The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Ellix Katz

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Chemicals Versus Organic

This has had serious impacts on our health as we ingest these toxic pollutants. The World Health Organization reports three million pesticide poisonings every year resulting in more than 250,000 deaths annually. Chemical agriculture has far reaching effects on our environment as well:

• Chemicals are polluting to our water, land, and air
• Impair the soil's viability
• Erodes biodiversity
• Requires measures such as irrigation, more chemicals, and increased fuel costs

Corporations are seeing opportunity and dollar signs. Many big food producers, such as Pepsi, Heinz, General Mills, and Unilever to name a few, have either bought out or maintain strategic alliances with "organic" brands such as Boca Foods, Kashi, and Morningstar Farms. Along with this shift have come even more regulations in the form of organic certification. It is now not a holistic, healthy term, but a regulated term of law governed by regulations full of lobbying and loopholes. Once again, the costs of these regulation and certification processes are leaving the small producer behind.

Bringing it Home

• Anyone, from those living on sprawling acres to the tiniest apartments, has the ability to grow their own food.
• Forward thinking school systems, such as those in Seattle, are implementing buying policies, stressing locality whenever feasible.
• Some schools are also integrating gardening into their curriculum, not only giving students skills in nutrition, botany, design, and much more, but re-orienting them with nature as well.
• Hospitals alone could make a massive impact by patronizing local producers, both to the economy and to the better health of their patients.
• Any organization, in any community, is in a position to help, simply by purchasing their needs locally.

The Politics of Seeds

At one time, you could not walk into a patent office in an attempt to patent a seed. Now, just in the past few decades, this has changed to protect the intellectual rights of breeders, effectively constraining the ways in which seeds may be planted, saved, traded, and given away. The Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 established specific ownership rights over seeds in the United States, and an amendment in 1994 prohibits the sale of any farmer-saved seed unless specific permission is given by the owner.

This represents a shift in our food supply from millions of farmers to just a few multinational corporations:

• Monsanto, along with the next nine largest seed corporations, control more than half of the world's commercial seed supply.
• Many jurisdictions around the world now prohibit the sale of any seed not bearing government certification.
• The seed industry, in conjunction with the USDA, has even come up with "terminator" technology seeds; those which generate self-sterilizing plants.
• The World Trade Organization is forcing seed patent laws on people globally

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