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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple
  • Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:17:25 -0600

Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple
By Joel Salatin, Public Affairs Books
Posted on June 20, 2009, Printed on June 20, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/

The new book Food Inc. explains the most realistic and effective
approach to transforming a system that is slowly but surely killing us.

Excerpted by permission from "Declare Your Independence" by Joel
Salatin, part of the book Food, Inc., available now from
PublicAffairs. Copyright 2009.

Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging
movement is simply opting out. The opt-out strategy can humble the
mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, "You do not
control me."

The time has come for people who are ready to challenge the paradigm
of factory-produced food and to return to a more natural, wholesome
and sustainable way of eating (and living) to make that declaration
to the powers that be, in business and government, that established
the existing system and continue to prop it up. It's time to opt out
and simply start eating better -- right here, right now.

Impractical? Idealistic? Utopian? Not really. As I'll explain, it's
actually the most realistic and effective approach to transforming a
system that is slowly but surely killing us.

What happened to food?

First, why am I taking a position that many well-intentioned people
might consider alarmist or extreme? Let me explain.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the unprecedented variety of bar-
coded packages in today's supermarket really does not mean that our
generation enjoys better food options than our predecessors. These
packages, by and large, having passed through the food-inspection
fraternity, the industrial food fraternity and the lethargic cheap-
food-purchasing consumer fraternity, represent an incredibly narrow
choice.

If you took away everything with an ingredient foreign to our 3
trillion intestinal microflora, the shelves would be bare indeed.
(I'm talking here about the incredible variety of microorganisms that
live in our digestive tracts and perform an array of useful
functions, including training our immune systems and producing
vitamins K and biotin.) In fact, if you just eliminated every product
that would have been unavailable in 1900, almost everything would be
gone, including staples that had been chemically fertilized, sprayed
with pesticides or ripened with gas.

Rather than representing newfound abundance, these packages wending
their way to store shelves after spending a month in the belly of
Chinese merchant marine vessels are actually the meager offerings of
a tyrannical food system.

Strong words? Try buying real milk -- as in raw. See if you can find
meat processed in the clean open air under sterilizing sunshine. Look
for pot pies made with local produce and meat. How about good old
unpasteurized apple cider? Fresh cheese? Unpasteurized almonds? All
these staples that our great-grandparents relished and grew healthy
on have been banished from today's supermarkets.

They've been replaced by an array of pseudo-foods that did not exist
a mere century ago. The food additives, preservatives, colorings,
emulsifiers, corn syrups and unpronounceable ingredients listed on
the colorful packages bespeak a centralized control mind-set that
actually reduces the options available to fill Americans' dinner plates.

Whether by intentional design or benign ignorance, the result has
been the same -- the criminalization and/or demonization of heritage
foods. The mind-set behind this radical transformation of American
eating habits expresses itself in at least a couple of ways.

One is the completely absurd argument that without industrial food,
the world would starve. "How can you feed the world?" is the most
common question people ask me when they tour Polyface Farm.

Actually, when you consider the fact that millions of people,
including many vast cities, were fed and sustained using traditional
farming methods until just a few decades ago, the answer is obvious.
America has traded 75 million buffalo, which required no tillage,
petroleum or chemicals, for a mere 42 million head of cattle. Even
with all the current chemical inputs, our production is a shadow of
what it was 500 years ago. Clearly, if we returned to herbivorous
principles five centuries old, we could double our meat supply. The
potential for similar increases exists for other food items.

The second argument is about food safety. "How can we be sure that
food produced on local farms without centralized inspection and
processing is really safe to eat?"

Here, too, the facts are opposite to what many people assume. The
notion that indigenous food is unsafe simply has no scientific
backing. Milk-borne pathogens, for example, became a significant
health problem only during a narrow time period between 1900 and
1930, before refrigeration but after unprecedented urban expansion.
Breweries needed to be located near metropolitan centers, and
adjacent dairies fed herbivore-unfriendly brewery waste to cows. The
combination created real problems that do not exist in grass-based
dairies practicing good sanitation under refrigeration conditions.

Lest you think the pressure to maintain the industrialized food
system is all really about food safety, consider that all the natural-
food items I listed above can be given away, and the donors are
considered pillars of community benevolence. But as soon as money
changes hands, all these wonderful choices become "hazardous
substances," guaranteed to send our neighbors to the hospital with
food poisoning.

Maybe it's not human health but corporate profits that are really
being protected.





  • [Livingontheland] Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple, Tradingpost, 06/22/2009

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