Missouri Senators: shills for corporations

Once again, our government voted against you and me--against the people--and voted, instead, to protect the corporations in the country.

The Senate just voted last week to keep you and I from knowing what's in our food.

Again.

Companies don't have to label genetically-modified foods (GMO's) to show that they're in what we eat. Basically, they're protecting the corporations--St. Louis' own Monsanto, among others, I'm sure--instead of protecting the people.

Forget that we otherwise are supposed to know what's in our foods.

Forget that all over Europe they don't even let GMO's into their food chain, let alone not label them.

This provision, added to the farm bill, "would permit states to 'require that any food, beverage, or other edible product offered for sale have a label on indicating that the food, beverage, or other edible product contains a genetically engineered ingredient.'"

What's particularly and especially galling about this is that our own Senators Roy Blunt (Republican) and Senator Clair McCaskill (Democrat) both voted to protect the corporations--Monsanto--instead of us.

It's not surprising--not surprising at all--since Senator Blunt regularly, typically and repeatedly votes to protect corporations and "Big Oil" and Monsanto instead of voting with and for the people--you and me.

As for Senator McCaskill, it's an election year and she no doubt needs and wants the Right Wing and corporate support and money.

It's disgusting.

It's this same Senator Roy Blunt who is, right now, also trying to get the Canadian company's Transcanada Keystone XL pipeline to cut through the good old US of A, from the Northern border all the way to Texas, just short of the Southern border, all so a Canadian company--Transcanada--can get their oil to world markets and make yet more money for themselves.

Forget that oil spills inevitably happen with these things. Forget that we'd have to then clean it up. Forget the environmental damage it would, without question, inflict, permanently.

Senator Blunt HAS to stand up for his corporations and get all that money in his pockets.

And Senator McCaskill has to fight to be re-elected.

Truly disgusting.

Links: http://www.americablog.com/2012/06/senate-votes-7326-to-deny-states-right.html

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/06/genetically-modified-america.html

Upcoming documentary

Remember, 3/4 of the grocery store is utterly unnecessary. Vegetables, some meat and/or fish--if you eat it--some pasta(s) and the freshest breads you can get, either at home or the store. After that, a few condiments--maybe--some seasoning(s) and everything with as little sugar, if any at all, and as few ingredients as possible. Nothing processed. It's easy. Easier than it sounds, too. It's great for your health, great for your wasteline, far less expensive, potentially, simple and you'll feel terrific. Take back your food. Take back your body. Take back your life.

Go read this article

Just do it:

How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

In an essay published last November in Canada's Maisonneuve journal, physician Kevin Patterson described his experiences working as an internist-intensivist at the Canadian Combat Surgical Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

One detail he noticed: The Afghan soldiers, police and civilians he treated in Kandahar had radically different bodies from those of the Canadians he took care of back home.

"Typical Afghan civilians and soldiers would have been 140 pounds or so as adults. And when we operated on them, what we were aware of was the absence of any fat or any adipose tissue underneath the skin," Patterson says. "Of course, when we operated on Canadians or Americans or Europeans, what was normal was to have most of the organs encased in fat. It had a visceral potency to it when you could see it directly there."

"Type 2 diabetes historically didn't exist, only 70 or 80 years ago," says Patterson. "And what's driven it, of course, is this rise in obesity, especially the accumulation of abdominal fat."

Go.  Read it.  It isn't that long.  You'll learn things.

More vegetables, folks, more vegetables.  It's not that complicated.

Link:  http://www.npr.org/2011/03/24/132745785/how-western-diets-are-making-the-world-sick?ps=cprs

Alice Waters: A magnificent impact on the world

Can you imagine how magnificent it would be to have the kind of impact on even just your own neighborhood, let alone your city--and then your state--and then your region--and then the nation you live in and finally, out to the world as Alice Waters, founder of the Chez Panisse restaurant in San Francisco had?

Here is a woman who recognized that our food was too processed and pumped full of chemicals and cancer-causing agents that she began doing purely natural food, straight from the earth to the meal table and in it, made a food revolution.  

From Wikipedia:

Alice Louise Waters (born April 28, 1944) is an American chef, restaurateur, activist, and humanitarian. She is the owner of Chez Panisse, the world-renowned restaurant in Berkeley, California famous for its organic, locally-grown ingredients and for pioneering California cuisine.^[1]

Waters opened the restaurant in 1971 at age 27. Since then, it has become one of the most awarded and renowned restaurants in the world, and has consistently ranked among the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Waters has been cited as the most influential person in food in the past 50 years, and has been called the mother of American food.^[2] She is currently one of the most visible supporters of the organic food movement, and has been a proponent of organics for over 40 years.^[3] She believes that eating organic foods, free from herbicides and pesticides, is essential for both taste and the health of the environment and local communities.

In addition to her restaurant, Waters is involved in a variety of other projects. She has authored several books on food and cooking, including Chez Panisse Cooking (with Paul Bertolli) and The Art of Simple Food, and is one of the most well-known food activists in the United States and around the world. Waters’ work and philosophy is based on the principle that access to sustainable, fresh, and seasonal food is a right, not a privilege,^[4] and believes that the food system needs to be “good, clean, and fair” ^[5]

With this vision, she founded the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996, and created the Edible Schoolyard program at the Martin Luther King Middle School (Berkeley) in Berkeley, CA. Waters also serves as a public policy advocate on the national level for school lunch reform and universal access to healthy, organic foods, and the impact of her organic and healthy food revolution is typified by Michelle Obama’s White House organic vegetable garden.[6]

To do well is one thing.  To be successful, sure, that's terrific.  But to realize something so fundamental but important that it not only gives you a success but also helps start a revolution of sorts, and then to go on from that success and successful idea and create other avenues to get the word out and help others do more with the ideas and enjoy those avenues and benefits, it's pretty incredible.

It's a terrific example of what only one person can do.

It's enough to give a person terrific hope.

Link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Waters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Panisse

Good questions on food and our government's complicity with corporations

When did we lose the right to know what we are eating? When did food labeling become a con game to make us think we're eating healthy even when we are not? Why is the government assisting those who wish to confuse us? --Robin Quivers Link to original post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-quivers/secret-ingredients_b_675961.html

Nice change of pace

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I read or am exposed to a column by Geoge Will and find that he and I agree on a subject.

Such was the case a week ago this past Saturday when he wrote of Americans, our diets and our exposure to corn, corn subsidies, corn syrup, meat in our diets and obesity in the United States. Even the title screamed agreement to me: "BAD HEALTH BUILT INTO OUR CORN-FED FOOD SYSTEM". (The capitalization was theirs).

He gave some terrific history about us, I think. For instance, he quotes Michael Pollan (no pun intended), author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and in Defense of Food. Mr. Pollan, he writes, "says that after World War II, the government had a surplus of ammonium nitrate, an ingredient of explosives--and fertilizer. Furthermore, pesticides could be made from ingredients of poison gases. Since 1945, the food supply has increased fster than America's population--faster even than Americans can increase their feasting."

Seriously, fascinating stuff.

People either don't know why we're so dang fat or they wonder why we are. The fact is, it has a great deal to do with farms, farming and corporations.

President Eisenhower warned us, for sure.

More:

--Did you know three in five Americans are overweight?

--one in five os us are out and out obese?

"Dureing World War II, when meat, dairy products and sugar were scarce, heart disease plummeted. It rebounded when ratioinng ended."

That's pretty incdredible right there.

"When you adjust for age...rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900."

Yow. That's pretty indicting stuff.

My sister has been claiming for years, along with others, that if we ate better and smarter, we wouldn't have to pay millions and billions of dollars to treat and try to cure cancer. She's not alone, by a long shot. There are medical people who have been claiming this for years, too. It seems the data makes this clear and not really debatable, doesn't it?

Still more from Mr. Will's column: "Four of the top causes of American deaths--coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer--'have well-established links' to diet, particularly through the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat,' Pollan says."

So why put this down now?

First, because Mr. Will wrote of it just this past week.

Second, to spread the information.

And third and finally, because I am, just now going to board a cruise ship out of Miami and if I've heard anything about cruising, it's that there is mass quantities of food, all over the ship, virtually non-stop.

This gives me more desire to tone it all down, in the first place, and maybe evaluate the consumption, casually, while I'm enjoying myself.

Bon appetit'.