George Orwell’s Words to Live By
Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on George Orwell’s Words to Live By
“It’s a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That’s the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what’s going on.” –George Orwell
Right! Being an activist for a movement may have merit, but it presupposes that the movement is cut and dried, and any deviation from the movement’s principles is heresy. Trying to understand what’s going on means getting past this rigid understanding to the heart of the matter. It means considering new ideas and concepts and being able to change your opinion as necessary. It means focusing on what you think is the truth. And the truth is never set in stone, but is fluid, ever-changing lightning that can’t be put in a bottle.
Seeing the truth reveals the meaning of things. And when you understand meanings, you can see the value of those things in proper perspective. Once you know the real value of things, you can prioritize your energy and activism for maximum efficiency. Simply championing someone else’s movement is just thumping a Bible. Think critically. Understanding results in developing your own version of the movement. If there’s an organic movement to change the way we grow food, your part in it will be much more effective if you aren’t blindly following a rulebook but are creatively working on some aspect that has risen in your priorities because of your deep understanding of the problem.
So the first step is seeing the truth, and that means having accurate information. You’d think there would be trusted sources of accurate information, but they are not to be found on national TV. I usually watch CNN when I eat lunch, and lately there’s been an advertisement by the American Petroleum Institute celebrating the fact that the USA has become the world’s leader in the production of natural gas and—with any luck—soon we will lead the world in the production of oil. “So let’s all,” the ad proclaims, “Republicans, Democrats, and Independents,” get behind the production of gas and oil. Of course it doesn’t mention that the natural gas is produced by poisoning the earth with toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that fracture deep rock layers, or that the extra oil is going to come from environmentally irresponsible drilling in the arctic, or from oil shale deposits in the lower 48 that have been over-estimated by as much as 96 percent according to the latest figures, and from Alberta’s dirty tar sands petroleum shipped here through the Keystone XL pipeline. Or that much of these fuels will be sold overseas to enrich the coffers of the Petroleum Institute’s members and pour millions into the bloated bank accounts of the Koch brothers and the top 0.1%. The ad—and much else on TV—is pure propaganda. The most credible truth-teller on TV is a comedian: Jon Stewart.
Providing information so readers can see the truth is what this blog attempts to do. Yes, it champions the organic food movement, but it also strives to understand what’s really going on. Is the organic movement just about clean food?
The answer is, “of course not.” It’s really about protecting the world’s biodiversity, on which the health of nature depends, because biodiversity is the nature of health. The more biodiverse the ecosystem, the healthier it is. The healthier it is, the better it functions in the ways nature intends. And the better world it presents for us to live in. Increasing biodiversity produces an unforeseen confluence of benefits. If setting up a bat house on your property brings in a family of bats, they can reduce the number of mosquitoes and lessen the chance that you’ll contract the West Nile Virus. Allowing a patch of diverse weeds to grow near the garden provides nectar for adult green lacewings—beneficial insects whose larvae will keep the aphids off your roses.
Ecosystems are systems of interconnected trophic niches; that is, a trophic niche is a food source that may support one or more plants or animals, or both. Some call it the web of life, and that’s accurate. The internet is a digital version of the natural web of life—the world-wide web. The more websites in the system, the more powerful and useful the system. That’s why net neutrality is so important. The FCC’s current proposal to destroy net neutrality by allowing internet service providers to create a fast lane for Big Media is exactly akin to the destruction of natural ecosystems in order to create a fast lane for Big Ag, Big Chem, and Biotech to control the food supply. You can see the hideous results on any big conventional farm that plants GMO crops, and in the aisles of your local supermarket.
My college degree is in Journalism—a profession I take seriously. The essence of my education was that skepticism is healthy. You can’t see the truth if you’re blinded by your own preconceptions or by someone’s ideology that you’ve swallowed whole. After I’d graduated and was working on a large daily newspaper, this lesson was driven home to me in a particularly brutal way.
Nobody was covering the county courthouse in a systematic way, so I self-assigned the courthouse as my beat. I knew it would be good to have an insider as a source, and I reasoned that the county treasurer, who handled the funds for all the county’s offices, would be the best source, so I made it my business to visit him three times a week to see what I could find about misappropriations of funds. I struck gold. He began steering me toward county offices that were raking off small sums of money from their activities. One week he told me about how the office of animal control was skimming money off its income from the sale of dog licenses. Another week, it was that a contractor was substituting cheaper building materials for more expensive ones mandated by the building code and pocketing the difference. I wrote one of these stories every week for a couple of months and the editors thought I was a genius. I thought so, too. But then I had a falling out with the editor-in-chief over his refusal to print a story I wanted to write about racism at the local country club, and I quit.
About six months later, they had evidently hired a much better reporter than I was, because the main headline on the front page one day read, “County Treasurer Indicted for Embezzling $10 Million.” The treasurer had played me like a violin. By steering me toward the small-change operators, he was really steering me away from himself. As Orwell says, “The job is just to try to understand what’s going on.”
The lesson was learned. And this blog strives to present information that I think is reliable enough for you to try to make sense of what’s going on with food and farming, biodiversity and environmentalism, and the machinations of the corporate oligarchy that has replaced the precious system of Constitutional checks and balances that was once the pride of America.
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SEE WHAT FAMILY FARMERS CAN DO
You’re undoubtedly aware that two counties in Oregon recently passed ordinances banning the planting of GMO crops within their borders. One of those counties is Jackson County. Here is a short video—very heartwarming—of family farmers in action a few days before the successful vote.
https://www.facebook.com/jeff.cox.10048/posts/10202105312253729
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GUESS WHICH OIL IS BEING USED IN CHINESE RESTAURANTS?
A reader of this blog has done a little freelance investigation about the cooking oil used in Chinese restaurants in his neighborhood and shared the results with me.
He says he asks a waiter which oil is used for cooking and the waiters invariably come back and say “vegetable oil.” So he asks, “What kind of vegetable oil?” And the waiter comes back and says, “cottonseed oil.”
This is extremely valuable information because we don’t want to be eating cottonseed oil. From now on, I will ask that same question of every Chinese restaurant I visit and if the answer is cottonseed oil, I’ll thank them and walk out.
Here’s why:
Almost all the cotton grown in America is genetically modified to withstand heavy applications of Roundup. It is also one of the crops most heavily sprayed with pesticides. So it’s the trifecta of garbage: its genes have been altered, which increasingly is shown to have negative health effects; its cells, seeds, and oil are contaminated with disease-causing Roundup (glyphosate), and it is likely to contain pesticide residues.
Cottonseed oil is used for salad oil, mayonnaise, salad dressing, and similar products, as well as bread, pastries, and cookies. Crisco is cottonseed oil—hydrogenated to boot, which makes it a trans-fatty acid. It’s used because it’s cheaper than canola or other oils. That’s probably why it’s used in cost-conscious Chinese restaurants.
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HOW MUCH MONEY DOES A KOCH BROTHER MAKE?
Please sit down before you read this. According to news sources, Charles and David Koch EACH make $1.8 million AN HOUR. ‘Nuff said.
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BOYCOTT THESE “TRAITOR BRANDS”
What are traitor brands? They are brands of food that Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association has identified as being owned by members of the Grocery Manufacturers Association—the processed food industry’s political and propaganda arm that spends many millions of dollars, contributed by you when you buy these brands, to prevent you from knowing whether your food contains genetically modified ingredients.
Although these brands purport to be organic—and may actually be organic—they have been gobbled up by big food corporations that use their profits to keep you in the dark. Boycott them!
Natural/Organic Traitor Brand Owned By/Parent company
IZZE PepsiCo
Naked Juice PepsiCo
Simply Frito-Lay PepsiCo
Starbucks Frappuccino PepsiCo
Honest Tea Coca-Cola
Odwalla Coca-Cola
Gerber Organic Nestle
Sweet Leaf tea Nestle
Boca Burgers Kraft/Mondelez
Green and Black’s Kraft/Mondelez
Cascadian Farm General Mills
Larabar General Mills
Muir Glen General Mills
Alexia ConAgra
Pam organic cooking sprays ConAgra
Bear Naked Kelloggs
Gardenburger Kelloggs
Kashi Kelloggs
Morningstar Farms Kelloggs
Plum Organics Campbells
Wolfgang Puck organic soups Campbells
RW Knudsen Smuckers
Santa Cruz Organic Smuckers
Smuckers Organic Smuckers
Dagoba Hersheys
Earthgrain bread Bimbo Bakeries
Simply Asia McCormick
Thai Kitchen McCormick
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HOW FOOD SYSTEMS AFFECT BIODIVERSITY
Kumi Naidoo, writing on EcoWatch, has the following, very enlightened, ideas to share:
On today’s United Nations biodiversity day, we are being asked to focus on small islands and their unique ecology and fragility in times of globally pervasive threats such as climate change.
But, the whole planet is a small island in the vast sea of space, capable of producing food for all as a consequence of rich biodiversity. That diversity is under threat; our actions can strengthen it or weaken it. Our agriculture systems can help mitigate climate change and feed us, or they can accelerate the change and contribute to hunger.
The food system we choose has a direct impact on which type of world we will have. It’s the difference between a field that hums and is robust with life, or one which is dusty, dry and dead. It’s the difference between a place where ecological farming has been used or where a cocktail of industrial chemicals has soaked into the soil where the same crop is grown, decade after decade.
Our current food and farming system is creating more and more of these dry, dead ends. It is agriculture characterised by three things: the industrial-sized growing of a single plant, or “monoculture,” genetically engineered (GE) crops, and repeated toxic chemical infusions of pesticides and the application of synthetic fertilisers. All of these harm people and the farming ecosystems they depend on.
Just one example of the consequences of the current flawed agricultural system is the current catastrophic bee decline. Bees are being decimated in Europe and North America by the intensive use of chemical pesticides. In recent winters bee mortality in Europe has averaged at about 20 percent. A third of the food that we eat every day depends on bees and other insect pollinators.
This dead-end road sees large multinational corporations persuading farmers to buy GE seeds based on the premise that they will increase yields, despite studies suggesting otherwise. Instead, they only increase farmers’ indebtedness by failing to deliver the promised return on investment–turning them into slaves to a pesticide treadmill as superweeds develop. This is the ugly story behind the majority of the food we consume.
This cycle increases our dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to climate change, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study recently reported. In fact, climate change affects this broken food system. Among other impacts, climate shocks cause food prices to rise, with deadly consequences in developing countries.
Climate change is estimated to have increased the amount spent on food worldwide by $50 billion a year. Climate change is also making food less nutritious according to a study published in Nature, with important staple crops such as wheat and maize containing fewer essential nutrients like zinc and iron. Projections show that up to 21 percent more children globally will be at risk of hunger by 2050.
Industrial agriculture does not rely on diversification but on the standardisation and homogenisation of biological processes, technologies and products. It promotes off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions to food and farming around the world and in so doing undermines local and natural diversity, which are essential for resilience to climate change.
Ecological farming increases resilience to climate shocks. It is based on the diversity of nature to produce healthy food for all: diversity of seeds and plants; diversity of many different crops grown in the same field; diversity of insects that pollinate (like bees) or eliminate pests; and diversity of farming systems that mix crops with livestock.
Scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, for example, recently found that certain beans greatly improve poor soils, increase productivity of maize when grown together, and respond well to drought. They can be used for food, animal feed, and soil fertility. Researchers found that growing maize and beans at the same time increased farmers’ income by 67 percent without the use of any chemical fertilisers.
Ecological farming also relies on the innovations of farmers that enable adaptation to local conditions. It’s the redeployment of traditional knowledge to counteract the impacts of climate change. In northeast Thailand, jasmine rice farmers have been adapting to increased drought by finding creative ways to use water resources—stock ponds for storage and simple wind-powered pumps made with locally available materials—which have been shown to increase yields and provide a safety net when drought strikes.
Ecological farming effectively contributes to climate change mitigation. Industrial farming is a massive greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. Agriculture, in fact, accounts for between 17 percent and 32 percent of all the emissions caused by humans, according to research for Greenpeace. Stopping chemical nitrogen fertiliser overuse and shifting to organic fertilisers (to increase soil fertility), improving water management in paddy rice production and increasing agro-biodiversity through agroforestry are just a few examples of how ecological farming practices and diversity could directly contribute to GHG reduction and help agriculture reduce the effects of climate change.
Agriculture is now at a crossroads: we can pursue the dystopian dead-end road of industrial chemical-intensive farming or choose diverse and resilient ecological farming.
Governments, donors, philanthropists and the private sector must start shifting funds towards research to generate new knowledge on biodiversity-rich ecological farming and services to disseminate diversified practices that are locally relevant. We must reject the dead-end trap of industrial agriculture and choose instead a food system that celebrates biodiversity and is healthy for people and the planet.
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GLOBAL MARCHES AGAINST MONSANTO DRAW HUGE CROWDS
Hundreds of thousands people have united across the world to voice concern over the spread of GMO foods and crops and to raise awareness over the biotech giant Monsanto’s growing grip on the global food supply chain. Activists on five continents around the globe, comprising 52 nations, joined the fight under the March against Monsanto umbrella.
It was not only the fear of genetically modified organisms in foods that knows no boundaries. Organized worldwide, peaceful family protests spoke out for the need to protect food supply, health, local farms and environment. Activists also sought to promote organic solutions to food production, while “exposing cronyism between big business and the government.”
With anti-GMO rallies having taken place in around 400 cities across the globe it’s still hard to estimate how many people participated in the event. Last year over 2 million people in 436 cities in 52 countries worldwide marched against the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds.
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EPA SHINES ON MOMS ACROSS AMERICA
The following is from Moms Across America, a group that’s been working hard to expose the dangers of glyphosate herbicide to families of child-bearing age.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine sitting down with the EPA in Washington DC with a team of esteemed PH.D scientists, lawyers and moms just as passionate as I am, about a chemical called glyphosate, which is sprayed on GMOs and our food crops.
“But there we were. Because of your support, your generous donations, your phone calls, your posts about and emails to the EPA to recall Roundup, they took us seriously. 9 members of the pesticide Re-Review board listened to 11 of us for 2 hours instead of 1. They listened to your testimonials and the statistics of our health crisis in America. It was intense.
“Their eyes displayed dismay, understanding and even searched for more. I saw that we have EPA members on our side. They may not be able to act now, but they want to. They want us to push on and give them the reason to make a bold change. They want their children to be safe as much as you and I.
In other eyes, I saw denial, refusal and resistance. Their resignation weighed heavily in the air. I heard reasons, explanations and infuriating avoidance. I saw fear of change.
“Some of the board members refused to see just how urgent this is. They refused to see that we are breastfeeding our babies RIGHT NOW, today and we need for them to be safe. NOW.
“Despite our compelling binder of studies and undeniable evidence through testimonials of mothers of risk of harm, they did not agree to our request to recall Roundup, or revoke the license of glyphosate. They did not agree to issue a simple statement advising mothers to eat organic.
“They did agree however, to continue working with us, to give us the protocol for the upcoming scientific study of glyphosate in breast milk which was funded as a result of our preliminary testing, supported by Sustainable Pulse. They did agree to ask Monsanto for their breast milk testing that we have word they are conducting. They did agree to include include that study in their review of glyphosate, which happens only once every 15 years. I hope you understand how profound your support is in turning their decision from one that supports the profits of corporations to one that protects the health of our children.”
I’m sorry, Moms Across America, but I think EPA politely shined you on. The EPA said they’d ask Monsanto for its breast milk study and include it in their once-every-15-years review of glyphosate? Guess what the outcome of that study will be.
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A NEW WRINKLE FROM THE BIOTECH INDUSTRY
Dana Perls of Friends of the Earth sent out this report:
Two Mondays ago, I sat in a room of some of the most powerful agribusiness, food and synthetic biology companies in the world. The goal of this industry meeting was to discuss how to get the public to accept synthetic biology, a new and unregulated set of genetic engineering methods, as the “foundation for the future of sustainable food.” It was meant to be a closed door and off-the-record industry meeting, in contrast to the open public forum on synthetic biology in our food which I helped organize the week before. But after some of the companies caught wind that Friends of the Earth was going to expose the leaked meeting information, we were cordially urged to attend by the meeting organizers.
Although there is no agreed upon definition of synthetic biology, it is a term that encompasses a variety of new, and many would say, “extreme” genetic engineering approaches, including computer generated DNA, directed evolution, and site specific mutagenesis. It’s faster and uses more powerful methods to engineer new genetic sequences than “traditional” genetic engineering. Engineers can even create entirely new DNA and organisms that do not exist in nature.
The meeting was under Chatham House rules – which means I can’t disclose who said what. However, I can say that the meeting was an alarming insight into the synthetic biology industry’s process of creating a sugar-coated media narrative to confuse the public, ignore the risks, and claim the mantle of “sustainability” for potentially profitable new synthetic biology products.
Over the course of the day, primarily CEOs, directors and PR people from powerful chemical and synthetic biology companies, bounced around tales of promise, discussed how to position synthetic biology as a “solution” to world hunger, and made blithe claims of safety that were not backed up by any actual data.
One problem, explained a participant, is that investors are Googling synthetic biology and finding activist blogs instead of media stories about how synthetic biology would help “feed starving people in poor nations” — how can they change the narrative? That seemed to be the point of the meeting.
Topics not discussed included risks to the environment; potential impacts on hundreds of thousands of small, low-income farmers; the lack of independent, transparent health and environmental assessments; and the lack of federal and international regulations. When I brought up these glaring omissions, my concerns were generally dismissed.
We were asked to brainstorm stories that paint biotech applications to food in a positive light. When I asked how biotech companies will protect small farmers who are producing the truly natural products, I was met with a hard cold stare, silence and a non-answer about needing to meet “consumer demand.”
Another person boiled it down that the industry’s most important task is to reassure the public and potential investors that these synthetic biology ingredients are regulated, safe, “natural,” and not new.
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