WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOR?

Good Thursday morning to you.

As promised, I’m going to touch on the “fighting” piece of this blog. Of course, we know you have to fight your busy schedule, traditional way of shopping, convenience foods and those friends and coworkers who say “but, it's your birthday! Just one piece of cake!” to eat healthy. But there is a bigger fight. A fight for freedom.

• Freedom to consume what you believe is healthy for you and your family (raw milk).
• Freedom to know what is in your food (Genetically-modified Organisms – GMOs).
• Freedom to decide what you and your family should put in your body (vaccinations).
• Freedom to earn a living by growing and preparing nutritious meals at your home and selling it to your community.
• Freedom to raise heritage breed animals and raise chickens in your backyard. (Michigan DNR’s Invasive Species Order; backyard chicken bans)
• Freedom to turn your backyard into a garden.
• The basic right to have access to good food. Real food.

America’s food subsidy program and political system is, in my view, terribly backwards. It rewards environmentally-repugnant lagoon systems and high fructose corn syrup (by the way, these are on us… first in tax dollars to subsidize and later in healthcare costs to deal with obesity and disease). According to a report by the Cato Institute, for every dollar of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operations, taxpayers contribute $10. These are the names you should know: ADM, Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, among others. They dominate your food supply chain. This is the system that delivered us mad cow disease. The broken system that unleashes unsafe pathogens into our grocery stores, into the bodies of our children, our grandparents.

This system does not reward you (unless you count cheap, unhealthy food-like products) and neither does it reward the American farmer. The farmer gets less than 10% of the cost of your food. Additionally, farm subsidies go to the largest farmers/landowners/businesses. When a genetically-modified Monsanto seed contaminates a neighbor’s organic farm, the neighbor must compensate Monsanto.

And neither does it reward the environment. The soil is depleted of nutrients due to environmentally-disrespectful farming practice. What kind of food can possibly come from malnourished soil? Chemical pesticides and fertilizers and manure lagoons leach into the ground and into our water. Estimates on the number of superfund sites for which Monsanto is at least partially responsible range from 56 to 93.

Right now, there are a few battles raging on, but I will start with just one – the BIG one – the farm bill. Where Congress decides how to allocate your tax dollars throughout the agricultural complex. I will post later a brief overview of two pieces of the bill that I (and my real food comrades) am urgently opposed to and what you can do if you want to take action.

Thanks for reading. I hope you understanding that my fight is for the freedom to choose what to put in my body (food, air, water, medicine), the right for EVERYONE to know what is in their food and where it came from and how it was raised / grown / prepared / packaged, and the right to grow your own food for you and your community if you choose to do so.

Sidenote: I believe strongly that huge corporations can’t possibly have my best interest at heart. They don’t know me. They don’t even know their own employees. And they seem to like to shirk accountability when things go wrong. I believe in the power of personal relationships. Are you more likely to cheat a stranger or your friend? Food for thought.