Category Archives: Food and Drink

Monsanto Takes Molokai’s Water

molokai11024x768.jpg Monsanto grows much of its seed corn on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, apparently including its new “water-efficient maize”:
In law, two-thirds of the water from the Molokai irrigation system should go to homestead farmers. In practice big landowners, especially Monsanto, take 84% of the irrigation system’s water consumption. Monsanto alone, according to Yamashita, takes almost twice as much water as all 200 homesteaders.

So I think I have this right. In the cause of developing crops that will allow the world’s farmers to use less water, Monsanto is so overusing the water in its own backyard that local farmers are have resorted to legal action to get their water back. As the Molokai Dispatch’s headline has it: “Monsanto could be its own worst enemy.”

We would expect nothing less from the company that brought us Agent Orange.

Radical Food Rethink for Britain?

According to Peter Griffiths in Scientific American, 10 August 2009, Britain wants “radical rethink” on food production:
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain must find ways to grow more food while using less water, energy and fertilizers to help feed a growing world population and offset the effects of climate change on agriculture, the government said on Monday.
OK, that makes sense. But where’s the radical part?
Farmers will have to adopt new methods to grow bigger crops while being more careful with increasingly valuable commodities such as water and fuel for machinery and fertilizers, Benn said.
OK, less water, fuel, and petrochemical fertilizers; good. But why a few farmers growing bigger crops? As The Institute for Optimum Nutrition points out,
Good food seems to have been erased from our cultural identity, yet Britain was once considered the gastronomic centre of the world.
I would bet Britain didn’t do that by cranking out bigger crops.

How about more small farmers, as well, plus urban gardens?

Monsanto Farm Bill: HR 2749

Here’s something that’s widely opposed by both the right and the left: the so-called “Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009”. And for many of the same reasons, including:
  • HR 2749 would impose an annual registration fee of $500 on any “facility” that holds, processes, or manufactures food. Although “farms” are exempt, the agency has defined “farm” narrowly. And people making foods such as lacto-fermented vegetables, cheeses, or breads would be required to register and pay the fee, which could drive beginning and small producers out of business during difficult economic times.
  • empowers the Dept. of Health and Human Services to micro-manage the raising and harvesting of crops (you might have assumed that Congress would’ve handed the U.S. Dept of Agriculture this terrible power.)

Here’s how your representatives voted when this thing passed the House. The vote didn’t break down neatly by party lines. However, if you look at the cartogram, it looks like city Representatives tended to vote for it, while rural ones tended to vote against. Maybe some rural reps realized that this bill isn’t about safety: it’s about Monsanto and big argribusiness driving small farmers out of business. There’s still time to stop it in the Senate, or when it comes back to the House after being reconciled with whatever the Senate passes.

Roger Ebert review of Food, Inc.

bilde.jpeg A brief excerpt:
All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor’s fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy. The family farm is largely a thing of the past. When farmland comes on the market, corporations outbid local buyers. Your best hope of finding real food grown by real farmers is at a local farmers’ market. It’s not entirely a matter of “organic” produce, although usually it is. It’s a matter of food grown nearby, within the last week.

Remember how years ago you didn’t hear much about E. coli? Now it seems to be in the news once a month. People are even getting E. coli poisoning from spinach and lettuce, for heaven’s sake.

Why are Americans getting fatter? A lot of it has to do with corn syrup, which is the predominant sweetener. When New Coke failed and Coke Classic returned, it wasn’t to the classic recipe; Coke replaced sugar with corn sweeteners.

High fructose corn syrup, bringing obesity, diabetes, and heart disease to a third or more of the U.S. population.

Perhaps it’s time to do something about this.

Before you say “there’s nothing we can do” consider that even Wal-Mart has changed its food buying habits due to customer demand. We vote every time we buy food, and the one thing big corporations don’t want to lose is customers.

Cronkite on War on Drugs

Walter Cronkite died today. I’ll remember him by what he fought for:
It surely hasn’t made our streets safer. Instead, we have locked up literally millions of people…disproportionately people of color…who have caused little or no harm to others – wasting resources that could be used for counter-terrorism, reducing violent crime, or catching white-collar criminals.

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this effort – with no one held accountable for its failure.

Amid the clichés of the drug war, our country has lost sight of the scientific facts. Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we’ve become blind to reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is too expensive, and too inhumane.

But nothing will change until someone has the courage to stand up and say what so many politicians privately know: The war on drugs has failed.

One Day’s Pickings

Picked one day: 34 poundsMust remember to go to the garden every day; this is what happens with one day skipped. Corn, cucumber, zucchini, watermelon, yellow squash, tomato, buttercup, butternut, and eggplant. 34 pounds.

The zucchini are playing out; most of these we wouldn’t have bothered picking a week ago. The tomato, corn, and watermelon are new this picking.

South Georgia Foodways, Agrirama, Tifton, June 26th, 2009

vine cuttingAgrirama had a vine cutting Saturday for a Smithsonian food exhibit that will be there a while, with numerous accompanying events. Tuesday evening there’s Organic Gardening Basics, and Friday there’s a South Georgia Foodways Festival, among quite a few others.