The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

Bags and boxes and baskets of tomatoes. Romas and Abe Lincolns and some other determinate heirloom I forget the name of. All ruby red and threatening to rot if not processed immediately, no human being can eat enough tomato sandwiches to dent the load.

So it’s been days’ worth of boiling water to loosen skins, a quick cold water bath, peeling, seeding coring, chopping. Having to do it in shifts to give my hands enough time to recover, hoping they don’t turn permanently wrinkled from the effort. Putting up quarts and quarts of tomato juice for drinking just because I can, and we love straight, watery tomato juice. Other boiling pots containing onion ends, the last of last year’s dried leeks and celery, fresh spices, some cuke ends and peels, pole bean pods and such, the accumulated compost of a vegetarian household added to those tomato skins and seeds and cores and trimmings to make broth for soups and stews and greens and those big wintertime pots of beans. Then to can it all in jars and put it away for later consumption.

Canned quarts of quarters. Frozen bags of chunks. Fresh tomato basil soup and tomato sandwiches and good ol’ ‘mater pies… it’s a wonder we haven’t all turned into tomatoes ourselves! And for the bulk of the gleaned harvest (the field entirely organic), drying. The solar dryer has been full of tomato quarters and chunks for days now, as much as that very nifty south porch unit can hold. The sun dries them just enough to move indoors in the evening when the sun goes down, into the oven on its lowest setting of 160 degrees, propped a little open with a spare canning ring, to finish the job. Meanwhile flats of fresh quarters and chunks get prepped for the solar dryer when the sun comes up. Start the whole process over again. Ripest fruits first because this sort of thing takes days and these babies are indeed very ripe.

Perhaps some of my readers don’t know that a full bushel of romas dried crispy can fit into a single ~2 pound plastic coffee container. And the saved container doesn’t have to be sterilized or sealed in boiling water – dried fruits and veggies require nothing more than a clean and dry container with lid. Crispy dried foods don’t need refrigeration, will keep literally for years (though none ever last that long around here). Tomatoes especially lose volume when dried, as they are primarily water to begin with. When the water’s gone, they hardly take up any room at all. And the best part is you don’t have to parboil and skin tomatoes that you dry. Still have to seed and core, cut to quarters or chunks, but leave that skin on. Lots of vitamins in those, and once they’re turned into powder or rehydrated and cooked they do not present that pointy fresh skin problem that led to parboiling and skinning preserved tomatoes in the first place.

At the end of the processing I’ll grind the crispy-dry tomatoes into powder for all sorts of uses, and it’ll fit into a single recycled 12-oz. pickle jar. Which I keep in the freezer just because I can (doesn’t take up any real room in the door shelf) to add spoonfuls to soup bases and pasta sauces, or to sprinkle on salads and sandwiches, or to make flavored table salt for Thanksgiving guests. All one need do is remember that there really is the equivalent of an entire bushel of tomatoes in that jar of powder – it’s potent, you don’t need a whole lot.

Much of the rest of the harvest will only be half-dried, put into freezer bags and stored frozen. These can be used at any time for pasta sauces and some fancy dishes, pre-soaked in a marinade that rehydrates them and gives the marinade flavor to them. Half-dried they will take up twice as much room as the crispy dried, and must be frozen or refrigerated because there’s still enough water in them to cause spoilage. But again, they need no sterile jars or lids. Half-dried tomatoes can also be packed into jars of olive oil, and those need not be refrigerated because the oil will keep them from spoiling for a few months. Such jars (never more than pints) of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil with added rosemary or basil make excellent culinary gifts my family and friends look forward to during the holidays when so much feasting is going on.

I’m down to just a couple dozen tomatoes as I write this, they must be finished up tonight because I’m having to cut off whole sections that are beginning to rot. It’s definitely a lot of finger-wrinkling work, but this ample harvest should provide my family with tomatoes enough to get through the winter. Canned or frozen you get the plump body of tomatoes, but much of their abundant vitamin C content has been lost. That’s another great thing about dried tomatoes – they retain almost all of their original complement of vitamins without loss in processing or storage. Such things can be very important during the colds and flu season, when too many people don’t get enough C.

Here’s hoping my fingers survive without permanent wrinkling, and that your tomato harvest is every bit as abundant and busy as mine has been. Oh… and because my hubby and one of my grandsons have complained that my regular ‘mater pie has too many chunky tomatoes in it for them to really like as much as they should (they just don’t like the consistency), I did an on-the-fly recipe alteration this week that has worked out extremely well. Can’t keep those pies long enough to refrigerate and enjoy for breakfast (my favorite). I’m calling it “Fresh Tomato Custard Pie,” recipe below.

Fresh Tomato Custard Pie

• Enough skinned, seeded, cored and chopped tomatoes to provide a full 4 cups (per pie)
• 3 tbsp. corn starch
• 3/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
• 1/2 tsp. dried basil
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella or mixed Italian cheese

Puree everything except the cheese together thoroughly in a blender or food processor until smooth and thick. Stir in the cheese and mix well. Pour this mixture into a prepared pie shell. You can cover with crust or leave open for pure custard pie. If you don’t have a top crust, sprinkle more shredded cheese on top.

Bake at 350º for 1 hour, or until the filling is semi-firm all the way through. If the crust isn’t golden by then, finish at 450º for another few minutes. Allow the pie to cool and set, at least 30 minutes. It is delicious hot (though a little runny), but I like it better cold and well-set. Excellent for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Enjoy!

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

To Deep Harm’s work I would add just a few details that should also be kept in mind whenever you hear that the plume is in your area, or has been in your area during the most important weeks of the growing cycle (like spring). First, it is NOT the external gamma dose given off by radioactive particles in the cloud/plume that are of primary concern. That will be so minimal on this side of the planet that it won’t add up to a single chest X-ray all told. The real danger comes from the isotopes themselves – atoms of matter in the air that you can’t even see. If these get into your body by breathing or being ingested with your food and water, they can do many times the biological damage right up close to your internal organs.

And for those of us who grow some of our own food, it is important to know that it’s not just these isotopes “falling out” of the cloud onto the ground and plants that needs to be considered. You could wash that off of many foods without too much trouble. A bigger problem is that when isotopes such as cesium, strontium and many others will, if they are in the soil, be uptaken by growing plants and incorporated into their very cells. Cesium is uptaken just like potassium, neither plants nor animal bodies (including yours) can tell the difference. Strontium is uptaken just like calcium, which will, if you ingest it, be greedily allocated to your bones. And this is known to cause leukemias and other cancers over time. The iodine that is such a threat to thyroid glands isn’t uptaken in high amounts due to its short half-life (8 days), but easily gets on the grass that is eaten by cows and from there into the milk.

Officials will of course be keeping careful track of the situation both in Japan and here in the U.S., but self-reliant homesteaders should also bear in mind that potential problems will tend to be downplayed drastically. Supposedly to prevent “panic,” though no nuclear power plant accident has ever actually caused people to run screaming down the streets as if they were being chased by Godzilla. In situations where radioactive fallout is present, what you don’t know CAN hurt you. Those who are in charge of knowing are too often unwilling to let you know everything you need to know. So bear that in mind as the weeks and months proceed, Fukushima’s nukes will be releasing steadily for the foreseeable future because they are not and cannot be contained.

As a perfect example of the kind of insufficient and occasionally downright misleading information that can come out of supposedly responsible ‘officials’, let me just deconstruct an article from the March 21 edition of the Mainichi (Japan) News:
No need to fear radioactive contamination of food, rain if proper steps taken: experts. This article is a short series of questions and answers, the most misleading of which I deal with below…

1. What happens if you eat food products that have been contaminated by radiation?

Expert Answer: Radioactive iodine has a tendency to collect in the thyroid, and ingesting massive amounts raises the risk of thyroid cancer. However, it has a half-life of eight days, which is relatively short.

Me – It doesn’t take “massive” amounts of iodine to cause thyroid problems or thyroid cancers, which tend to show up years down the road. The greater the dose, the sooner the problems appear, 3-5 years if you get a lot, 10-20 years for far lesser doses. The 8-day half-life means nothing in this equation except to assure you that what you have ingested is emitting its radiation quickly and steadily to your thyroid. Sure, it may be essentially gone in a two or three months because it has decayed, but the damage it did to sensitive internal tissues while it was decaying is already done.

2. What are the “provisional regulation levels” of radiation that spinach and raw milk were found to exceed?

Expert Answer: These levels refer to standards from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on [Japan's] Food Sanitation Act.

Me – Spinach, milk, canola and other leafy greens in a 150-mile distance from the stricken reactors have tested for iodine and cesium at above these standards and the Japanese government has acted to prevent those food products from getting into the marketplace. It is reasonable to presume that agricultural products from this entire region will be a total loss this year, and due to large amounts of longer-lived isotopes in the soil, may have to be abandoned as a ‘dead zone’ like that around Chernobyl for many years into the future.

3. Is it okay to keep eating such food products?

Expert Answer: According to former University of Tokushima professor Jun Sekizawa, much of the radioactive material found on spinach can be eliminated by washing and boiling it. As for milk, Sekizawa says, “drinking even the most contaminated [1,500 becquerels] several times is still less than one tenth of the radiation people are exposed to in the natural world. He adds that people will be fine if they do nit keep drinking the milk.

Me – This is nothing less than insidious. You cannot scrub green leafs enough to cleanse them of radioisotopes (root crops should be okay if they are harvested now). Nor does boiling affect radioisotopes in the least. Pasteurization of milk won’t get rid of iodine or strontium either. So it’s a complete lie that it can be boiled out of vegetables. Assuming that ‘officials’ are reporting truthfully about contamination levels – which has never been known to happen in the entire history of nuclear technology – telling people to boil is doing WORSE than nothing. The fair assumption should be that the ‘official’ story on radiation is short by at least a factor of ten. Proceed accordingly.

4. Is it safe to drink tap water?

Expert Answer: The maximum consumption limit per one liter of water is 300 becquerels for iodine and 200 becquerels for cesium. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says that while people should refrain from drinking water whose iodine and cesium levels exceed the regulation limit, it can safely be used for bathing and washing. The ministry also says that it is safe to drink the water if there are no other alternatives.

Me – I’d avoid drinking the water entirely when radiation levels are present. If I had no other choice (and many people still stuck in the prefecture don’t have a choice), I’d drink it to stay alive. Here in the U.S. levels are unlikely to reach anything close to federal limits, but I’d sure replace the charcoal and particulate filters on my water filtration system just to make sure. Iodine is captured very well by activated charcoal. Then I’d change them again when the all clear comes. I would seriously avoid showering or bathing in hot water, as the steam will bring contaminates right into your nasal passages and lungs. Only lukewarm or cool for washing, and definitely use an abrasive type soap such as Lava. Or use a loufa sponge. Throw it away after a few uses.

Whenever there is radioactive contamination present in the air, soil and water, people who spend time outdoors should definitely wash off thoroughly once indoors. Dry quickly and well, especially the face, and don’t re-use towels. Keep soiled laundry in enclosed containers. Don’t wear your outdoor shoes inside the house. Luckily, the Japanese are noted for fastidiousness in these areas, it will serve them well in this crisis.

5. What should we do when it rains?

Expert Answer: Stay out of the rain as much as possible, and whatever you do, don’t drink the rainwater.

Me – Always wear a brimmed rain hat to keep the rain out of your hair, and a rain coat to keep it off your skin. Keep this outer clothing away from the living areas of the house (like in a mud room) along with shoes and boots. And do that scrubbing wash thing whenever you’ve been exposed – the rain will contain far more contaminates than will be present on a nice day in the air.

Bottom line for those of us who don’t live in Japan, we are not going to be exposed to seriously dangerous levels of isotopes or gamma dose from the plume. Most of the very serious heavy metal fission products will fall out of the cloud over the ocean (or very close to Fukushima) well before they get here. But if we remember that it’s not the exterior gamma dose that will most harm us – but the isotopes falling out of the plume that might get inside us – we should be mostly okay.

Back in the days of atmospheric bomb testing the levels were very, very high. I can remember when word came down that we couldn’t make snow ice cream anymore, and always wondered how much of a nasty dose I got from eating it every year up until then. Yet another reminder that ‘officials’ aren’t going to tell the truth about the dangers if they can help it. Besides strontium and iodine, which were specifically cited back in 1963 as the reason for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, cesium that got into the food and water supplies was a big consideration.

Think about this, then – there is more cesium-137 in just one of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima than was released by all the nuclear weapons ever exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age. Sobering thought, but one that it might be valuable to hold when the real debate on shutting these nasty things down for good comes to a forum near you!

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

One of my favorite sources is the Organic Consumers Association [OCA], which is tireless in its efforts to follow and disseminate necessary news and useful resources for homesteaders like us. If you haven’t signed up yet for their newsletters, go on over to OCA and do so. You sure won’t be sorry!

In my newsletter this week I was again informed that OCA’s website has been under sustained hacker attack, operatives for the ‘usual suspect’ [Monsanto] notwithstanding. Somebody out there doesn’t want us to have the good information OCA delivers to us for free, and is actively attempting to thwart the effort. Show ‘em some love if you’ve got some love (or money) to spare!

One of the issues OCA is on top of that should be of serious concern to all of us who grow organic fruits and veggies or raise free-range chickens, grass-fed beef or offer organic dairy products is the Obama administration’s alliance with Monsanto in matters of developing policy. The new proposals for “food safety” have proven positively draconian for small value-added producers, many of whom are having their farms raided by gestapo-type goon squads and their equipment, animals and food products seized, and are facing astronomical legal bills all in the name of corporate agribiz profits and total control of the food supply. I mean, it’s not like these people care about toxic substances, unsustainable practices, mad cows or melamine in baby formula or anything. What they want to eliminate are your choices, access to markets, and ability to make a living by sustainably tending and preserving the land instead of raping it wholesale.

Knowledge can be our most effective weapon beside our commitments to the land, our families, our way of life and our hard work to make it work. If readers have more sources for keeping up, please offer them in the comments and I’ll check them out and report back.

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

I know (or hope) that all my readers feel as strongly about organic standards, scientific assessment of all GMOs – including for potential long-term health effects as well as cross-contamination of organic crops – and protections for small farmers and their markets as I do. So I’ll ask all of you to please sign the Food Democracy NOW petition to President-Elect Obama outlining our important policy goals and making alternative suggestions for appointment choices in this department.

No matter what an individual appointee’s past positions may have been, he or she will be working for the President and carrying out the policies of his administration as dictated by him. Which would serve to put some hefty shackles on Vilsack’s probable desire to walk his favorite corporation’s self-serving desires past any and all proper overview and alignment.

US agricultural policies in coming years can make or break our entire back-to-the-land, organic, sustainable living efforts entirely moot if we don’t stand up immediately for what WE want and need in the way of support from our government and its agencies. So get on it, dear readers, and don’t forget to add your own comments to Obama so that he knows exactly where we stand and how important we’re going to be if those GMO monoculture, chemical-intensive crops ever fail.

And Happy Holidays to every single one of you and those you love. Throw an extra log on that Solstice bonfire for me, we’ll be celebrating our Solstice Baby’s birthday with a big one right here on the homestead.

Links:

Food Democracy NOW petition
Flashback: Blue Jersey interviews Tom Vilsack
AgSuck: Looks like Tom Vilsack to head USDA
Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!

Yeah, I should’a known better. I wrote a post here about How NOT to Be Poisoned by Your Food, and got poisoned anyway. Got sick enough for two whole days to be really, really sorry.

It might have been tomatoes. Or it might have been a pepper or cilantro used as seasoning. The FDA seems to be suspicious of anything coming in from Mexico right now, and I didn’t ask.

A friend came over last weekend with tons of food for munchies and the grill. It was his birthday, and we ate quite a lot. He’s a meat-eater and we’re not, though I did try a grilled shrimp that was delicious. Didn’t taste the bratwurst, the hamburger patties or the chicken. But he had this container of olive oil and vinegar ‘stuff’ gathered at a salad bar style buffet at the big local grocery, with mozerella and artichokes and peppers and cherry tomatoes and whole garlic cloves and such – it just looked too good. I tasted the cheese, the artichokes, a jalapeno and one cherry tomato. Before I knew it I was puking my guts out, and was so sick the next day I couldn’t get out of bed.

It was almost immediate, too. Which of course has to be food poisoning. Since I didn’t also have the watery runs, I’m guessing salmonella that never got past my stomach, and I’m pretty sure it came in that little container of oil and vinegar goodies God only knows where they came from.

Despite the fact that the outbreak’s been going on for months and the FDA claims it just can’t find the culprit, haven’t recalled anything and don’t plan to do a darned thing, I’m telling my readers yet again to BEWARE OF FOREIGN PRODUCE. Even when it’s the most appetizing-looking stuff at the ‘build your own’ bar at your own local grocery store. Salmonella poisoning is no fun at all (thousands have been hospitalized just in this current outbreak), you’re better off not eating at all if your own tomatoes and peppers aren’t yet ripe. One poisoned ingredient in the mix can quickly poison everything it’s mixed with, and your system will hate you for it.

Just a warning, it can happen even when you’ve been really careful. All you have to do is give in to what your friends bring to munch on – and no one but me got sick, which tells me something. Hubby didn’t touch any of it (except the shrimp). Both friend and grandson are confirmed meat-eaters (hoping grandson gets over it soon). Anybody who can stomach ground mystery-meat and bratwurst can handle a little salmonella without getting sick. Don’t let that be your guide!

Buy local, dear readers! There’s a farm truck, fruit and veggie stand or farmer’s market near enough to you to make it well worth your while!

As we homesteaders begin to rake in the summer produce (while planning for yet more), it may be time for some good advice on how to make sure that the produce you’re buying at the grocery store, at the farmer’s market, and off that farmer’s truck by the side of the road fully safe for your family to eat in this age of imported food, bad farming practices and bacterial contamination.

I am presuming that homesteaders know enough about the critters in the soil (and compost) to be regular produce-washers and cooks who know how long to cook a hamburger or egg so as to preclude any possibility of e.coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella poisoning. But with recent news of e.coli contamination of fresh produce – everything from “pre-wahed” lettuce and spinach and scallions to tomatoes – it’s good to review the basics.

Most of us who can our own produce as well as cook our own food also know that contamination like Salmonella and e.coli can be easily transferred from one food to another if we’re not very careful with the cleanliness of our working areas, cutting boards and utensils, and equipment. Sure, we can kill the critters with high enough heat and processing times, but as a semi-vegetarian, who wants to eat dead bugs either?

There’s a great series of articles on basic household cleaning agents that not only talks about things we already know per poisons, but offers alternatives that are cheap, readily available and extremely multi-purpose. Among the list of ingredients are white vinegar and baking soda (things always in stock around my place), which also happen to be the best way to make sure your produce – as well as your sink, cutting boards and equipment – free of pathogens and other things like wax that traps pesticides onto purchased produce.

You could go out and buy some spray-on veggie wash (it’s a regular Big Business), or you could just make your own. Another best-bet tool is a good veggie-brush, which should be disinfected before use every time, just like the sink.

Best veggie wash (also removes wax, but use the brush) is a basic vinegar and soda concoction. Mix it up, put it in a spray bottle, keep it by the sink. It does double-duty to clean the sink and equipment too, whatever you aren’t actually sterilizing beforehand (like canning jars and lids). It can be used on fresh spinach and lettuce too before rinsing under running water, because vinegar isn’t going to taint the taste of your salad!

Best recipe for the disinfectant wash-spray:

3/4 cup white vinegar
2 tbsp. baking soda
1 tbsp lemon juice (optional)
1 cup water

Put it in a spray bottle and shake before use. Don’t spray mushrooms, they’ll absorb it. Spray produce well, let it sit for 5-10 minutes in pre-disinfected sink, then rinse thoroughly with running water.

Even if you buy the “pre-washed” salad mixes in bags, ALWAYS wash before eating! It was just those pre-washed, bagged products that caused such misery and death in 2006.

Keep Your Family Safe!