Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Food is Life


Food is Life
I recently watched a documentary called “Fresh” which was so inspirational to me that I had to blog about it and share some of the information.
For me this is a film that every human being on the planet must watch, so that we can one by one start to make a difference in our food industry.
We have gotten to a point in our food industry that cheaper is not better. Nature is screaming to us enough, but we are not listening. We hear on the news about outbreaks of e-coli, avian bird flu and mad cow disease, but we sit back and do nothing and continue to buy food that is grown with pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics. Is anyone listening? It’s not working.
We need to heed ecology. If we look at nature as our template then what we are doing is only going to fail and send us to the bottom of the pile, which I think is where we are. We need to respect the design of nature and practice sustainable farming, it’s the only way.
It seems that it’s all about money and how much big companies can make off of farmers, but guess what, we are getting more and more diseases in our animals and the antibiotics are not working as there are now strains that cannot be stopped with antibiotics.
We now have the science that shows that medium sized organic farms are much more profitable than big industrialized farms.
How much money would farmers save if they didn’t have to pay for antibiotics, vet bills, herbicides and pesticides? What if they let the animals out and let them graze which is what animals do best. If we look to our past and how animals lived they roamed free, they were always moving. Let us treat herbivores like herbivores and not feed dead beef to beef and chickens. Chickens have beaks and claws for a reason so why does industry cut them off? Is it because they keep hundreds of thousands of chickens in dark airless barns, on top of each other feeding on grains and dead beef filled with herbicides and antibiotics?
Cows are not meant to eat dead cows or grains, they are meant to graze and eat grass. Chickens are meant to graze behind the cattle pecking at their poop and removing bugs and digesting the rest, only to poop back into the ground to fertilize the grass so that the next rotation of cows can graze. Nature is a circle of life and we have interrupted this circle and bread disease instead.
If we want to feed the world don’t use industrialized agriculture. Take away all the pesticides, herbicides, expensive machinery and make farming sustainable.
Seventy percent of the grain that is grown in North America is grown for animal feed, not human consumption. Let’s farm grass instead of grains. If we take care of the grass it will take care of our animals and in turn take care of all of us by feeding us healthy animals who are rich in omega 3’s and vitamins, not riddled with disease. No wonder cancer is rampant in our society and our soils so depleted.
If we practiced sustainable farming all the negatives in agriculture would come to a screeching halt. Let us use technology and innovation with our wisdom to create a healthy world that will feed everyone.
Industrialized agriculture has made our food cheaper but at what cost? We’ve diminished our food nutritionally. The more you process food the less nutritious it is. Cheap food is an illusion people, there is no such thing. The real cost of the food is somewhere, be it environmental, health or other costs to us.
We are subsidizing the wrong foods like corn syrup and wheat. What about produce? Why is it that poor people can feed their family with Kraft Dinner but not healthy produce? This is so wrong.
Can we change the food system so that all food is affordable to all? Recreating food that is natural is empowering.
Make the decision to buy only healthy, sustainable food from organic farmers and stop this ticking time bomb on our plates.
To watch this inspirational documentary visit http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/02/26/fresh-video-documentary.aspx?e_cid=20120226_SNL_Art_1



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