..."our food system is at Wounded Knee"...

This paragraph really hit home for me -

"This industrial food experiment, historically speaking, is completely abnormal. It’s not normal to eat things you can’t spell or pronounce. It’s not normal to eat things you can’t make in your kitchen. Indeed, if everything in today’s science-based supermarket that was unavailable before 1900 were removed, hardly anything would be left. And as more people realize that this grand experiment in ingesting material totally foreign to our three-trillion-member internal community of intestinal microflora and -fauna is really biologically aberrant behavior, they are opting out of industrial fare. Indeed, to call it a food revolution is accurate."

This is quite an article, it brings common sense and a desire to return to basics to a forefront of our consciousness and as you may have read from time to time, this is what I'm trying to do myself.  A return to the basics of life seems (at least for me) to start and after traveling full circle, end with food.  We all need to eat, even fat people like myself still need to ingest some calories every day in order to survive; and that doesn't even begin to talk about the mental health, the joy we get from feeding ourselves well and with the sensual gratification.  Granted water is even more essential and so we need to protect that as well but that's another post, no one has yet tried to synthesize water (at least not that I know of); recapture, desalinate, recycle, purify, recapture and adulterate yes, but manufacture doesn't seem to be a viable option unless you're on the Starship Enterprise and everyone knows there you can just order a tea extra hot and it pops out of the computer but I digress. 

Regardless of what we do we MUST protect our food supply from over-manipulation.  We cannot continue to feed our children food that contains poisons that can build up over time to cause any sort of chronic conditions or even death.  I really don't think humans were ever meant to consume petroleum byproducts; indirectly as most of us know through the nitrogen fertilizer used to produce the ubiquitous soy and corn (corn remember from The Omnivore's Dilemma, makes up over 60% of the current American diet) as well as directly through preservatives and colorants added to enhance appearance and increase shelf life.

This article I Drink Raw Milk by Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface Farms seems to state the obvious (eat naturally, locally produced foods from decentralized farms) as well as the not so obvious (that the industrial food conglomerates are fighting tooth and nail to destroy the "raw milk revolution").  This is just a foreward for the book The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David Gumpert.  The article has piqued my interest enough that I'll be searching out this book.  While I continue to try and feed my little family with the best products produced naturally and from suppliers nearby I think it is easy to lose sight of the the bigger picture and the targeting of all of us by the giant food conglomerates and chemical companies that are trying to steal away our food choices.  I think it's time to get a reminder on and read this book. 

If I think about it, all we really need to do it turn on any television channel that targets children and see the amazing amount of marketing that tries to tell them how wonderful it is to eat at Burger King or McDonald's.

In closing, I'll share another paragraph in case anyone out there doesn't have a chance to to read the entire article -

"This clash of choice versus prohibition brings us to today’s Wounded Knee of food. The local heritage-based food movement represents everything that is good and noble about farming and food culture. It is about decentralized farms. Pastoral livestock systems. Symbiotic multi-speciation. Companion planting. Earthworms. It is about community-appropriate techniques and scale. Aesthetically and aromatically sensual romantic farming. Re-embedding the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the village. And ultimately about health-giving food grown more productively on less land than industrial models."

Think, eat, drink...

Hasta