Hey, lady — where’s that post about meat?

Folks, I meant to have it today.  Really, I did.

See, though — it’s Thursday.  And apparently, to my brain, a Thursday where it’s 80 degrees in March is just the kind of day where it’d really like to go outside and actually play in the dirt rather than write about it.  It’s just a day made for slacking with a book and the first sun tea of the season. (Even when that season comes really, really early.)

I did do some research on the whole meat thing.  With all we’re hearing about it lately — what with pink slime, meat glue, and mutant chickens being in the news and all — I found out one thing for sure: it’s a freakin’ huge topic.  I’m a little overwhelmed in the research, in fact.  And most of it doesn’t really fit in with this week’s Dirt Revolutionaries focus.

Plus, it was interfering with my sun tea enjoyment.

So, in the spirit of simplicity, I thought I’d put it off until I could get a better handle on the solutions.  (Which will likely be right around the time my glass stops sweating.)  Apologies if you were on the edge of your seat.

Instead, I want to share a cool link with you.

The Balanced Platter has an entry today called 9 Reasons You Should (and Can) Keep a Vegetable Garden.  That picture up there is from the entry, in fact.  It fits right in with this week’s focus, too — you can, and you totally should.

The whole blog’s pretty awesome, actually.  Check the entry on what to make with winter produce, or get the scoop on garlic and a recipe for Drunken Garlic Chicken.

Tomorrow, we’re back to business as usual.

There’ll also be a second entry tomorrow afternoon with a bunch of great resources surrounding all of this week’s topics, plus a few.

Happy Slacker Thursday!

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 I bake my own bread.

Not all of it, mind you.  There are times when I have to make the choice to buy from a bakery, when things are all crazified and I know I’d burn many loaves into charcoal if I tried.  But most of the time, I bake my own.  I know exactly what’s in it, who’s touched it, and, for the most part, what’s not in it.

Which becomes more important after reading the list of strange ingredients on a loaf of Wonder bread.  Have you seen that list?  High fructose corn syrup, diglycerides, exthoxylated mono and diglycerides, sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide, datem, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, calcium propionate.

Know what’s in my bread?  water, salt, yeast, flour.  Period.  Full list of ingredients, right there.  And no -ates or -oxides or -glycerides, much less any high fructose anything.

It may not last for six months in the cupboard, but it also doesn’t taste like cardboard and glue, either.  Call it a trade-off.

By now, y’all know I’m a bit…obsessive sometimes, right?

I get on a kick, and for some reason, my brain won’t let things go.  I have a need to know more about things, to dig into them and find out what makes them all tick.  I drove my parents nuts as a kid, partially for that reason.  (I was a taker-aparter.  Alarm clocks, tape recorders, the mattress’s box-springs…once, even a dead frog.  My poor parents deserve sainthood.)

Anyway, this obsessive need to know more about things led me to looking into commercial flour.  Since that’s the major ingredient in the bread, and I knew precisely bupkiss about how it was made or where it came from (other than just the generic grow wheat – presto! flour!), I got a little nuts in figuring out how it went from that picture up there to a nice, tidy little bag on my store shelves.

Thanks to wheatflourbook.org, my curiosity was satisfied.  The following graphic shows the whole (HUGE) process, start to finish.

All of THAT, just to grind wheatberries into usable flour.  Including putting back IN some nutrients lost during the grinding process, which kind of boggled my mind.  (Though the unique combination of enrichment bits is how they’re able to patent a particular brand of flour, I’m guessing.) Equally as boggling are the guidelines for what’s acceptable for contaminants in commercial flour:  75 insect fragments and one rodent hair for every 50 grams of flour.  I kid you not.

Personally, I’m kind of against the idea of bugs in my bread.

Call me silly.  It was almost enough to make me rethink the whole no-carb thing.

Plus, the sheer amount of fuel that’s needed to make a sack of flour kind of made me give a bit of a pause.  They steamer ship in wheat?  From where?  (Likely, China.)  Run it through a huge process, then truck it back out in disposable packaging and we buy it and truck it back home to make morally-superior bread from scratch.  It kind of took the wind out of my pretentious baker-chick sails.

What if…?

This is where my brain took the windlessness and went a little crazy.  Fair warning.

I thought that maybe I could find a local source for wheatberries and just grind my own.  I mean, that way, I could control the number of insect parts (and, hopefully, rodent hairs…though dog hairs are still a distinct possibility…) that went into my flour, I’d be supporting local agriculture, and cutting down how far my bread had to travel to be bread.  It’d likely be healthier, too, since there’d be no loss of nutrients from the crazy processing.

To my surprise, there are a TON of home machines available for the home miller.  Everything from small, hand-cranked models that make small bits at a time, to huge electrical contraptions that would make enough for a year in a few minutes, to at least one model that you could power by rigging up a bicycle to it.  I settled on a mid-grade electric model with good reviews, after spending way, way too much time looking at them.

What if (redux)…?

I’m kind of lucky, here in the Midwest.  There are tons of farmers, all over the place, who sell wheat in bulk to home millers, within an hour or so.  Everything from soft white wheats to hard red wheats and the whole range inbetween.  (They’re all good for various things — some do better in baking, some are better for flaking, etc.)

But since I was already going kind of crazy, and since I do have garden space this year, I thought maybe I could just grow some wheat.  I mean, it’s a grain crop.  Those are notoriously easy to grow, from what I understand, and if I was going to do this thing, I thought I may as well just do this thing.  I spent hours looking for seeds.  Found a few sources, in fact.  Had some varieties in my shopping cart, when a friend from Facebook alerted me to something fairly shocking:

It is illegal in the USA to grow your own wheat crop, even for your own use.

I’m not kidding.  I wish I was.  (By the way, that link’s a little bit Chicken Little-esque, but the facts are sound on the case.  Growing wheat has been illegal since the 1930′s.)

Turns out that, due to the instable nature of wheat crops, you are simply not allowed to grow your own wheat, since it could destabilize the wheat market if too many people decided to vote with their dollars and not support industrial farming.  I quote:

One of the primary purposes of the Act in question was to increase the market price of wheat and to that end to limit the volume thereof that could affect the market. It can hardly be denied that a factor of such volume and variability as home-consumed wheat would have a substantial influence on price and market conditions. This may arise because being in marketable condition such wheat overhangs the market and, if induced by rising prices, tends to flow into the market and check price increases. But if we assume that it is never marketed, it supplies a need of the man who grew it which would otherwise be reflected by purchases in the open market. Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce. 317 U. S., at 128.

There are cases that I found, as late as 1995, where the Supreme Court has upheld the law banning home-grown wheat.  (In fact, that quote is from the 1995 US v. Lopez case, where the guy had to destroy his crop and pay a hefty fine…for wanting to make his own bread.)

There are ways around the law.  You can register your crop (and pay a fee), or raise perennial grasses, or go with something other than wheat (like spelt, for instance).  But to grow it in your garden is to risk federal prosecution.

I’ll be buying my wheatberries locally, thankyouverymuch.

And to think, this all started with wanting bug-free bread.

Like I’ve said this whole week, producing your own food is a revolutionary act, people.  It goes against the whole idea that we need to be disconnected from the process, separated by hundreds of miles, a layer of plastic, and a billion machines..from the very stuff that keeps us alive.  When baking your own bread can be a criminal act of an outlaw…we’ve gotten away from the simplest parts of our own lives.

If this year of Finer Fruits is about disconnecting from the Machine and finding that simplicity again, I’m learning that the Machine is a lot stronger than I thought it was.  It’s not just about realizing something’s broken, but about fixing it, from the ground up, literally.

 

 

 

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Before I even get into this today, I feel I need to warn you.

I get ranty about all of this.  I also get red-faced ass-burning pissed off, and more than a little terrified.  As a person who, as one would expect, eats food in this country and would very much like that food not to kill me, the thought of this one company makes me more than just a little afraid to put anything in my mouth unless I know the person who made it from seed to plate.  For good reason…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I also want to acknowledge the following:

• This is as political as I’ll ever get in this blog.  Ever.  And this, even, isn’t a republican v. democrat/liberal v. conservative issue, thank god.  It’s a human v. corporation issue, and if you eat, it affects you.  Considering that the alternative to eating is starving to death, this means you.
• I’m all for companies profiting from what they do.  Do not mistake this post as some kind of hippie-esque we should all just love each other and not charge anyone for anything ever utopian-type socialist blathering.  I’m a free-market capitalist.  I like money.  So do companies.  We could go there about greed and such, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  (Rant all you want, occupy whatever you want, buy/boycott what you want.  This ain’t that.)
• It’s very hard to talk about this issue without tipping over into tin-foil-hat-wearing-conspiracies.  In fact, the two camps often overlap when it comes to the issue of our food.  It makes it hard not to either a) give in and start folding up the aluminum headgear or b) dismissing it all as the ravings of lunatics.  However, I’m going to try very hard to keep the conjecture to a minimum (well, a minimum for me), and just tell you what you need to know in order to be more informed about the choices you make every time you open your mouth to shovel in a Twinkie or six.  I’ll try to back it up with links to actual articles that aren’t all THE ALIENS DID IT, so you can see, objectively, why I’m so terrified of and angry with this company.
• It’s likely going to be a very long article, even by my standards.  And you know how yappy I am when I’m talking about nothing of consequence, so you know that when I acknowledge that there’s a lot to cover, there’s a lot to cover.  It’s ALL important, however, and I hope that despite the sheer amount of crazy that I’m verbally throwing your way, that you’ll try to make it to the end.  I’ll try to at least be entertaining enough to make it worth it.  Deal?

To me, Monsanto represents everything that’s wrong with the industrial food production system in the world.  Everything.

Here’s the deal:  We all have to eat.  Whether we like it or not, our lives here in the USA are geared toward eating what we can get at a store or a restaurant or a drive-through, too.

That means that the people who control the food, quite literally, control whether we live or die.  It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s really not — if the companies that make/supply the food suddenly went away tomorrow, there would be huge swaths of our population that would, literally, starve to death.  Especially in areas that are deemed “food deserts”, where some folks have very limited (or no) access to healthy food, a sudden stoppage of supply would be devastating.

Now consider that Monsanto has its greasy little paws in more than 85% of the food that’s on the shelves as we speak.

Eighty-five percent.

Scary, isn’t it?

Even if none of the rest of this article was true, that one fact — that 85% of our food is directly controlled by one single company — should be enough for alarm.

Are your bells ringing?  Is that little internal OMG ALARM going off yet?  Mine were.

Moreover, once I started looking at what this one powerful company has been doing, I went from alarmed to near-panicked.

Let’s start with one of the most visible problems:  GMO crops.

Just in case you don’t know about the whole GMO kerfluffle, here it is in a nutshell:

GMO stands for “genetically modified organism”, and it is not, inherently, a bad thing.  People have been cross-hybridizing plants for a long, long time.  Even just using Mendel’s genetic theories of choosing to save seeds that have certain mutated characteristics is, technically, GMO-ing a crop.  (If you looked at corn pre-1900, for instance, it’d be strange to you now.  There were no straight, golden ears.  They were twisted and kind of odd, and much smaller than what we think of as corn now.  Farmers intentionally saved seed corn from straighter ears and bigger ears, essentially forcing the evolution of the corn plant in a certain direction.  This is just good business, really.  Use what works and toss the rest.)

Thing is, we weren’t happy with having to wait for things to grow and evolve.  And with modern technology being what it is, humans are now able to do much more radical, weird things to our plants in order to give them characteristics we think would be better for business.  Things like, oh, say, splicing fish DNA with tomato DNA in an effort to have a tomato that lasts longer on the shelf of your local grocery store.  Things that Dr. Caligari would probably look at and think I ain’t touchin’ that, man.

As of 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that GMO crops could be patented, too.  This’ll be important later on in the story, but for folks who think that this weirdo GMO business has been around forever and, therefore, couldn’t possibly be a bad thing — it really hasn’t.  Selective breeding is a far cry from splicing your salad with a wildebeast.  Moreover, when selective breeding was done pre-1980, it was done for everyone, for the common good of all, not for profit.  Keep that in mind.

When it became a profitable thing, that’s when Monsanto jumped into the game.

In its infancy, Monsanto was a small company that made industrial chemicals. Agriculture chemicals were just a small part of the business, until they hit upon a gold mine:  chemical pesticides.  You’ve probably seen Round-Up(r) on store shelves, in fact.  If you live in Ag country, you’ve surely seen the commercials aimed at farmers, talking about the product’s amazing ability to kill everything — any unwanted plants that bother commercial farmers.  At its inception, the product was revolutionary.  It killed just about anything, and was the best herbicide out there.

Problem was…it also killed the crops.  It was really good at being an herbicide.  And killing the plants farmers were trying to grow was A Bad Thing, obviously.

So Monsanto set out to GMO up strains of corn and soybeans that would be resistent to its herbicide.  That way, farmers could plant Monsanto seeds (patented, of course), and use Monsanto herbicides (patented also), and get all the corn with none of the dead things.  Perfect system, right?

Not so much.  Because nature has a way of adapting.

With the bigger herbicides came the bigger, better, and stronger weeds.  Which made for bigger, better, and stronger herbicides.  Which needed bigger, better, and stronger GMO seeds.  Which then naturally produced even bigger, even better, and even stronger weeds.

You can see how this might be a cycle that would frustrate farmers and Monsanto alike.

There’s this thing about weeds, though.

Weeds grow.  And they grow indiscriminately.  Which means that even if I happened to be not using Monsanto’s herbicides/seeds, if my neighbor was, I’d still get the bigger, badder, and stronger weed growth.  The evolved weeds would still be in my fields, whether I was contributing to the problem or not.  Many farmers started making the choice to use Monsanto’s products simply because the new weeds were everywhere, thanks to the evolutionary leaps being forced by the herbicides.  There wasn’t really much of a choice, especially during the ’80′s, when family farms were in a lot of trouble already.  Use it and feed your family for a year, or don’t use it and go belly-up.  It’s still a choice, but not one with very attractive options.

So now we have nearly an entire industry with Monsanto controlling both the seeds and the way to keep those seeds alive.

Moreover, because the seeds are patented (as the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 — it was perfectly legal to do so), farmers are now indebted to Monsanto for everything — from the seeds to the chemicals — and can’t get out.  We’ll talk here in a bit about farmers who have tried and had the pants sued off them for daring to get away.  Suffice it to say, though, that for the most part, you can’t stand in farm country and throw a rock without hitting something that’s patented by Monsanto.  Not a good thing.

So now we have a whole industry dependent on one company, which now has heaping buckets of money that they can use for whatever they want.

Like I said in the disclaimers, I don’t think that’s inherently bad.  There’s nothing wrong with making money.  It’s what you do with that money that matters.

Monsanto has chosen to buy out competitors.  (Including CalGene, the company I referenced earlier that spliced together tomato and fish DNA to improve shelf life.  It’s called the FLAVR SAVR tomato, by the way.)  It’s also chosen to use those very deep pockets to do some really shitty things.

For instance, they’ve been vehemently opposed to labelling GMO foods.

There’s a reason for this.  Most consumers who care about what they eat are a little nervous about GMO foods.  We’ll get into that in a second here. (There’s good reason.)  Europe actually banned GM crops for human consumption, in fact.  Here in the US, though, the powerful Monsanto corp has done an insane amount of lobbying against telling you what you’re eating.

This is DIRECTLY from Monsanto’s own website:

Some might ask what the harm would be in requiring the labeling of products. U.S. labeling laws are based on health and safety. Requiring labeling for ingredients that don’t pose a health issue would undermine both our labeling laws and consumer confidence. Ensuring that such labeling is accurate would also put a huge burden on regulatory agencies.

A better question might be: What would be the benefits of labeling products containing GM ingredients? Individuals who make a personal decision not to consume food containing GM ingredients can easily avoid such products. In the U.S., they can purchase products that are certified as organic under the National Organic Program. They can also buy products which companies have voluntarily labeled as not containing GM ingredients. The law allows for voluntary labeling so long as the information is accurate, truthful and avoids misleading consumers about the food. Monsanto supports both options.

Aside from all the rhetoric bullpuckey in that statement, let’s break that down, shall we?

They’re saying that to label GM food (theirs) would be an unnecessary burden that would make people choose other food.  They’re then saying, in the next breath, that non-GM foods should be labelled instead, and apparently, that’s not an unnecessary burden on regulatory agencies, simply by virtue of it not being them that has the labelling.  They also say, effectively, that you can’t make your own choices, and that if food was labelled, you’d be confused about your choices.  How nice of them to think of our welfare, as mindless masses who can’t make up our own minds.

California proposed a bill that would force labeling, and Monsanto spent billions to try and put it down, even.

That, alone, should make consumers perk up their ears.  When a company spends massive amounts of cash to make sure you don’t know about something, there’s probably a damn good reason why they don’t want you to know.

To my knowledge, no GM food has ever made anyone’s nose fall off.

Of course, the reason I don’t know of any detachable noses may be because Monsanto is notorious for paying off people it hurts with its food. (Including at least one point in its history where it was feeding uranium to pregnant women for some reason.  Yeah, THAT’s a good idea.)

It also may be because Monsanto is violently opposed to testing any of its GM products.  We don’t know what the long-term effects of eating food laced with miRNA (micro RNA, for those who don’t know) might be.  Maybe it’s perfectly safe and our stomach acids will kill it all.  Or maybe we’ll all be brain-eating mutants with removable noses.  We just don’t know, because Monsanto throws an incredible amount of money and resources at opposing any agency, body, or group that might suggest that perhaps a little testing may be a good thing.

And now that Monsanto owns far more than just seeds (including companies that produce everything from milk hormones to artificial sweeteners laced with nerve toxin), the idea that chemical-laden and genetically-altered foods (which, under independent testing, have been implicated in everything from obesity to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease and Asperger’s syndrome) would be able to go to market not only unlabeled, but also completely untested seems beyond ridiculous.

I know you’re wondering it, too:  Where’s the FDA in all of this?  Aren’t they supposed to keep us safe from this kind of nonsense?

Well, yes.  Yes, they are.  In theory.

In theory, the FDA is all about keeping citizens safe from food and drugs that may be unsafe.  It should be all about testing AND labeling, one would assume.

However, since the early ’90′s, when a Monsanto executive was appointed to oversee the FDA, that mission seems to have become a little murky.  And worse, when it was questioned whether or not an executive for the biggest food company in the US just may have a little conflict of interest issue when in charge of the very agency that’s supposed to regulate the actions of her former friends and employers, a GAO said that no, it’s not a conflict of interest at all.  It boggles the mind, really.

Since then, there’s been what’s been called a revolving door between Monsanto and the FDA.  The list of former employees who went on to “serve” at the FDA is impressively, frighteningly long. Nearly all of the FDA big positions are former Monsantans.

Still feel safe about putting that frankenfood in your mouth, knowing that the FDA says it’s okay and doesn’t need to be tested?

Clearly, Monsanto has conquered the US Government.  But what about the farmers?

Monsanto doesn’t spend all of its mattress full of cash on blocking bills to force it to tell you what you’re eating.  It uses some of that money, instead, to sue farmers who may want to break the cycle of power it has over them.

See, crops like soybeans and corn are air-pollinated.  That means that if there’s a wind coming from the east, all of the crops planted to the east of my farm could be pollinated by whatever those crops are, even if I choose not to use Monsanto’s seeds.  Anything short of putting a bio-bubble over the whole farm simply wouldn’t work, since wind has a tendency to go wherever the hell it wants to go.  And it’s not like someone’s got a finger on the Wind Control, choosing where the air goes — it just goes.

Which means that small farmers who make the choice not to feed into the industrial machine that is Monsanto’s business plan will often times end up with pollen from those GM crops on their own, non-Monsanto crops.  Not by choice, but by nature.

And since 1980, when the courts ruled that they could, in fact, patent a seed — Monsanto’s been suing these resisters, claiming sometimes huge “technology fees” if they find contaminated crops.  Farmers can try to fight it, but even if they’ve saved their own seeds for replanting for years, Monsanto will often throw large amounts of money at legally challenging/suing these small farmers until the farmer can’t afford to continue.  Farmers that do continue often win, but many simply can’t afford to fight the fight, which leaves many of them bankrupt and unable to continue farming.

In this way, Monsanto bullies its competition/hold-outs out of business with lawyers, and gets rid of farmers not using its seed/herbicides, bit by agonizing bit.

This is bad news, not just for farmers, but for us.

Here’s why:

Soil, like we talked about yesterday, has stuff in it that makes plants grow.  Duh, I know.  What I didn’t mention yesterday is that that stuff is plant-specific.  Certain plants need certain minerals/compounds in order to grow up all healthy and strong.  Growing a particular crop will, eventually, leech from the dirt all of that particular mineral/compound, unless it’s put back into the soil somehow.  When we say soil is infertile, or have to use chemical/artificial fertilizers for a plant, it’s because previous plantings have leeched all of that out of the soil in order to grow and produce fruit.

Back in the olden days (pre-1980, really, before the age of Aquanet and Hair Bands…and Monsanto’s agriculture focus…), farmers used to rotate crops.  What that means is that this year, I might plant corn in my east field, and soybeans in my west field.  Next year, I change that up, planting wheat in the east field and corn in the west.  Or maybe I leave part of it fallow, so my cows will leave poo there while grazing, and re-energize the soil naturally.

With industrial farming, and the big contracts that the farmers have to sign with Monsanto in order to use its products, the game changed.  Farmers plant one crop, over and over, year after year, all of the same variety, which is using the same nutrients from the soil.  When the nutrients are gone, farmers either go out of business or they buy commercial chemical fertilizers (sold by…you guessed it…Monsanto!) to recharge the now-dead soil for more growing of the same crops.

Moreover, since the seed is controlled by one company, the varieties of seed available is rapidly dwindling.  Where before, farmers would save seed, some of which would naturally hybridize with other varieties, creating what’s called biodiversity, now we’re seeing what was a seemingly-infinite number of variations on the same plants (say, corn) dwindle down to a scary, miniscule few.  (It’s scary because if something were to mutate — a predator or a competitive weed species or something — the weakness could wipe out an entire year’s worth of most of that crop.  Imagine if there was a year where no corn grew, at all.  No corn syrup, no e-85 gasoline, no corn oil, no corn on the cob, no cornmeal — and since corn is in almost everything that’s processed these days, the impact of having a zero-crop year could be devastating on our food supply, not to mention on commercial meat operations, which use corn and other grains to feed the large volume of cattle/etc. that it produces.  We’ll talk about meat later this week, by the way.)

No biodiversity = a very precarious situation, not just for the dirt, but for us.  And Monsanto wouldn’t have it any other way.  They’re trying very hard to make sure that all the seeds planted in this country — from canola to corn — are all their small, biologically-narrow supply.

IF YOU READ NO OTHER PART OF THIS, READ THIS, REVOLUTIONARIES:

You may be reading all of this and thinking, this is why I want a garden…so I can get away from companies like this that are trying to feed us garbage and call it food.

Your heart is in the right place.  So is the dirt under your fingernails.  Growing things at home, organically, or buying from people who do is the single best thing you can do to take back control of your food.  But there’s a problem.

If you buy seeds from big-box stores that are not labelled “organic”, you may be buying from Monsanto without knowing it.

Monsanto has, very quietly and with cash, purchased one of the largest home-seed distributors in the world. Moreover, nowhere on the package is there any indication that you may be purchasing seeds that are owned (and, thus, patented) by the company.  With your dollars, every purchase of one of those seeds goes to fund this company and all it’s secretive, evil practices.  And considering how anti-label Monsanto has been, historically, god only knows what kind of crazy mutations/chemical changes/DNA or miRNA additions might be in that seed you think is helping you get away from the craziness of the food system.

There is a partial list of some of the patented varieties of seed that Seminis-now-Monsanto owns here. Much like the author of the first article I linked in this section, I copied this to my iPhone so I could check seed names against those owned by Monsanto, to avoid unwittingly feeding into the company’s coffers.  It’s estimated that with this purchase (and others), Monsanto now controls anywhere from 40-80% of the HOME seed market, too.

Let’s be clear, folks.  Any company that owns 80% of a necessary market is dangerous, and shouldn’t be a part of a free-market economy.

If this was just a market for plastic fishing hooks, or something else that we all don’t need to survive, I’d be the first in line to roll my eyes at naysayers and haters.  They’re obviously better at what they do, or they wouldn’t have huge market share, right?

But it’s not plastic fishing hooks.  It’s the very thing that keeps you and I alive.

And even if it was fishing hooks, if the company was bullying its competitors and non-users, buying out any competition, changing the hooks so that they hurt the users and throwing money at Congress so they don’t even have to tell people that the product may be dangerous?  That’s not “being the best”.  That should be illegal, even if it’s not.  (And actually, in fishing hooks, the not labelling wouldn’t happen, because our consumer protections are much, much stronger than our food protections right now.)

I’m just one person though.  What can I even do?

First of all, knowing the enemy is the best way to fight it.  I haven’t even touched on a fraction of what this company’s done/is doing to injure you and I and every person in this country.  Entire movies have been made about it.  A google search will bring you literally tens of millions of pages documenting things they’ve done, including stories by farmers they’ve bullied (including sending out guys with hooked noses and black suits to terrorize people.  I kid you not.).  The organization Millions Against Monsanto (where most of the pictures from this article have come from) has a central website with news and actions you can take.

Most importantly, though, you can remove yourself as much as possible from the commercial food system that makes up the lifeblood of Monsanto.

Eat as local as you can.  Know your farmers.  Read labels, even if they’re getting away with not labelling things as much as they should. Don’t give in to your kids’ requests to buy junk food or McDonald’s.  (or your own.)

Eat food.  Real food.  Don’t let a megacorp tell you what you will and won’t understand.

As always, the forums are always open if you have stories to share, questions to ask, or resources I didn’t get to here.  I’m closing comments on this entry to avoid any Monsanto employees from coming in to shill (they seem to do that on articles that are critical of the company oft-times), but the forum’s open after you’re approved.

See why all of this scares me so much now?

 

 

Okay, Revolutionaries…it’s time to dish some dirt.

Or, rather, dish about dirt, which is much less common and much more fun in the long run anyway.

More than any other factor (including seeds and stuff), the dirt in which you decide to plant your stuff is going to be key to making your own food by magic.  And since dirt means different things in different places — soil can vary widely from geographical area to geographical area, and even within a county, depending on a whole host of factors — I thought I’d just share a few things about prepping your very own variety of dirt to make it as hospitable as you can make it for growing food.

Dirt Geekery Ahead.

Generally speaking, there are two different kinds of soils that might give you some issues:  clay and sand.  (There are a whole range of variables within that scope, by the way, but my expertise is limited.)

Clay soil is thick and heavy.  If you take a handful of your own dirt and squeeze it and it stays together in a hard lump, your soil is probably mostly clay.  It’s great for retaining moisture, but can also, well, retain moisture…to the point where you can drown your plants, or suffocate them with a lack of oxygen.

Sandy soil is the polar opposite.  If you squeeze a handful of sandy soil, a stiff breeze will blow it away like dust.  For plants that need a lot of drainage, it’s great.  For plants that need a lot of water, or that get topheavy, you can end up with withered plants or big water bills, or plants that fall over like dominoes when the wind blows.  Plants can also have roots that bake to a crisp with sand, since it warms up more than the wetter clays do.

Most garden soils will naturally fall somewhere inbetween, with a bias toward one or the other.  But even if you have a yard full of complete clay (like my old house in the country, where we would literally get a ceramic-hard patch of adobe that would repel water in anything but the heaviest rains), you can fix it with soil amendments.

Adding stuff to dirt?

Yep.  Soil amendments are just what they sound like:  things you add to your dirt to make them a more hospitable environment.  They range from fluffy mossy stuff that will puff up clay soils and let in more air to dense composts that add nutrients to soil that’s been depleted or abused, all the way to weird powdery stuff that’s meant to hold sandy soils together for more moisture and support.

What you’ll use will depend on your dirt, of course.  And while I could go into a great big diatribe here about what goes where, you’re probably better off taking a big ol’ bag of your dirt to your local extension office or a great local greenhouse/garden center, and letting an expert take a look.  After all, those are people who are growing things in your region and know your area’s dirt intimately.  They can point you toward the stuff that will best take your dirt and make it Super Awesome Happy Plant Dirt.  (Technical term.)  You can find your local extension office here, in fact.  They’re smart people, and most of what they offer is free, so they’re worth finding.

When’s the best time to start making your dirt more Super Awesome?

Now.  Like, right now.  Unless you’re in the parts of the country that are still under snow.  Then you can start saving your food scraps for a compost bin, or for a worm compost (called vermicompost or vermiculture) bin, if you’re an overachiever.  (Scarily, worm poo is one of the best soil amendments you can make for nutrition, along with compost you make at home, since you know, without a doubt, there’s no added scary chemicals that could get in your vegetables.  Wormpoop.com not only has the instructions on how to make your own bins, but also sells the redworms in bulk so you can start now and have a good bit of it for tea by the time you plant.)

All this sounds like a lot of work.

And it can be.  Definitely.  You can get really dirtgeeky if you let yourself.  There are tests you can give your soil to find out everything from what’s in it to what the pH of the soil is, a billion different additives each with a legion of followers who will tell you it’s the best thing ever, and, honestly, you could work your soil for years to tweak it to be the absolute Best Soil EVAR, without planting a thing.

Here’s the deal, though:  Last year, in my community garden plot, because I had no clue about anything to do with gardening or dirt…I did nothing.  The garden rototilled the plot for all of us in April or May, and other than coming in in June and yanking out the clumps of Creeping Jenny that had sprung up like, well, weeds…I didn’t do a thing.  A neighboring gardener told me about grass clippings as mulch, and gave me a big pile of them to put on the dirt in July, but other than that…?  Not. A. Thing.  And I still got tomatoes coming out of my ears.

This year, I’m doing a lot more with my dirt.  We’re prone to heavy clay soil here, and I have both compost and a worm poo tea (I know, it sounds gross, but apparently, it’s amazing.) that I’m adding.  And after watching a few instructional-type things, I’m looking for a source of wood chips for the cover.  I’m still not geeking out nearly as hard as some folks do, because I’m a busy girl.  I figure even baby steps are okay, as long as there are tomatoes at the end of it.

Taking a cue from nature itself.

If you’re even more hands-off, or you need some more info about dirt (and what’s possible), I highly highly HIGHLY recommend watching Back to Eden.  (Fair warning:  if you’re offended by religion, you’ll have to tune out a bit for some of it.  The main guy they talk to is a little preachy.  It doesn’t bug me, but I know a couple of friends have said it was a little hard to stomach for them.  That said, the info is worth it.)

The film interviews Paul Gautschi, who bought a plot of completely unusable, farmed-out land in Washington state.  He tried again and again to get a tiny garden to grow at all, fought the soil and the weather, and finally stopped fighting.  Instead, he looked around at what nature itself was doing in the orchards and forests near his land, and came up with a system that not only works, it works everywhere.  His garden is huge, done without the use of any chemicals at all, and is actually putting back into the soil every year.  What at first looked like a patch of dusty chalk has been transformed in a relatively short amount of time into thick, rich black dirt that puts out an incredible amount of produce every year.  You’ll learn a ton from it, whether you want to or not.

One last resource:

Once you’ve watched Back to Eden, if you’re still hungry for more information (no pun intended), there’s a really great BBC documentary online that is well worth watching.  It’s called Natural World: Farm of the Future, and you can watch the whole thing online here. In it, Rebecca Hosking talks about her family farm, and how she’s contemplating thinking of changing from a fossil-fuelled method of production to one that’s more natural.  She interviews a bunch of groundbreaking new farmers, doing things in ways that seem incredibly simple when you watch, but are completely revolutionary in comparison to the Way Things Are Currently Done(tm).  From forest farms to vertical gardening, the show really goes into what’s wrong with commercial agriculture and posits ways to fix it…and has tons of ideas for things you can adapt for your own little patch of dirt.  (It’s a little bit Peak Oil hypey, but it’s British, so it’s an understated kind of hype. :>)

Tomorrow’s a big day here.

Just so you know, I’m working on a post for tomorrow that’s kind of epic.  It’s one of those you really should know about all this kind of things, and it’s got a few disclaimers attached to it, but it’s important, and I hope that even if you’re only ever going to be a farmer’s market patron with no garden of your own, ever, that you’ll stay tuned for it anyway.

Tomorrow, I’m talking about Monsanto, and why you should care what they’re doing.  (And you should.)

Stop back by, and in the meantime, think about your dirt, Revolutionistas.

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I found this the other day on Facebook, and haven’t been able to find a source for the graphic itself.  (The quote, though, is by Jules Dervaes of Urban Homestead, which is kind of Teh Awesome, if you’re interested in all things home grown.)

Normally, today would be all about a recipe.

And next week, we’ll be back to Simple Weekend Cooking.  (I have one for y’all, I just haven’t had a chance to cook-test it yet, and while I trust the source, I’m all about the making of the thing first.)

This week, catch-up week, though — I’m not really cooking today, per se.  Made some muffins, but that’s more baking than cooking.

I’m putting seeds into dirt instead.

Last year, I got a plot at our new community garden.  I’ve always had delusions of being a gardener someday — one of those people who could wave a magic stick over the ground and make broccoli appear as if by magic – but the reality of the thing is…well…I’m kind of brown-thumbed.  As in, I can kill anything at twenty paces brown.  Crops fail in my presence.  I love my plants to death with overwatering or fertilizing or just hugging them too much.  Whatever it is — I’m more of a farmer’s market patron than producer.

Then came last year.  I’m not sure what changed.  Maybe I turned 40 and my latent green thumbs went all un-dormant or something.  Maybe I just finally had soil that didn’t suck.  I’m not sure.  Regardless of the reason, I put one tomato plant and four jalapeno plants in the ground, along with some lettuce seeds that I fully thought had no shot of germinating, and even a green pepper plant, just for kicks.

By the end of the season, I had enough for five gallons of salsa.  Green peppers.  Giant BAGS of salad fixins.  Did I mention five gallons of oven-roasted salsa, where the only thing I had to buy was garlic?  (Mine didn’t grow, but I started it late in the season.)

I was MAGIC.  I MADE FOOD.  From DIRT.

Fast forward to this year.

This quest for a simpler, more connected and passionate life has had a couple of unexpected side effects.  I quit doing quite a few dumb things already.  (With a long list of Dumb still to go, but life’s a process.)  I’m more active, and don’t spend days on end in this same computer chair, trying to remember what the sun feels like.  I’m reconnecting with the processes of everyday life and appreciating them more.  (Even laundry’s an adventure if you pay attention.)

And most importantly, I’m learning.  Learning not only the esoteric type stuff that you’d assume, but oddly enough, more about the world.

And folks, I’m learning about food.  And it’s not pretty.  (And how many sentences can I start with the word “and”..?)

This week, I’m going to share some of that with you.

I’m going to warn you now:  some of it is controversial.  Some of it is hypey and paranoid and, frankly, disgusting.  (Meat glue and pink slime?  The ubiquitous “they” want us to eat this stuff and like it?)

While a large part of my yearlong quest here is intended to dive deep into passionate enjoyment of all the simple things the world has to offer, learning more about the industrial/commercial food system that literally feeds us has been a bit that has not only stressed me out, but made me WAY more focused on taking that brown thumb of mine and forcing it to turn green by whatever means necessary.

Really, when you think about it — what can be more joy-inducing than being intimately connected with what goes into your body?  (All dirty puns aside.)  By the end of this week, I’m hoping that you’ll not only be outraged and a little afraid (I was.), but also energized and determined to stick your hands in some dirt — or to support local people who do.

Are you already a gardener or aspiring gardener?

I joined a site called My Folia a few years ago that, even as a free user (which I’ve always been) lets you track what you’re planting and how it does.  (If you look at my gardens, they’ve all been abysmal failures until last year, even.  It’s kind of funny and kind of sad, all wrapped up into one.)  It’s kind of gardener-geek paradise, really.  Come on by and try ‘er out, even if you’re not quite sure yet what you’ll be planting, or where.

And we’ve got some good gardening discussions going on over in the forums, too, if that’s more your speed.  (I’m an organization geek, so tracking sites make me all squee-ey.)

So instead of cooking, today, I’m putting seeds in dirt.

There’s 8 weeks left until our last frost date, and this year, I’m looking at a double-plot in the community garden and a bunch of heirloom variety seeds (unpatented types) so I can save and trade with other foodmakers.

What are you doing today?

 

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