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The Good Food Evolution
"Every year 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses occur, leading to about 300,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths." (New York Times, Sept. 4, 2010)
That's because most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the food produced by agribusinesses who care as little about our health as they do about the health of the chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and where visible, is covered with excrement.
Fortunately, another healthier agriculture has been emerging in the last few decades.
This good food evolution has usually been started by grassroots individuals who grew up in rural communities and now live in cities.
In Detroit, for example, African American elders raised in the South saw the vacant lots in our deteriorating neighborhoods not as blight but as opportunities to plant community gardens that would also give city kids a sense of the time and patience that are a normal part of country life and that human beings now need for our continuing evolution. Detroiter Gerald Hairston, who grew up in W.Virginia. brought these elders together, and called them "Gardening Angels."
When we started Detroit Summer in 1992, a program to involve Detroit youth in rebuilding, redefining, and respiiriting Detroit from the ground up, these Gardening Angels provided the agricultural experience and skills needed to reconnect city youth with the Earth. Out of this reconnection of country and city, of oldsters and youngsters, the Detroit urban agricultural movement was born.
Now there are at least 1300 community gardens in Detroit, and almost every week another producer or writer requests our participation in a news feature or documentary highlighting the role of urban gardening in the rebirth of Detroit.
The weekend of September 10-12, people from all over the country and world, including a delegation of Detroit urban gardeners, attended a Good Food revolution conference at the Wisconsin State Fair Park in Milwaukee, convened by Growing Power.
Growing Power was founded by Will Allen, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper and the first African American to play on the University of Miami basketball team, who never forgot that the people in rural Maryland where he grew up always had plenty to eat ,even if they lacked fancy clothes. So when he retired from pro basketball, he bought a few acres in Milwaukee, and founded Growing Power.
Today this farm and community food center provides fresh produce for thousands of Milwaukee residents, attracts visitors from all over the world to its workshops in urban agriculture and aquaculture, and has inspired the many neighborhood gardens and small businesses that are at the heart of Milwaukee's Renaissance.
The May 2010 issue of TIME Magazine included Will among the world's 100 most influential people.
At the September 10-12 Conference, delegates shared information about how to create a new food system that builds better health and more closely-knit communities. Workshops were given in Urban and Small farming, Urban Aquaculture, Brownsfield Development, Renewable Energy and Experiential Education to involve schoolchildren in the movement for more nutritious food.
Among the speakers were Will Allen, Winona LaDuke, an Objibwe activist who is executive director of Honor the Earth, Children's Health specialist Dr. Judith Palfrey, and myself, who spoke via Skype from Detroit.
The Good Food evolution is an inspiring example of the "Next American Revolution." It's been a "Quiet Revolution." People have been simply exercising the power we have within ourselves to live more simply for the sake of our own physical and spiritual health and the health of the Earth and other living things.
But the Milwaukee conference makes clear that this evolution is gathering momentum. It is an idea whose time has come.
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21 Comments so far
Show AllAs we get control of our own food supplies, we will not die so much from sugar diabetes, from cancer, from coronary disease.
Corporations cause many modern diseases. They dump pesticides, which are typically endocrine system disruptors, on or into our food, and then we eat the food.
They also do their best to suck all of the living nutrients out of food. Tomatoes are pumped full of water these days, and picked green too.
Their factory farms are the source of the MRSA ravaging our hospitals. They continue to breed germs which are highly resistant to all antibiotics, because for them it's cheap to maintain pigs in terrible conditions and on very low doses of antibiotics, the perfect breeding ground for superbugs. They continue to undo all of the research the world has put into controlling infections.
Last week I was telling one of my Obamabot co-workers about intergrated corporations that produce chemicals to enable toxic food production, produce toxic food, insure you in case the toxic food makes you ill and make the drugs to treat symptoms when the toxic food makes you ill. They profit at every step of the process.
When she responded by calling me a consipracy theorist, I pointed out that if I wrote an article on this topic in a business journal it would be received as innovative, savvy business practice.
Local food is good. Naivete is not. S 510 will give Monsanto total control over food in the US.
"41 words inside S 510": http://yupfarming.blogspot.com/2010/09/41-words-inside-s-510.html
"Again, Monsanto has no interest in this bill!": http://yupfarming.blogspot.com/2010/09/again-monsanto-has-no-interest-in-this.html
"S 510 and Crohn's Disease" (or what a food safety bill shouldn't look like): http://yupfarming.blogspot.com/2010/09/s-510-and-crohns-disease.html
"What's 'around' S 510?": http://yupfarming.blogspot.com/2010/08/whats-around-s-510.html
Exactly how S 510 will take your gardens: http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/s-510-manager’s-amended-version-the-corporate-“coop”…the-chicken-shit’s-come-home-to-roost/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PPJ+(PPJ)
The 2009 Food ‘Safety’ Bills Harmonize Agribusiness Practices in Service of Corporate Global Governance [Proof Monsanto designed these dangerous bills.]
http://tiny.cc/sTQN5
History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job
http://tiny.cc/i9zyz
The Festering Fraud behind Food Safety Reform
http://tiny.cc/ocROi
Food "Safety" Reform and the Covert Continuation of the Enclosure Movement [The Rockefellers, IMF, World Bank are behind this bill. See page 5]
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Food-Safety-Reform-and-t-by-Nicole-Johnson-100426-437.html?show=votes
A reminder of what Monsanto is and how they operate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLzELDt3d2I
Past time to wake up.
After moving to Sacramento in the early '60s, I learned what I still consider to be one of the most important lessons I've ever learned when we discovered a small Chinese community huddled along the bank of the river south of Sacramento one day as we explored this strange new part of the country we now lived in.
The buildings were old even then. There wasn't any room for growth, and behind the storefronts at the edge of the public roadway, the small houses of the Chinese prisoners huddled closely together. Prisoners they were, as I learned years later from a documentary of their lives on the History channel. They'd come here to help build our railroads and other great projects, and were then rejected by Americans, and forced into these little communities, their lives very restricted.
Amazingly, in every nook and cranny of exposed soil between those small homes, if only a foot square, there were vegetables growing, and more were in hanging baskets, and wooden boxes wherever there had been spaces where they could be placed. It's lessons such as this that we should also be teaching our children and grandchildren, along with the truth of what our food supply has become.
that's the way most of the people in the world outside the US would like to live if they were allowed. many actually do live that way.
when i visited south korea a decade ago, i found south korean households keeping several "garbage" recepticles for sorting and maximum recycling. i was told that it costs more to dispose of an old washing machine than to buy a new one. so they would have bulky items repaired as best as they could. everyone was familiar with the well-defined guidelines and participating in the entire process. i repeatedly saw their jaw dropping at the nonchalant american practices.
p.s. yes, south korea is one of many "more-developed" countries that have been using china as their dumping ground for hazardous industrial garbage. they are no perfect angels.
In this world of declining moral and cultural values, this fine article is like a ray of sunshine on a cold dismal day. Thank you
Growing your own and buying local is good and practical up to a point. If we want to go without coffee, tea, rice, wheat, beer, bananas etc then we can be even more local, but I doubt you will get many converts.
We need a 2 tier system, local for as much as we can and fair for the rest. The first we can do, the second will need some effort.
However getting out and growing food requires almost year round effort, attention, a willingness to get dirty, sweaty, achey and when the weather, pests etc don't cooperate, very frustrated.
It also requires knowledge you can no longer glean from PBS 'victory garden' or even a book.
Those of us who grow food and teach others have a lot of work to do to get people off their backsides and away from the TV.
While food is too cheap and convenient to buy prepared, we locavores have our work cut out for us. We also have to contend with those that are in charge of the food supply who (ironically) instill in us that local is not safe (FOTFL).
what you can't or don't grow locally but you have to have can be traded with other localities.
no one is advocating that everyone grow own food and become gardener / farmer, either.
you don't have to choose between "thousand choices" aribusiness and "a handful choices" local farming.
again, there's no billions, in home / community gardening, to be had by monopolistic global corporates.
wall street and its bidders in DC will do their very best to discourage and even criminalize decentralized small-scale farming / gardening that they can't control.
"grow and eat locally" is the most critical and doable componant of the "alternative way of life" movement.
Aberfan September 13th, 2010 11:51 am
"It also requires knowledge you can no longer glean from PBS 'victory garden' or even a book."
How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons
http://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-Vegetables-Possible/dp/1580082335
http://growbiointensive.org/
http://www.bountifulgardens.org/
Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetables-Garden/dp/1890132276
http://www.fourseasonfarm.com/
Terran
Yes, more gardens in cities! I like the idea that even if you are cash broke you could still have lots to eat. (though maybe it's not so much fun when it's 100% zucchini...)
Also, more home fermenting of live culture foods / beverages. Raw milk cheese and kefir, herbal beers with the wild yeast left in it, kombucha, etc. The nutrition in live culture foods is more easily absorbed by the body than vitamin pills.
To Terran,
OK yes there are books ;)
Thanks for the web sites I will check them out.
Also check out Kitchen Gardeners International http://kitchengardeners.org/
Please add Steve Solomon's "Growing Food when it counts" as well as his soil and health online library.
I was sloppy, what I meant to say is that the information in books may not be very applicable to your area , soil and climate. eg. Elliott Coleman farms in New England not KY.
Hope you had a good growing season
pax
Solomon's book is okay if you have acreage.
Try "the urban homestead" by Coyne and Knutzen, "this organic life" by Joan Dye Gussow, "animal vegetable miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver and "farm city" by Novella
Carpenter.
Only the urban homestead is a true gardening book. The others are more approach, autobiography, lifestyle and very enjoyable reads!
wow
I'm glad someone else has read Solomon's work.
He has an interesting take on growing food.
Thanks for the Coyne and Knutzen reference.
Novella's book makes me want to keep pigs, sadly not allowed in the city....
You know what's scary...I recently visited a national park and was reading the literature there about why not to feed the animals. One of the reasons given was that if the animals eat enough garbage (human concocted "food") their digestive systems will change so that they can no longer digest their normal healthy natural foods. Supposedly they can die from starvation while having a stomach full of food. I'm wondering if the literature is exaggerating things, and yet it begs the question: Can our digestive systems be manipulated so that we aren't able to eat healthy anymore even if we want to? Isn't it strange that foods that cause unbearable gas, for instance, such as cruciferous vegetables, are some of the healthiest? Did it used to be that way a hundred years ago before all these chemicals began being introduced into our food supply?
CurvyRedSue: Our digestive systems aren't so much "manipulated" as just plain trashed.
See "Why Stomach Acid Is Good For You" by JV Wright, MD and L Lenard, PhD for a real eye-opener on how the medical profession has aided and abetted this travesty.
Urban farming could reduce a few trips to the groceries but we need to get back our lands and get the small farms going if we have to break away from agri-business and sustain.
This is the best group of comments I have seen for awhile; must be gardeners. Stir fry your zucchini with onion and garlic. Add some beet tops and whatever else you have as greens. Yum. Growing food is great fun, especially if you can do it with some friends. The Jeavons book is worth getting. Read about perma-culture.
Responding to CurvyRedSue, I have stopped corporate food. When I go away from home and have to eat corporate food, my digestion and elimination reacts negatively to it. It takes a few days after returning home to my garden food and my own dairy milk as well as moderate amounts of grass-fed beef before my digestion and elimination returns to normal. I changed over to non-corporate food including having severe gastroesophageal reflux disease without too much distress; however, trying to eat it now causes problems so I am pretty much stuck with my non-corporate food, but it is so tasty it is not much of a sacrifice although I do miss some of my favorite junk foods. Non corporate foods I have no “heartburn” and no constipation. My blood work done recently with liberal full-fat, non-pasteurized goat’s milk since 1980 is completely normal.