10. Vegetable based food

DENUTRIFIED FOOD AND INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

Recently, it has been noted that Americans are shrinking--as junk food and denutrified food takes its toll.

"Poverty and poor diet mean the average US man is getting smaller, while Europeans keep growing taller
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1185457,00.html

Researchers have made a startling discovery: Americans are shrinking. A nation once famed for its strapping, well-nourished youth is gradually diminishing in physical stature." Of course, it's only Americans shinking, as the rest of the world continues to grow. Why? The U.S. has rejected health for industrial production in many food products and the lies of big medicine that ignore industrial production kills food, with suffering of the population, the soil, and the economy as a result.

A book on our innate "bioregional diet" as important to resuscitate for our own health is Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, by Gary Paul Nabhan

From Publishers Weekly
With 21st-century science promising better living through genetic engineering, and myriad diet fads claiming to be the answer to obesity and disease, this exploration of the coevolution of communities and their native foods couldn't be more timely. Ethnobiologist Nabhan (Coming Home to Eat) investigates the intricate web of culture, food and environment to show that even though 99.9% of the genetic makeup of all humans is identical, "each traditional cuisine has evolved to fit the inhabitants of a particular landscape or seascape over the last several millennia." Sardinians are genetically sensitive to fava beans, which can give them anemia but can also protect them from the malaria once epidemic in the region. Navajos are similarly sensitive to sage. [Other cultural regions--of food, genes, and culture over time--thus build animal fats into diets as why people some people are healthy on these diets and others less so.] In both cases, traditional knowledge allows safe interactions with these powerful medicine/poisons through cooking methods or food combinations. Nabhan questions the wisdom of genetic therapy, which "normalizes" the "bad" genes that can cause sickness but also enhance immunity. Most inspiring in this bioethnic detective story are Cretans, maintaining their health for centuries through traditional living, and Native Americans and Hawaiians, whose communities, devastated by diabetes, find an antidote by returning to their traditional foods, customs and agriculture. Mixing hard science with personal anecdotes, Nabhan convincingly argues that health comes from a genetically appropriate diet inextricably entwined with a healthy land and culture.

From Booklist:
Ethnobotanist and nutritional ecologist Nabhan continues the paradigm-altering investigation into the matrix of food, place, ethnicity, and well-being that he's been conducting in such influential books as Coming Home to Eat (2002). A leading voice in the slow-food movement and a thoroughly engaging guide, Nabhan now delineates the evolutionary dimension of newly recognized interactions among cuisine, culture, and genetics that inspired him to modify an old adage: "We are what our [recent regional instead of ancient paleolithic!] ancestors ate and drank." He teases out the evolutionary secrets of chili peppers and explains why some folks like them hot and others can't take the heat. Since it's easiest to see the hidden benefits of ethnic cuisines in isolated island societies, he travels to Sardinia, where, for centuries, fava beans have protected the populace from malaria, and to Hawaii, where natives have discovered that traditional yet neglected taro dishes control diabetes [in their genotypes best]. With millions [really the majority of the world, he writes] of people suffering from little-understood food-related maladies, Nabhan's revelations of the complexities of our [regionally] inherited interactions with food, the true significance of the healthful "synergies" of traditional ethnic cuisines, and the essentiality of both biodiversity and cultural diversity are as critical as they are fascinating.

Therefore, beware the industrial pressures that attempt to avoid your 'bioregional diet' of traditional regional foods, many of them (not all!) high in saturated, animal fats. And beware the people who do this merely to sell "unsaturated vegetable oils." Why? Ms. Fallon describes the U.S. as the worst case scenario of powerful industrial destruction of bioregional dietary standards, where diet and scientific knowledge is sculpted or perverted to be advertising for industrial profit for such unhealthy versions of vegetable oils, instead of for health:

The Oiling of America, by Mary Fallon (of the Weston Price Foundation, discussing Dr. Mary Enig's (Ph.D., medicine) research on animal fats, cholesterol, and industrial food's perversions of scientific studies on health
2:03:00 min

"Margarine is the bad guy and butter and eggs are the good guys [for certain regional foodways--see Nabhan's book above.] For fifty years, big business, government agencies and medical organizations have campaigned deceptively against animal fats, meat, eggs, butter and other nutritious, traditional foods, leading to huge profits from the sale of toxic margarine, shortenings and liquid vegetable oils, and the foods that contain them [because these have greater profit margin potentials for large scale suppliers than the others]. Scientific data contradicting current anti-animal fat public health policy was suppressed and censored for many years. Dr. Enig and Sally Fallon now tell you the truth about how that happened. The Oiling of America will open your eyes to fraud and deception behind the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. Topics include:

* How scientists cheat in scientific studies
* Why cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease
* The dangers of cholesterol-lowering diets and drugs
* Why trans fatty acids and [the industrial chemical processing techniques of many] liquid vegetable oils are [making them] so dangerous to human health."

In the 'medicines/drugs' section of Commodity Ecology be sure to read what is posted there about the health properties of saturated vegetable coconut oil. In general:

[1] Check out the films at BioregionalStateTV for other agricultural solutions for sustainability. Click on 'more from user' for the rest.

[2] Additionally see the category "6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics" for how to remove the urban and rural metabolic breaks in nutrient flows with city-to-farm composting and other ingenious ways to stop such separation of human consumption from production.

[3] In the name of maintaining biodiversity, the Slow Food Movement of institutionalizing biodiversity and varietals is a far more long term and far more sound model for health, ecology, and economy--than industrial pesticide/herbicide laden agriculture.

"The Slow Food movement was created to combat fast food and claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion. It was the first established part of the broader Slow movement. The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to fast food. It has since expanded globally to 100 countries and now has 83,000 members."

As if it's not obvious, I don't care for totalitarian unsustainable police states whether they are Cuban or based in the United States. However, for a working model of organic, slow-food, pro-biodiversity agriculture and political mechanisms that support it instead of destroy it, take a page from the "accidental agricultural revolution" in Cuba after they lost access to subsidized Soviet Block inputs from 1989:

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-1 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadcasting Company
46 min
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5350731284170267256



"Cuba: The Accidental Revolution are two one-hour documentaries celebrating the country’s success in providing for itself in the face of a massive economic crisis, and how it’s latest revolutions, an agricultural revolution and a revolution in science and medicine are having repercussions around the world. Cuba: The Accidental Revolution (Part 1), airing Sunday, July 30 at 7 P.M. on CBC Television, examines Cuba's response to the food crisis created by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989. At one time Cuba's agrarian culture was as conventional [and unsustainable and polluting] as the rest of the world. It experienced its first "Green [Industrial Agricultural and Toxic] Revolution" when Russia was supplying Cuba with chemical and mechanical "inputs." However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 ended all of that, and almost overnight threw Cuba's whole economic system into crisis. Factories closed, food supplies plummeted. Within a year the country had lost over 80% of its foreign trade. With the loss of their export markets and the foreign exchange to pay for imports, Cuba was unable to feed its population and the country was thrown into a crisis. The average daily caloric intake of Cubans dropped by a third. Without fertilizer and pesticides, Cubans turned to organic methods. Without fuel and machinery parts, Cubans turned to oxen. Without fuel to transport food, Cubans started to grow food in the cities where it is consumed. Urban gardens were established in vacant lots, school playgrounds, patios and back yards [and the state allowed these to be private profit-driven cooperatives, as well as allowed urban farmers to use unused public land in usufruct]. As a result Cuba created the largest program in sustainable agriculture ever undertaken. By 1999 Cuba’s [organic] agricultural production had recovered and in some cases reached historic levels [thus in other words organic agriculture was more productive than suboptimal industrial/pesticide/herbicide based]."

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-2 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadasting Company
46 min.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3045843288423571289



"In Cuba: The Accidental Revolution (Part 2), airing Sunday, August 6 at 7 P.M. on CBC Television, we learn that the country has been blockaded since 1961, but today Cuba has the highest quality of life in the region, the highest life expectancy, and one of the highest literacy rates in all of Latin America. With the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba lost the foreign exchange needed to pay for expensive drugs and medicines. As a result, much of Cuba’s medicine today is based on medicinal plants. These are grown on farms, processed in small labs and made available to patients through an extensive network of medical clinics. Today Cuba’s advances in alternative medicine could have important consequences for other countries around the world. Cuba boasts other firsts as well: The Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana is regarded as the flagship biosciences lab in the developing world. Cuban scientists are working on an HIV vaccine, a meningitis vaccine, a Hepatitis C vaccine, and other pharmaceuticals. Cuba has also embarked on a program of medical internationalism. There are 25,000 Cuba doctors serving in 68 poor countries around the world. The Latin American School of Medical Science has 10,000 students from developing countries primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean. They are educated for free with the understanding they will return to their home countries to practice. Fidel Castro has survived many perils and at 78, he is rumoured to suffer from a number of afflictions. As his health declines the world wonders: what will become of Cuba's Green [Biodiversity] Revolution after he is gone? Even now Castro presides over a political system, which although socialist, has an economy where bartering and quasi-entrepreneurial practice seemingly influence many trades and professions, including the "green" sector...."

Totalitarianism has nothing to do with sustainability. It only perpetuates the forms of power and developmental inequalities that lead to environmental degradation. Lots of very ingenious agricultural/foddering relationships and medical regimes based on choice (shock!) of treatments have sprung up in Cuba because its totalitarianism was weakened in some sectors of the economy. It's worth knowing a different model of organizing agricultural and medial reality is not only possible, it is better. The political sector is still totalitarian in Cuba though the economic issues since 1989 have gone through some interesting forms of ecological rationality and ecological localization that go against state management and previous state encouragement of environmental degradation toward state encouragement to maintain biodiversity and locality instead.

Since in the bioregional state local jurisdictional autonomy on economic developmental path decisions is the primary jurisdiction, decisions like this along the model of 'does it fit where we live?' will be instrumental for setting commodity ecology policy in a watershed. This is seen in the many county level governments and states that have institutionalized higher local levels of human health and ecological health protection concerning commodities than federal baselines of the U.S. It is additionally seen in the 'accidental biodiversity localization revolution' in Cuba since 1989.

Thus, decisions on all commodities will be up to particular local watersheds, a model of state more akin to modeling biodiversity and ecological variegation as the purpose of the state to protect and maintain, instead of destroy. However, this fails to mean that large scale baseline standards laws (or laws to outlaw) certain commodity uses and merely supply-side uses will disappear from larger jurisdictions. These will only be baselines of human health, ecological, and economic sustainability local protection though, in all cases, instead of attempts to make multiple local areas suffer under larger federal 'glass ceilings laws' attempting to stop local health, ecological, and economic protection from going higher, when the public in that area wants it.

In this movement toward material sustainability, I can think of nothing more appropriate than [1] to demote supply-side biased agricultural monocropping and its recent budded-off twin, [2] to demote supply-side biased cloned animal strategies. Both have always been short term evil twins against local long term ecological, health, and economic durability. They are evil twins organizationally speaking because they are interwoven in massive pollution/externality streams connected via monocropping feedstocks for such 'animal monocropping.'

In this category of 'vegetable based food, the Slow Food Movement encouraging local varietal use and maintenance is far more important to institute with commodity ecology interactions.

Seven Arguments Against Industrialized Agriculture

Arguments against agricultural monocropping are very numerous and interrelated to health, biodiversity/ecological, and economic sustainability issues:

[1] Organic actually has equal or higher output than industrialized agriculture.

[2] The industrialized agricultural food is incredibly denutrified and denatured--leading to wider ill health.

[3] The social practices of creating industrialized food is self-defeating. It is connected to soil erosion and humus demotion.

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, damage to the soil was noticed, and its effects on vitamin content in the food were noticed. From Ausubel's book Seeds of Change:

"During the period of the 1920s and 1920s, several U.S. scientists noted that food quality, along with animal and human health, declined when the synthetic NPK trinity of nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium was substituted for organic manures and compost. So striking were these findings that the scientists and over four hundred medical doctors in England published a statement by the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet calling for a revolution within medicine. They argued for a greater emphasis on preventive medicine with a balanced fertile soil as the foundation of a healthy diet.

It was further noted that organic seeds actually did much better than chemically treated seeds, despite the propaganda otherwise:

"In the 1920s, the nutritionist Sir Robert McCarrison experimented with cultivating seeds organically and chemically [for a comparison of outcome effects on each]. His tests showed that the seed from a manure-grown crop was superior in its germination rate to other seeds [chemically grown]. The longer the manure had been composted, the more impressive was this biological effect....This experiment is one of the only ones ever conducted on organic seeds. This oversight is more surprising considering the primary importance of the superiority of organically grown foods...[p. 130-1]"

And there were even Congressional testimonies given.

The below is a verbatim unabridged extract from the 74th Congress 2nd Session: Senate Document 264, in 1936, showing they were aware that "modern" agricultural positional choices of herbicides/pesticides are really regressive politically since it is increasingly destroying the consumer instead of serving them. Minerals were being leached out of the food. However, still nothing is being done, belying that suppliers are really looking out for us at all--including looking out for themselves:

"Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins, or upon precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance?"

"The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them."

"The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren't worth eating as food...Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the text books on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it. Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further we delve into it the more startling it becomes."

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that a carrot is a carrot - that one is about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But it isn't; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking in the particular mineral element which our system requires and which carrots are supposed to contain."

"Laboratory test prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago (which doubtless explains why our forefathers thrived on a selection of foods that would starve us!)"

"No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them! And we are turning into big stomachs."

"No longer does a balanced and fully nourishing diet consist merely of so many calories or certain vitamins or fixed proportion of starches, proteins and carbohydrates. We know that our diets must contain in addition something like a score of minerals salts."

"It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack or one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives."

"We know that vitamins are complex chemical substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance for normal function of some special structure in the body. Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency. It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless."

"Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories of vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein of carbohydrates we consume."

"This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions of science to the problem of human health."

Senate Document No. 264, 1936. [[http://www.mich.com/~vit/gvt.html]]

[4] The power relations in agricultural food becomes a form of risk enforcement and forced 'foddering' of humans without their say in the matter if it is industrialized--along with the demotion of other options for health as

[5] Industrialized agriculture demotes biodiversity.

[6] It encourages by #5, more systemic ecological situations where pesticides/herbicides are unable to handle pests that only grow because of the ecological monocrop scale. If scale was smaller, pests would go down as a consequence as well.

While food becomes more denutrified with industrialized agriculture and all its externalities, the medical lobby wants to seriously demote vitamins even though it is known that many people are 'fed though malnourished' from their food. Vitamins and nutritious food are cheap solutions to health of a people and the ecology involved. However, such healthful practices interferes with profit margins of people who only get paid when you are in ill health, so the medical industry has a concern to maintain ill health instead of actively promote health. What else can be said except to note their desire--supposedly by 2009--to force the Codex Alimentarius (a U.N./WTO amalgam) to attempt to outlaw certain vitamin supplements? It's already recently implemented in Europe as of two years ago.

This following 2003 article excerpt, from the UK Alliance for Natural Health, an organization mounting a legal challenge to the Food Supplements Directive, was before Britain was roped into the same framework. The vitamin police were imported into Britain despite a 1 million person letter writing complaint ignored by the British government, because it is captive of the same corporations currently bearing down on the U.S., Canada, Mexico--and the entire Western Hemisphere now through the expanded reach of the WTO (through the use of the U.N.'s) Codex that makes the EU frameworks internationalized by 2009:

"ON 3rd JULY 2003, the European Food Supplements Directive was passed into English Law, which will, over the next few years, effectively ban around 5000 discrete products currently legal to sell in health food shops and pharmacies. This Directive has been devised and pushed forward by the unelected EU bureaucrats in order to "harmonize" the selling of health supplements throughout the EU, and was railroaded through the British Parliament by the Blair Government despite being rejected by the House of Lords. The way that the Government passed it was outrageous: just before the vote by the Standing Committee in the House of Commons, five Labour MPs who were going to vote against it were replaced by more obedient MPs. Even then, this directive was only passed by 8 votes to 6!

"So it seems that the European Parliament and the present UK Government are determined to pass the Food Supplements Directive despite the will of the people and even of MPs themselves. Why? Because it is the will of the EU Parliament which is very strongly influenced by the massive pharmaceutical companies in Europe. They are the only ones that will financially gain from the destruction of the health supplement industry. After all, people who take responsibility for their own health by taking supplements need less drugs because they are healthier.

"It is ironic that the Malnutrition Advisory Group has recently released a report showing that about 2 million people in the UK(!), including 60% of hospital patients, are not getting adequate nutrition and they admit that this is severally affecting their health and ability to heal. Of course, they don't mention supplements because they are still under the false and dangerous impression that this fictitious thing called a "well-balanced diet" exists that can adequately supply all the nutrients that the body needs. Of course, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support this; in fact, the research actually indicates that modern food production and processing techniques, cooking methods and pollution levels guarantee that it is well-nigh impossible for anyone to get the nutrients they need for optimum health on a "well-balanced diet". (And if you can't get optimum nutrition using ingredients from the supermarket, how on earth are you going to find it in a disgusting NHS hospital slop canteen!) Given this terrible state of modern nutrition, it is astonishing that our governments are trying to move legislation towards a vastly reduced availability of nutritional supplements. What is going on?

"Many of us have been protesting about these proposals for the past five years, writing letters to our MPs and MEPs, signing million signature petitions and even marching on Parliament here in London. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a democracy where the will of the people is the driving factor of legislation. The EU Parliament is not interested in personal freedom, or even personal health… only control and more control. And they have tried to justify this assault on our rights to take supplements on the grounds of our safety, even though health supplements have a safety record second to none — see LaLeva's Safety of Dietary Supplements and Comparative Safety Graph. And given their incredible safety, it is rather odd that the tabloid newspapers have been running sensational headlines over the past few years on the dangers of nutritional supplements. (I wonder who is behind those media campaigns?)

"Already, the supplement market in Germany and Norway are severely controlled, and it is illegal, for example, to buy Vitamin C over 200mg in strength because it is considered by Brussels to be unnecessary, although of course, it is very necessary for the population to continue to buy cigarettes and alcohol as they are very healthy for governments' bank accounts. I have just heard (10/3/04) from a very reliable source that a woman has been arrested in France for selling 500mg tablets of Vitamin C because in that country doses of that strength are now considered medicinal! (There is absolutely no safety issue with Vitamin C and you can freely buy 1000mg tablets here in the UK and US at the moment… I take 3 a day.) Soon, these sorts of controls will be pan-European, and you will only be able to buy from a small and bland list of ineffective, inorganic supplements and in doses that the EU diktat considers appropriate. Many innovative products and companies will simply disappear, and it will become much harder for each of us to take responsibility for our health."

More on this issue at a previous post.

So the WTO's Codex would 'harmonize' disharmoniously with current U.S., Canadian, and many other countries in the Western Hemisphere's more locally representative laws that benefit the consumer health freedom access to vitamins and minerals--forcing all countries internationally involved in the WTO to remove their pro-consumer and health freedom access legislation, like the EU. [[http://energygrid.com/health/2003/07ap-supban2.html]]

All of this consumptive consolidation and externalities are integrated into enforcement of industrial agriculture.

[7] Consolidated industrial models of agriculture impoverish farmers and make small scale land tenures less durable which are required for sustainability and institutionalizing biodiversity.

For instance, the huge opposition to "Terminator taxes" on simple seeds amongst the global farming population is another sign that industrialized agriculture is coming up against serious opposition for its extension.

Terminator Seed Rejected In UN Meeting In Brazil!

From Multiple Sources
3-25-2006

Just an hour ago here in Brazil, the Chair of the UN meeting announced that governments have agreed to reject language that would have undermined the moratorium on Terminator.

Groups, communities and individuals across the world have joined together in this fight to ban Terminator and your action has been effective in this important first step.

The Ban Terminator Campaign will continued to monitor the meetings today and next week.

Terminator rejection - a victory for the people

A broad coalition of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and civil society today celebrate the firm rejection of efforts to undermine the global moratorium on Terminator technologies - genetically engineered sterile seeds - at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Curitiba, Brazil.

"This is a momentous day for the 1.4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds," said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, "Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty. Terminator directly threatens our life, our culture and our identity as indigenous peoples", said Viviana Figueroa of the Ocumazo indigenous community in Argentina on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

"Todays' decision is a huge step forward for the Brazilian Campaign against GMOs," said Maria Rita Reis from the Brazilian Forum of Social movements and NGOs, "This reaffirms Brazils' existing ban on Terminator. It sends a clear message to the national government and congress that the world supports a ban on Terminator."

"Common sense has prevailed--lifting the Moratorium on the Terminator seeds would have been suicidal ­ literally," said Greenpeace International's Benedikt Haerlin from the Convention meeting. "This is a genuine victory for civil society around the world - it will go a long way to ensuring that biodiversity, food security and the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world are protected."

Terminators, or GURTS (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), are a class of genetic engineering technologies which allow companies to introduce seeds whose sterile offspring cannot reproduce, preventing farmers from re-planting seeds from their harvest. The seeds could also be used to introduce specific traits which would only be triggered by the application of proprietary chemicals by the same companies.

At the CBD, Australia, Canada and New Zealand along with the US government (not a party to the CBD) and a number of biotech companies were leading attempts to open the door to field testing of Terminator seeds by insisting on 'case by case' assessment of such technologies.

This [Anglo-American corporate] text was unanimously rejected today in the CBD's working group dealing with the issue.

It still needs to be formally adopted by the plenary of the CBD.

Despite today's victory, there is no doubt that the multinational biotech industry will continue to push sterile seed technology.

'Terminator' will rear its ugly head at the next UN CBD meeting in 2008.

The only solution a total ban on the technology once and for all," concluded Pat Mooney of the Ban Terminator Campaign. Now all national governments must enact national bans on Terminator as Brazil and India have done.

---
http://www.rense.com/general70/term.htm

And more from the author of Seeds of Deception, an hour-long talk by the author about his book on GM-crops:

The REAL Reasons You Want to
Avoid Genetically Modified Foods
(Jeffrey Smith, on his book Seeds of Deception)
59 min 57 sec




Conclusion

In general, the added risks and lack of similarity in industrial food versus more sustainably produced and nutritious food is anti-consumer, anti-farmer, anti-soil, and anti-sustainability on every level. There are many other forms of agriculture that have been developed, for instance perennial polyculture, or 'no till' agriculture, or forest multi-story polyculture.

As mentioned in the Commodity Ecology title page, institutions on the watershed level (CDIs and commodity ecology) help facilitate this changeover, equitably and sustainably, for the iterative long term.


[Slow Food Snail with Green Phrygian Cap]

The bioregional state in many ways, from the point of view of animal/vegetable varitals, the state formation implications or component of the Slow Food Movement:

The Slow Food movement incorporates a series of objectives within its mission, including:

* forming and sustaining seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems

* developing an "ark of taste" for each ecoregion, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated

* the preservation and promotion of local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation

* the organization of small-scale processing (including facilities for slaughtering and short run products)

* the organization of celebrations of local cuisine within regions (e.g. the Feast of Fields held in some cities in Canada)

* Taste Education

* educating consumers about the risks of fast food

* educating citizens about the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms

* educating citizens about the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties

* Various political programs to preserve family farms

* Lobbying for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy

* Lobbying against government funding of genetic engineering

* Lobbying against the use of pesticides

* Teaching gardening skills to students and prisoners

* Encouraging ethical buying in local marketplaces

Building those two institutions of commodity ecology and the CDI in all watersheds will aid in making commodity uses streamlined and optimized in particular watersheds as well as encourage local democratization--instead of merely watching corrupt governments institutionalize more biased commodity uses against local health, the ecology, and against the sustainability of the economy itself.