The attached video says it all better than I can. We can appreciate- to an extent- that there is a need to stretch the world's food supply. Let's just not kill ourselves in doing so.
It's very telling that the Europeans and Japanese are ahead of us in food testing and unwilling to rubber stamp every scientific *breakthrough* that comes along each day in regard to our food. It's also very telling that the GOP-types systematically dismiss everything the Europeans do as 'socialist', 'backwards' and-ironically- 'progressive'. I just don't get how progressive could be a dirty word.
There's big bucks in corporate farming. New advances in chemicals and food engineering can be patented and licensed and there's money to be made on the paperwork involved in all that. Look at Monsanto and their love of litigation. It's not grandpa's farm anymore. Nor Maggies....
I'm of that generation that had ZERO children that had food allergies. We ate whatever we wanted without fear. A young Ferrerman could eat a PB & J, stick his fingers in another kid's mouth, with no fear of killing that child via cross-contamination. Today, there are probably kids in your child's class who would get frightfully ill- or die- from ingesting a food with peanuts in it.
The GOP, or at least the teaparty arm of it, wants the good ol' days back. They want to go back to various eras in American history when life was 'simpler'. This usually manifests in pre- Civil Rights, pre- Roe v. Wade, pre-FDR etc. etc. I mentioned they hate progress, didn't I? Regulation of industry inhibits corporate profits just as Unions, minimum wage and child labor laws do. They are against anything that might cost rich people money. It's as simple as that. Curiously, it's the progress of science that is causing all this chaos in our food chain and it's something I'm gonna guess our glorious founding father's- many of whom were farmers- would abhor this. They were old fashioned in their farming methods, having their slaves tend to the crops with hand tools, horses and were largely dependent upon the weather for irrigation. Insects were always a problem but, the cure (whatever it was) was not worse than the cause. I'm gonna guess they rolled with the occasional worm in the apple.
Progress is not supposed to kill us. Our food is not supposed to kill us. The ridiculous rise in food allergies and cancer rates can only be the result of under-regulated chemicals and genetically modified foods. We need to be more European in our thinking, backwards as they may be....
Please take 18 minutes and listen to Robyn.
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxMileHigh-Robyn-OBrien-Patri#.T0MS1lY_n0A.facebook
7 comments:
Well, your comment moderation is still on. Mine is totally off. Let's see what happens...
Okay, I didn't have to do the nutty robot thing. What did you change?
Hell if I know! I thought I would lose the moderation thingy, thingy but, evidently I did not. I went to the comments aditing and allowed ALL comments I guess. So, you DID NOT have to do the captcha thingy, thingy?
LOL, no, but I always allowed all comments. I give up. Moderation is off, so I'm sure every damn robot will be greeting me in the morning. : )
I'm of the era where ingesting *some* dirt was part of life and my immune system is in top working order. I remember when buying fruit and veg included small wildlife and you had to wash everything before you cooked or ate it. Now it's pest free and most people don't bother washing it as they know it is critter-free. I always wash everything because you don't know what they've sprayed on it.
All these cleaners that kill 99.9% of all known germs mean that kids don't build immunity to anything - that is if you are one of the people who uses this stuff. I didn't and my kids are all allergy free.
To make the worlds food supply go a bit further we in the west could try eating a bit less. That would help.
There's a bit of truth in "what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger". But, they seem to be creating new chemicals everyday to see just how much we can take! I've known for years that the wonderful, "new car smell" was VOC's dissipating from the leather, plastics etc. Those might not hurt us at all but....it's a heads up. I've heard of people with latex allergies who can't be in carpeted rooms. Latex is relatively new but, it's in a ton of stuff. I'm with you on the cleaners. Better-faster-stronger might be more kill than cure.
I don't think Latex is all that new. It's rubber in its liquid form before it's been vulcanised, and rubber's been around since the explorers ventured into the far east and saw money leaking from trees.
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