Who Owns the Future of Food?: From genetically modified organisms to seasonal organic

Dear community,

I am organizing an event (not an official Local to Global event) sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee Los Angeles on seeds, seasonal foods, genetic modification of food, and the connection of these issues to local and global peace. If you are around, come join us! See details below.

Peas and carrots,

Nisha Namorando Vida

Local to Global Life Works Founder/Director

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Date: Thursday, March 8, 2012

Time: 7:00-8:30 pm

Event title: Who Owns the Future of Food?: From genetically modified organisms to seasonal organic

Organized by: American Friends Service Committee

Address: 634 S. Spring St., 3rd Floor. Los Angeles, 90014.

Cost: Free

Description:

What is in your food? In the United States, purchasing an industrially farmed, processed and packaged food item containing ingredients shipped several times across the globe and requiring laboratory work (in the form of pesticides and genetically modified seeds) is oftenfar cheaper than purchasing a locally grown carrot or tomato from the neighborhood farmer’s market.  Industrial agriculture is a primary contributor to global warming, behind automobile and factory exhaust, and highly processed foods resulting from the industrial agricultural process are a primary contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart problems and other illnesses. Over 70% of foods eaten by Americans contain genetically modified seeds, and the farming of soy is a primary contributor to the massive destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Food is traded as a commodity on stock exchanges, meaning that it is grown and sold to raise a profit for business people. In response, urban communities across the United States have started to grow their own food from organic and heirloom seed.

What exactly is a ‘genetically modified seed’? What is 'heirloom'? What does growing one’s own vegetables have to do with peace in one’s community and world peace? Who owns the future of food? Join the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Friends Peace Dialogue to address these questions. Come learn something new and contribute to this important conversation. Our featured speakers for the evening are Megan Bomba and Deanna Marie Weakly.

Megan Bomba:

Megan is a UC trained biologist, who helped coordinate the founding of the Seed Library of Los Angeles (SLOLA), helps manage it currently, and is spearheading the effort to create a branch of the library in Northeast Los Angeles. SLOLA serves as a way to collect and catalogue heirloom and non-genetically modified seeds grown by Los Angeles basin food growers for current and future generations of Angelenos.

Deanna Marie Weakly:

Dee is a Master Gardener who started the rooftop garden at the LA Community Action Network. She continues to work with Skid Row and other downtown Los Angeles residents to grow edible plants and is also working with City Year on a school garden project at Compton Elementary. Her goal is to start an urban farm on the Angel’s Flight hillside in downtown LA. This urban farm would be accessible to all downtown Los Angeles residents.

The Friends Peace Dialogues is a monthly speaker series sponsored by the AFSC for the community. Learn about AFSC's Friends Peace Gardens at Los Angeles area high schools here: http://rootsforpeace.blogspot.com/.

Come join us!

What are you eating? What's in your food?

I had the opportunity to go to a meat farm - New Frontier Family Farms - over the weekend as a member of the LA Eco-Village food coop. I myself am a vegetarian, was interested to check out a farm claiming to raise happy chickens in an environmentally sustainable manner and to learn what that might mean to these farmers. I asked them to explain why they do what they do based on the local to global impacts of their work. Check the video above, and feel free to peruse the rest of the article below. And please, as always, feel free to share your thoughts. :)

Peace!

Nisha Namorando Vida
Local to Global Life Works Founder/Director 

LA Eco-Village food coop folks gathered around chicken tractors and New Frontier Family Farms co-owner Heather to learn about how they raise their chickens.

One of the little ones in Farmer Dave's hands

We learned about the term 'free range'. The farmers informed us that according to government regulation, the way that they raise their chickens (in open air, outdoor pens, which they use since there are coyotes and wild dogs in their neighborhood) is considered 'free range'. Dave and Heather feel that 'free range' should mean that the chickens run around as they please, but they say that they at least work to keep the chickens living in a comfortable situation. Check this link for criticisms on 'free range'. Check this link for how to decode your egg carton.

Chickens chilling in the sun

Chilling chickens and Farmer Heather

At New Frontier Family Farms, chickens stay in the pens as you see above. After a few days, the grass gets worn down, and the pens are shifted to a grassier patch. We were informed that meat chickens tend to be a bit lazy and stay near where their food is. When the pen is lifted, they often follow it to stay near their food. This is apparently a different situation from egg-laying chickens, who are very active and will sometimes fly into trees and on top of roofs, if they aren't unlucky enough to be born as a factory chicken.

Chicken manure fertilizes the pasture on which the chickens graze.

Dave informed us that the health of the chicken mostly depends on the health of the grasses it is eating, which depends on the soil. It all comes back to the Earth. (Watch the film Dirt!)

Chicken feed in addition to the grasses they graze on and the grubs they pluck from the dirt.

A good reason to buy pasture raised meat is because most animals consumed (chickens, cows, goats, sheep, rabbits, etc.) mostly eat grasses by nature. Even 'organic', 'vegetarian fed', or 'cage free' are not necessarily eating the foods they should be biologically. Further, most likely the grains and 'vegetarian feed' these animals are consuming is soy and corn (soy farming, by the way, is the biggest contributor to destruction of the Amazon, other than cattle raising). If you buy organic, then you are likely not buying genetically modified foods, but soy and corn are grains that none of these animals would ever eat in nature. New Frontier supplements their chickens' diets with an organic feed that they said unfortunately contains corn and soy. They said, however, that of all the feed supplements they have tried, they have had the least chicken death and illness with the one they currently use.

In this video, Farmer Dave explains how he kills chickens. He and Heather discussed how they have looked into different methods for killing chickens, but this is the least cruel and painful. The chickens do not live stressful lives, and experience minimal stress and no pain until the final moment of death. After they are defeathered, Heather removes all of their innards. Some of the people who order meat from them request the liver or feet, and so they keep these for customers. Currently, they bury the chicken parts that are not sold, though they informed us that they are looking into composting methods. The kids that Dave refers to in the above video are his own - they help out on the farm. He says they prefer living on the farm, even though they have to do more work, because they have a wide space in which to play, and can observe wild birds (such as hawks nesting on the farm).

 Close up of the defeathering machine

Dave and Heather's farm are surrounded by dairies and meat farms. As soon as we exited and started driving toward the farm, we could smell methane. As Dave mentioned in the video at the top of this post, there are a lot of polluting byproducts from animal rearing, particularly when it is done irresponsibly. He says the water is so bad in their area that it was killing off a lot of their chickens. They installed an industrial water filtration system (below), which has lowered the illness and death levels of their chickens to 15% of the previous number.

The people of the United States have an enormous impact on the world. We alone use 25% of the worlds energy and natural resources. What we eat is central in this equation, whether it is because of the pesticides that leach into the ocean, or the tons of fossil fuels burned by shipping meats and other ingredients across the nation and the world. Further, if we want to have peace within ourselves, we need to think about the peace levels experienced by the food we eat, since both plants and animals release stress chemicals and hormones based on their life experiences.

"Free range"

It is horrifying how 'conventional' chickens are raised and slaughtered.

So, if you are interested in making the world a better place, think about what you eat, what was eaten by what you are eating, and how the animals are treated. And remember, each of your dollars is highly coveted and goes a loooooooong way. Buy local as often as possible. Visit your farmer's market - ask how the chickens are raised, what they are fed. If you are going to eat meat, at least eat meat from animals treated well at a farm that treats the Earth with respect.

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All pictures and videos taken by LTG, except for 'Free Range' above. That photograph comes from a slaughter machinery company website.

What do you do with your money?

This is one of the most important questions any person interested in living better with other humans and our planet can consider.

Image via dpr-barcelona

Firstly, you may think 'a dollar is just a dollar' so therefore it doesn't matter what you spend it on.  But think of this - the population of the United States is roughly 307 million people. Target Corporation last year earned $67 billion. In the first 3 quarters of last year, BP earned $288.57 billion (this is less than its revenue for the year since 4th quarter was unavailable; also, BP is a global company but consider its revenue vs. a global population of 7 billion). A television star like Kim Kardashian earns $12 million per year. These individuals and companies don't earn this money out of thin air. They earn it because consumers (aka, YOU) spend money on their goods and services. 

Image via Treehugger

Regardless of how much a company gives to charity, corporate business managers (and reality TV stars) take home a LOT of money. This is at time a complex issue in terms of 'justness', given some of these companies' and individuals' impact on the Earth and the destruction their choices cause to others. 

It is also valuable to know where your money goes so that you don't end up funding a destructive production cycle for a product. For example, many people see bananas as healthy and so buy them. However, many companies that farm bananas slash rainforests to grow these fruits. Its the same situation with leather - Brazil is a top exporter of leather and cow meat, which is often grown on cattle farms in the Amazon that require those rainforests to be chopped down. Many times these farmers enslave laborers in debt bondage situations, where the laborer often cannot do much about their position since they are deep in the forest. These are just a couple of examples about how products you may buy fund a host of negative things in the world.

Image via Localblu.com

If you want more control over your money, your life, and the future of this planet, AND if you want to invest in your local community, consider shopping local or using things you can easily get for free from the world around you. An obvious example is shopping at your local farmer's market for groceries and soaps. You can get lemons from your neighbor's overburdened tree and use them to clean most of your home - kitchen counters, sinks, toilets, and diluted in water to clean the floor. You can move your money into a local credit union, many of which list the organizations and local businesses in which they invest on their website. You can support local vintage shops to buy your clothes. Take a walk through your neighborhood on a daily basis (if possible) for exercise and to check out what businesses are around that you can frequent.

If you want more suggestions or if you have a suggestion, feel free to leave a comment here. :)

Peace!

Nisha Namorando Vida
LTG Director/Founder

Postscript: If you take issue with this post or have a take on this in any way that you would like to publicly share, please post a comment! Dialogue = crucial.

Photo by Nisha Vida at: August Local to Global Event