Can you find local produce?

Who prevents us from buying fresh, local fruits and vegetables?

Did you guess the government? Move to the head of the class!

Jack Hedin tells us what happens to small organic farmers who try to expand in order to meet demand. Add to this, the massive transfer of land so that corn can be grown for ethanol, and you'll see how hard it will be in some areas for people to find local food.

Since I live in California, which is not a big grain-grower, I have lots of fresh produce to choose from. But Jack is right about the supermarkets. Except for Whole Foods, none of the big chains have local produce.

And Jack points out that California's Big Ag is one of the culprits in this problem - our mono-culture corporate growers want to have all the sales. And they want government to protect them from the small fry.

Is that hypocrisy I smell from these "free-market" types?

This isn't the way to run a country, folks. Or an economy. Leave the small farmer alone and let him grow for the local people.

Unethical business

Another recent newspaper article caught my attention. This one is about California berry growers who are unhappy with new restrictions on pesticides. It has to do with the air pollution caused by spraying the fumigant. The pollution violates the Clean Air Act.

The growers say they'll have to stop growing strawberries if the regulations take effect. Only strawberries, evidently, make enough money to make it worth it for them to grow anything. No strawberries - no nothing, is what they are saying. They'll let the land lie fallow.

Hallelujah. Let it lie fallow. Let the soil recover from pesticide poisoning and then grow something organically. Something that nurtures the soil and the air and is safe for people to eat.

Honestly, conventional strawberries are one the worst fruits you can eat, when it comes to the amount of pesticides passed on to the consumer. It never ceases to astonish me that these things sell at all.

Why are people still buying them? Why doesn't everybody ignore the conventionally grown berries and buy the organic ones?

But you know what really gets my goat? It's the attitude of business. Particularly, of the farmers who grow these conventional crops, but also of business in general. Because this attitude is everywhere.

It's the idea that I, as a business owner (of any kind of business) have the right to produce my product for the cheapest rate I can. That I have the right to destroy rivers, soil, air, to poison people (as long as it can't be "proven"), to cause erosion, to wipe out species of fish or birds or animals or plants, to hire illegal immigrants and pay them starvation wages, to do anything I can get away with, for as long as I can get away with it.

As long as I can make a profit.

I can hear your eyes rolling. But look, I'm a business owner. I have nothing against making a profit. And you know, I could make a better profit if I covered the cost of my clients' groceries and went to the cheapest grocery store on the block and bought old, marked-down meat, produce, and canned goods loaded with perservatives. I could easily charge my clients enough to cover the cost of these groceries twice over.

Great bottom line!

But it's not honest. It's not ethical. I feel strongly enough about it to run my own business in an ethical way. And I feel that every single business, everywhere, should be run in such a way. No corners cut. No cheap ingredients.

You know, back when the processed food industry was in its infancy, food processors used "fillers" such as sawdust, plaster of Paris, and chalk, strychnine, copper chloride, arsenic...

Really and truly. And it wasn't China. It was us.

All in the name of increasing profits.

Conventional growing methods, using fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and mono-culture are just another example. With far-reaching consequences because we are killing the soil and poisoning the water.

This isn't the way to run a business. Yet we allow our entire economy to rest on it, and ridicule the people who call for ethical behavior.

Is this really the way we should live?

Cynicism about Diversity

As I was reading about the seed banks, the nasty corner of my brain began a taunt against those who think mono-culture is a good thing. One of the problems created by Big Ag and our commercialized food industry, is that it's created a reduction in seed diversity.

Nature creates hundreds, maybe even thousands, of varieties within a particular species. Before industrialization got hold of corn, for example, it grew in wild proliferation throughout the Americas. Now we're down to just a few varieties, grown in great plots of land that cover thousands of acres. It's all the same kind of corn and we all eat it. We eat it in practically everything, due to the proliferation of corn syrup. Cheap and filling.

Monsanto and its ilk would love to make this situation even worse. They like nothing better than creating a specific seed and getting a patent on it, then selling it, year after year, to farmers who then have to buy the special fertilizer to make it grow. And they sue the bejesus out of farmers whose fields are contaminated by these wind-blown seeds, accusing them of "stealing" the seeds.

When these are the farmers who went out of their way to NOT buy the damn things because they wanted to grow Real Food!

Oh, don't get me started.

Where did my point go?

Ah, there it is: I am bitterly amused to see us, on one hand, establishing special, "safe" places to store our seeds, when on the other hand, we're voluntarily wiping out the same seeds and handing our lives over to Big Ag.

Don't we get it? We need these seeds. We need diversity. One single insect, one single bacteria or mold or virus, can wipe out entire food sources because we've let the food industry whittle our crops down to one or two varieties. Mono-culture brings the same danger. We shouldn't grow acres and acres of Just One Thing because we lose the protection that is built-in when there are many different plants in the same area. Or the protection that comes from rotating crops.

We should fight it everywhere we see it. One of the best ways to fight it is to not buy it. Refuse to buy produce grown on a farm that uses mono-culture, fertilizers and pesticides. Insist on organic, sustainably grown food. That includes fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, fish... whatever you eat, it should be grown honestly and sustainably. It should benefit the planet and be there for your grandchildren.

As much as possible, grow your own. Preserve your own by canning, drying, freezing... whatever you can do.

We need to think about our food. We need to insist that we have control over it and refuse to support wasteful practices and policies, whether they are implemented by government or by corporations.

Keep it local. Keep it diverse. Support organizations like Seedsavers.org or Slow Food in their attempts to protect our plant heritage. Let nature do what nature does best: create new and diverse things to eat.

Saving Seeds

No, not saving seeds as in reserving from your crop so you can plant next year. That's good to do, too.

This is saving seeds in the doomsday-apocolypse-kind-of-way. I didn't know we did this. That's "we" as in the human race. Yep, this is a joint effort, world-wide. There are "seed banks" scattered around the planet, where the seeds for our food are safely stored in case of disaster.

Cool, isn't it?

The reason I heard about it is that a new seed bank has just opoened in Norway: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built deep in the permafrost in a remote Arctic mountain. It can withstand earthquakes, storms, and nuclear attacks.

You know, in case there are any survivors of said nuclear attack and they want to eat. Of course, we have to hope that someone with the keys to the place also survives, but that's another issue...

There are other seed banks, not all in great places and some have been destroyed (such as one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan - guess who might have, indirectly, had something to do with that?). A bank in the Phillipines was flooded after a typhoon.

So it's important where these are built. Having worked on the Yucca Mountain Project - our feeble attempt to find some place to bury nuclear waste - I have a good idea of hard it is to find these places. There are so many factors to consider.

But the idea is great. The seeds will be safe and people can withdraw them as needed (no, it's not necessary to wait for the nuclear attack). Any country in the world can deposit seeds for no cost.

It's funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, founded by U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International.

Now for the cynicism: we need to make sure Monsanto doesn't have any ownership in this thing. They'll patent all the seeds and indenture future generations who need to make withdrawals.

Tomorrow, I'll get more cynical and talk a little about the "diversity" side of this issue.

PCB in our Food

The CC Times had an article today about cleaning up the bay. For years, there has been a warning in place to severely limit eating fish taken from the San Francisco Bay. All the usual committees and investigations and political discussions have been going on and at last, a plan has been sent to a state board for consideration. Amid all the usual protests from industry, which does not want to pay for cleaning up the bay.

This kind of thing has always thrown me for a loop. In the first place, what industry, for whatever reason, has the right to pollute a source of food for a people? Where did they get this right? Why has government turned a blind eye and let them do this? How is it possible that people don’t see a problem with this?

PCB was banned almost 30 years ago. Go us. We did something right. But the damage from PCB did not fade into the sunset. It seeped into our soil and into our air and into our water. And it doesn’t go away for a long, long time.

So we are told to eat no more than two meals a month of fish from our bay. Pregnant women and children are limited to one meal a month.

But this is our food source. We should have access to all the edible species in our food source, with sensible conservation our only restriction.

Here’s the jaw-dropping paragraph:

“A coalition of business and industrial groups argued that rather than requiring costly cleanups, the water board should focus more on warning anglers not to eat too much fish.”

What!? How? How did we get to this? What is wrong with these people?

“Just don’t eat?” That’s your solution? Every person in that coalition should lose their business to a more responsible adult and THEY should have to live in such a way that most of their food comes from the bay.

How completely arrogant and irresponsible they are. I’m furious. We should all be furious.

Mercury

Have you heard about the "comprehensive" study (shouldn't all studies be comprehensive?) about mercury in fish from the delta? It's been in the paper lately. We've known for years that there is mercury in fish and we have to be careful how much we eat. But now they've determined that the amount of mercury depends on the type of fish and where in the delta it lived.

So some are safer than others. Basically, the larger, predator fish have more mercury than the smaller species and the fish caught nearer Sacramento will have more than the fish caught lower down. Great. Information we need, as long as we remember to take it to the store with us and ask the seafood clerk where the fish was caught and hopefully, he or she will know that.

Not really likely, methinks.

My only point is a complaint I've had ever since I was a teenager: why do business people (whoever or whatever kind of business) feel they have the right to pollute our water (in this example) to make it easier and cheaper for them to do business?

This has always pissed me off. In this particular case, the mercury (most of it) is a holdover from our golddigging days. You heard me - over 150 years ago! It was cheaper and faster to blast the hills with high-pressured water and wash all the debris into the rivers, so that's what they did.

Okay, maybe they didn't know they were washing mercury into the rivers and condemning their descendants to a polluted environment and poisonous fish. But this kind of thing happened all over, with all kinds of industries. It's why we insist on having regulations on businesses, now. It's why businesses will pack up and go to China or someplace without regulations, so they can poison those people and save some money.

And my reaction has not changed from the way I thought 35 years ago, and this is the way I run my own business, now:

If you can't afford to run your business in a way that protects and sustains the environment and the people around you, then don't be in business. Please, do something else. We don't want you.