Take Action: Stop Monsanto's GMO alfalfa today!

Image by Timothy Valentine via Flickr

Before you do anything else today, please take two minutes to sign this petition to Agriculture Secretary Vilsack. Here's why. Food Democracy Now! says that if the secretary deregulates GMO alfalfa this week,

Organic dairy and livestock farmers will lose more than $1.4 billion in sales and consumers can say good-bye to organic dairy products forever. Already, Monsanto's cronies in Congress and agribusiness lobbyists are pressuring Vilsack to issue a “partial” deregulation so GMO alfalfa can be planted this fall and next spring. The ball is now in Vilsack's court. He needs to hear from you today!

Food Democracy Now!

Butterfly and Alfalfa
Image by cdw9 via Flickr

You know why this stuff is bad, right? Once it's planted in fields, the pollens can be carried by wind and critters to other fields. Organic fields become infected with the GMO. Before long, we won't have a choice to buy organic anymore. We'll all be eating genetically modified food whether we like it or not.

Plus, Monsanto sues farmers who haven't bought their seed when the megacorp finds some of their GMO plants mixed in due to pollen transfer from nearby Monsanto fields. Need another example? Here's a good one: Who Owns Life?

So far, the courts have sided with Monsanto, even though the farmers would rather not have had their fields contaminated by the stuff! More, no farmer to date has had the financial resources to sue the other way and win.

Need a little more persuasion? This video is just about guaranteed to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Take a look.



For fact sheets, a shopping guide and more, check these links.

• Genetically engineered alfala (pdf), one page background fact sheet published by the National Organic Coalition
• Non GMO Shopping Guide
• Top 10 Reasons to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

This is one of those days I nearly despair of ever living in the world of Ordinary. Thankfully, there are organizations like those listed above working diligently to help build it one fact sheet, one action, one vote at a time. Have you signed the petition? Please do your part. It is perhaps the most important thing you'll do today, and will only take a moment.

P.S. The urgent need to act preempted my usual post on becoming a zero waste household (formerly War on Garbage) today. If time permits, I'll post it this evening or tomorrow morning.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Food shock

Manna to a fast-food child?
Image: © L. Kathryn Grace

Call me a bleeding heart. A few weeks ago I fought tears as I watched a family of four checking produce prices on one of those television news magazines. The camera caught the daughters racing to the fruit and veggie aisles, the younger begging her mom to buy her an apple. Her older sister told her to put it back. It cost too much.

Mom and Dad could buy fresh fruit and veggies only if they could get enough to feed four people for the same price they would pay for a fast-food meal at a local drive-through. At $1.49/lb, the apples didn't hold up to that 99 cent burger, fries and Coke meal.

The child who craved the apple has Type II diabetes, the kind that used to afflict older people. Like so many of today's children, her life expectancy is shorter than her parents'. Her dad has diabetes too. His medications take a huge chunk of the family's income, far more than they can afford. So they take all their meals in the car, driving through, paying at the window, 99 cents each. Maybe Dad gets a bigger, slightly more costly meal.

Name that vegetable
http://www.flickr.com/photos/epsos/
CC BY 2.0

If that wasn't bad enough, today I watched British Chef Jamie Oliver's video of his visit to a first grade classroom in Huntington, West Virginia. In the town some call the unhealthiest city in the United States, where almost half the grown-ups are obese, where diabetes and heart disease stalk nearly everyone, Jamie Oliver asked six year olds to name the shiny, red vegetables in his hand.

No one knew.

Not one child.

How about this one? He held up a potato. No takers. Big, purple thingy? Maybe it's a turnip. Oliver gave them a hint. First word in its name is egg. "I know, I know!" said one kid in the back. "Egg salad!"

Beets, mushrooms. Cauliflower. Not one child knew the name of even one of the foods Oliver showed them. Not one.

See for yourself.



If these children have never seen a tomato, let alone tasted one, when will they discover its mystery, that it is a fruit disguised as a vegetable? And if they've only tasted greasy pizza, hamburgers that look like they were cloned in a plastic food factory, and syrupy soda pop, how many severely delicious delights have they missed already in their young lives?

Have their taste buds, unaccustomed to the nuances of fresh, whole foods, atrophied? If you sliced open a tree-ripened pear and handed it to them, then handed them a tea rose, would their olfactory glands be developed enough to tell the difference? Would they smile and inhale deeply? Could they revel at the spurt of sweet, flavorful juice of a just-picked, perfectly ripe strawberry, warm from the sun? Will they ever have the chance to experience a strawberry that actually has flavor and juice?

Building Ordinary is going to take a lot more work than I thought.

Thankfully, Oliver is on the job. So is Chef Ann Cooper, and Chef Alice Waters with her Edible School Yard project, and so many others, perhaps you among them.

In his TED prize acceptance speech, Oliver says if one of us teaches three others to cook a few simple, inexpensive meals at home, and they teach three others, who teach three others, in just 25 turns, everyone in the country will know how to cook affordable, healthy meals at home, and we can begin to give our children the gift of a longer life, perhaps as long as we older Americans can hope to live.

So to get started, I will begin sharing, now and then, some of the cheap, extremely simple meals we eat in our house.

What about you? Got any ideas for teaching three people to cook inexpensive, wholesome meals at home?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Would you eat this?

School lunch: Yum or yuk?
Image courtesy Mrs. Q

It's very challenging to teach students when they are eating school lunches that don't give them the nutrition they need and deserve. Oftentimes what is served barely passes muster as something edible. And after a meal high in sugar and fat, they then must pay attention in a classroom.

Mrs. Q
Fed Up: School lunch project

Looks like this meal falls into the category of "food-like substances," as author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food)likes to say. Wouldn't you agree?

Mrs. Q, a teacher, got fed up with inattentive children who were hungry, hyper and ... hungry, especially after lunch. She decided to look into what they were eating. Then she took it a step further.

For the rest of 2010, Mrs. Q is eating the same school lunch her students, the majority of whom qualify for subsidized lunches, wolf down (or not) in the cafeteria every day. She's often hungry after lunch. Sometimes she's downright disgusted. She finds some of the food inedible. She says she would not feed this food to her toddler.

If we are going to build Ordinary, we need to pay attention to what we're feeding our children. The Fed Up: School lunch project is a good place to start.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Fast food--cheaper than homemade?

Not according to the Washington Post's Sally Sampson. In Dude, It adds up, Sampson tells of her quest to prove whether commercial fast food is cheaper and tastier than the same homemade fast food. Her panel of experts: nine teenagers. Her methodology: find out what's in that popular, breakfast egg-sausage-muffin, that juicy lunch-time double-patty burger, and that cheesy, hand-tossed suppertime pizza, then replicate it at home.

Her findings: Not only did she make the fast food at home at considerable cost savings, but her teenage panel found her versions to be juicier where juicy count, crunchier where crunchy counts, and tastier all round. What's more, she delivered the goods at significant calorie savings.

Yes, Virginia, if your mama can afford to buy fast food for you, your papa can afford to fix the same thing for you at home, and it will be better for you and taste a whole lot better.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.