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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] a manure plow...
  • Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 09:16:11 -0500

No, definitely not that, which I've heard of but not seen.

For one thing, I just checked, and Soylent Green came out in 1973. This was a short story I read no later than the early 1960's. There was nothing in it about where the synthetics came from; just about how selling or buying natural food was illegal -- because, if I remember this correctly, it was grown in the *dirt*, yuck! -- The more I think about it, the more I think it may have had to do with the raw milk issue, rather than just being a satire on how drug laws were set up. I don't think I even knew at the time that raw milk was becoming illegal; but I suspect the time period for that was about the same. (Maybe not; I just tried looking this up and apparently this has been an issue for most of the 20th century; the Illinois supreme court heard a case on the issue of regulations banning raw milk in 1914. -- In the process of looking this up, I also discovered that raw milk sales are currently legal in 28 states in the USA. I don't know whether this includes New York, where such sales are so restricted as to be very nearly illegal in practice.)

(Apparently I can't even blather along about fiction without stopping to do research. If I'm not careful, I won't get anything done today but email.)


-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale



On Mar 4, 2010, at 8:49 AM, Wiediger, Alison wrote:

Soylent Green?




Many many years ago, when I was I think about twelve, I read a science fiction story in which only synthetic food was legal; the protagonist of the story had gone to something rather like a speakeasy to get a meal of real food, and got busted.

The story made little sense to me at the time, but it stuck with me, though I don't remember the author's name or the title. I think it was probably meant as a satire on drug laws; I doubt anybody writing in the early 60's or before was considering the possibility that it might be a real problem with food. -- though I suddenly realized just now, wasn't that time around when raw milk was becoming illegal? Maybe the author was a dairy farmer, after all. (My family weren't farmers, I wasn't then following farm issues at all.) 





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