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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] The looming food crisis

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The looming food crisis
  • Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 06:35:29 -0500

But let's not oversimplify and despair.  Gains can be made.  A healthy diet can be achieved by a variety of (preferably home or locally-grown) vegetables, and grains, supplemented by a very minor amount of milk, eggs, and meat.  My wife and I currently consume about 6 - 8 eggs, a half-gallon of milk, and about 2 pounds of (various) meat per week.  This for a lifestyle of heavy manual labor.  And currently, what we can't grow comes from a supermarket.  The biggest improvement came from eliminating "processed" foods.  Buy as near to natural as you can find.  Not perfect, not cheap, not as good as we will need to do, but I'm encouraged by the progress.  We are fitter, and our grocery bills are smaller, than a year ago, and I'm convinced that the improvements we've made can be implemented by nearly everyone.
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
From: Liz
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The looming food crisis

At 03:53 PM 8/31/2007, you wrote:

>Yes, there is a place for various animals in a sustainable society, both
>food and work animals, and right and wrong ways to handle them. Where Lappe
>hits hard is the factory farms where cattle and poultry are crammed into
>tight quarters, force fed unnatural grains and antibiotics, and sent sick
>to slaughter. We can do without the stinking, gargantuan feedlots of the
>midwest, and feed millions more people. If the ethanol switch closes down
>some of them and makes beef cost more, fine with me.

I'm not a vegetarian, so my comments were based on simple economics.
I look at what beef costs right now in the grocery store and wonder
how anyone can afford it. Since I won't buy supermarket beef anyway,
and the man who was selling locally raised beef went out of business,
our meat consumption has been drastically reduced. I use beans, rice
and other complementary proteins, but I fear that many people are
substituting simple carbohydrates, worsening what is already an
epidemic of Type II diabetes (if it's correct to speak of a
completely preventable disease as though it were somehow transmissible).

The problems of contemporary food production and transportation are
so interwoven that it's very difficult for the average person to step
outside the system. I've been talking to a social services friend
about holding cooking classes for people on public assistance, to
help them find ways to get the most food for their limited dollars
(or food stamps). Unfortunately, in spite of the obvious need for
something like this, she says it's almost impossible to overcome the
temptation of brightly colored boxes of pasta mixes and similar
starchy "foods" on the supermarket shelves. It's going to have to all
come crashing down before any real change takes place.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com

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