What Is the Deal With the Food Crisis?

So I've been thinking a lot about food since I was a wee little kid; my parents where farmers and so I learned about food as soon as I learned other fundamental truths of life; some of my earliest memories where of putting seeds in the ground alongside my parents as a toddler; I knew from my earliest days that a lot of work, sun, rain and minerals goes into food.

But lately, specifically the last several years, food has become a foremost topic in my mind. I think I'm going to break this post into several different categories because there is so much to be said about food and the food storage the "silent tsunami" if you will, that is sweeping the world.

First topic I guess I'll call Organic Foods.

I first really became aware of the process of growing organic foods the last several summers, when I worked for an organic farmer. Previously, my only real experience with agriculture had been on my parent's commercial cabbage/wheat/beets and corn farm, and some attempts my mom made to get a small, roadside stand business off the ground. We grew an acre of broccoli and another acre of squash a few summers in a row, and sold this produce to a chain on the East Coast called Wegmans which does a good job of buying stuff from local (and these days, organic,) farmers. But we had to do a lot of extra "leg work" to sell our produce, and both my parents decided it just wasn't worth the work, so they went back to focusing on the large, commercial aspects of their farm. They are by no means organic farmers, and lately, my dad is focusing more and more on corn, since biodiesel has forced corn prices sky-high and my dad can get a lot more for corn then he could previously.

So Rivka Davis taught me about organic farming, or perhaps, more correctly, market gardening, as she calls it. She is truly a person who farms with all of the right intentions; much of her acherage is devoted to woods; she plants some corn close to the woods so the deer will have something to eat too (the idea is that they will eat the little "deer garden" and leave her market gardens alone...this works better in theory then in reality.) She sells only locally, to a few health food stores, at a farmer's market and she has a few loyal customers who call her weekly and put in their orders and then come and pick vegetables up right at her farm. She uses no pesticides or herbicides (just hearing the word "herbicide" gives me the creeps, since I am understanding more and more that all plants are neither good nor evil, they just have uses that are well known to people or not very well known.) My cousins laughed at me when they heard I was working on an organic farm, they laughed and said "bet you spend all of your time weeding, don't you?" And part of the reason Rivka's operation is so small is because an organic farm is truly more labor intensive, but that is also the beauty of it, as I see it. What my dad does, and what my cousins and uncles do, is not what I'd really consider farming. A lot of what they do relates more to the machinery, the equipment, the tractors they use, then actually knowing and having a relationship with your plants. True, my dad is quite a bit different then many of the other commercial farmers I've seen, who work as hard and as fast as they can, to try to get the biggest yield possible, to make the most money they possibly can. My dad does have a little more of a relationship with his plants and his land then many farmers; he'd rather spend time watching rainstorms and talking to his trees then farming I think; but he doesn't know how to make a living watching rainstorms and talking with trees. My dad is slowly, ever so slowly, creeping towards becoming organic. He buys less and less spray each year, simply because being petroleum or oil based, the prices have shot way up and he can't afford it. He also refuses to use genetically modified seeds, which he says Monsanto tried to trick him into planting this year by "accidentally" sending a package of genetically modified seeds along with the non-modified stuff he ordered. When my dad called them and said "I never ordered the GMO seeds, should I send them back," the Monsanto rep said "oh just keep it and consider it a gift..." Gift my ass...Monsanto wants my dad to become a loyal customer of the frankinseeds that they have created, which only grow and produce if they are used concurrently with a special spray that Monsanto has also created and therefore monopolizes, called RoundUp Ready. I'm worried that if even a few of the RoundUp seeds end up in my dad's fields, Monsanto will do what they have done to farmers in India, which is sue them for "stealing their seeds," when a few of their GMO seeds are found in the farmer's field. And people wonder why so many farmers in India are committing suicide by drinking pesticides? Anyway...

I can't write anymore about these horrible things that are happening right now, so I guess this is going to be a to-be-continued blog.

Love ya,
Carrot
(Eat locally grow, organic foods...shop at a farmer's market for greatest satisfaction)