Silhouette of Barry Logan who shut down his seven
year experiment La Milpa Organica Farm, September 18, 2010.
Logan applied gardening principles to local Micro Farming
in San Diego, but broke regulations on the books that
are out of the beat with nature. He is on probation
for breaking laws. Current laws and proposed Food Safety
regulations will further define local farming
in the U.S. A national conversation
about food safety is needed. Logan has been
one of three Beet Keeper, Return! beet growers.
The project aims to create a nation of gardeners
through encouraging every one to grow a beet
in a pot. One pot+ one person = You're a Gardener.
NOTE
THE day before CHEWING ON FOOD SAFETY
was printed on the Huffington Post,
October 5, 2010
The New York Times reported that
Monsanto was falling on hard times:
On October 5, 2010, Jeffrey Smith
author of "Seeds of Deception"
was also on KPFK in Los Angeles.
He is calling a red alert on the science
reports that indicate GMO's may have
serious health effects in the gut.
Jeffrey Smith also reported October 5,
2010 on the Huffington Post
that an appeals court upheld
Court Victory: Bovine Growth Hormone Labeling http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/court-victory-bovine-grow_b_75100...
11:16 am
October 5, 2010
The Senate will likely pass Food Safety legislation
when it reconvenes after the election November 2.
Now is the time to get a national conversation going
that raises important questions.
CHEWING ON FOOD SAFETY
A NATIONAL CONVERSATION IS NEEDED
Now is the time to become educated about the
Politics of Food and help educate our Senators
before they vote on Food Safety legislation
when they reconvene after the election.
What is your point of view?
Please go to the Huffington Post
and express your self.
Food safety laws that were being discussed on the hill during September - S.510 and S.3767- may be on a break for the moment. The issues remain and will be taken up when the senate reconvenes. We need a national conversation about food that is making us sick, and ask each other: Why? Most of us do not know how to eat. This plays into the hands of those who would dictate food policy. We need a moment of awakening. We need to regain our beat with nature. We need to have some relationship with healthy soil and growing things.
From a beet’s point of view, food was never meant to be a commodity. Food was never meant to be a force in the political arena to restrict people from foods they feel they need for natural health. Food was never meant to be in the hands of large industrial growers who prefer to have fewer people growing food. They rely more on drugs and chemicals to provide a poor imitation of what nature had in mind.
Nature's original technology is here to stay on an Enchanted Garden planet. We can grow 1000 years of peace in harmony with nature if we begin now to regain our beat with nature. Gloria Estefan sang, "Turn the Beat Around!" Truly, to reform food safety, we are asked to turn the beet around. Small size growers are part of nature's original technology -- and healthy legislators should be too. High tech and GMO's give us the option to have fewer people on the farm; they need a thorough vetting. A true dialogue between science, ethics, and food is coming into focus. Indeed, we are only now beginning to understand the true meaning of food safety.
CHEWING ON FOOD SAFETY:
VIDEOS AND LINKS TO STUDY
ON THE PLANT YOUR
DREAM BLOG
Editor's Note: We've asked Jill Richardson, author of "Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It" for a behind-the-scenes analysis of the legislative battle over food safety legislation that remains alive in the current Congress.
It's already very difficult to stay in business as a small farm and diverting labor from farm activities to write and follow food safety plans (when the food they produce isn't the nation's major food safety problem in the first place) would make it that much harder to stay profitable.
All in all, great care has been taken in the year and a half or so since the bill was first introduced to write in many protections for small, sustainable, ethical farmers and small businesses. And, assuming the FDA is trustworthy in following the bill as written, the bill looks pretty good for any small farmer or processor.
The question is which scenario would be more likely: for the FDA to abuse its power (despite bill language encouraging it to be mindful of small farms and processors and sustainable growing practices when enforcing the bill), or for large corporations or farms to sneak through any loophole that was intended for small, sustainable farms and businesses?
CAN THE FDA BE TRUSTED?
Good point Jill...
Can we trust the FDA regarding food policy?
One of the key players i Food Safety Czar Michael R. Taylor.
I want to direct everyone to the Chewing Your Food Link
here. Please scroll down and read about Michael R. Taylor.
Among the comments are those from award winning
filmmaker Kevin Miller: http://kevinpmiller.blogspot.com/2008/11/return-performance-for-michael-r-tay...
Even with this language, James S. Turner, Chairman of Citizens for Health isn't reassured. "We have the most contaminated food supply of any industrialized country because of the way FDA applies laws," says Turner, who I interviewed this week (listen here). "The problem is that the words written on paper and the way the FDA typically enforces are two different things."
Few have followed and monitored the activities of the FDA for as long as Turner has. He's been at it since 1968. He points out that former Monsanto vice president for public policy, Michael R. Taylor, as the newly appointed FDA food czar in his role as the Deputy Commission for Foods, will be the one to oversee the Food Safety Modernization Act's implementation. Says Turner, "the FDA enforcement pattern has been to ignore, placate or make a deal with the giants, and then turn around and pick on the growers it can outsize and intimidate -- the medium and small ones. Add to that, the new inclusion police powers imposing criminal terms of five to 10 years for any violations, this bill will come down like a hammer on small suppliers," Turner believes. Here's a list of campaign contributions made by groups, supporting, and opposing the S510.
posted
September 27, 2010
MORE FROM JILL
The various parties have come far in compromising on the protections provided for small, sustainable farms and processors, but because one side insists on absolute exemptions and the other side refuses to accept that, it seems a compromise that both sides are 100 percent happy with will not be forthcoming.
Jill Richardson has worked with Consumers' Union
in lobbying for Senate passage of food safety legislation.
First, and never mentioned by its supporters, S 510 will force the grassroots sustainable ag organizations that are mostly volunteer and more underfunded than the FDA ever has been to expend a huge amount of their limited resources to stay on top of the many new rules it will generate when those organizations are already unable to keep up with the existing load from the FDA, FSIS, AMS, APHIS, etc. My guess is there is already an average of more than 1 per day! After S 510, there will be many more and some, like the new standards for produce safety; will be much bigger and more complex. It is foolish to believe that the local, healthy food movement will even be able to keep up with, much less adequately respond to, all of them.
We need Barry Logans. We could use a million like him. He provided wonderful food to three farmers markets, the kind of food that we thrive on. What will replace wonderful food he grew, free of chemicals, nourished in rich soil, full of nutrients? Dead, genetically modified factory food? If S510 passes, almost certainly.
The lesson is clear - over regulation destroys small organic farming. The big outfits can easily hire specialists to fill out the endless paperwork, to get around the hundreds of pages of meaningless regulations. The small organic farmer, our best hope for a sustainable and healthy planet, cannot.
s510 creates a nightmare of paperwork and regulations that will strangle any small farm. But no food outbreak was created at a small organic farm. All the outbreaks that led to the introduction of the "food safety bills" were created by the large agricultural industry.They have used their power and influence to twist the bill into a monster that will destroy their competition, the small organic farmer, while doing nothing to make industrial food safer.
Any food safety bill must exempt completely small farmers, organic farmers, small processors, farmers markets and people growing their own food. Or all the good food will be gone, and we will lose all our choices. And our freedom to eat good, unmodified food.
Use the paypal at the top.
Thanks,
Keep The Beet Media Star
funraiser and creator
of the Rock Your Soul Opera
Called Beet Keepers, Return!
Thanks for Starring in my
Rock Your Soul Opera!!!!
Hey Arianna, Keep The Beet Media Star here, The World's First Talking Beet Plant. Thanks for publishing Chewing On Food Safety: A National Conversation is needed October 5 on the Huffington Post.
I love your profile picture. I would like Leslie, Your Enchanted Gardener
to take some photos of you before long.
If there is anything else I can do to help,
I am here for you. You can friend me on Facebook.
Always looking out for you,
Keep The Beet Media Star
The World's First Talking Beet Plant
5:41 am
October 6, 2010
Time to put Leslie's body back to bed...
Catch up with you later...
Keep The Beet Media Star...
NOTE IT IS RAINING NOW
Leslie planted seeds with the youth here
last Wednesday. It was a sweltering hot week,
one of the hottest in three months.
he said, to Jesse and Holly,
When we plant seeds, it rains.
The next day, there was rain all day in San Diego.
There was no rain in Orange County, about 75 miles
north. It is raining now.
Leslie got an email from one community leader
today saying that no one would take him seriously
unless he was better at reporting the facts.
I want to root for you all in writing fact based
reports on Food Safety. I am just me.
your beet.
I want to encourage you all to keep expressing
yourself and participate in government.
I like this quote from Arianna Huffington
that she said September 26, 2010
at Solfest:
Huffington said that we now have legitimate anger but that we need to channel it in the right direction. The government is not a spectator sport, she said. The public needs to get involved.
Huffington's seven steps
1. Share your story with others, including what you have and what you don't have
2. Tap into your resilience
3. Build your financial literacy
4. Move your money from a national bank to a local one (e.g., credit union)
5. Give back and help others
6. Hold leaders accountable
7. Unite with others to make a difference
She said that she is not letting Washington off the hook, but communities, families, and individuals need to solve problems and right the wrongs of our times.
Quoting Winston Churchill, "America can always be counted on to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other possibilities," Huffington ended her speech on Sunday with a sense of urgency -- to make change now.
After her talk, Huffington allowed time for questions. One person asked why The Huffington Post has gone from focusing on just the political issues to now offering entertainment stories. Huffington responded that she never just wanted to draw in the "converted" but that if someone was interested in a story on Angelina Jolie, for instance, he might later be drawn to other more political or environmental stories on the site. Huffington also added that the website has grown from just one page to 22 sections.
Monica Stark can be reached at udjfeatures@pacific.net
Keep The Beet Media Star
FROM THE SACRED TO THE SILLY...
and THE ABSURD...
2:14 pm
October 6, 2010
Regina Jensen...my editor...at Space of Love Magazine
points out that I lose credibility by including too many
"cutsy" things in my work now. I see where my work
goes from the sacred to the silly.
I notice that our reliance on science
borders on the absurd, and our devotion
to those the application of Risk Assessment
to Food Safety.
HERE IS A QUOTE FROM A PROFOUND BOOK
THE WHEEL OF HEALTH WRITTEN BY
G.T. WRENCH M.D. in 1938
His reference is to the Hunza people
was admired by Dr. Bernard Jensen.
I learned the application of wholeness to nature
from him.
"And with their whole diet they preserve the wholeness of their
health. This also we have failed to do. Our health or wholeness
has fragmented no less than our diet. A swarm of specialists
have with the invention of science settled on the each several disease;
there is a huge, unmanageable accumulation of knowledge,
and this and that disease is checked oe overcome. But our wholeness
has not been restored to us. On the contrary, it is fragmented
into a great number o disease and still more ailments. We have
lost wholeness, and we have got in its place its fragmentation
with a multiplexity of methods, offically blessed and otherwise,
dealing with the fragments in their severality.
I highly recommend reading Chapter 7 of
"The Wheel of Health" on "Fragmentation."
It can be found online.
THIS BOOK PRETTY MUCH IDENTIFIES
a great deal of the problems we now have on our
hands decades later. Fragmentation of the
Wheel of Health has produced contaminated foods.
Fragmentaion applied to a concept of our throwaway
society, has created the conditions on the sea.
The chain of whole being has been broken on both
land and sea. We will not find our way home through
further breaking things down into tiny pieces.
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