Real Food and A Box Full of Kids

This is the first day of the NDiN Real Food Challenge. I had a post about our first day and the instant challenges we (I) found feeding everyone "Real Food". But I'm posting this instead.

A Box Full of Kids

If you read this blog regularly you know we have been struggling with a kid who couldn't stand when she was born. She is the black and white one on the right. Her name is Patty. It took us some time (and some suggestions from a few helpful readers) to pin down the problem. She had White Muscle Disease. That's a vitamin E/selenium deficiency. She seems to be doing pretty well now, but her sister (who appeared strong when she was born) died today. Her heart just stopped. (That is another effect of selenium/vitamin E deficiency.) As I looked more closely at the whole herd it became apparent that everyone was suffering some of the effects of this deficiency. I've dosed everyone up with cod liver oil, extra kelp meal, and a selenium rich mineral supplement. Should solve the problem for the goats.

So, you are probably wondering what this has to do with Real Food and the Real Food Challenge. Well, here are my thoughts for the day. What I discovered was the deficiency in my goats came from their feed. They have been on hay for a couple of months now, and confined to the barn for about a month (the snow is so deep there is nothing for them to nibble on and no reason for them to go out to pasture. It would be pointless for them and more work for me.) The 'organic' hay I bought this year is from a new source. They are new to the organic game, and their fields have just 'transitioned'. Before they changed the fields had been farmed traditionally. In researching White Muscle Disease and ways to deal with it I found that selenium was depressed in plants grown on soils with low pH and on soils subjected to chemical fertilizers. It had not been a problem in the US until after the wide spread use of chemical fertilizers began. Vitamin E deteriorates in plants that are stored for long periods of time. This year we used first cut hay from a farm where the fields had just recently switched to 'organic' practices. The food caused the problem.

These kinds of studies are readily available for animals and animal feed. BUT, no one talks about it in relation to human food and human health.

Today has made me rethink this challenge and what I'm doing. I'm a farmer. My business is food. Producing fresh, nutrient dense, balanced food for my family and my community is my responsibility. That's an idea I intend to explore more this month. The how and the why of Real Food.

Alan's Soap Box - After Food Inc.- First Steps

I wasn't very satisfied with my last post. It only covered part of my response. The angry, hopeless, frustrated part. But, I can't live that way. So, here is the first of a series of post about ACTION!

First steps

1. USE your anger. Let is spur you into doing something. Make it something constructive. Here are some things we will be doing.

- Planting more food. Our paper garden just got bigger and more complex. If we want an alternative to the Industrial Food System WE have to create it. We have the space and the skills at our farm to be part of the solution, so we are going to do that, for our selves and for our community.

- Sharing. We will be sharing more of what we have. More of what we grow, more of what we know how to do, more of what we think. We will share the movie with others. We will have discussions. We will share the food we create, even with those who want nothing to do with alternative food systems. (I've gotten quite a few people interested in local food issues by using fudge. Probably more people that way than by talking about the problems.)

- Supporting. We can't do it all. So we will support others in our community who are doing things too. Some of the support will be buying things from them. Some of it will be spreading the word about what they are doing. And some will be in the form of smiles, encouragement, and help. It is not an easy road to take, and connecting with others on the same path makes it more likely we will all make it.

- Connecting to the wider world. While our focus will be local, the story needs to be told on a much wider scale. We will do that here. We will also participate in some of the blogging activities that support this kind of action. One we will join is the NDiN Food Inc Challenge. (More on this later.)

These are some of the First Steps we are taking.

What are YOU going to do?

Food Inc - some thoughts after viewing.

Depressing. The movie left me feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. Angry. Sad. Wanting to DO SOMETHING!

Talking with friends about the movie I found they had similar reactions. But, a week later it had settled into a dull itch, an empty ache in the heart. Guilt at inaction, frustration at not knowing quite what to do.

For me the movie told a story I already knew. It was well presented. It tugged at my emotions, put images to ideas I already had explored, made me feel, made me want to act.

What it didn’t do was give direction.

Oh, there were suggestions…

Buy local
Shop at your Farmer’s Market
Eat Organic
Eat less Meat, less processed food, be more conscious of what you buy.
Vote with your dollars
Support stricter regulations
Support traceability
Have the government shut down big food like they did the tobacco industry
ETC.

It all sounds great… EXCEPT…

Where I live, at the edge of a small town, surrounded by corn and soy bean farm and unemployed factory workers, there isn’t a farmers market until May. There are very few choices for locally produced food. This time of year (from October through the beginning of May) there are really none. You can get “organic” food at Wal-Mart if you can afford it. You can vote with your dollars, but there aren’t any real “candidates for change” out there in the food world. The vote in my area would be more about supporting locally owned, small businesses rather than the big box corporations. (The food isn’t local in either store.) The government can’t shut down Big Food the way it did with Big Tobacco. People can live (however unhappily) without tobacco, but not without food, and the alternative to Big Food doesn’t exist in most of this country anymore. And regulations… WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH. They are not protecting us, but MORE won’t fix that. What regulations are very effectively doing is exterminating the alternative. Just try becoming a small food producer and see how fast the “safety” regulations come slamming down on you.

Grow a garden was one of the suggestions. I love it, except at my house right now the ground is frozen solid, the high temp has been around 20° F, and it’s all buried under an ever increasing pile of snow. Kind of tough for gardening. Even if the season was right, it still takes skills which have been lost by a great portion of the population, space, which many people don’t have, equipment and seeds which cost money, and time, also a scarce resource for most people. AND, it takes YEARS to build a productive garden system. It is a good start at an answer, but home gardens alone won’t solve the problem.

The movie held out a couple of folks as examples of an alternative, Joel Salatin and the organic yogurt guy (I don’t remember his name.) They did provide a glimpse at a possible alternative, and they did represent some positive changes that could be made. BUT, they weren’t that different. They weren’t that many steps from Big Food. Joel Salatin captured it best for me. He said “ I have no desire to scale up and get bigger… but if more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.” That’s exactly what the organic yogurt guy did (now he is a supplier for Wal-Mart.) That’s what most of the organic food you find has done. That’s the same model that created Kraft Foods, Tyson, Monsanto. Meet the need. I really like Joel and what he does. He is a great inspiration to small farmers who want to try different methods. BUT, underlying what he does is the same mechanism that created all the mega-corps we have today. Swapping Monsanto for Mega Joel doesn’t really solve the problem.

Food Inc. also brushed by some other issues that are closely tied to the food problem, operate on the same model, and are crushing us as people and destroying the world in the process. ENERGY. WATER. HEALTH. All linked inextricably with food. All being controlled by bigger and bigger companies. All guilty of the same abuses, safety problems, environmental damaging methods, all dangerously vulnerable to collapse, and all critical for our survival. These things are so interlinked that you can’t solve them in isolation.

So, what do we DO?