The Non-GMO Shopper's Guide

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GMO Meltdown: The Round-Up Pathogen

From Farm And Ranch Freedom

For more, click here for Dr. Huber's letter to the European Commission
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One of the nation’s senior scientists alerted the federal government to a newly discovered organism that may have the potential to cause infertility and spontaneous abortion in farm animals, raising significant concerns about human health.  Dr. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, believes the appearance and prevalence of the unnamed organism may be related to the nation’s over reliance on the weed killer known as Roundup and/or to something about the genetically engineered Roundup-Ready crops. In a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the professor called on the federal government to immediately stop deregulation of roundup ready crops, particularly roundup ready alfalfa.

Below is the full text of the letter.  FARFA received an electronic copy of the letter from Dr. Huber and we have spoken with him directly to confirm its authenticity.

The letter was intended as to alert the government about preliminary research results that indicate serious problems.  As Dr. Huber himself clearly states, more research is needed. 

Dr. Huber wrote a second letter, in March, to European officials, explaining the issue in more depth.  Click here to read the second explanatory letter.

January 16, 2011

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn—suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup.  This organism appears NEW to science!

This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen’s source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.

We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.

For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman’s terms, it should be treated as an emergency.

A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario:

Unique Physical Properties

This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.

Pathogen Location and Concentration

It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.

Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease

The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income—sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss’ wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).

Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure

Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.

The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.

For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.

Recommendations

In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA’s participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.

It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.

I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure.

Sincerely,
COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber
Emeritus Professor, Purdue University
APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS) 

If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls Everyone Would Be a Vegetarian

 Click here to see the video at Organic Remix

Music legend and activist Paul McCartney delivers a powerful narration of this must-see video about factory farmed animals and how we can help animals and the environment by adopting a plant-based diet. Watch now to discover why everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls. Learn more: meat.org

Organic Remix

 Click here to explore Organic Remix

ORGANIC REMIX is a free informational source, devoted to an organic and sustainable lifestyle, holistic health practices, a nurtured environment, renewable technologies and consciousness-based education for all.

It was created by Olia Saunders, a New York based graphic designer and photographer, organic lifestyle enthusiast, yoga teacher and a non-violent food advocate.

The impetus for this blog was driven by her passion to share information gathered over many years of research. It is dedicated to like-minded people who want to learn from and share knowledge with each other, thus helping to improve our world by making conscious decisions and ultimately, benefit from a holistic and sustainable lifestyle.

Let's Move She Said-And We Have

From Ezekiel J. Emanuel at the Opinionator from the New York Times

During the first spring of the Obama presidency, the First Lady broke ground on a White House vegetable garden. Then, in February 2010, she announced the Let’s Move initiative, a campaign to change the way America’s children eat and exercise, with the goal of ending childhood obesity in a generation.

In the years since, what has Michelle Obama’s work accomplished, besides (and I can say this from experience) the harvesting of some delicious lettuce, green beans and honey?

The answer is: a lot. One of the most important results has been increasing public awareness of the importance of obesity. In 2008, over two-thirds of adults and a third of adolescents and children in the United States were obese or overweight. Although most Americans already saw obesity as a major problem, a majority opposed increasing federal spending to combat it. This attitude has begun to change. By 2011, a Pew survey found that most Americans believe the government should play a significant role in reducing obesity among children. Today, 80 percent of Americans acknowledge that childhood obesity is a serious problem.

Mrs. Obama’s campaign has also led to improvements in the access to and content of school meals — which are where many children get the bulk of their calories and nutrition. In late 2010, the lame-duck Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act which, for the first time in 30 years, increased funding for school breakfasts and lunches above the inflation rate. The act also gives the Agriculture Department authority to set health standards for all foods sold on school property — including those in vending machines. Best of all, it reduced government paperwork to establish eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals, ensuring that tens of thousands more children will get healthy food they need.

In conjunction with the Let’s Move campaign, three of the largest food service companies that operate school cafeterias — Sodexo, Aramark and Chartwells — committed to meeting recommended levels of fat, sugar and whole grains in the next 5 years and doubling the fruits and vegetables they serve over the next 10. Then, just last month, after a long struggle that included a fight over whether pizza sauce should count as a serving of vegetables (the final verdict was that it does), federal regulations upgraded the quality of food in the school meals to ensure they contain more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and less sodium and saturated fat.

There has also been important progress in the private sector. Walmart, Walgreens, Supervalu and other smaller grocers have promised to build or expand 1,500 stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables in communities without access to healthy food. The FreshWorks Fund, a team of grocery industry groups, banks and health care organizations, committed $200 million to eliminating these so-called “food deserts” in California, bringing access to nutritious groceries to millions.

Even more impressive, Walmart announced that, by 2015, it would remove all trans fats and reduce salt and added sugars by 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively, from thousands of packaged foods it sells. We know that when Walmart drops salt by 25 percent, everyone will drop salt by 25 percent, because when Walmart demands suppliers change how they make their products, it drives the whole marketplace. Walmart has also committed to making healthier foods more affordable.

In the restaurant world, Darden, which owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, among others, has committed to reducing total calories and salt across its menus, and is offering vegetables, fruit and milk as the default side dishes and drink for every kid’s meal.

And there are plenty of other achievements: the Agriculture Department redesigned the cluttered food pyramid into an easier-to-follow circular symbol called MyPlate; the United States Tennis Association is building or refurbishing 3,000 tennis courts; 1,000 salad bars have been donated to schools; and, with the health care reform law, chain restaurants are posting calorie counts on their menus.

It has been only two years since Let’s Move began, and we can’t know yet if there has been any reduction in childhood obesity rates. After all, it took nearly 50 years to convert the country into a fat blob; it will take time to return to a slim fit. But it is possible.

Most powerful of all, Mrs. Obama’s campaign has already begun to change the way the food sector — producers, restaurants and grocery stores — approaches its youngest customers. With rising public awareness of the importance of good nutrition, companies are changing their business models, incorporating nutrition when they design and develop cereals, snacks, menus or school meals. While not all food companies have changed yet, the market is beginning to require them to come up with healthier products. At this rate, I believe we’ll start seeing childhood obesity rates declining after a few more harvests of the White House garden.

Mindful Eating as Food for Thought

Jennifer May for The New York Times

Diners wait until everyone is seated at the Blue Cliff Monastery. More Photos »

Click here to read the full article from Jeff Gordinier at the New York Times

TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love — let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.

Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.

Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.

Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. 

In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.

Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.

“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”

The GMO Battle: Does Whole Foods Support Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Alfalfa?

If you’re a health nut like I am, you’ve likely already heard about the allegation that Whole Foods Market has apparently surrendered to the agricultural giant, Monsanto, and agreed to support the introduction of genetically modified alfalfa into our ecosystem. Genetically modified organisms (specifically, those which are being created for the sole purpose of human consumption) is one area of Holistic Nutrition in which I am exceptional passionate.

So the recent turmoil has prompted me to write this piece and hopefully explain the occurrences for those who may otherwise not be aware.

First of all, the controversy brewing in the United States over genetically modified alfalfa is not a new subject. It has simply reached a critical cross-road and the developments that have been unfolding over the last week or so have begun to aim a spotlight on the topic.

Monsanto, a corporation driven purely by financial gain with no regard for the human or environmental impact of its products, continues to push for the introduction of more genetically modified organisms. Why is this important to them? Because they hold the patents to the seeds. But why would farmers want to use these seeds? Because they are genetically modified to be resistant to RoundUp herbicide, meaning the farms can spray their crops to kill off other organisms, but allow the alfalfa to survive. But there’s a catch (actually, there’s many catches, but I’m just writing an article, not a book). Genetically modified organisms will not properly reproduce for future generations. With traditional farming practices, farmers would breed crops and keep the best seeds in order to have successful subsequent growing years. They would also practice crop rotation techniques to allow the soil to regenerate and replenish the nutrients used by the previous year’s crops. But this art is slowing dying as a direct result of the greed of Monsanto.

Once a farmer begins using Monsanto seeds, they are essentially hooked for life. They cannot easily go back to using traditional methods because the cross-contamination of their seeds with those from Monsanto results in an infringement of the patent and trademark laws. Many farmers who have never even used Monsanto seeds have fallen victim to these laws due to the cross-pollination effect of wind, that occurs naturally. Percy Schmeiser is probably the most famous of these farmers. His crops were contaminated when a truck drove passed his property carrying Monsanto seeds. Monsanto came after
Percy claiming he was in violation of using their patented product intentionally. Once genetically modified organisms have been unleashed into the environment, there is no way to control them or take them back. They will spread. Nature knows no borders.

As I mentioned, the battle of genetically modified food is not new. Monsanto has been trying to get approval from the USDA to allow them to provide farmers with alfalfa seeds for many years. Fortunately, there has been enough public protest and companies, such as Whole Foods, to stand up and fight against this abomination. Currently, 93% of soy, 86% of corn, 93% of cotton and 93% of canola (rapeseed) seed planted in the US in 2010 was genetically engineered. If we continue to allow more GM food to be grown, there will be little we can do to avoid consuming it even if we don’t want it. Not only will crops become cross-contaminated, but organic livestock (which would otherwise be GMO-free) could be fed genetically modified grains, threatening the integrity of the organic meat and dairy industries. We will inevitably be consuming more gmo in one form or another, without knowledge or consent.

As I mentioned, some companies like Whole Foods have attempted to stand up and be the voice for the public. Whole Foods has always been opposed to all GMO… until recently, it would seem. The USDA put forth a proposal to allow GM alfalfa to finally make its way to farmland. According to Whole Foods, the USDA presented the industry with two options: total deregulation of Genetically Engineered alfalfa, or deregulation with some conditions to facilitate coexistence and protection of non-GE farmers. Wholefoods reluctantly opted for the latter.

The options presented by the USDA were essentially to either allow Monsanto full control to do as they want completely unregulated, or to allow Monsanto to do what they want, but implement some regulation and attempt to control Genetically engineered alfalfa so it can co-exist with non-GMO varieties.

This is where the recent controversy really takes off. Upon hearing this news, the Organic Consumers Association immediately published an article detailing how Whole Foods Market (as well as Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm) surrendered to Monsanto and began supporting genetic modification. The information spread through the industry like wildfire. Within hours, Whole Foods was being bombarded with vicious attacks from loyal customers.

In an attempt to explain their position, Whole Foods has released a few statements and responded to countless angry inquiries. Their decision was not one that was made lightly. As I mentioned, Whole Foods has made it very clear that they do not support the USDA’s choice to allow for the introduction for Genetically Engineered alfalfa. However, they were forced to make a decision between the 2 options listed above, or else sacrifice their seat at the table and have no voice at all. The position in which Whole Foods was placed was not an easy one.

And so the dilemma continues to move forward. Thousands of angry consumers feel helpless. Many are upset with Whole Foods and argue that the company should have taken a harder stance in their position and not allow the USDA to bully them into making a decision between 2 evils. Why couldn’t Whole Foods have simply said “No, we do not support either of these options” and continue fighting the battle against GMO through other means? Or perhaps it was the right decision for them to keep their voice with the USDA so they can continue to fight from the inside? These are incredibly difficult questions to answer and begin to get very political, too.

There are many aspects of genetically modified food which could be discussed. For now, though, this article is merely intended to explain why there seems to be so much controversy surrounding this subject at the moment.

Want to read more:

• http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2011/01/no-regulations-ge-alfalfa/
• http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/01/30/stonyfield-farm-takes-a-swing-at-monsanto-and-the-oca/
• http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22449.cfm
• http://www.organicvalley.coop/community/organicsense/article/article/gm-alfalfa-whats-happening-now
• http://www.facebook.com/vancouvernutritionist#!/note.php?note_id=485295751970&id=24922591487

How you can be help and take action:
Despite the efforts and recommendations of Whole Foods (and other organic companies), the USDA fully deregulated GE alfalfa on January 27, 2011. This means that farmers can plant the Frankenfood with no restrictions. But the fight is not over. President Obama has the power to overrule the USDA’s decision, and it’s important that he do so in order to protect the organic meat and dairy industry.
Please sign this petition to voice your opinion:

• http://www.change.org/petitions/ask_president_obama_to_protect_organic_and_stop_monsantos_ge_alfalfa

Here are some other resources for you to help:
If you’re interesting in helping organize or coordinate a Millions Against Monsanto and Factory Farms Truth-in-Labeling campaign in your local community, sign up here:

• http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/index.cfm

To pressure Whole Foods Market and the nation’s largest supermarket chains to voluntarily adopt truth-in-labeling practices sign here, and circulate this petition widely:

• http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22309.cfm

What do you think Whole Foods should have done (or should do now)?

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Filed Under: Food & Nutrition, Green & Healthy Living, News, Spotlight Tagged With: alfalfa, genetically engineered, genetically engineered alfalfa, genetically modified, gmo, monsanto, whole foods

About Rich Ralph
As a Registered Holistic Nutritionist in Vancouver, Rich took his passion for health and wellness to the extreme in 2007 when he became the first man to successfully roller-blade across Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, in support of cancer research. He is committed to educating and encouraging people to make powerful and sustainable nutritional adjustments which will provide the greatest impact to your well-being.

Small Farm Training Center 2011 Harvest and Performance Report

Editor's Note: This blog began in 2008 as a chronicle of the sustainable farming efforts, led by Terry Sheldon, at the Small Farm Training Center at the New Vrindaban Spiritual Community in West Virginia.

We return to that original spirit with a report from the Small Farm Training Center on its 2011 harvest and year-in-review.

"The Small Farm Training Center (SFTC) is a land based educational center and a hands-on working organic farm. Our purpose is to create community—a web of supportive relationships—by making locally grown organic foods readily available and affordable with the use of simple technology."


Click here to learn more.

Contents

1). Overview
2). Review of Annual Crop Production.
3). How Much Was Harvested? What’s the Wholesale Value?
4). Status of Student Apprentice Training Program.
5). Three Recommendations to Boost New Vrindaban Sustainable Development.
6). Networking, Local Community Outreach and Plans for 2012.

Overview

The Small Farm Training Center’s (SFTC) is an educational center and a hands-on working organic farm. Our mission is to address the looming issue of food insecurity by creating a land based green economic model that functions in both the city and rural environs. With the help of small scale technology, we make organically grown food affordable and available.

Review of Annual Crop Production

The 2011 agricultural cycle was shaped by extremes in weather. Excessive Spring rains, a period of searing summer heat and eighty days of Fall rain showers (typically 3-4 rainy days in a week from August 20th until Nov.15th), all combined to negatively impact crop production. Here are the highlights:

–First Spring planting date, March 16th.
First crops planted: spinach, lettuce, parsnip, radish, carrot, beet, chard, fava bean,
–Second planting May 16th –May 26th. Transplants grown and donated by West
Virginia State Univ. included: tomato, okra, brussel sprouts, cabbage, peppers,
kale, cucumber, basil and stevia.
–Third major planting July 17th-August 1st. Direct seeding of winter squash,
pumpkins, green beans, late beets and summer squash.
–Successes: lettuce, spinach, winter squash, pumpkins, okra, green beans,
cucumber, kale, summer squash, bitter melon and fava bean.
–Failures: cabbage, peppers, beets carrot, parsnip,
–Mixed results: tomato, chard, brussel sprouts.

*notes: Tomatoes did not begin setting red fruit until Sept. 1st. Good yield but late harvest. Six hundred cabbages were destroyed by ground hogs. 1000 pepper plants performed poorly due to wet soil conditions Chard yielded heavily until July when the plants succumbed to an invasion of leaf hoppers. Brussel sprouts did well in the Garden of Seven Gates but were attacked by aphids in the Teaching Garden. Carrots and parsnips plantings were destroyed by groundhogs in the Teaching Garden. Three attempts to grow winter storage beets all failed due to weed pressure The beet beds were too wet to allow either hand or mechanical cultivation.

How Much Was Harvested? What’s The Wholesale Value?

*note: The wholesale value chart below is determined by price comparisons to Jebia’s Market. The quantities are calculated according to standard weights and head counts for a specific vegetable. For example, a waxed box of chard weights approximately 25lbs and contains 20-25 individual chard bundles (tied with a twisty or rubber band). Jebia’s wholesale price for non-organic chard is $23.00 per box. Organic produce is typically 30% more.

ITEM QTY HARVESSTED WHOLESALE VALUE COMMENTS

Tomato 120 boxes $18/box $2160
Cucumber 45 boxes $26/box $1170
Lettuce 20 boxes $27/box $540
Chard 51 boxes $23/box $1173
Bnut Squash 40 bushels $20/bu $800
Pumpkin 70 pcs $3.@ $210
Kale 6 boxes $20/box $120
Spinach 6 boxes $28/box $168
Spaghetti Squash 13 bushels $20/bu $260.
Summer Squash 16 boxes $24/box $384
Okra 14 boxes $27/box $378
Green Beans 9 boxes $22/box $198
Fava Beans 75 lbs $2/lb $150
Red Bell Pepper 8 boxes $30/box $240
Jalapeno Pepper 6 boxes $29/box $174
Red Chile Pepper 3 boxes $29/box $87
Radish and Greens 9 boxes $21/box $189

Total……………..$8401
Total if paying organic wholesale prices………….…..$10,921

Status of Student Apprentice Training Program
–Number of inquires via email and phone……………………17
–Number of apprentice participating…………………………….7
(Brandon, Brian, John, Laslo, Yogadeva, Tracy and Ben)

Needs: The most urgent need for boosting apprentice participation is website development—specifically, a dedicated person to handle content management and recruiting. In short, we’re under-communicating what we have to offer. Target audiences include ISKCON social media outlets, animal rights organizations such as PETA and Farm Sanctuary, food activist organizations, universities and colleges, gardening clubs etc. For a comprehensive view of SFTC’s apprentice opportunity see www.farmeducation.org. Look for ‘training” in the top menu bar of the home page.
The apprentice program has mentored 30 plus full time participants and dozens of weekend helpers over the past five years.

Three Recommendations to Boost New Vrindaban Sustainable Development

a). Follow the lead of New Vraja Dhama (Hungary).
At New Vraja Dham, all devotees supported by the temple—from temple president to pot washer, yes even pujaris!—are available for 3 hours of farm related service per week. Devotees often fulfill their obligation by dividing the 3 hr. time slot into two days of 1.5 hours. The farm manager arranges work assignments knowing that each day he can expect a team of helpers. By sharing the chores in the garden, barn and fields, the whole community gains insight into the value of the cows, the land and the joy of shared sacrifice for Lord Krishna’s pleasure.

b). Restore brahminical standards in Krishna’s kitchen.
Our farming and gardening should be guided by the purity of the offering to Sri Sri Radha Vrindaban Chanda. Foods planted, nurtured, and harvested by devotee hands are, in the words of Srila Prabhupada, “One hundred times better” than bhoga purchased from the outside. Implementing that standard of purity should be expected in the place Srila Prabhupada anointed as a holy tirtha and ISKCON’s first farm community.

Adopting a higher standard begins with connecting the dots between the garden, the kitchen and the Lord’s altar.

c). Incentivize farming, farm culture and farm related occupations
Not only are New Vrindaban’s original settlers aging, but the ones who are experienced farmers—who can successfully grow food in large quantities—can be counted on one hand. Farming is not just ”another” manual trade. Organic farming, in particular, demands a diverse set of skills, the most important of which is the ability to accurately read and quickly adjust to the rhythms and mood swings of mother nature.

How does New Vrindaban attract the next wave of agrarians? How do we convincingly present the case for “plain living and high thinking” when the only occupations that offer a living wage revolve around Hindu fund raising, guest facility maintenance and internet administration? In the past seventeen years—that’s the number of consecutive years the Teaching Garden has been productive—we’ve purchased over one million dollars worth of outside bhoga. Imagine if that money had stayed within the community to create a local food economy.

Networking, Local Community Outreach and Plans for 2012

What began six years ago as a genuine effort to share surplus produce with area food pantries and soup kitchens has blossomed into a burgeoning grass roots movement called the Green Wheeling Initiative. The Small Farm Training Center has played a leading role in local networking efforts to bring about a unique collaboration of academia, social service agencies, city government and urban gardeners.

SFTC is currently pursuing the following initiatives outside of New Vrindaban

-A grant funded study to explore how Wheeling spends its food dollar.
-A grant funded mandate to form a business plan to shift food production
and consumption by 10% over a three year period.
-The expansion of a Community Garden Network, now comprised of fourteen urban
gardens as well as New Vrindaban’s ‘Teaching Garden’ and ‘Garden of Seven Gates.’
-The creation of a downtown Wheeling ‘Green Zone’ in partnership with West
Virginia Northern Community College.
-Regular interaction with seven local colleges and universities to stimulate dialogue
and debate about a local food economy.

Within New Vrindaban, SFTC’s 2012 plans include:
-Completion of the artisan bakery.
-Renovation of the Small Farm Training Center Guest House facility.
- Opening the Center for Preventative Medicine (inside SFTC Guest House).
-Construction of the Children’s Learning and Play Center (the Teaching Garden).
-Enhanced Student Apprentice Program, including a written curriculum.
-Irrigation and drainage for the Garden of Seven Gates (ECO-V grant funded).

Environmental Imagination: The Food Movement and Climate Change

 

 

From Jebediah Purdy at the Huffington Post

The two most visible environmental issues today, climate change and agriculture, are about as different as they could be. Taken together, though, they give some reminders. Environmental consciousness is very young. Its challenge to some of the ways we live is deep. And it can be a great source of cultural and political creativity and renewal.

Climate change is huge and diffuse. It works on a literally planetary scale. No one can say for sure that it is the cause behind any particular event, like a drought or storm. Part of the challenge to doing anything about it is that it is hard to imagine, easy to ignore, impossible to touch. Even as the scientific warnings around climate change grow clearer and louder, fewer Americans believe in or care about it, and national action on it is dead for now.

Food has been on everyone's mind for most of a decade -- where it comes from, what it does to us, how it affects the rest of the natural world. It doesn't require global vision or national action. Where I live, in central North Carolina, and all over the country, a new generation of kids is scrounging farmland and experimenting in making a living from the land. What they're after is as local and concrete as it gets. By sticking their hands in the dirt, eating what they or a neighbor planted, they are turning a network of ignorance -- the anonymous, placeless food of industrial agriculture, with all its invisible polluting side-effects -- into a circuit of knowledge: here I planted it, here it grew, and here it will turn back into soil when it's done.

That is the purest version, to be sure, and not all that much food comes from these purists, but I'd argue that the tens of millions of eaters with a new interest in the environmental, ethical, and health quality of their food are after versions of the same thing: taming an opaque tangle of simple calories and complicated harm by drawing some clearer lines from the field to the table.

Personal action, even ordinary collective action, is frustratingly ineffective against climate change. Greenhouse gases emitted in one place are equally diffused through the global atmosphere a year later. Self-restraint, even by fair-sized countries, gets swamped by everyone else's self-indulgence.

By contrast, a person can draw the circuit of eating close enough to make a real difference in her own health and, if she coordinates with growers, in the health of a piece of land. Community springs up naturally around growing, selling, preparing, and eating food, where every step of the process makes a difference. There isn't much community around climate change because it so thoroughly frustrates the personal and shared acts that form a community practice.

This comparison raises a distressing thought. It's often said about eating disorders that people who feel their lives are out of their control focus great acts of will on the small area they can control, their own eating. A cynic could see the food-conscious United States as frantically engaged in a symbolic environmental micro-practice that we can understand and control, while an all-pervading macro-problem broods and prepares to wreck large parts of the world we know. Maybe there is something to this.

But there's another way of looking at the two issues that is more hopeful. For all their practical differences, climate and food are both cardinal examples of the ecological insight that made environmentalism possible: everything is connected, so what we drop into rivers, winds, or soil ends up in our bloodstreams. Flashes of this thought appeared in the nineteenth century and much earlier, but as a guiding principle it really dates from after World War Two. Widespread appreciation of it goes back no further than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published fifty years ago, which detailed the silent, terrible, invisible journey of pesticides through the capillaries of a poisoned world.

In big ways, the modern food movement goes back to an eccentric, powerful, and often beautiful book by Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America. Writing in 1977, as the first popular wave of environmental awareness and activism crested, Berry tied ecological destruction to the American food economy. In the move from diversified, small-scale agricultural to industrial production, he saw a larger decline in miniature: from integrated organic fertility to systems that import artificial fertilizer to the farm and discard rich manure as a pollutant, breaking (in Berry's phrase) one solution into two problems; from intimate knowledge of a piece of land and its species to the tunnel-vision ignorance of the industrially enabled, public subsidized ignorance of someone who produces of one thing, whether corn, wheat, or pork, in a radically simplified system; from respect for the hard but sometimes good work of farming to dislike, even contempt, of labor, which came with a willingness to make agricultural labor, in industrial poultry plants and slaughterhouses, as degrading as it has ever been.

Berry argued that the two approaches to food had different ethics at their core. One was oriented to caretaking, sustainability, and good work: qualitative values that set limits to the willingness to exploit a place for present convenience. The other turned its face to maximization: maximum calorie production as government policy, maximum profit for agribusiness, and the same industrial ideal for the small farmer caught between the two. These quantitative values would set no limit to human actions as long as production and profit continued. In fact, they would tend to overrun any limits on profitable production. And, because complex and long-distance systems tended to hide from eaters all the harm their food had done along the way, this system involved us all in damaging nature and our own bodies and made that damage hard to see and harder to trace.

So the food system, viewed in 1977, had a certain amount in common with climate change today. It was -- and still is, in good part -- a scheme of ignorance, convenience, and destruction that turned our everyday activity into a small weapon against environmental health and, ultimately, our own well-being.

There were technical reasons to doubt that it could get better, but it wasn't only a technical problem. It was also a cultural problem. Then two-plus generations of idealists and eccentrics got busy on the cultural problem. Journalists like Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) made the environmental and human harms of industrial agriculture indelibly visible. Farmers rediscovered and pioneered integrated techniques, but they also rediscovered, and drew others into, the idea that responsible, productive, knowledgeable work is good work, and that getting to do that work is a gift, not (just) a burden. The young people starting farms, and lining up to work on other people's, aren't doing it for the profit margins, the hourly wage, or the vacation. And those who like to buy from these farms, or from responsible larger producers, have realized that knowledge of your food is a gain, ignorance a loss, and are trying to make up some of our huge cultural loss.

The new farming movement turns the ecological perspective from a way of diagnosing problems to a way of imagining a good life: taking part in ecological processes with as little harm, as much knowledge, and as much pleasure as possible. That people are making this happen, even as a series of experiments, strikes me as powerful evidence that a culture can heal some of its self-inflicted wounds. Wendell Berry's book, which was a jeremiad, now looks like a friendlier kind of prophecy, thanks to its readers.

Maybe our next question is whether climate change is also a cultural problem as well as a technical one, and, if so, what a cultural response would look like. There's no doubt that climate change arises directly from how we live: like people who treasure convenience, power, and speed, who disperse around the world as we collapse distance and time, and who have learned to treat waiting -- for anything -- as an affront. All of that takes power, that is, energy. Energy-wise, we are the most powerful generation of the most powerful species this planet has carried on its groaning back. For this to change, either our energy will have to become much less environmentally damaging, or our lives will have to do the same. Considering that energy efficiency and total greenhouse-gas emissions have skyrocketed together for centuries now, these are probably false alternatives. The real question is whether both changes together could be enough.

The cultural experiments so far are nibbling around the edges. A few individuals and organizations buy carbon offsets. A few more, genuinely hard-core, live with zero or near-zero net carbon emissions in their own lives. Communities commit to reducing their emissions, regardless of what the rest of the country or the world is doing, and start planning together for major climate change -- a prudent thing to do, for sure, but also a community-building exercise of imagination.

What more, if anything, can we do? The history of environmental politics shows that people act most effectively when they have something to fear, but, while averting the threat, also find something to love. Americans saved their national forests and parks because they were afraid of running out of timber and healthy open spaces, but also because they had learned to find joy in wild lands that had once frightened them. They passed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act because Rachel Carson and others had taught them to fear industrial poison, but also because they were coming to revere the idea of ecological harmony and prize swimmable streams and clear, visible air. (That's not to say we have enough of these, but the ideals, as well as the threats, helped to motivate these laws.)

Maybe climate change will prove too diffuse and global to get our minds around, and show once and for all that we are too selfish and parochial to be running a whole planet. Maybe the food movement will turn out to be what some have always called it, an elitist fad.

But maybe we learn something about climate from the last forty years of food culture. We could use ways of imagining, and caring for, the planet's atmospheric system as acutely as we do national parks and our own neighborhoods. We need ways to find beauty in its balances, take awe from its power, and feel what it means when the whole planet's metabolism changes. And we would be awfully indebted to anyone who could help us to live in more knowledgeable ways that did less harm, and be more fulfilled with that.

It sounds utopian, for sure. But we don't live only on the energy reserves of the planet's history. We also live on the unacknowledged utopian imagination of our ancestors, who envisioned seemingly impossible forms of freedom and satisfaction that we treat as if they were natural.

We should unlock our own utopian imagination to think about living well for the future on the planet we have made, and are remaking faster every year. The cultural change around food is a modest but important reminder that we can.

Meatless in The Midwest: A Tale Of Survival

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Some patrons, unlike the reporter, line up for brisket at Arthur Bryant’s barbecue, in Kansas City, Mo.

Click here to read the full article from A.J Sulzberger at the New York Times

IN an ideal world, vegetarians would be built like camels. Not humpbacked, of course, but able to sustain themselves through long stretches by tapping stored energy reserves, like previously consumed soy products.

But after the first three dinners in my new hometown, where I moved from New York to cover the Midwest for this newspaper, even this veteran vegetarian was flagging.

This city, after all, is celebrated as a Mecca of meat. And any newcomer should expect to start with a tour of the most venerable purveyors of cows, pigs and chickens in what I’ve been told are their most delicious forms.

So, yes, I’ve “eaten” at some of these famous restaurants. There was the meal at the Golden Ox steakhouse (baked potato), Stroud’s fried chicken (rolls) and Arthur Bryant’s barbecue, where, searching for vegetarian options on the menu, skipping over the lard-bathed French fries, pausing to consider the coleslaw, I ordered the safest option (a mug of Budweiser).

After three days of this, starving, I went alone to the nearest Chinese restaurant I could find, where I feasted on a steaming plate of meatless mapo tofu.

It should be stated right up front that the Midwest, with its rich culture, stark natural beauty and superlative decency, quickly defies stereotypes. Living in the middle of the country is very different from living in the middle of nowhere.

But make no mistake: meat-loving is one stereotype that the region wears with pride. Lard still plays a starring role in many kitchens, bacon comes standard in salads, and perhaps the most important event on Kansas City social calendars is a barbecue contest.

Even though the region boasts some of the finest farmland in the world, there is a startling lack of fresh produce here. This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce.

“The mentality of the Midwest is, green is garnish,” explained Heidi Van Pelt-Belle, who runs Füd, a vegetarian restaurant in Kansas City.  

As a result, many heartland vegetarians say that eating, that most essential activity, can be a constant struggle. Longtime members of the club recall the days when doctors and family members alike warned that forgoing meat would result in serious malnutrition. This was not hyperbole to those who, lacking other options, subsisted on pizza.

Over the years, many have learned tricks, like calling ahead to a restaurant to negotiate a special entree. Dinner party? Best to eat first, knowing that side dishes might be the only options. Some say they have learned to cook for themselves more, to avoid the inevitable barrage of questions, if not outright mockery, that comes with eating in public.

Just outside Iowa City, Sparti’s Gyros taunts vegetarians even as it caters to them. The menu includes the Greek Veggie Wheat Pita, but adds a punch line: “For people who just don’t like eating. Put some meat on it!”

In Nebraska, a place where cattle outnumber people, vegetarians are sometimes accused of undermining the state economy. The owner of what was billed as the lone vegetarian restaurant in Omaha said it had several pounds of ground beef thrown at its doors shortly after opening. After a short run, it closed last year.

“Being a vegetarian in Nebraska is like being a Republican in Brooklyn — less of an outcast than a novelty,” said David Rosen, who became a vegetarian as a teenager in Omaha and is now a writer in Brooklyn. “Except that you don’t have to prepare special meals for Republicans.”

Organic Produce May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

Planting the Beach: American demand for year-round organic fruits and vegetables has incited a farming boom in the arid deserts of the Baja Peninsula in Mexico.

From Elisabeth Rosenthal at the New York Times

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.

Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

Many growers and even environmental groups in Mexico defend the export-driven organic farming, even as they acknowledge that more than a third of the aquifers in southern Baja are categorized as overexploited by the Mexican water authority. With sophisticated irrigation systems and shade houses, they say, farmers are becoming more skilled at conserving water. They are focusing new farms in “microclimates” near underexploited aquifers, such as in the shadow of a mountain, said Fernando Frías, a water specialist with the environmental group Pronatura Noroeste.

They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession.

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Experts agree that in general organic farms tend to be less damaging to the environment than conventional farms. In the past, however, “organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case,” said Michael Bomford, a scientist at Kentucky State University who specializes in sustainable agriculture. He added that intense organic agriculture had also put stress on aquifers in California.

Some organic standard setters are beginning to refine their criteria so that organic products better match their natural ideals. Krav, a major Swedish organic certification program, allows produce grown in greenhouses to carry its “organic” label only if the buildings use at least 80 percent renewable fuel, for example. And last year the Agriculture Department’s National Organic Standards Board revised its rules to require that for an “organic milk” label, cows had to be at least partly fed by grazing in open pastures rather than standing full time in feedlots.

But each decision to narrow the definition of “organic” involves an inevitable tug-of-war among farmers, food producers, supermarkets and environmentalists. While the United States’ regulations for organic certification require that growers use practices that protect water resources, it is hard to define a specific sustainable level of water use for a single farm “because aquifer depletion is the result of many farmers’ overutilizing the resource,” said Miles McEvoy, head of the National Organic Program at the Agriculture Department.

While the original organic ideal was to eat only local, seasonal produce, shoppers who buy their organics at supermarkets, from Whole Foods to Walmart, expect to find tomatoes in December and are very sensitive to price. Both factors stoke the demand for imports. Few areas in the United States can farm organic produce in the winter without resorting to energy-guzzling hothouses. In addition, American labor costs are high. Day laborers who come to pick tomatoes in this part of Baja make about $10 a day, nearly twice the local minimum wage. Tomato pickers in Florida may earn $80 a day in high season.

Manuel Verdugo, 42, began organic tomato farming on desert land in San José del Cabo five years ago and now owns 30 acres in several locations. Each week he sends two and a half tons of cherry, plum and beefsteak tomatoes to the United States under the brand name Tiky Cabo.

He has invested in irrigation systems that drip water directly onto plants’ roots rather than channeling it through open canals. He is building large shade houses that cover his crops to keep out pests and minimize evaporation. Even so, he cannot farm 10 acres in the nearby hamlet of La Cuenca because the wells there are dry.

At another five-year-old organic farm, Rosario Castillo says he can cultivate only 19 acres of the 100 he has earmarked for organic production, although he dug a well seven months ago to gain better access to the aquifer. The authorities ration pumping and have not granted him permission to clear native cactuses. “We have very little water here, and you have to go through a lot of bureaucracy to get it,” Mr. Castillo said.

Many growers blame tourist development — hotels and golf courses — for the water scarcity, and this has been a major problem in coastal areas. But farming can also be a significant drain. According to one study in an area of northern Baja called Ojos Negros, a boom in the planting of green onions for export a decade ago lowered the water table by about 16 inches a year. “They were pumping a lot of groundwater, and that was making some people rich on both sides of the border at the expense of the environment,” said Victor Miguel Ponce, a professor of hydrology at San Diego State University.

The logistics of getting water and transporting large volumes of perishable produce favors bigger producers. Some of the largest are American-owned, like Sueño Tropical, a vast farm with rows of shade houses lined up in the desert that caters exclusively to the American market.

While traditional organic farmers saw a blemish or odd shape simply as nature’s variations, workers at Sueño Tropical are instructed to cull tomatoes that do not meet the uniform shape, size and cosmetic requirement of clients like Whole Foods. Those “seconds” are sold locally.

Yet the connection to the United States has brought other kinds of benefits. Del Cabo Cooperative, which serves as a broker for hundreds of local farmers, provides seeds for its Mexican growers and hires roving agronomists and entomologists to assist them in tending their crops without chemicals.

As the American market expands, said John Graham, a coordinator of operations at Del Cabo, he is always looking to bring new growers into his network — especially those whose farms draw on distant aquifers where water is still abundant.

David Agren contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 31, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Ideals.

Milk-Superfood or Hyper-Allergen?

From Adam Heifer

In my time as a health professional I don’t think there is any other food i've come across that has more controversy and conjures up such a polarity of opinions as Milk. Although an ongoing source of confusion for years, a client’s recent inquiry over milk gave me the impetus to write this article. I will state that my purpose is not to convince anyone to drink milk or not. This is intended to give a brief, but thorough understanding and accurate depiction as to why such polarities of opinions exist. Are both statements right? Well read on and find out…

Milk - super food or hyper allergen?

Now milk goes way back as a Superfood- According to Ayurveda (the “science of life”- A 5000 year old healing system with roots in India) milk has special and unique nutrition unlike any other food- It is said to balance emotions and help balance all the “doshas." Acclaimed Indian Swami Srila Prabhupada stated that milk helps to form and maintain our “finer brain tissues,” which is a boon in the quest of self realization- Now that’s quite a statement if you ask me... On the other side of things, (occurring in the more recent years) milk has been branded a health risk- linked to cancer, diabetes, allergies, and digestibility issues.

The main issue to understand when deciphering information about dairy is that the negative statistics about milk are being compiled from a product that really isn’t milk in its true form. Pasteurized, homogenized corn, soy and/or grain fed milk is not really milk anymore. It falls into the category that Michael Pollan (Omnivores Dilemma) describes as “edible food like substances.” The entire structure of the product becomes changed and compromised- This leads to the digestibility issues and health concerns. The digestibility issue is usually blamed on the pasteurization (heating of the milk at high temperatures to potentially kill off any “pathogens”), thus destroying vital enzymes during the process that would allow proper assimilation of the milk. The greater issue is that during the heating/pasteurization process the fragile milk proteins are drastically changed, which leads to deeper digestibility issues. The “milk” becomes a foreign substance and our body mounts an immune response to it.

Homogenization breaks the fat molecules down to such a micro level that they can’t be properly assimilated by our body- It alters the enzymes and fats so that they enter the bloodstream and can “scar” the arteries, leading to cholesterol buildups. If that’s not enough, there is the antibiotics and growth hormone issue that also accompany conventional supermarket milk. Organic milk may be antibiotic and growth hormone free, but still runs into the same issues when it’s pasteurized and homogenized. Also, the nutritional and health value of the milk changes when the cows are grain, soy, and corn fed (which much of the organic milk is). This is not their natural diet and it shows up in the quality of the milk.

This is the crux of the issue in regard to conventional, pasteurized milk. Emphasis on the words conventional and pasteurized. Where the misinformation occurs with milk is when people start making blanket statements:  “Milk is linked to allergies, cancer, contains antibiotics etc..” This is true for conventional, pasteurized milk, but doesn’t have anything to do with real milk- I just want to make this distinction clear...

Now for the other side of things: pure, grass/pasture-fed cows milk is a whole other story- It is a raw, living, vital food. For as damning as conventional milk can be for our health, raw milk is equally as healthy. Many consider it the “wonder tonic” that the Ayurveda deems it, and the results are there to back it up. Raw milk has been known to reverse chronic disease and maladies from asthma and eczema to irritable bowel syndrome. Ingesting in its pure, natural state ensures that crucial enzymes and beneficial bacteria (such as lactobacillus) are intact which aids in proper digestion. In fact most people who have digestibility issues with conventional milk do just fine with grass-fed raw, real dairy. People all over the world have sworn by raw milk and dairy for helping them to regain their overall health and vitality back. Some indigenous people/cultures (who tend to be the healthiest people in the world) revere raw whole milk and dairy products as a “sacred food” as they know it to be a cornerstone to their robust mental and physical health, well being, and good fortune.

The formula for proper raw milk has to be that the cows are grass fed, and of course the farmers are conscientious and clean. Raw, grass-fed milk in its pure state has natural enzymes (its own “defense system”) to protect it from pathogens. There is no need to process it to protect us from any contaniments (Pasteurization also kills the pathogen fighting enzymes). Now there is a reason why other dairy products are pasteurized- Even organic, grain-fed milk could have contamination issues-It is processed for your protection.

Sale of raw dairy products are now illegal in most states (but interesting how you can buy Twinkies and an artificially sweetened mega energy drink). If you decide to try to go the raw route, there are buying clubs you could get involved with. Just look online, ask around, and do the research. There are also some grass-fed (but pasteurized) milk options at health food stores that some do fine with.

I personally avoided most dairy products for many years- Though the benefits of milk were tied into my Yoga culture/lineage and I heard from top health professionals about the deep health advantages of real dairy for quite some time. For these facts, when I finally had the ability to have access to them, I gave them a try.

In my training, I have noticed a distinct difference while starting on a raw heavy cream (a fairly recent addition). Raw cream is dense in fat soluble vitamins (which regulate hormones, metabolism, and assist in a healthy immune system), healthy fats for proper metabolism, Congelated Lineolic Acid/CLA and CoQ10. I treat it more like a “supplement” than a food (as consumption consists just of a couple spoonfuls a day), but it has made it into my routine and I feel great.

 *Bonus Section:
Again, this article isn’t written to dissuade you from, or sway you into consuming dairy products- We respect all stances, but it isn’t a forum to get into personal, ethical, or moral issues on dairy consumption. Its purpose is solely to distinguish the very distinct differences between conventional milk and raw real milk- We hope you understand the facts a little better now, and the choice is yours.
Now for those who choose not to drink milk, there is a whole “milk alternative” industry vying for your business for what you’re going to put on your cereal or in your coffee. Some products try to tout as a “healthy alternative” (from conventional), but realize that none of them have any real health value.

Once something is put in a carton or can and on a shelf, it’s been pasteurized and has had the “life” sucked out of it. I would advise to stay away from any soy alternatives for the myriad of issues associated with conventional soy in general. I am not crazy on the rice milks either (for the general “dead” reason) along with the sweeteners and oils they put in with them. If I had to choose any, I would say go with an unsweetened almond milk- Best choice yet, learn to make your own live, raw almond milk with soaked almonds. It takes a little time and energy, but a wonderful and delicious healthy choice.

Adam is a Reiki Master, certified Health and Lifestyle counselor, Licensed Massage Therapist, 20 year practicing bramana initiated Bhakti Yogi, Spiritual advisor, visionary, jock and veteran of the “hardcore punk scene” all rolled into one. Adam is the founder of Omkara World and produced the mind/body fitness DVD “Intelligent Fitness."
Click here for Adams past article archive.
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Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Corn Fields

Hungary has taken a bold stand against biotech giant Monsanto and genetic modification by destroying 1000 acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds, according to Hungary deputy state secretary of the Minstry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar. Unlike many European Union countries, Hungary is a nation where genetically modified (GM) seeds are banned. In a similar stance against GM ingredients, Peru has also passed a 10 year ban on GM foods.
Special report: GMOs continually banned around the world as concerns grow — find out where.

Planetsave reports:

Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been ground with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary, deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. The checks will continue despite the fact that seek traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

During the invesigation, controllers have found Pioneer Monsanto products among the seeds planted.

The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary, but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to the thousands of hectares in the country. Most of the local farmers have complained since they just discovered they were using GMO seeds.

With season already under way, it is too late to sow new seeds, so this years harvest has been lost.

And to make things even worse for the farmers, the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation. Therefore, if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company’s creditors, rather than the farmers.

NaturalSociety Note: This article is from July 26, 2011, but had to be re-added.
Explore More:

1. France Takes Stand Against GMOs, Monsanto Despite End of Ban
2. Bill Gates Foundation Buys 500,000 Shares of Monsanto
3. Study Proves Three Monsanto GM Corn Varieties Pose Health Hazard
4. Merck vs Monsanto | Fighting for the Worst Company Award
5. Monsanto GMO Sugarbeets to be Destroyed | Court Concludes USDA Illegally Approved Biotech Crop

Beware These Organic Brands

By Dr. Mercola from Mercola.com

Mark Kastel, co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute, has a long history as a marketing- and political consultant, and as a lobbyist (working for family farmers).
While he didn't grow up on a farm, he ended up taking a summer job during his youth with the International Harvester Company.
That was his first farm experience.
Later, he was recruited by JI Case, another large agricultural equipment manufacturer.

"I worked in corporate agribusiness," he explains.
"Then I had a health crisis in the late 70s; I was acutely exposed to pesticides and it injured my immune system…
I was lucky enough to see the preeminent environmental allergist… Theron Randolph… who recommended that, among other things, I go on an all organic diet; that there weren't many things we could do to relieve the strain on my immune system while I was healing, but controlling your food and your water intake is something you can take control of."

The rest, as they say, is history.
At the time, he was operating his own farm implement business, which was in a region dominated by the industrial, chemically-intensive farming model. He switched gears and began gardening and farming organically.

"It caused a major professional shift in my life. I ended up doing consulting work for years, for what are now some of the leading organic companies," he says.
"[T]here wasn't really a readily available source for organic food until the early to mid-1980s when it started. It kicked into high gear in the 1990s when genetic engineering became an issue; when people became more synthesized to chemicals in their food.
… I helped launch the Organic Valley brand when they began in the late 80s or early 90s... Then I helped found the Cornucopia Institute eight years ago, when it looked like the wheels would fall off of this movement; when the giant corporate agri-businesses that has squeezed family farmers out of conventional farming, and that were responsible for the deterioration in the nutrient level and the safety of our food, were buying out, on a wholesale basis, all the brands that had launched the organic commercial movement."

The Cornucopia Institute

The Cornucopia Institute is an organic industry watch dog. Their core constituencies are the family farmers across the U.S. Currently, Cornucopia has more organic farmers as members than any other group in the country, and what they lack in financial resources and political influence, they make up for with a coalition of dedicated farmers and passionate consumers and providers of organic foods.

"The secret weapon we have is building bridges between the organic farming community and the consumers… millions of people who passionately give a damn; who really care about the authenticity of the food and respect the people who are doing it," Kastel says.
 "Our goal is to—from a research and educational perspective—empower consumers and wholesale buyers so that they can make good and discerning choices in the market place."

Organics have Never Been Under Such Dire Threats!

As you will soon learn, organics are now being profoundly threatened by a number of potentially devastating votes that will take place by the USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which I will summarize at the end of this article.
We're in dire need of your involvement, so I urge you to please print out the hyperlinked proxy letter and mail it to Cornucopia for hand delivery at the rapidly approaching NOSB meeting. Corporate lobbyists will be present, and so will the Cornucopia Institute, to counter their obnoxious claims and make sure your voice, in support of organic integrity, is heard. For more details on this meeting, please continue to the end. You'll no doubt be shocked, and hopefully resolved to help stop this impending madness.
Signed proxy letters should be mailed to:

The Cornucopia Institute
PO Box 126
Cornucopia, Wisconsin 54827

Can You Really Afford NOT to Eat Organic?

As Kastel says, we're now at the point where we really cannot afford NOT to buy organic food, even if it is more expensive. The U.S. is forecasted to soon be spending close to 20 percent of our gross national product on healthcare, and the failing health of the American people is a direct result of poor nutrition and toxic foods. Healthcare costs are also the number one cause of individual bankruptcy.
We simply MUST take organic agriculture seriously if we want good health.

"[I]t's a matter of prioritizing where we put our money. You know that classic adage, "Pay now or pay later," Kastel says. " I'd rather pay now and have a better quality of life, especially when it comes to the developing fetuses, lactating mothers, young developing children. Not only are we exposing them to the soup of neurotoxic chemicals during development, but, we're depriving them of a lot of essential nutrition.
The USDA did a study in 1999 comparing essential nutrient content in our food…  They found that about half of the essential nutrients on our food had been reduced by as much as 38 percent [compared to the 1950's].
If [nutrients are] not in the soil; if we're depleting the soil through industrial processes, and it's not in the plants, it's not in our milk, in our meat, it's not in us. Many of the immune enhancing compounds that make life wonderful, make our food taste wonderful, and also protect us from cancers and a lot of chronic disease. The attributes to organic food are not just the avoidance of toxins. It's also about what it does have in there, and that's the superior nutrients."

I couldn't agree more. Reprioritizing your budget to spend more where it really counts is imperative if you want to optimize your health. This may mean cutting something else out of your budget, but surely in the long run it will be worth it.

"If families reprioritize, they can have the most wonderful food, and the gift of health, which is… priceless."

Weeding Out the "Greenwashers"

The Cornucopia Institute has been on the forefront of the movement to keep the organic movement truly organic. As many of you are now aware, there's plenty of "greenwashing" going on as large corporations try to get a piece of the organic market share.
The very first campaign the Cornucopia Institute launched was on factory dairy farming posing as all organic. Dean Foods, the largest, milk bottler in the U.S. (a $ 12 billion company; the size of Monsanto) had just bought Horizon, which was (and still is) the number one organic dairy brand.

"When we started… they were buying from a 10,000-cow farm in California with no pasture. We don't think that size is the determinant. It's not about corporate scale. It's about corporate ethics. There are some corporations that have invested in organics and have done it right—but not Dean Foods."

The Cornucopia Institute filed a number of legal complaints, which eventually, after much delay, resulted in sanctions against a select number of dairies that failed to conform to organic practices. The Institute has also helped push through stricter organic standards and regulations. The problem now is that despite the fact that the laws exist, large factory farms are not being re-inspected to ensure that they're conforming to the new, stricter organic standards. All is not lost however…

"We say that there is a higher authority in the United States than the USDA at organics, and that is the organic consumers," Kastel says. "So we published our first in-depth research study on this issue, organic dairy, and a score card that lists every organic dairy brand in the country: butter, milk, cheese, ice cream—both the name brands and the private label store brands.
The good news is that 90 percent of all organic dairy brands are done with high integrity. They're really conforming to the expectation of the consumers. They're grazing their cattle, which increases the nutritional value of the milk or Omega-3s, antioxidants, and CLA. These are really beneficial compounds for human health, but, they are also beneficial to the cow. They live long, healthy, happy lives, as opposed to the animals that are confined in industrial environments.
So consumers get to vote.
Now the gold standard for organic retailing is the 300 or so consumer-owned cooperatives around the country—the natural food cooperative groceries. Almost all of them dropped the Horizon label."

They've replicated that process for organic soy foods and organic eggs, and they're currently lobbying the USDA to tighten the organic egg standards and enforcement. In this interview, Kastel also discusses The Authentic Almond Project; an effort to overturn the USDA's new regulation calling for all raw almonds to be pasteurized for safety—a ruling that has devastated the businesses of raw almond growers in California. For more information, please listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript.
You can click on this link to view a nice graphic or how many products are disguised and "Green Washed"

Many "Natural" Breakfast Cereals and Snack Bars Contain GMO's

Another report recently published by the Cornucopia Institute investigated "all natural" and organic cereal brands. Shockingly, their independent third-party testing revealed that many trusted natural brands contain genetically modified (GM) corn and soybeans—including brands enrolled in the Non-GMO Project.
This is information you simply cannot get anywhere else, and reason alone to support the Institute's efforts.  Natural products that contained, unimaginably, as high as 100 percent genetically modified grains included:

Kashi®	Mother's®	Nutritious Living®	General Mills Kix®
GoLean®	Bumpers®	Hi-Lo®

Two breakfast cereal products that are currently enrolled in the Non-GMO Project, Barbara's Bakery's Puffins and Whole Foods' 365® Corn Flakes, contained more than 50 percent GM corn...   Meanwhile, the research control Cornucopia used, Nature's Path® USDA certified organic corn flakes, contained only trace amounts of GM contamination (less than 0.5 percent).
Cornucopia writes:

"These test results underscore the importance of the organic label, which ensures consumers that the manufacturer uses only non-genetically engineered ingredients. More extensive testing is necessary to draw conclusions regarding the truthfulness of "non-GMO" claims, but these preliminary results point to several problems. First, manufacturers can claim that they avoid purchasing genetically engineered ingredients, but these claims may be meaningless unless they are verified by a third party, such as an organic certifying agent.
In addition, many of the most reputable organic companies have developed their own testing protocols to ensure the purity of their products. Furthermore, the Non-GMO Project, which "enrolls" products before it verifies them as being non-GMO, may give consumers a false sense of security. Our test results reveal that several "enrolled" products were in fact made with GE ingredients."

The "All Natural" Label is Frequently Misused on Conventional Products

The report also reveals that "natural" products—using conventional ingredients—are frequently priced higher than equivalent organic products, suggesting that some companies are taking advantage of consumer confusion and trust in the "all natural" label... According to the Cornucopia report:

"Since breakfast cereals are popular with children, it is especially important for parents to be aware of the differences between "natural" products, with conventional ingredients, and certified organic ones. Children are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of synthetic pesticides and other inputs that are commonly used in "natural" products but prohibited in organics."

In the featured interview, Kastel further expounds on this issue, and why it's so important to expose these practices and demand honest labeling:

"Kashi, which is a big name in natural cereals, has a big market share. Not only can you find them in natural food stores, you can find them in Walmart. Kashi is owned by Kellogg's and highly contaminated with GMOs. It's very expensive; it's more expensive than the organic brand. Somebody's making some money here at the expense of consumers, at the expense of organic farmers who are truly stewarding the land.
Our job is to educate consumers so they can make those marketplace decisions," Kastel says.

The Cornucopia report clearly shows that the terms "natural" and "organic" are not interchangeable, and as a concerned shopper, you need to beware of the differences between the two, or risk paying more for what amounts to little more than a conventional product. According to the report:

"On August 31, 2011, a class action lawsuit was filed against Kellogg/Kashi® for allegedly misleading consumers with its "natural" claims. One Kashi® product in particular, GoLean® Shakes, is composed almost entirely of synthetic and unnaturally processed ingredients, according to the plaintiff."

The Power of Marketplace Activism

The goal of the Cornucopia Institute is to "shift the market share to the true heroes of this industry, the farmers and their marketing partners, and send a really strong message to the "bad actors," Kastel explains.

"In this whole world, there are only two kinds of power; money and people. We have the people… The most powerful thing is the marketplace activism, I think, because these corporations listen to money. We have been able to change some of their practices, because [once] they are losing their business, they need to respond…That's the first leg of the three–legged stool for Cornucopia.
The second would be regulatory, and we are working really hard now… to rein in abuses at the USDA. The Congress has set up the National Organics Standard Board to advise the USDA, and every material used in organics has to be screened by them. Unfortunately, during the Bush administration, they stacked it with corporate players, so we have people like General Mills making the decision for the organic industry…or Dean Foods [Kastel says that despite the fact that the Obama administration is doing better, there's still a way to go in terms of transparency and respecting the will of Congress and the organic community in terms of appointments]. 
… The third tactical approach here is the courts, and that's always our last approach because it's expensive and it takes a lot of time. So, we try to win the easier fights."

There's no doubt that the Cornucopia Institute has rich and powerful adversaries. Some of these may appear to be from within the organic movement itself, but don't be fooled! Giant conventional food manufacturers have quietly purchased a large number of small organic brands. One example he gives is that of Cascadian Farms, a large producer of organic foods that began as a small farm in the Pacific Northwest, in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. Today, the brand belongs to General Mills, but you won't find any indication of this ownership on their packaging!
Ditto for Horizon organic milk or Silk soymilk. Nowhere on those cartons will you find any indication that Dean Foods owns these brands.

"When they bought Silk, it was an all organic company," Kastel says. "Now, it's almost all conventional. In that case, you'll see on the Horizon and Silk cartons: "White Wave." That was one of the original tofu companies. They create this façade."

If you go to the Cornucopia website, there is a chart titled, "Who Owns Organics?" where you can find out who really owns your favorite organic brand. The primary question is, if it's owned by a large conglomerate, are they acting ethically and truly conforming to organic standards, which includes sustainable farming methods?

How You Can Support the Movement for Authentic Organics

In terms of funding, the Cornucopia Institute gets its money from:

• Individual members, most of which are organic farmers
• "Urban allies"—concerned consumers who want to support the organic movement
• Foundations that want to support human health and ecological farming
• Organic industry (organic food co-ops making up the greatest number of cornucopia's commercial members)

I would urge anyone concerned about the state of our food supply to support the work of The Cornucopia Institute by making a tax-deductible donation.
You can also sign up for their newsletter, which will empower you with the knowledge of which brands are authentically organic and respect organic values, and which are not. The Cornucopia Institute will also alert you to important legislation, and how you can make a difference.
So please, do consider making a donation to The Cornucopia Institute.

URGENT Action Items!

The Cornucopia Institute is now in URGENT need of your help, and joining the Institute and/or signing up for their newsletter will assure you get timely updates on these important issues.
At the end of November, the USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will vote on a number of important issues with regards to organics, including:

1. The approval of an organic egg regulation that would require organic chicken farmers to provide a mere two square feet per bird of outdoor space. This is a huge favor to industrial producers allowing their factory farmed eggs to fall under the designation of "organic." Meanwhile, it will handicap family farms that are truly letting their birds out to pasture.
2. A vote will take place to decide whether to allow a food additive produced by Martek Biosciences in organic foods. The product is an omega 3/omega-6 oil synthesized from fermented algae and soil fungus. The oil is extracted from this biomass using hexane, a neurotoxic byproduct of gasoline refinement that is specifically banned in organics.
   
   Cornucopia investigated Martek’s patent and safety filings at the FDA, and discovered that the product also contains synthetic chemicals, stabilizers, carriers, and some of the ingredients are also genetically modified. (As it turns out, some of their products were developed by Monsanto before Martek bought the technical rights.)
   
   “They’ve already added this to almost all infant formula in the United States,” Kastel warns. “Algae and fungus have never been a part of the human diet, let alone children’s. And now we see it in organic infant formula, and companies like Dean Foods are adding it to organic milk… it’s in every single formula available on the market… except for one organic brand [Babies Only brand, which contains DHA from eggs. All other organic brands appear to contain Martek’s omega oil].
3. The NOSB is also considering approving the addition of sulfites (artificial preservatives) to organic wine.  This would be the first time artificial preservatives are allowed in organics

Organics has never been under such dire threats, so I urge you to please take a moment right now to print out, sign, and mail the proxy letter provided by Cornucopia back to them ASAP for hand delivery at the rapidly approaching NOSB meeting.
Corporate lobbyists will be present, and so will the Cornucopia Institute, to counter their claims and make sure your voice, in support of organic integrity, is heard.
So, please, print out this proxy letter right now. Sign it, and mail it, as soon as possible, to:

The Cornucopia Institute
PO Box 126
Cornucopia, Wisconsin 54827

Also consider including a donation check with your letter, to support the invaluable work the Cornucopia Institute performs to protect your and your family's right to clean, wholesome, truly organic food.
As of right now, there does not appear to be any additional benefit to contacting your congressman, but if the need arises, Cornucopia will notify all their members and subscribers with the information.
I can't encourage you enough to participate in this process. It's important to recognize that you CAN make a difference! Always remember that collectively, we have the most effective power in the marketplace that can exceed the power of these multibillion dollar, multinational corporations. We can vote with our pocket books. But we also need to make our voices heard; we have to let these agencies know that we are watching, we're paying attention, and we're not going to allow this immoral, if not downright illegal, industrial favoritism to continue.

Source:  Video Transcript

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