The last few days, and today in particular, have been pretty revelatory. Yesterday I watched Food Matters, this morning I went to an obesity conference, and just now I started watching the future of food. I don’t know where to start, but overall I’m pretty disgusted.
FIRST—Food matters. If you haven’t seen this film, watch it! All it did was reinforce my desire to get an ND and maybe chill on the MD. So I’ll be a naturopathic doctor where I can’t practice in some states, and will only be called doctor in a few, but the benefit far outweighs the cost in my mind. I could go on forever just on Food matters but you can watch it. Basically—our doctors are ill-trained in nutrition and the film just lays it all out about how what we eat and what we put in our body directly correlates with how healthy/sick we are. No brainer, right? Except YEA!! because they’re not talking about how all these immune issues, cancers, and other things are directly an effect of what we eat and how they can be solved by changing what we eat. I’m paraphrasing of course, but please just watch it. Plus something to look up is nutritional therapy—it’s actually illegal to substitute nutritional therapy for the recommended cancer treatment (radiation, chemo,…) even though it’s been proven to be effective.
SECOND—the Future of Food. What the hell, WHAT THE HELL!! So we leave the 19th century thinking, oh you know we have food shortages around the world, wouldn’t it be nice to come up with a way to have more abundance of food so people wouldn’t be starving? Nice idea, except in 2010, we still have people starving while over here we have people that are 300+ pounds. Hmm….
How about this 95% of the crop diversity we had is extinct now—-thousands of types of potatoes, we (the US) plant 4, thousands of bananas, we really only eat 1, I mean the list continues. And it isn’t just that we created a mono-crop system, we effectively killed out the rest of the types. Now correct me if i’m wrong, but one thing I do remember from all those science classes I took is that diversity is good—especially genetically—because it makes us more likely to survive. I don’t understand how those same scientists, biologists, bla bla bla, thought that wouldn’t hold true for our crops and our food. Somehow they thought that one crop systems would be more efficient and provide us with more food. Yes it gave us more food, but at what cost.
Mono-crop systems are even MORE vulnerable to disease, bug infestation, and so on. So then they create pesticides (which is modified nerve gas?) to spray with. THEN they genetically engineer plants to be “round-up ready”—meaning you can spray the plant with the pesticide, kill the pests, but not kill the plant. Great (btw there’s e.coli genes spliced into our plant DNA that is “round-up ready” and we don’t know yet how that’s going to affect us, along with a bunch of other antibiotics). Then to be even more CRAZY, GREEDY, just plain OUT OF THIS WORLD. Our court system allows the patenting of seeds—meaning one very large company (…monsanto…) can not only patent their seeds, but then go into the seed storage (where we’ve stored all different types of seeds so as not to LOSE our genetic diversity) and then patent those as well because they’ve never been patented. Then buy up all the rest of the seed companies (can someone say monopoly?) and make it so that they can decide which seed to market and if anyone gets caught using it they can be sued.
But get this, even if you didn’t voluntarily use the seed on your land and it happens that someone nearby does, or drives by with a truck of seed, that then by wind carriage cross-pollinates with your crops and you now have monsanto seeds and they find out—YOU CAN STILL BE SUED FOR PATENT INFRINGEMENT.
I’m speechless. I’m utterly confused. How did this happen? I mean it was never a voting issue, it went above and around the people. We all joke how because of all the crap in the stores we’re gonna start our own farms and grow our own food, but this company and its patent, and the ability to patent seeds—to patent life—makes that difficult as well.
What the hell are we eating?
like black butterflies 