though, is that this project requires a willingness to critique oneself and one’s culture — and a healthy measure of humility.

But I believe learning to recognize enforced dependency as an organizing principle in the modern, globalized world is well worth it because this knowledge truly is power. And I think most of us would agree that we need the power to make big changes. Understanding enforced dependency is a powerful starting point for a new clear vision that can see through cultural myths and the mystification of manipulators who benefit from all of us quietly playing their game of business as usual.

Recognizing how we and others have been colonized within the globalized world helps us see behind the divide-and-conquer strategies of many leaders, strategies that divert our attention to casting blame on other victims of systemic problems instead of paying attention to the systemic problems themselves. Knowing that forces beyond our control have left millions with very limited choices in attempting to better their lives provides fertile ground in which to cultivate empathy and solidarity rather than hatred and blame as we move through difficult times that promise to prove increasingly challenging as climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and other crises converge in often mutually reinforcing ways. This knowledge can help us build solidarity among all of those whose positions are slipping dangerously toward poverty and powerlessness as the global economic crisis deepens.

In a truly globalized world like the one in which we live, there really is nowhere to run or hide that will allow us to escape all of the ravages of rapidly converging crises. And so, we must face each other. In crisis, will we face each other as enemies or as partners? I hope it will be increasingly as partners. And if we are to be partners, we need to know each other and our respective histories.

That’s where learning about how and why dependency is enforced on diverse people globally comes into play. The specific manifestations vary regarding how people worldwide experience enforced dependency, but understanding the organizing principles of this phenomenon that affect us all allows us to see how our individual stories are living variations on a theme.

Breaking Free from Enforced Dependency

The global economy upon which most of us depend for our very survival isn’t sustainable. We simply can’t maintain a debt-and-interest-based money system that requires infinite growth within the bounds of a limited Earth.

So who is this system of enforced dependency serving anyway? Well, it serves all of us who participate in it in some ways, but it’s proving to be less and less reliable in satisfying our needs, and the system is sure to become increasingly unstable as the oil supply crisis deepens and as other crises including climate change continue to unfold. The system is already failing millions who realize they must emigrate from their homes for a chance at living life with some measure of material wellbeing.

Where can we go from here? The rest of this series on “Living and Learning Sustainability” offers a response to this question. For now, we can start by considering how we can reduce our dependency and become more resilient with regard to the basics of life — our food, our water, our energy. How can we produce these things more locally? What do we need to learn to do so? There are many actions that we can take, and all of our actions must match the possibilities inherent in the places we live: our ecosystems and our communities.

What is sustainability anyway? We’ll focus on this last question in next month’s segment. Doing so will help us prepare for a future in which we not only survive, but maintain and advance the best of our humanness within an increasingly unstable world.

•  This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.

The European Court of Justice ruled that all food products containing GMOs – whether intentional or not – must undergo an approval process.

This marks a much stricter view than that being pushed by European Union Commissioner for health and consumer affairs, John Dalli,  who wants no regulation of foods genetically contaminated “by accident,” a ludicrous idea given that coexistence ensures genetic contamination.

At the center of the dispute is Bavarian beekeeper Karl Heinz Bablok who joined with several others in suing the state when its research plots of Monsanto’s GM corn, MON 810, contaminated his honey.

In 2008, an administrative court banned Bablok from selling or giving away that honey.  But in a bizarre turn, the Augsburg court also ruled that beekeepers have no claim to protection against the growing of GM crops. They immediately filed a new lawsuit.

Discussing today’s ruling, attorneys for the beekeepers noted that they may now have “a claim for damages against a farmer if MON 810 pollen from his cultivation gets into their honey.”

Attorneys Dr Achim Willand and Dr Georg Buchholz explained:

If the beekeeper can no longer sell his honey, this is considered a major impairment causing a claim for damage.  If the beekeeper moves his bees in order to prevent this impairment, it is also possible that the cultivator is liable for the additional work and expense of the beekeeper.

They added that the “decision is important not only for beekeeping, but in general for the production of food and feed, as well as for trade.”

The new ruling will also apply to “imports containing traces of material from genetically modified crops that don’t have sufficient approval within the EU,” they said.

The European Court of Justice only “interprets EU law and does not settle the dispute itself,” notes Inf’OGM, a French group that maintains a neutral position on GMOs.  Member states like Germany, France and Spain can apply the ruling however they deem fit in particular cases of genetic contamination.

In describing the questions before the court, Inf’OGM explained that Monsanto failed to seek approval for genetically modified pollen.  Instead, MON 810 approval only covers flour, gluten, semolina, starch, glucose and corn oil.

MON 810 approval is currently under reconsideration.  It has been linked to organ damage in test animals  and its approval may be withdrawn.  Until last year, it was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in the EU, although a total of 40 GMO food and feed products have been approved for sale.

One of Commissioner Dalli’s first acts after taking office in 2010 was to lift the 13-year ban on BASF’s GM potato, Amflora.  Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic took the bait and immediately suffered from 47 contamination events.

Today’s ruling also overturns the court’s Advocate General recommendation this February which found that genetic material inadvertently transferred from GM corn to other living organisms “is no longer viable and is thus infertile, is not a living organism and, therefore, cannot be regarded as a GMO.”

In that same recommendation, however, the AG maintained that any products containing GMOs should be regulated.

Thijs Etty, a transnational environmental lawyer specializing in biotechnology and EU law, told Food Freedom, “The Court’s ruling underscores the EU’s zero-tolerance stance towards non-authorized GMOs, and signals a sensitive loss for Monsanto and the EU Commission.”

Etty explained that the EU Commission “has been working hard to loosen if not abandon the zero-tolerance policy,” citing a recent regulation “allowing ‘low level presence’ of non-authorized GMOs in feed imports.”

Today’s ruling puts that new regulation into question.

GMO opponents won a brief reprieve last year when Commissioner Dalli’s initial proposal to radically overhaul existing GM approval rules was later rebuked. The controversial proposal was dropped after the European Commission’s legal counsel determined the new rules violated EU and international trade laws.

Of note, the European Food Safety Authority, which rules on GMO safety, has been under fire for hiring members with financial interests in the biotech industry.  EFSA chair Diana Banati resigned last year after it was revealed she served as a consultant to biotech corporations including Monsanto, Bayer and BASF.

Four other EFSA board members also have substantial ties to the food industry. One has financial interests in the GM seed industry (Piet Vanthemsche) and another is a chief lobbyist for the German food industry (Matthias Horst).  Milan Kovác and Jirí Ruprich both have links to food industry bodies, EFSA admitted.

“Today’s decision is an important victory for beekeepers, but also GMO-opponents and environmental NGOs,” concluded Etty.

But it’s not a complete victory. Though not as bad as in the U.S., GMO label laws still leave European consumers in the dark since meat, milk and eggs from animals fed GM feed are exempt, which bulldozes consumers into supporting the biotech industry.

Used in formulations by Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and others, glyphosate has been linked to spontaneous abortions in livestock, birth defects in humans, insect resistance, and weed resistance.

Worse, regulators have known for years of these links, Earth Open Source reported.

In early August, Dr. Mercola reported:

The first report was recently issued on ambient levels of glyphosate and its major degradation product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), in air and rain. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the U.S.

Weekly air particle and rain samples were collected during two growing seasons in agricultural areas in Mississippi and Iowa. Rain was also collected in Indiana. The frequency of glyphosate detection ranged from 60 to 100 percent in both air and rain.

Weeks after Mercola’s report, the USGS just issued a press release:

Glyphosate is used in almost all agricultural and urban areas of the United States. The greatest glyphosate use is in the Mississippi River basin, where most applications are for weed control on genetically-modified corn, soybeans and cotton. Overall, agricultural use of glyphosate has increased from less than 11,000 tons in 1992 to more than 88,000 tons in 2007.

Though glyphosate is the mostly widely used herbicide in the world, we know very little about its long term effects to the environment,” says Paul Capel, USGS chemist and an author on this study. “This study is one of the first to document the consistent occurrence of this chemical in streams, rain and air throughout the growing season. This is crucial information for understanding where management efforts for this chemical would best be focused.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, the USDA and FDA continue to permit our land, air and waters to be polluted by this highly toxic agrochemical, despite a growing body of scientific evidence of its lethality to the biosphere.

Mercola explains:

A couple of years ago, a French court found Monsanto guilty of falsely advertising its herbicide as “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly” and claiming it “left the soil clean.” The truth is that Roundup is anything BUT environmentally friendly. Monsanto’s own tests showed that only two percent of the herbicide broke down after 28 days, which means it readily persists in the environment!

Glyphosate is the most commonly reported cause of pesticide illness among landscape maintenance workers in California, and researchers have now linked it to Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a serious plant disease, in many fields around the world. Numerous studies have also shown that glyphosate is contributing not only to the huge increase in SDS, but also to the outbreak of some 40 different plant and crop diseases! It weakens plants and promotes disease in a number of ways, including:

• Acting as a chelator of vital nutrients, depriving plants of the nutrients necessary for healthy plant function
• Destroying beneficial soil organisms that suppress disease-causing organisms and help plants absorb nutrients
• Interfering with photosynthesis, reducing water use efficiency, shortening root systems and causing plants to release sugars, which changes soil pH
• Stunting and weakening plant growth

The herbicide doesn’t destroy plants directly; instead, it creates a unique “perfect storm” of conditions that activates disease-causing organisms in the soil, while at the same time wiping out plant defenses against those diseases. So the glyphosate not only weakens plants, it actually changes the makeup of the soil and boosts the number of disease-causing organisms, which is becoming a deadly recipe for crops around the globe.

Another problem with aerial application of herbicides is aerial drift. Citing a Canadian report from 1998 on the environmental fate of glyphosate, Mercola quotes:

Aerial drift of the herbicide will cause injury to nontarget plants… Minute quantities of mist, drip, drift or splash of glyphosate onto nontarget vegetation can cause severe damage or destruction to the plants or other areas on which treatment was not intended.

Indeed, earlier this year, Food Freedom reported that the Mississippi Rice Council (MRC) sounded a national alarm over damage caused by aerial drift of glyphosate, calling for severely restricted aerial application:

MRC president Mike Wagner recently told crop dusters at this year’s Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association annual meeting that glyphosate is wreaking havoc on the natural rice industry….

Wagner reported that, “Rice specialists noticed that rice that had no obvious damage through the growing season would yield and mill poorly and would exhibit the classic trait associated with late glyphosate drift — the kernel would be shaped like a parrot beak instead of its normally elongated, symmetrical shape.”

Field studies run in 2007 and 2008 by the University of Arkansas showed reduced rice yield by up to 80% from glyphosate, as well as glufosinate, a herbicide produced by Bayer. On top of reduced yield, both herbicides burned the leaves and stunted the growth of rice plants.

Glyphosate needs to be banned outright and the industrial monoculture system needs to be converted to mixed farms that work with nature instead of against it.

1. Feng-Chih Chang, Matt F. Simcik, and Paul D. Capel, “Occurrence and Fate of the Herbicide Glyphosate and Its Degradate Aminomethylphosphonic Acid in the Atmosphere,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 548–555, 2011
2. 2 Richard H Coupe, Stephen J Kalkhoff, Paul D Capel, and Caroline Gregoire, “Fate and transport of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid in surface waters of agricultural basins,” Pest Manag Sci 2011

Farmers from several Midwest states began reporting root damage to corn that was specifically engineered with a toxin to kill the rootworm.  Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann recently confirmed that the beetle, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera, has developed resistance to the Bt protein, Cry3Bb1.

Bacillus thuringiensis – Bt – is a bacterium that kills insects.  Different proteins are engineered into cotton as well as corn plants.

Two-thirds of all US corn is genetically modified per the USDA, and the bulk of that is Bt-corn. Monsanto has the biggest market share in the US, reporting about 35% in 2009.

In response to the July 2011 study, Monsanto said only the “YieldGard® VT Triple and Genuity® VT Triple PRO™ corn products” are affected.

“It appears he has demonstrated a difference in survival in the lab, but it is too early to tell whether there are implications for growers in the field.”

However, Kansas State researchers summarized the study, indicating that the specimens tested came from fields suffering severe rootworm damage and compared them to those from unaffected fields.  In other words, it was a field study.

Resistance developed where the same Bt corn had been grown at least three years in a row.  Gassmann found “a significant positive correlation between the number of years Cry3Bb1 maize had been grown in a field and the survival of rootworm populations on Cry3Bb1 maize in bioassays.”

Ag Professional’s Colleen Scherer explains that “the Cry3Bb1 toxin is the major one deployed against rootworms. There is no ‘putting the genie back in the bottle,’ and resistance in these areas is a problem that won’t go away.”

Monsanto urges farmers to try their “stacked” GM products where more than one trait is engineered and to employ integrated pest management (IPM) techniques.

Kind of like getting on a treadmill of ever increasing DNA manipulation and chemicals to maintain monocultures, instead of reverting to time-honored mixed farms that use companion plants (including weeds) for pest control. IPM does not have to include toxic chemicals or genetic manipulation for success.  (See, e.g., Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture).

This year, Monsanto launched a “triple-stack” sweet corn which it envisions being sold at Farmers Markets.  The FDA’s GMO label ban will certainly help, since most people who buy local are specifically trying to avoid genetically engineered foods.

In line with Monsanto’s goal to enter farmers markets, the Union of Concerned Scientists just came out with a report urging federal financial support in order to create jobs. The report notes that the number of farmers markets has doubled in the past ten years.

But, as we watch the feds target natural producers with raids and product seizure, while leaving Cargill’s 36 million pounds of tainted turkey alone until someone died, we can expect that any federal money put toward farmers markets will be used to support only that produce which is genetically modified, chemically doused and/or irradiated.

“How do we get our reputation back?”  That’s what Tommy and Carolyn Adkins asked the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. (FTCLDF)

Without a retraction at the web page, they can’t.

Contrast the actions of FDA with those of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), the agency that has the hands-on responsibility for insuring that Tucker Adkins Dairy produces a safe product.  The department could have suspended the dairy’s license or suspended raw milk sales if it suspected the dairy was responsible for making people sick; it did not,” FTCLDF said in a statement to Food Freedom.

The department took two milk samples on its own, each of which tested negative for campylobacter.  DHEC has found that the dairy has done nothing wrong.  In its seven years of operating as a licensed dairy, Tucker Adkins Dairy has never been cited for a violation by the department nor has a complaint ever been made against the dairy for the raw milk it produces.

This further shows the FDA’s war on natural food producers, as we see with their continual raids, like Wednesday’s assault on Rawesome Foods and Sharon Palmer’s Healthy Family Farms.

As an update, Palmer’s employee, Eugenie Victoria Bloch, was released in today’s arraignment. The court set bail at $30,000 for Rawesome Foods operator, James Stewart.

What struck me most about the recent Rawesome raid was the absolute inaction by those who witnessed it. No one tried to stop the cops or protect their food supply. They complained, yes; but no one actually tried to stop the unconstitutional seizure and destruction of safe and healthy food products.

One woman even said, “We should have a citizen’s arrest here.”  Well, why didn’t she?

Another woman said, “Welcome to America, where it’s a crime to eat organic.” It’s as if those witnesses believe they have no rights other than to complain, or to protest the next day in an organized fashion.

More likely, though, they are thoroughly convinced that law supersedes human rights. Heaven forbid they should actually have to get physically involved when protecting their natural and inalienable rights. Have none of them read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn?

Merely complaining doesn’t get the job done. Tyranny is brutal and resistance is messy, and the meeting of those two ideologies is often bloody.

Meanwhile, the FDA continues to falsely assert that pasteurization makes milk safer, though the Centers for Disease Control has shown that only six-millionths of a percent of raw milk drinkers become ill, according to an analysis by pathologist Ted Beals.

FDA-approved milk, on the other hand, contains genetically modified ingredients which have been linked to cancer, organ damage and infertility. The milk produced at factory farms, in fact, is so contaminated that it must be pasteurized. When a factory farmer’s relative surreptitiously took some milk from one of his factory cows to a school, several children became ill.

Raw milk intended for direct human consumption is raised in a much cleaner environment. It needs no pasteurization – it’s what humans have been doing for thousands of years.

None of this matters to the government. Its goal is to remove all natural, unadulterated foods from the market, to enable corporate control of all food. The food being forced on to us in the US is banned in several countries because of all the adulterants permitted by the FDA, to wit:  chlorinated chicken, arsenic chicken, GMOs, antibiotic overuse, etc.

Recently, University of Minnesota researchers discovered a natural food preservative that kills food-borne bacteria, and, you guessed it, they patented it. In order to get the patent, the naturally occurring lantibiotic had to be genetically modified.

They want to add this to “meats, processed cheeses, egg and dairy products, canned foods, seafood, salad dressing, fermented beverages and many other foods,” researchers Daniel O’Sullivan and Ju-Hoon Lee told Food Freedom in a statement.

Rather than further adulterating the food supply with DNA-modifications, wouldn’t it be safer to clean up how food is produced?  Even Louis Pasteur understood, at the end of his life, that a germ can only cause problems if the host terrain is compromised, an idea promoted by Antoine Bechamp.

In other words, germs don’t cause disease; rather, a weakened immune system facilities germ proliferation.

Holding a protest the next day is all fine and nice and fits well within actions authorized by this criminal government. But the time to take action is when the cops are raiding your food stores.  Even dogs know this, as does most of the animal kingdom.

I am certain that many of those people witnessing the Rawesome raid would have no problem getting physically involved if they were witnessing a gang rape.  Is your right to healthy food any less important?

Despite laws claiming the unconstitutional power to enter your home without a warrant, would you let that happen?

King and Gandhi lost, remember?  The USA and India are wholly corporate-owned, and those corporations are forcing farmers off their lands, which they are then polluting with their toxic mining, toxic factories, and toxic agriculture.  Both nations have forced genetically modified foods adulterated with a host of other ingredients on the populace.

Both nations use state-sanctioned violence to promote corporate aims. Complaining and protesting hasn’t stopped them.

Maybe next time goons show up to seize and destroy food that has sickened no one, people will assert their Second Amendment rights and protect their food supply. This is exactly why that right was written into the US Constitution – to protect us from tyranny.

Yeah, some of us will get arrested and some of us might get shot if we confront armed raiders. But eating factory foods is killing most of us anyway – a slow, painful, expensive death that enriches the pharmaceutical industry and FDA coffers.

Should we die on subservient knees complaining, while allowing these raids to proceed? Or should we stand up and risk being arrested or shot for defending our inalienable right to eat the foods with which we evolved?

I walked straight ahead, looking neither right nor left in a darkened alley illuminated by a half-moon.

“Pssst.”

I quickened my pace, but there was no avoiding the shadowy figure.

“Ain’t gonna harm ya. Jus’ wanna sell ya somethin’.”

I hesitated, shaking. Stepping in front of me, he shoved a hotdog under my nose. “Ten bucks each,” he whispered ominously through his throat.

“Ten bucks?!” I asked, astonished at the cost.

“You want it or not?”

With Michele Obama (who chose to attack obesity rather than poverty, worker exploitation, or even hunger and malnutrition), supported by publicity-hungry legislators, hotdogs were the latest feel-good food to come under assault. A medical association whose members are vegans had spent $2,750 to place a billboard message near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The picture showed four grilled hot dogs sticking out of a cigarette box that had a skull and crossbones symbol on its face. An oversized label next to the box informed motorists and fans of the upcoming Brickyard 400, “Warning: Hot dogs can wreck your health.” The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine claimed that just one hot dog eaten daily increased the risk of colorectal cancer by 21 percent.

The Committee isn’t the only one destroying Americans’ rights to eat junk food. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which seems to come up with a new toxic food every year, once declared theatre popcorn unhealthy. Many schools banned soda machines. Back in 2011, McDonald’s reduced the number of french fries in its Happy Meal and substituted a half-order of some abomination known as apples. Even cigarette company executives, trying to look professorial at a Congressional hearing, once said that smoking cigarettes wasn’t any worse than eating Twinkies. However, smoking a Twinkie could cause heart and lung diseases, cancer, and diabetes.

Nevertheless, in Michele Obama’s second term as First Anti-Fat Lady, I was desperate for my daily fix of hot dogs, and my would-be supplier knew it. I leaped at my stalking shadowy figure with the miracle junk.

“Not so fast!” he growled, pulling the hotdog away. “Let’s see your bread.”

“I don’t have any bread,” I pleaded. “Not since a zoologist at Penn concluded that hummingbirds that ate two loaves of bread a day got constipation.”

“Not that bread, turkey! Bread! Lettuce!”

“I haven’t eaten lettuce in three years since the government banned it for having too many pesticides, and the heads that remained were eaten by pests.”

The man closed his trench coat and began to leave.

“Wait!” I pleaded, digging into my pockets. “I’ve got change.”

He laughed, contemptuously. “That’s not even coffee money.”

“I don’t drink coffee,” I mumbled. “Not since the government arrested Juan Valdez and his donkey for being unhealthy influences on impressionable minds.”

I grabbed for his supply of hotdogs, each disguised in a plain brown wrapper, each more valuable than a banned rap record. He again pulled them away.

“I ain’t no Salvation Army. You want ’dogs, you pay for ’dogs. I got thousands who will.”

“I need a fix. You can’t let me die out here on the streets.”

“If it was just me, I’d do it. But there’s the boys. They keep the records. If I give you a ’dog and bun, and don’t get no money, they’ll break two of my favorite fingers. I don’t cross nobody. And I don’t give it away.”

“Please,” I begged. “I need a ’dog. It’s all I have left to live for. I don’t care about colorectal cancer. Without hotdogs, my life is over. You can’t let me die out here on the streets.” He shrugged, and so I suddenly got bold. “Give me a ’dog,” I demanded, “or I’ll tell everyone you have the stuff. You won’t be able to meet the demand. The masses will tear you apart like a plump frank.”

“You wouldn’t do that to a guy just trying to make a buck, would you?”

“Two ’dogs with mustard and onions, and I keep my mouth shut. No ’dogs and I scream like a fire engine.” He had no choice.

Walking away, he stopped, turned back, and called after me—“Tomorrow. This corner. This time. Two ’dogs. Twenty bucks. I’ll see you every night.”

I didn’t reply. He knew he had me.

Around 10.7 million people already need urgent humanitarian assistance, while many thousands are fleeing a devastated Somalia each day to take refuge in makeshift camps across Ethiopia and Kenya. The United Nations has now officially declared two regions of southern Somalia to be in famine – a situation in which at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and other basic necessities, and starvation, death and destitution are evident. As the Famine Early Warning Systems Network makes clear, the currently inadequate levels of humanitarian response are likely to see famine spread across all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months and could lead to “total livelihood/social collapse”.

With food insecurity in the East African region remaining an ongoing concern for decades, many humanitarian agencies have been trying to draw attention to a potential famine in these countries for some time. The UN made an appeal for $500m in 2010 to assist with food security, but managed to secure only half from donors. Consequently, hunger levels have rocketed over recent months, and in some areas the number of young children suffering malnutrition is now three times the normal emergency level. At least half a million children risk death if immediate help does not reach them, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The humanitarian coordinator for Somalia has also described the lack of resources as alarming, with insufficient donations of food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need. The underlying problem is repeated by various aid organisations: that the international response is not commensurate with the urgent requirements of those affected by the humanitarian catastrophe, and there is a lack of international support to address the deep-seated causes of the crisis or to mitigate future crises.

Yet the extreme deprivation being widely reported across East African is just the tip of the iceberg. Needless impoverishment and death is an ongoing catastrophe that unfolds daily, largely without any attention from the world’s media or the public. At least 41,000 people in the developing world continue to die each day from easily preventable diseases that barely occur in high-income countries, such as diarrhoea, malaria or nutritional deficiencies. Despite the scale of these preventable deaths – amounting to 15 million lives lost each year, half of which affect young children before their fifth birthday – there is no official recognition that such extreme deprivation should also be considered a humanitarian catastrophe and treated accordingly.

These shameful mortality rates occur as a result of the ongoing silent disaster of world poverty, which receives a similarly inadequate international response to the periodic famines or food crises in countries like Somalia. For over a decade, international efforts to reduce poverty have centred around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of globally agreed targets that are set to expire in 2015. Although the MDGs have done much to focus attention on global poverty, they are widely considered an insufficient and superficial approach to economic development and saving lives.

A Deadly Lack of Ambition

The politically sensitive principles of equity and distributive justice that featured in the original Millennium Declaration have gradually faded from the official development discourse, accompanied by a deadly lack of ambition. Even if the MDG goal on halving rates of poverty is met, a staggering 882 million people will still be living in absolute poverty in 2015. In effect, the MDG’s focus on merely reducing over time the number of people living below the threshold of human survival tacitly accepts the continuance of poverty-related deaths each day. Similarly, goals four and five commit to reduce maternal mortality by only three quarters by 2015, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, which accepts not only a high number of preventable maternal and child deaths remaining at the end of the MDG period, but also many millions of such needless deaths in the interim.

In an interdependent and globalised world, there can be no meaningful process of development whilst so many people living in poverty die prematurely and unnecessarily. The impact on families, communities and economies are devastating, and preventing these deaths is an urgent moral necessity. Even in the crudest economic calculations, putting an end to avoidable deaths would amount to a significant investment in human capital, as healthy individuals whose basic needs are secured are far more likely to contribute to the growth of communities and nations. It is objectionable from any social, moral or economic viewpoint that sufficient resources are not immediately made available to address the crises of extreme deprivation, especially in its most acute manifestation well before the situation degenerates into a full-blown famine.

International efforts to address the life-threatening poverty of millions of people in the poorest countries must aim far higher and provide much more than the current insufficient, voluntary and often conditional donations of overseas aid and disaster assistance. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is essential to avert humanitarian disasters and prevent extreme deprivation and poverty-related deaths. Given the scale of these related crises, an international program of emergency relief must become the highest priority of world governments, followed by assistance for developing countries to secure ongoing state-provided welfare and essential services for all their citizens. Efforts to improve the redistribution of wealth nationally through the development of local industries, better taxation and the provision of comprehensive social protection for all people should become the new focus of international development policy.

Central to this transformation of development is the principle of sharing, which embodies universally accepted ethical values that reflect our common humanity. Aligning the international policy discourse more closely to our shared moral obligations can help redeem decades of unjust economic and social policy, prevent future famines and help manifest an inclusive vision of progress and development. In the simplest economic terms, sharing points to the need for a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, and a shift in power relations from financial and commercial interests to the world’s majority population. The East African crisis presents another opportunity for civil society to demand that wealth and resources are shared more equitably across the world, and that policy-makers prioritise the complete eradication of poverty above all other concerns.

Moalim, quoted by the British Telegraph, was not posing as spokesperson to the estimated 11 million people (per United Nations figures) who are currently in dire need of food. About 440,000 of those affected by the world’s “worst humanitarian disaster” dwell in a state of complete despair in Dadaab, a complex of three camps in Kenya. Imagine the fate of those not lucky enough to reach these camps, people who remain chronically lacking in resources, and, in the case of Somalia, trapped in a civil war.

All that Batula Moalim was pleading for was “plastic sheeting for shelter, as well as for food and medicine.”

It is disheartening, to say the least, when such disasters don’t represent an opportunity for political, military or other strategic gains, subsequently, enthusiasm to ‘intervene’ peters out so quickly.

UN officials from the World Food Programme (WFP) are not asking for much: $500 million to stave off the effects of what is believed to be the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 60 years. This is not an impossible feat, especially when one considers the geographic extent of the drought and creeping famine. Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya are all affected, and terribly so. Sudan and Eretria are also not far from the center of this encroaching disaster.

60 percent of the amount requested by WFP has already been raised. More is needed, however, especially as the reverberation of the drought is already surpassing the immediate need for food and shelter. Five million are already at risk of cholera in Ethiopia alone, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hundreds have reportedly died, and many more are likely to follow.

Cholera requires an immediate remedy as the intestinal infection leads to sever diarrhea, dehydration and death. Other figures are equally grim. 8.8 million people, also in Ethiopia, are at risk of contracting malaria, according to Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesman.  Jasarevic has also told journalists that these ailments have already been reported in Somalia, and other Ethiopian regions. This means the disaster is not confined to refugee camps and is thus much harder to control.

For refugees, there is nothing worse than having no safe haven in sight. Still, they must escape when death becomes the only alternative to aimless journeys. While hundreds of thousands are gathering in Kenya’s camps, an average of 1,700 Somali refugees venture to Ethiopia each day. The latter, a country with a population of about 85 million, is fully embroiled in the crisis. 4.5 million Ethiopians need assistance, a rise of over 50 percent in less than three months, according to WHO. One can only try to envisage the speed at which this disaster is unraveling.

International organizations, including WFP, WHO and UNICEF have made numerous appeals. Some major media outlets responded by giving the humanitarian crisis a degree of coverage. While donations have bashfully trickled in, the goals are yet to be reached. According to a report by the Telegraph, “no African country has offered a donation to help drought victims in the Horn of Africa outside of those affected.”

The report, published July 15, quoted Michael O’Brien-Onyeka, Oxfam’s Regional Campaigns Policy Manager for East and Central Africa, who said it was “disappointing” that “African states insist on ‘African solutions for African problems’ with regard to Libya but fail to respond to droughts and famines.”

On the subject of Libya, it may be helpful to consider some financial figures.

“The British Government has pledged £38 million in food aid to Ethiopia,” reported the Telegraph. The following day, British Daily Mirror reported on the seemingly different subject of Libya. Four more British jets were recently deployed to the war zone near Libya, raising the total to 22 RAF jets, according to James Lyons in the Mirror (July 16). The cost thus far is £260 million, only £40 million short of the total amount needed by the WFP to feed 11 million starving people.

Here is another example of the dubious nature of British involvement in the war on Libya (falsely slated as a war to prevent imminent massacres of civilians): “Tornado GR4s cost around £35,000 for every hour they are in the air and are having to fly long distances from their base in Gioia del Colle, southern Italy, to Libya,” according to the Mirror.

Major African countries and Britain are not the only parties involved in acts of duplicity. The US military adventurism in the Horn of African, especially Somalia, and its renewed use of costly unmanned drones can feed, cloth, shelter and treat countless refugees. More, Arab and Muslim countries tend to be the least responsive parties in such situations. While it is true that the chief of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu made several appeals for help, such singular calls generate feel-good moments but no major mobilization for action.

The disaster in the Horn of Africa is partly man-made. Countries with ‘failed states’ status (in other words, victims of outside interventions) cannot possibly fend off crises of this magnitude. For the last 20 years, Somalia has had no central government controlling the country’s territories. Outside intervention has made it impossible for any party to unite the disjointed country. What is a Somali refugee to do?

To help the millions disaffected by the multilayered disaster in the Horn of Africa, we need more than appeals for blankets and food stuff.  We also need a degree of human decency and common sense. We need to re-channel some of the funds wasted on disastrous wars into actually saving lives. If warning parties would ground their Tornado GR4s and other warplanes for a few days, the single action alone could save the entire region.

For now, though, let us all do what we can to help the Horn of Africa survive this terrible ordeal.

We demand that our Government ensure that it is safe, cheap, and abundant. In response, Government has been a factor in the production, regulation, research, innovation, and economics of our food supply.

Though painting Uncle Sam as Mrs. Doubtfire, when it comes to the results of government intrusion into the food supply, he’s more like Joseph Mengele. Over the last hundred years, we’ve seen climbing rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and neurological disorders, thanks to Uncle Sam’s “regulation” of food additives and environmental pollutants.  We’ve also seen the number of farms decline by 98%.

Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally is only too happy to regurgitate the promotion of government control of food, pointing out when Uncle Sam actually provides a social safety net, to wit: the SNAP program, otherwise known as food stamps.

She fails to mention that 184 House Democrats (along with 217 Republicans) just voted to make deep cuts in US food assistance in the 2012 Agricultural Appropriations bill (HR 2112), which I summarized here, based on the analysis of several different experts, and my own stumbling through the massive bill.

One piece I relied on, by Congressmen Sam Farr and Norman Dicks, points out that though the Women, Infants and Children program got a slight boost, the $6 billion budget nowhere near meets the needs of the 50 million+ US citizens who live in poverty, most of them women and children. That’s less than $150 per year for each hungry person.

But, hey, how about those foreign resource wars that Uncle Sam funds to the tune of $1.2 trillion?

Two years ago, the estimate of those in poverty reached 47 million. Since then, unemployment has boomed while the number of jobs has declined. You do the math; I’m sure the number of those truly living in poverty is much higher than 50 million, though recent government figures assert that the number in poverty hovers at 40 million.

Trueman hails a feature of SNAP that allows recipients to buy seeds and vegetable plants. Yes, that is a good feature. Too bad that HR 2112 made the following cuts, note Farr and Dicks:

Funding for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which serves predominantly low-income seniors, is $138.5 million. This is $38 million (22%) below the 2012 request and $37 million (21%) below 2011.

Funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which works with states to assist food banks, is $38 million. This is $12 million (24%) below the 2012 request, and about $11 million (23%) below 2011. The bill also cuts $51 million (20%) from the funding that TEFAP receives annually from the SNAP program.

The bill reduces the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program to $15 million, which is $5 million (25%) below the $20 million level that has been provided for many years. The program gives vouchers to WIC participants for the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables at state-approved farmers’ markets.

Trueman does acknowledge that Big Ag’s lobby has twisted Uncle Sam’s arm to the detriment of the public, but fails to acknowledge that the Obama Administration is well known for appointing those lobbyists to key positions.

* He’s got Monsanto heading his newly created Food Safety czar in the person of Michael Taylor, whom Jeffrey Smith describes as the “person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history.”

* Obama appointed biotech poster boy Tom Vilsack as head of the USDA, who’s been sued twice so far for violating law by approving genetically modified crops without proper environmental assessments.

* He made Monsanto lobbyist and pesticide-pusher Islam Siddiqui the US Ag Trade Representative.

*  Obama also put Elena Kagan on the US Supreme Court. In the No-GMO world, she is most notorious for her government-funded support of Monsanto when she served as Solicitor General.

Speaking of the “economics of our food supply,” which the exhibit touts, the new ag appropriations bill also made deep cuts to local and regional food system development programs. Agribusiness giants dominate the market today. This is Uncle Sam setting US priorities. The Senate is now reviewing HR 2112.

Without expressing any comprehension of the impact of food control legislation, Trueman blows the horn of the Food Safety Modernization Act:

Sure, Uncle Sam’s always been kind of a drag, with his stern face and wagging finger. But to ‘nanny-state’ haters, he’s a Beltway busybody in drag, democracy’s Mrs. Doubtfire, a Maryland Mary Poppins. If you believe that government is always the problem, never the solution, then you have no use for, say, more stringent food safety regulations…

Really?  Mrs. Doubtfire?  The FSMA promises to enforce irradiated foods, promote genetic engineering, and run out of business small and midsize operators on which we’ve thrived for hundreds of years. Burdensome hyper-regulation will force them to upgrade their facilities to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars or lose their license. A veritable Big Food dream, and an Oliver Twist nightmare.

“Safety” has nothing to do with the FSMA – this is about forcing us to eat factory-produced foods adulterated with GMOs, chemicals, drugs and nanomaterials, where most of the nutrition has been removed. It’s really a nice racket – for the medical profession, pharmaceutical industry, and chemical manufacturers, as well as Big Ag.

In fact, this kind of regulated contamination of US food (and the environment) prompted the making of The Idiot Cycle, an excellent film showing how Uncle Sam’s “nanny-statism” is making us all sick so that chemical companies and Big Pharma (sometimes one and the same) can earn obscene profits. (My review here.)

Like all the “modernization” acts, the Food Safety Modernization Act is but another in a long line designed to enhance profits of Big Business at the expense and health of the rest of us, including the environment.

Though this probably deserves its own essay, let’s take a brief look at some of those “modernization” acts and their impact on us:

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 deregulated the financial services industry, leading to the collapse of global finance, from which we have still not recovered (except for those banksters and their bailouts, which both Bush and Obama signed despite 95% of the public opposing them.)

Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 also deregulated Wall Street, allowing for credit default swaps, unlimited trading in food commodities futures, and the infamous “Enron loophole,” which benefited (among others) the wife of the congressman who authored it: Phil Gramm.

Farr and Dicks also point out that the 2012 ag appropriations bill defunds the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that seeks to rein in food commodities trading. This would bring food prices down, but the House defunded it in HR 2112.

Also see, e.g.:

F. William Engdahl’s Getting Used to Life Without Food;

Ellen Brown’s How Banks and Investors Are Starving the Third World; and

Frederick Kaufman’s The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

Help America Vote Act of 2002 (a modernization act) replaced hand-count and lever technologies with software, which can be hacked without detection. By 2004, 95% of the U.S. said goodbye to verifiable election results, no matter what election officials say.  (See my annotation of 21 scientific reports condemning computerized voting systems.)

Voter Registration Modernization Act of 2009 didn’t pass, but don’t ignore it. This bill seeks to set up online voting, another ludicrous assault on democracy. There is no way to ensure these votes are valid.

Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 Already discussed here, but in more detail in several pieces listed here. Steve Green’s famous piece, S.510 Is Hissing in the Grass, woke up fans of food freedom and food sovereignty with Canada Health whistleblower Shiv Chopra’s quote:

If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes.  It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.

Oh, we’re seeing that. Not only has the FDA increased its raids on natural food producers and sellers, but (as many readers know), it also recently claimed authority under the FSMA to seize food without credible evidence it’s been contaminated.

When you think about what’s in 90% of US food, the risk of becoming ill from natural foods and supplements is far, far below what’s happening to the majority of Americans, with climbing rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and neurological disorders. Yet natural food producers are under attack by Uncle Sam given his commitment to global trade rules.

This isn’t Mrs. Doubtfire or Mary Poppins.  This is Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin all rolled up into one.  This isn’t a nanny state; this is food fascism – criminalizing our right to eat the foods of our choice, grown and prepared as we like, while destroying the ability of family and mid-size farms to earn a living.

I’m sure the “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam” exhibit will provide a fascinating study – not into enhanced food safety or increased health invoked by federal policy, because that clearly has not happened – but in the power of propaganda.

Bob Koehler says these types of efforts “abandon us in a state of feel-good pseudo-security.”  Despite that, and you can blame this on morbid curiosity, I hope to see it.What’s Cooking is on display through January 3, 2012.

At first glance, the fields are terribly lush and gorgeous, but if your eyes linger too long, strange unnerving traits become noticeable. Every cornstalk is like the one next to it. It’s called genetic modification, and these clones represent what is considered to be the optimum in height, overall production and disease resistance. There’s no organic variation, just acres of monotonous growth. It’s all quite serene until you notice that Stepford quality. This is practically the only crop being grown in the region- soy may show up here and there, it’s another “modified” crop, but overall it’s corn that dominates. Every year at this time, I’m filled with dismay, seeing these factories disguised as plants.

It wasn’t always like this. As recently as the 80s some farming variety was still in place. I recall measuring the passing of summer by the look of crops like milo (grain sorghum) and the undulating wheat. It’s the closest to the relaxation of watching ocean waves that you could get in the Midwest, watching that wheat. Sunflower crops were grown for their seeds and oils. These enormous, frenzied gardens took on human sunbather traits as each flower moved to face the lolling, hazy sun of August.

Farmers were encouraged to “get big or get out” by guys like Earl Butz. If they tried to clone an ideal man, he wouldn’t have made the cut. He served as the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford. Sadly Eisenhower introduced him to power, making him an Assistant Secretary during his tenure. Eisenhower may have had the pulse of the military industrial complex, but he unwittingly opened up an agricultural industrial complex through the introduction of this man. Commodity crops were encouraged by Butz, making it more difficult for small farms to find markets for harvests not encompassed in that model.

In an example of nefarious government meddling, subsidies were placed on corn farming, creating a hellish pattern where struggling farmers ripped out more land for corn so they could get the subsidies. This produced more of the product, and subsequently drove down the price, necessitating the placement of even more land into corn production. The benefit of subsidies fell largely on the agribusiness firms that purchased the corn, anyway. It never seemed to benefit the little farmers. But then why would it? They were told to get big, after all.

In a chain of consequence, the relatively low price of corn, and a regulated high sugar price made a Japanese invention from 1966 assume huge significance in the health of each and every American. This was High Fructose Corn Syrup — maybe you’ve heard of it. Well since you’ve heard of it, the Corn Refiners Association is trying to convince the FDA to let them call HFCS “Corn Sugar”. You haven’t heard of that! It’ll be a whole new lease on life for the liquid with an image problem. Perhaps we can rephrase the term “obesity” and call it “Corn Storage” if they get their way. It seems only fair. That’s really what most American extra weight is — repositories for the HFCS that now is said to make up 10% of caloric intake, more for children, evidently. That number is a little misleading, however, because it doesn’t take into account the intake of beef and chicken which have been fed the stuff as well. This level of corniness would be difficult to quantify.

The hijacking of this traditional crop of the Americas to a factory farm creature is one more indignity heaped on the indigenous people who elevated this strange plant to a consumable staple in a manner we can’t quite figure out.

The emergence of maize as the prime crop of the Americas is filled with mystery and gaps of explanation. Charles Mann does a magnificent job in his book “1491″ of describing the puzzling emergence of this crop. A very homely, non-sexy plant named teosinte looks to have been an ancestor, but very little resemblance is there to the maize that fed so many over the centuries. The seeds in teosinte scatter. They don’t wait for someone to pick them, making harvest unlikely, maybe even impossible. Another oddity is that corn now completely relies on human hands to sprout due to the thickened husks. It’s not like a “wild corn” version is out there, even though other cereal crops have such relatives evident. Mann mentions that the Mexican National Museum had a presentation on the plant and simply said that maize was “created” not necessarily domesticated. There is certainly a spiritual notion behind all of this that science can’t adequately explain.

That hackneyed expression “you are what you eat”, I’d say there is truth even in the trite. Our bodies are being formed by a sweet concoction that removed the holy mystery that was maize (and I’m not pushing the word holy in the kind of sense that passes in a church). We ingest this syrup directly, and we also eat animals that are fed this syrup. Is it any wonder that we have a sugary, mechanistic view of the world and our place in it? I would say that corn is emblematic of much of what has gone wrong in our society. The arrogant notion that cycles and nature are to be triumphed over, not worked with, and the overarching faith that technology equals wisdom.

I just don’t see beauty in these undulating lines of green any longer.

Now being reviewed by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, the final version of HR 2112 will lay the terrain on which the 2012 Farm Bill will be crafted. The House Agriculture Committee began preparatory hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, reports NSAC.

Key sections provide deep cuts to domestic food programs, threatening food banks, low-income seniors, women and children, and farmers’ markets supported by WIC vouchers issued thru the Women, Infants and Children program.

HR 2112 also made deep cuts to rural development, conservation and eco-remediation programs, and to local and regional food system development programs.  This can be seen as nothing other than a punitive response to the growing local food sovereignty movement.

Earlier this year, Maine and Vermont enacted home rule ordinances to protect small farms from the overreaching hyper-regulation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA), which became law in January. On June 10, the State of Maine passed a Joint Resolution in support of local food sovereignty.

One positive provision in HR 2112 prohibits the Food and Drug Administration from spending any funds to authorize genetically modified salmon.  Contrary to some media reports, Congress did not “ban GM salmon,” nor did the House “pass a law” thru HR 2112. A federal law is enacted only after Congress (both the Senate and the House of Representatives) passes it and the US President signs it.

GIPSA Rules Defunded

By far, though, the most controversial cut in HR 2112 relates to “GIPSA Rules,” which would begin ending unfair trade practices in the meat industry. Everyone who eats animal products should understand how this works, because these rules not only benefit small operators, but also product quality, food security and the environment.

HR 2112 prohibits GIPSA – the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration – from using funds to finalize antitrust rules in the meat industry.

This overturns a key provision in the 2008 Farm Bill, which required the USDA to develop those rules.

“Some question whether the Appropriations Committee can overturn national legislation,” said National Farmers Union president Roger Johnson in a press conference today.

Speaking for a coalition of cattle and hog producers and poultry growers, Johnson demanded that President Obama keep his campaign promise to reform livestock and poultry markets.

“The GIPSA Rule reinstates the USDA’s long-held interpretation of the Packers and Stockyards Act that was overturned by 2005 and 2006 court cases,” he said.

In both those cases, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s rejection of the jury verdict. In the 2005 case, London v. Fieldale Farms, the jury awarded London $164,000. In the 2006 case, Pickett v. Tyson, the jury awarded $1.28 billion to Pickett for eight years of price fixing by Tyson.

Substantively, the London court held that an operator must show harm to the entire industry, not just the plaintiff.

Under the GIPSA rules, “Farmers and ranchers no longer have to prove unfair practices harm the entire industry, only that the abuses damaged plaintiff,” said Johnson.

This is the usual standard in tort law. Can you imagine being hit by a car and having to prove the defendant’s action was harmful to all drivers? Of course not. The court ruling flies in the face of common sense and entrenches monopolistic power.

In Pickett, U.S. District Court Judge Lyle Strom absurdly reasoned that price manipulation is allowed if the perpetrator has a business interest in doing so. By this logic, companies can do whatever they want to improve profits, despite laws against such actions.

Judicial corruption aside, the USDA’s failure to fully enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act of 1921 and other anti-corporate farming laws has resulted in the loss of nearly a million operators in the beef, pork, poultry and specialty meat market over the past 30 years.

This chart shows figures just for the pork industry, from info derived from the National Pork Board’s 2010 Quick Facts.  Ninety percent of family hog operations and 95% of midsized operations have folded in the past 34 years.

When Congress passed the Packers & Stockyards Act of 1921 (PSA), it sought to bust the monopoly of the Big 5: Armour, Swift, Wilson, Morris, and Cudahy, which then controlled 75% of the meat packer market.

Today, four firms control 85% of the market: Tyson (IBP), Cargill (Excel), ConAgra (Monfort), and Farmland National Beef.

Clearly, PSA enforcers have not done their job.

Though mandated over three years ago, the USDA still has not formalized the GIPSA rules. At today’s meat coalition press conference, speakers urged the USDA to finalize the rules.

Defunding the GIPSA Rules clarifies federal priority to protect the rich at the expense of the rest of us.

The Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA) explains that these firms use their monopoly power to “manipulate markets, deny or severely restrict market access to independent livestock producers, and use unfair practices like confidentiality clauses to the detriment of both contract producers and independent producers.”

Mike Callicrate of R-CALF USA calls it “predatory pricing.”

The big packers, so called, stand between hundreds of thousands of producers on one hand and millions of consumers on the other. They have their fingers on the pulse of both the producing and consuming markets and are in such a position of strategic advantage they have unrestrained power to manipulate both markets to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of over 99 percent of the people of the country.

So spoke Wyoming Senator John Kendrick in 1921, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, arguing the need for the Packers and Stockyard Act.

Market concentration is even worse today.

Food, Bombs and Wall Street

While lawmakers claim the need to cut government spending, they won’t touch the military’s outrageous budget for domestic surveillance and illegal resource wars.  Instead, cuts apply to the US social safety net thru HR 2112.

There’s the $1.2 trillion US military budget that could use substantial reduction. And, the Obama Administration reported to Congress last week that the Libya invasion alone will cost $1.1 billion by September.

Certainly, food not bombs is a more sane policy after Wall Street collapsed the global economy with its criminal trading schemes.

Instead of arresting anyone from Wall Street, authorities instead continue to arrest Food Not Bombs members, who refuse to obey a law against feeding hungry people in Florida.

Just last month, the FDA cited the Food Safety Modernization Act for authority in declaring it no longer needs credible evidence to seize food that may be contaminated, entirely ignoring the Fourth Amendment.  Given the increasing frequency of the FDA’s illegal raids on small ops not involved in interstate commerce and whose product sickened no one, we can expect more small producers to be shut down.

Food prices have spiked because of Wall Street commodities trading, explained in lay terms by Ellen Brown who cites the detailed work of Frederick Kaufman.

In HR 2112, efforts to control trading in futures by the Dodd-Frank Act are stymied by funding cuts. In commenting on the bill, Congressmen Sam Farr and Norman Dicks describe the cut this way:

The bill provides $171.93 million for Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a reduction of $136 million (44%) below the request (which proposed an increase for the implementation of the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation) and $30 million (15%) below 2011. At a time of volatile commodity prices, including oil and energy, and only three years after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, inadequate funding of CFTC is an unacceptable risk to the markets on which our economy depends.

On this we agree.

But rather than a safer product, clearer warnings or regulatory distance between federal officials and the industry they are supposed to oversee, tuna fish consumers have gotten nothing but more studies.

Last year Time magazine reported 100 samples of both lean red tuna and fatty tuna from 54 restaurants and 15 supermarkets in Colorado, New Jersey and New York, exceed recommended amounts of mercury.

And this year Consumer Reports says every tuna sample tested at an outside lab “contained measurable levels of mercury, ranging from 0.018 to 0.774 parts per million. The Food and Drug Administration can take legal action to pull products containing 1 ppm or more from the market. (It never has, according to an FDA spokesman.)”

In fact, mercury-filled tuna is so rampant in the food supply, it was what inspired Fischer Stevens to make the Oscar winning-documentary about the Japanese dolphin fishing industry, “The Cove”.  He personally came down with mercury poisoning, he told NBCLA, after eating tuna three or four times a week which caused him to investigate the entire seafood industry.

Nor is much of the meat necessarily safe. Even though you can cook pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter out, veterinary drugs, pesticides and heavy metals like copper and arsenic remain after cooking says a government report.

According to a 2010 Office of Inspector General report, of 23 pesticides designated by the EPA and FDA as high risk, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service only tests for one. Four carcasses contaminated with “violative levels of veterinary drugs” were released onto the public dinner plate in just six months, says the report.

Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves,” says the report, sounding more like an animal activist group than the U.S. government. “When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.”

FDA records corroborate the OIM report, finding that Templeton Feed & Grain and Darr Feedlots recently sold antibiotic-tainted animal feed and that Land Dairy and Martin Feed Lot sold cows with the antibiotic sulfamethazine in their livers to be sold as human food.

And while consumers are told to cook meat thoroughly to remove pathogens that are eliminated by intense heat, cooking has a downside. Frying, broiling and grilling beef, pork, poultry and even fish can produce cancer causing compounds from dripping fat called heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons says the National Cancer Institute. They are linked to stomach, colon, bladder and several other cancers and are to be avoided.

And processed foods like luncheon meat, ham and hot dogs? They are pre-treated with nitrites to kill food-borne germs and maintain a “natural” color like the natural “color” of mass farmed salmon. Nitrites become nitrosamines which are well known carcinogens. They are as good for you as cigarettes.

The students are eager to measure and mix, but Tipton-Martin is also teaching critical thinking — and patience — in her SANDE mentoring and training program. She has them examine various kinds of chocolate, encouraging them to “taste with your sense of smell — the cinnamon makes it Mexican chocolate,” trying to engage these youngsters of the digital age in a more embodied way of knowing. When she is satisfied that they understand what they are doing, the boys go to work with their measuring cups and mixing bowls, producing their cocoa creations that will go home with them in a plastic bag.

When the lesson is over, Tipton-Martin walks the students back to their homeroom, past the vegetable-and-herb garden that is also part of SANDE (the acronym stands for “Spirit, Attitude, Nutrition, Deeds, and Emotions”). She isn’t just trying to teach young people to cook healthy food and understand nutrition, but to understand where food comes from and why it all matters.

Folks in the United States are coming to understand that all this does matter very much. Industrial agriculture and fast-food still dominate, but more and more people are shopping at farmers markets, seeking out healthy food, and recognizing the social costs of reckless eating habits. For Tipton-Martin — an African-American chef teaching mostly black and brown kids — it’s a particularly opportune moment to be working on these issues, as Michelle Obama is using the First Lady’s pulpit to focus attention on childhood obesity. Last June, Tipton-Martin was one of the chefs and nutritionists on the South Lawn of the White House to promote Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, and this week she’s front and center at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals being held in Austin (she’s chair of the host city committee).

So, all in all, it’s been a good year for Tipton-Martin, as her career takes a turn around another of several bends. Her resume includes newspaper journalism (a food writer/editor, first at the Los Angeles Times and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer), cookbook writing and editing, and non-profit work (a four-year stint at Southern Foodways Alliance, a center dedicated to documenting and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the American South, housed at the University of Mississippi). Since moving to Austin in 1999, she’s created a niche for herself as a writer/activist/social entrepreneur, a status marked by the Community Leadership Award she received from the University of Texas in 2010.

Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature — the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup — but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

That’s why, no matter which of her current enterprises is consuming her time, Tipton-Martin is always working on cracking “The Jemima Code,” her phrase for getting past the caricature to the real lives of those women. Drawing on varied sources — oral and written histories from both slaves and slave-holding families, old cookbooks, and people’s stories — Tipton-Martin has for the past two years been adding stories of those women to her website by that name, convinced that there’s a deep lesson in how white Americans, especially in the South, have dealt with these women.

In one of her blog entries, Tipton-Martin explains, “Aunt Jemima became the embodiment of our deepest antipathy for, and obsession with, the women who fed us with grace and skill.” Many white families depended on Jemima and despised her at the same time, leaving these women who cooked and cared for families on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Rather than merely pity such women as exploited laborers or romanticize them as the ultimate maternal figure, Tipton-Martin wants to tell the stories of their skill and creativity:

Why don’t we celebrate their contributions to American culture the way we venerate the imaginary Betty Crocker? Why wasn’t their true legacy preserved? Can we ever forget the images of ignorant, submissive, selfless, sassy, asexual despots? Is it possible to replace the mostly unflattering pictures of generous waistlines bent over cast iron skillets burned into our eyes? Will we ever believe that strong African women, who toted wood and built fires before even thinking about beating biscuit dough or mixing cakes, left us more than just their formulas for good pancakes?

Tipton-Martin’s interest is not merely historical; by telling the stories of these women, she hopes not only to remind the black community of their strength but give white people an opening for honest self-reflection. When Tipton-Martin says she is haunted by those women, it is really the racism, sexism and economic inequality they faced that haunts her. And it’s not really those historical forces, but the enduring presence of those inequalities in American life that Tipton-Martin can’t shake.

“These women create ways for me to interact with my own past,” she says, and struggle with the present.

Tipton-Martin grew up in the middle class in Los Angeles at a time when more opportunities were opening up for some blacks, especially those who were trained to fit into white society. Tipton-Martin was one of them, a good student who took to journalism and early on learned how to live “in costume,” offering a profile that wouldn’t scare white people.

That kind of bargain with the dominant culture can be soothing but is rarely satisfying, and Tipton-Martin’s own struggles run through “Jemima Code.” For example, she tells the story of Vera Beck, who was the test kitchen cook at the Cleveland newspaper. Tipton-Martin writes that Beck “forced me to circle back and confront [my] ‘contrary instincts’”:

I thought I was contented — a thirty-something food editor living far away from home on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, enjoying amazing and exotic world cuisine — the daughter of a health-conscious, fitness-crazed cook whose experiments with tofu, juicing and smoothies predated the fads. In the few short years we had together at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vera taught me a few life lessons while showing me the way to light and flaky buttermilk biscuits.

Among those lessons was the recognition that Tipton-Martin’s upbringing in a more integrated world also had cut her off from a tradition based on observation and apprenticeship in the kitchen, which was about more than cooking. “It was entirely possible that I would stumble blindly through the rest of my life without ever discovering the Aunt Jemima spirit living in me, if it hadn’t been for Vera Beck,” she writes.

Tipton-Martin is blunt in describing the complexity of the race and gender politics of her life. Being light-skinned with naturally straight hair — “I look like the Jezebel house servant mulatto girls of slavery” — made it easier to enter the middle class, she says. But at the same time, her appearance meant she had to “overcome the stereotype that I’m Barbie, too.” She speaks about the advantages she’s had, but doesn’t ignore either the racism or sexism of the culture.

As time goes on, Tipton-Martin is less willing to don the costume, less interested in presenting herself and her work in ways that make it easy for others. Rather than cashing in on the moment by writing a breezy recipe book that exploits the women of the Jemima Code — something along the lines of “Mammy’s sassy lessons for healthy cooking” — she wants to write a book that confronts the social and political issues. “Everybody’s intrigued,” she says, when she takes the idea to agents and publishers, but wary.

Tipton-Martin knows well how the white world rewards people of color who fit in, rather than challenge, white norms. But she finds it more and more difficult to smile away the racist or ignorant comments.

An example: At the opening event for the new Foodways Texas, project (she’s a board member), Tipton-Martin said a white woman told her that this work on food and nutrition is so important because “those people” come from cultures with bad diets. “I used to just smile” at such comments, she says, “but that day I told her the problem was not ‘their’ cultures but fast food and processed food, which is an American problem.”

Tipton-Martin has increasingly less patience for what we might call “the ignorance of the privileged” — the desire of people with status and wealth to explain away problems of inequality as simply the failure of “those people” rather than think about the injustice of the system, from which the privileged benefit. But she also recognizes that people struggling in difficult circumstances — especially the kids from poor neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown — need more than political analysis. She rejects the simplistic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” prescription of conservatives but believes that young people need role models. That’s where the women of the Jemima Code come in:

For me, they are important role models. They’re the closest I can get to saying to this [younger] generation that there are women who had it harder than you. Even though you think your life is really hard — and it is, and there are all these forces against you — you can persevere. The women of the Jemima Code took control of their lives under circumstances in where they didn’t even have control of their own bodies, but they were able to claim their dignity.

For Tipton-Martin, those women are not just potential role models for young people but for herself as well. She writes, “I discover that the woman I am becoming is a mere shadow of the women they were: patient and loving; smart, talented, hard-working; strong physically and emotionally, compassionate; multi-tasking.”

Tipton-Martin has a habit of engaging in the critical self-reflection that she asks of others, which leads to a professional and personal restlessness. She was raised to assimilate, to fit in, to prove to the dominant culture that she could make it under the rules written by white people, by men, by the wealthy. She was fitted for “the costume,” but found it increasingly uncomfortable.

“As long as I could just keep popping from costume to costume, I didn’t have to reconcile any of this and find out what it is that I hoped to accomplish,” Tipton-Martin says.

Negotiating life without a costume means talking honestly about a history — collective and personal — that the dominant culture desperately wants to ignore. That means not only highlighting the skill and accomplishments of the women of the Jemima Code, but facing the pain, anger and shame that comes with living in a system that still values white people, men, and the wealthy over others.

For Tipton-Martin, that conversation can start at dinner by giving a voice to the women who for so long put food on the table.

To watch Tipton-Martin’s talk on the Jemima Code to the Culinary Historians of Southern California in November 2010.

Sponsored by Rep. Walter Kumiega, LD 366 was rejected by the Ag Committee on May 11. The raw milk bill would have obviated licensing for the direct sale from farmer to consumer and protected small operations from overly burdensome rules recently imposed at the bureaucratic level.

“Requiring someone with two cows or a handful of goats to invest ten thousand dollars or more to build an inspectable facility doesn’t make economic sense,” Kumiega told Food Freedom. “Hand milking is a perfectly acceptable method and does not need the same facilities that a machine milking operation does. LD 366 seeks to restore an exemption that was a standard practice up until two years ago, when it was changed by an administrative decision.”

In response to the Ag Committee’s issuance of a Majority Ought Not to Pass report on LD 366, Kumiega requested a roll call, which showed that by a vote of 80-70, the House accepted the Ag Committee’s recommendation not to pass the bill.

The bill goes to the Senate now, and will come back to the House for another vote, he said, advising that he may work on an amendment with a member of the Ag Committee and run it again.

Also sponsored by Rep. Kumiega, LD 330, “An Act To Exempt Farm Food Products and Homemade Food Offered for Sale or for Consumption at Certain Events from Certain Licensing Requirements,” died in committee on April 7th.

Not just small farms are affected by government intrusion via hyper-regulation. Church suppers, potlucks, bake sales, Scout sales, lemonade stands, community picnics, and all traditional food sharing events must now follow strict “safety” protocols. All food producers must be licensed, and all food must be sterilized and packaged, according to the federal Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

“This violates hundreds of years of tradition,” local farmer Deborah Evans told the Food Rights Hour on April 16th. Evans was part of the group who spearheaded the food sovereignty ordinances.

Home Rule vs. Corporations

Prior to passage of the FSMA, Canada Health whistle blower Shiv Chopra warned it “would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” It looks like he was right.

But, if any state has a chance of succeeding in bucking the FSMA, it’s Maine, with one of the strongest Home Rule traditions in the nation, backed up by Constitutional and statutory authority. “Home Rule” states allow local municipalities self-government on community issues.

Not only did a Maine town become the first local government outside California to ban GMO crops, but Maine towns have also passed ordinances banning corporate water extraction. A hotbed of “radicals” – you know, people who protect their environment – would naturally be the first in the nation to assert food sovereignty.

Though the food sovereignty ordinance passed unanimously in Sedgwick and Penobscot, with just a handful of nays in Blue Hill, in March and April, it was defeated in Brooksville by a vote of 161-152.

Brooksville was the only town to vote on the ordinance by ballot, rather than by a show of hands. Outrageously, the ballot was printed with the recommendation to vote against all proposed ordinances in the referendum. The biased ballot has prompted demands for a revote.

However, Maine, like all states, limits home rule through bureaucratic rule making. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund explains that Home Rule is defeated in practice by “regulatory boards and agencies controlled by state legislatures and ‘special districts’ that are responsive to interested industries, but not community constituents.”

As if to prove CELDF’s point, Maine regulators openly scoffed at the food sovereignty election outcomes. Hal Prince, director of the Division of Quality Assurance and Regulation at the Maine Department of Agriculture, told Down East, “A town can’t pass an ordinance that frustrates state and federal laws.”

Apparently, the state loses inspection funding if it does not impose federal laws on food production and processing. The towns received a letter from the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, Food and Rural Resources informing them that state law pre-empts the ordinances:

[P]ersons who fail to comply will be subject to enforcement, including the removal from sale of products from unlicensed sources and/or the imposition of fines.

But a closer look at Maine’s constitution, statutes and case law indicates that governance over local food production that is sold locally easily falls within Home Rule. A legal analysis prepared by Charles Bussell, Local Regulation of Genetically Modified Crops, concludes that Maine, California and several other states have strong enough Home Rule protections to pass such ordinances.

Surely, banning biotech is a hell of a lot harder than rejecting state intrusion on how local food sold locally is prepared.

When Montville banned genetically modified crops in 2008, the state sent a letter in that instance, too, claiming the ordinance is invalid – get this – on the grounds that GM corn is not a plant but a pesticide, and therefore regulated by the Board of Pesticide Control. The state also claimed the ordinance violated Maine’s Right to Farm law by regulating “best management practices.” The city asserted that it is not banning a farming operation but a farming product. Meanwhile, GM crops are no longer grown in Montville. (See p. 12-21 for the ordinance, those letters, and background info of this State of Maine biotech collection.)

In its constitution at Article VIII, part 2, § 1, Maine grants municipalities home rule on matters “which are local and municipal in character.” But an enabling statute, Title 30-A, §3001, extends Home Rule beyond that which is “local and municipal in character” explains Bussell, who then cites a 1993 Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling, School Committee of York v. Town of York, which bolstered Home Rule.

Bussel notes, “The statute makes clear that the power of municipalities in Maine is strong—their power is to be construed liberally with a rebuttable presumption that a municipal ordinance is valid.”

Maine statutes also specifically and strongly support small family farms, which Montville detailed in its ordinance banning GM crops, naming Title 7, Sections 1-A and 1-B. Here’s a tiny sampling of the language:

The survival of the family farm is of special concern to the people of the State, and the ability of the family farm to prosper, while producing an abundance of high quality food and fiber, deserves a place of high priority in the determination of public policy.

Requiring small family operations with just a few animals to build high tech facilities clearly abrogates public policy to allow family farms to prosper. That bureaucratic rule making defeats democracy is no surprise to Home Rule proponents. Despite the clear intent of the state legislature to protect the economy and character of small farms, the state Ag department has invoked food “safety” rules that small operations cannot afford. And that’s the point. Food “safety” is corpogov speak for destroying factory farm competition from small, family farms.

Deborah Evans also told Food Rights Hour that potentially hazardous foods – basically anything that requires refrigeration – must be made in a commercially licensed kitchen, which can cost $150-200,000 to build.

Another ordinance organizer, Bob St. Peter, told Food Chain Radio on April 9th that farms with less than a thousand chickens, previously exempt, now face a slurry of regulations including a ban on outdoor slaughter.

The new rules violate thousands of years of practice, not just in Maine but throughout the world, in favor of an industrialized system that has proven lethal and ecocidal. It is the centralized factory farm model which causes food poisoning and which is destroying the environment.

“I’m not willing to become a scapegoat for a system that seems to be breaking down and making people sick,” St. Peter objected. People patronize traditional farms because “it’s time tested to be safe and good for our communities.”

Rep. Kumiega agrees. “The great push for food safety regulations from the FDA and USDA is misguided and, by hurting small, local food producers, will in the end make our food supply less safe,” he told Food Freedom.

“These regulations are needed to make large food producers more safe, although they are arguably a failure, since studies show a majority of supermarket meats are contaminated with diseases ranging from E. coli to MRSA.”

Since food “safety” rules violate Maine’s constitutional requirement to support family farms, as well as Home Rule (which is constitutionally and statutorily granted), Evans foresees the validity of the food sovereignty ordinance being decided at the Supreme Court.

One final note: a Food and Farm Freedom Rally is being held in Washington, D.C. on Monday, May 16 at 10 AM at the Upper Senate Park. Though initially organized in support of Dan Allgyer, one of many victims of FDA raids on raw dairy operations, the event has gained national momentum. Speakers include Sally Fallon Morell of Weston A. Price Foundation, author David Gumpert, and Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy.

In response to FDA actions, Congress Member Ron Paul has introduced HR 1830 to permit raw milk and dairy sales across state lines.

On May 4th, the FDA stated:

Previously, the FDA’s ability to detain food products applied only when the agency had credible evidence that a food product presented was contaminated or mislabeled in a way that presented a threat of serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals.

Beginning July, the FDA will be able to detain food products that it has reason to believe are adulterated or misbranded for up to 30 days, if needed, to ensure they are kept out of the marketplace. The products will be kept out of the marketplace while the agency determines whether an enforcement action such as seizure or federal injunction against distribution of the product in commerce, is necessary.

Credible evidence no longer applies, it seems.

The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

FDA thinks it can engage in search and seizure willy nilly. They’ve already been doing this, of course — but only at natural food facilities. Factory farms like DeCosta Eggs can sicken thousands of people over a period of years, without ever being shut down or having its product seized or destroyed. But, if you raise natural foods without pasteurizing them or adulterating them with drugs and genetically modified ingredients, even though no one becomes ill from your product, then be assured, the FDA will seize your products, your computers, your paperwork, and shut you down.

Most recently, the FDA shut down Pennsylvania farmer Dan Algyer, though no one became ill from his natural milk. Morningland Cheese and Estrella Family Creamery are but two more in a long line of victims of the corporate war on natural food, though their products sickened no one. And most of the nation knows of the armed raid on Rawesome Foods last year. (Also see David Gumpert’s book, The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights.)

In the May 2011 edition of the Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine (hat tip FTCLDF), Greg Breining summarizes the issues in MILK vs milk: Do consumers have the right to choose? Well, of course we do. Food freedom is as inalienable as the right to breathe. The freedom to eat the food with which humans evolved is requisite to our survival as individuals and as a species. Thomas Jefferson agrees:

“Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.”

That’s often paraphrased as: “If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

Another rule announced by the FDA requires importers to declare if any nation refused their food or feed product for any reason, and to give the reason. Both rules go into effect July 3, 2011.

Read the new FDA rules.