See the British documentary film that has not been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer (Tracy Worcester) by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork producer).
Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer. But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film. Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.
Guest: Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His latest is Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.
MICHAEL POLLAN: The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous 10,000. The modern supermarket has, on average, 47,000 products. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.
ERIC SCHLOSSER: We’ve never had food companies this powerful in our history.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: Everything we’ve done in modern agriculture is to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: If you can grow a chicken in forty-nine days, why would you want one you’ve got to grow in three months?
MICHAEL POLLAN: When you go through the supermarket, there is an illusion of diversity. So much of our industrial food turns out to be rearrangements of corn.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Sometimes you look at a vegetable and say, “OK, well, we can get two hamburgers for the same price.”
MICHAEL POLLAN: They have managed to make it against the law to criticize their products. There is an effort to make it illegal to publish a photo of any industrial food operation.
The following is an excerpt from a July 2009 letter sent by the founder of Seed Saver's Exchange to SSE members. In its 2009 Catalog of Heirloom Seeds, Books and Gifts, SSE called itself "a non-profit membership organization dedicated to conserving and promoting heirloom vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers. These include our members' family heirlooms' and [26,000 endangered] traditional varieties from around the world." This letter demonstrates that its original purpose has been usurped. Those with a different motive have, by slow infiltration and financial contributions, taken over one of humanities greatest collection of treasures' -- seeds.
NEW YORK (December 29, 2009) – A pesticide that could be dangerously toxic to America’s honey bees must be pulled from store shelves as a result of a suit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Xerces Society. In an order issued last week, a federal court in New York invalidated EPA’s approval of the pesticide spirotetramat (manufactured by Bayer CropScience under the trade names Movento and Ultor) and ordered the agency to reevaluate the chemical in compliance with the law. The court’s order goes into effect on January 15, 2010, and makes future sales of Movento illegal in the United States.
“This sends EPA and Bayer back to the drawing board to reconsider the potential harm to bees caused by this new pesticide,” said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo. “EPA admitted to approving the pesticide illegally, but argued that its violations of the law should have no consequences. The Court disagreed and ordered the pesticide to be taken off the market until it has been properly evaluated. Bayer should not be permitted to run what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on bees across the country without full consideration of the consequences.”
THE WAY THEY WERE A Tennessee fainting goat at SVF Foundation in Newport, R.I.
By BARRY ESTABROOK
Published: January 5, 2010
NEWPORT, R.I.
IT didn’t take long for Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat sporting a luxuriant Vandyke beard and an impressive pair of curlicue horns, to live up to his breed’s name. When Peter Borden, accompanied by a stranger, entered the immaculate stable that Chip calls home, the goat pressed his velvety nose through the bars of his stall, begging for a scratch. But at the visitor’s approach, Chip apparently had second thoughts. His left foreleg stiffened, his brown eyes went glassy and he began to list to one side.
“There he goes,” said Mr. Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation, a heritage livestock preservation facility here. The guest turned away, and Chip quickly recovered, his dignity intact.
Located on a 45-acre estate in Newport, SVF is the only organization in the country dedicated to conserving rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation. Chip, now SVF’s unofficial mascot, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early 2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mother’s womb and spent the next several months frozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7, 2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat.
The building adjacent to the one that houses Chip contains three stainless-steel tanks about the size of commercial washing machines. About 45,000 semen and embryo samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle, sheep and goats are preserved there in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 312 degrees — essentially a frozen ark. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transplants them into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.
Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.
The government's 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.
Minister Hilary Benn said shoppers had led the push for free-range eggs and could do the same for sustainable food.
The Tories said ministers "belatedly" recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.
Environment Secretary Mr Benn unveiled the government's Food 2030 plan at the Oxford Farming Conference and said a rising population and climate change meant food could not be taken for granted.
Crop scientists have been pushing up corn yields for decades. But the newer strains just can't stand the heat
By Andrew Leonard
A troubling fact about corn: In the United States from 1940-1960, after the introduction of hybrid corn and in the wake of the disastrous Dust Bowl years of 1934 and 1936, corn yields and corn heat tolerance both grew. But since 1960, while yields have continued to grow as new hybrid and genetically modified varieties have been introduced, along with other agricultural innovations, heat tolerance has actually fallen.
Why is this significant? Because after a certain temperature, usually around 86 degrees Fahrenheit, corn yields drop dramatically. And even the most conservative mainstream climate scientist predictions about the effect of global warming include temperature rises that would hammer the corn-growing heartland of the United States.
These insights come from a fascinating new paper, "The Evolution of Heat Tolerance of Corn: Implications for Climate Change" by North Carolina State University's Michael J. Roberts, a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University. The researchers take advantage of a 100 years of incredibly detailed information on corn yields and temperature records in Indiana, the third-largest corn-growing state in the U.S.
How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community
by Heather C. Flores
Foreword by Toby Hemenway
"In a time of so much hopelessness this book reminds us that there really is so much we can do. I encourage everyone seeking peace and well being to dig into this rich loam of information. It will inspire you to grow food not lawns."
—Keith McHenry, Co-founder of the Food Not Bombs movement
Gardening can be a political act. Creativity, fulfillment, connection, revolution—it all begins when we get our hands in the dirt.
Food Not Lawns combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens."
But Food Not Lawns doesn't begin and end in the seed bed. This joyful permaculture lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden—simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community—to all aspects of life. Plant "guerilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces.
Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and the ills of our throwaway society. In Food Not Lawns, she shows us how to reclaim the earth one garden at a time.
Farming is a global business these days — what happens on the far side of the world often impacts what farmers in the Southeast plant and how they market their crops.
Farming is also a local business and how the public perceives agriculture goes a long way toward influencing state and federal elected officials, who make the laws that govern agriculture. For the most part our elected officials don’t really understand what farming is all about and don’t have unified voice to explain it to them.
Food safety is a big public issue, yet the estimated 6-7 million tons of potentially toxic municipal waste that goes on farm land each year is not a public issue — at least not yet.
In Virginia, for example, there are about 8.5 million acres of farmland, but only 55,000 acres are treated with biosolids, a legal, but euphemistic term for municipal sludge.
[While the jury is still out as to whether the necessary changes can be brought about successfully within the capitalist model, at least the sentiment about what is worthy of so-called 'investment' (sic) is pointing in the right direction. - Christian]
by Woody Tasch
Foreword by Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini
Review published in the May/June 2009 issue of Orion magazine
THE AMERICAN ECONOMY was built not for stability, but rather for appetite and yearning. The corporation, the money system—our basic institutions are rootless, placeless, and encoded solely for financial gain. Every new dollar that enters the economy comes laden with interest, which becomes a silent taskmaster that drives the machinery at an ever more frantic pace.
As Woody Tasch points out in his new book, the financial system is out of sync with the natural system. The algorithms of finance are oblivious to what the rhythms of nature can support, and the relentless quest for yield is exhausting the substrate of the entire system. “As financial time contracts,” Tasch asks, “how can we maintain a healthy relation with natural time?”
March 3, 2010 - The Center for Community Alternatives is the official sponsor of the Triangle Intentional Community Meetup Group who just had its first community 'hatched'. The agrarian intentional community ecovillage, Carolina Common Well, is now accepting applications for exploratory memberships.
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October 21, 2009 - The Center for Community Alternatives is now breeding Gulf Coast sheep at its rural facility in Hurdle Mills, North Carolina. The breed, listed as 'critical' by the American Breeds Conservancy, is being brought back from the brink of extinction. The Center had three lambs born this Winter: two rams and a ewe. Please contact us
[While the jury is still out as to whether the necessary changes can be brought about successfully within the capitalist model, at least the sentiment about what is worthy of so-called 'investment' (sic) is pointing in the right direction. - Christian]
