New York Times
October 15, 2006
The Way We Live Now
The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry — something along the lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said recently, “as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”
This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.
Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.
But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.
It’s conceivable the same problem could occur in your own kitchen sink or on a single farm. Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we started processing all our food in such a small number of “kitchens” did the potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.
Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.
Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers’ market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess it’s because I’ve just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before — it hasn’t been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m sure there is some, it seems manageable.
These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what’s going on at the farmers’ market — how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . .sentimental.
But there’s nothing sentimental about local food — indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental — and deliberate — contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms — in technologies rather than relationships.
It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author most recently of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.”
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Friday, October 13, 2006
The Organic Myth
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_42/b4005001.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_oct6&link_position=link1
The Organic Myth
Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market
Next time you're in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we've come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.
So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield's organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. "It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house," he says. "But once you're in organic, you have to source globally."
Hirshberg's dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren't enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp -- some of the other ingredients that go into the world's best-selling organic yogurt.
Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT ) to General Mills (GIS ) to Kellogg (K ) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. Hirshberg himself is under the gun because he has sold an 85% stake in Stonyfield to the French food giant Groupe Danone. To retain management control, he has to keep Stonyfield growing at double-digit rates. Yet faced with a supply crunch, he has drastically cut the percentage of organic products in his line. He also has scaled back annual sales growth, from almost 40% to 20%. "They're all mad at me," he says.
As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil -- places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers' wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.
Everyone agrees on the basic definition of organic: food grown without the assistance of man-made chemicals. Four years ago, under pressure from critics fretting that the term "organic" was being misused, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued rules. To be certified as organic, companies must eschew most pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, bioengineering, and radiation. But for purists, the philosophy also requires farmers to treat their people and livestock with respect and, ideally, to sell small batches of what they produce locally so as to avoid burning fossil fuels to transport them. The USDA rules don't fully address these concerns.
Hence the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals. It simply isn't clear that organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale. For Hirshberg, who set out to "change the way Kraft (KFT ), Monsanto (MON ), and everybody else does business," the movement is shedding its innocence. "Organic is growing up."
Certainly, life has changed since 1983, when Hirshberg teamed up with a back-to-the-land advocate named Samuel Kaymen to sell small batches of full-fat plain organic yogurt. Kaymen had founded Stonyfield Farm to feed his six kids and, as he puts it, "escape the dominant culture." Hirshberg, then 29, had been devoted to the environment for years, stung by memories of technicolor dyes streaming downriver from his father's New Hampshire shoe factories. He wrote a book on how to build water-pumping windmills and, between 1979 and 1983, ran the New Alchemy Institute, an alternative-living research center on Cape Cod. He was a believer.
But producing yogurt amid the rudimentary conditions of the original Stonyfield Farm was a recipe for nightmares, not nirvana. Meg, an organic farmer who married Hirshberg in 1986, remembers the farm as cold and crowded, with a road so perilous that suppliers often refused to come up. "I call it the bad old days," she says. Adds her mother, Doris Cadoux, who propped up the business for years: "Every time Gary would come to me for money, Meg would call to say 'Mama, don't do it."'
Farming without insecticides, fertilizers, and other aids is tough. Laborers often weed the fields by hand. Farmers control pests with everything from sticky flypaper to aphid-munching ladybugs. Manure and soil fertility must be carefully managed. Sick animals may take longer to get well without a quick hit of antibiotics, although they're likely to be healthier in the first place. Moreover, the yield per acre or per animal often goes down, at least initially. Estimates for the decline from switching to organic corn range up to 20%.
Organic farmers say they can ultimately exceed the yields of conventional rivals through smarter soil management. But some believe organic farming, if it is to stay true to its principles, would require vastly more land and resources than is currently being used. Asks Alex Avery, a research director at the Hudson Institute think tank: "How much Bambi habitat do you want to plow down?"
IMPOSSIBLE STANDARD
For a sense of why Big Business and organics often don't mix, it helps to visit Jack and Anne Lazor of Butterworks Farm. The duo have been producing organic yogurt in northeastern Vermont since 1975. Their 45 milking cows are raised from birth and have names like Peaches and Moonlight. All of the food for the cows -- and most of what the Lazors eat, too -- comes from the farm, and Anne keeps their charges healthy with a mix of homeopathic medicines and nutritional supplements. Butterworks produces a tiny 9,000 quarts of yogurt a week, and no one can pressure them to make more. Says Jack: "I'd be happiest to sell everything within 10 miles of here."
But the Lazors also embody an ideal that's almost impossible for other food producers to fulfill. For one thing, they have enough land to let their modest-sized herd graze for food. Many of the country's 9 million-plus dairy cows (of which fewer than 150,000 are organic) are on farms that will never have access to that kind of pasture. After all, a cow can only walk so far when it has to come back to be milked two or three times a day.
STEWARDS OF THE LAND
When consumers shell out premiums of 50% or more to buy organic, they are voting for the Butterworks ethic. They believe humans should be prudent custodians not only of their own health but also of the land and animals that share it. They prefer food produced through fair wages and family farms, not poor workers and agribusiness. They are responding to tales of caged chickens and confined cows that never touch a blade of grass; talk of men losing fertility and girls becoming women at age nine because of extra hormones in food. They read about pesticides seeping into the food supply and genetically modified crops creeping across the landscape.
For Big Food, consumers' love affair with everything organic has seemed like a gift from the gods. Food is generally a commoditized, sluggish business, especially in basic supermarket staples. Sales of organic groceries, on the other hand, have been surging by up to 20% in recent years. Organic milk is so profitable -- with wholesale prices more than double that of conventional milk -- that Lyle "Spud" Edwards of Westfield, Vt., was able to halve his herd, to 25 cows, this summer and still make a living, despite a 15% drop in yields since switching to organic four years ago. "There's a lot more paperwork, but it's worth it," says Edwards, who supplies milk to Stonyfield.
The food industry got a boost four years ago when the USDA issued its organic standards. The "USDA Organic" label now appears on scores of products, from chicken breasts to breakfast cereal. And you know a tipping point is at hand when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. enters the game. The retailer pledged this year to become a center of affordable "organics for everyone" and has started by doubling its organic offerings at 374 stores nationwide. "Everyone wants a piece of the pie," says George L. Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the country's largest organic farm co- operative. "Kraft and Wal-Mart are part of the community now, and we have to get used to it."
The corporate giants have turned a fringe food category into a $14 billion business. They have brought wider distribution and marketing dollars. They have imposed better quality controls on a sector once associated with bug-infested, battered produce rotting in crates at hippie co-ops. Organic products now account for 2.5% of all grocery spending (if additive-free "natural" foods are included, the share jumps to about 10%). And demand could soar if prices come down.
But success has brought home the problems of trying to feed the masses in an industry where supplies can be volatile. Everyone from Wal-Mart to Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST ) is feeling the pinch. Earlier this year, Earthbound Farm, a California producer of organic salads, fruit, and vegetables owned by Natural Selection Foods, cut off its sliced-apple product to Costco because supply dried up -- even though Earthbound looked as far afield as New Zealand. "The concept of running out of apples is foreign to these people," says Earthbound co-founder Myra Goodman, whose company recalled bagged spinach in the wake of the recent E. coli outbreak. "When you're sourcing conventional produce, it's a matter of the best product at the best price."
Inconsistency is a hallmark of organic food. Variations in animal diet, local conditions, and preparation make food taste different from batch to batch. But that's anathema to a modern food giant. Heinz, for one, had a lot of trouble locating herbs and spices for its organic ketchup. "We're a global company that has to deliver consistent standards," says Kristen Clark, a group vice-president for marketing. The volatile supply also forced Heinz to put dried or fresh organic herbs in its organic Classico pasta sauce because it wasn't able to find the more convenient quick-frozen variety. Even Wal-Mart, master of the modern food supply chain, is humbled by the realities of going organic. As spokesperson Gail Lavielle says: "You can't negotiate prices in a market like that."
While Americans may love the idea of natural food, they have come to rely on the perks of agribusiness. Since the widespread use of synthetic pesticides began, around the time of World War II, food producers have reaped remarkable gains. Apples stay red and juicy for weeks. The average harvested acre of farmland yields 200% more wheat than it did 70 years ago. Over the past two decades chickens have grown 25% bigger in less time and on less food. At the same time, the average cow produces 60% more milk, thanks to innovations in breeding, nutrition, and synthetic hormones.
It's also worth remembering how inexpensive food is these days. Americans shell out about 10% of their disposable income on food, about half what they spent in the first part of the 20th century. Producing a budget-priced cornucopia of organic food won't be easy.
Exhibit A: Gary Hirshberg's quest for organic milk. Dairy producers estimate that demand for organic milk is at least twice the current available supply. To quench this thirst, the U.S. would have to more than double the number of organic cows -- those that eat only organic food -- to 280,000 over the next five years. That's a challenge, since the number of dairy farms has shrunk to 60,000, from 334,000 in 1980, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. And almost half the milk produced in the U.S. comes from farms with more than 500 cows, something organic advocates rarely support.
What to do? If you're Hirshberg, you weigh the pros and cons of importing organic milk powder from New Zealand. Stonyfield already gets strawberries from China, apple puree from Turkey, blueberries from Canada, and bananas from Ecuador. It's the only way to keep the business growing. Besides, Hirshberg argues, supporting a family farmer in Madagascar or reducing chemical use in Costa Rica is just as important as doing the same at home.
Perhaps, but doing so risks a consumer backlash, especially when the organic food is from China. So far there is little evidence that crops from there are tainted or fraudulently labeled. Any food that bears the USDA Organic label has to be accredited by an independent certifier. But tests are few and far between. Moreover, many consumers don't trust food from a country that continues to manufacture DDT and tolerates fakes in other industries. Similar questions are being asked about much of the developing world. Ronnie Cummins, national director of the nonprofit Organic Consumers Assn., claims organic farms may contribute to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, although conventional farming remains the proven culprit.
Imported organics are a constant concern for food companies and supermarkets. It's certainly on Steve Pimentel's mind. "Someone is going to do something wrong," says Costco's assistant general merchandise manager. "We want to make sure it's not us." To avoid nasty surprises, Costco makes sure its own certifiers check that standards are met in China for the organic peanuts and produce it imports. Over at Stonyfield, Hirshberg's sister, Nancy, who is vice-president of natural resources, was so worried about buying strawberries in northeastern China that she ordered a social audit to check worker conditions. "If I didn't have to buy from there," she says, "I wouldn't."
For many companies, the preferred option is staying home and adopting the industrial scale of agribusiness. Naturally, giant factory farms make purists recoil. Is an organic label appropriate for eggs produced in sheds housing more than 100,000 hens that rarely see the light of day? Can a chicken that's debeaked or allowed minimal access to the outdoors be deemed organic? Would consumers be willing to pay twice as much for organic milk if they thought the cows producing it spent most of their outdoor lives in confined dirt lots?
ETHICAL CHALLENGES?
Absolutely not, say critics such as Mark Kastel, director of the Organic Integrity Project at the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group promoting small family farms. "Organic consumers think they're supporting a different kind of ethic," says Kastel, who last spring released a high-profile report card labeling 11 producers as ethically challenged.
Kastel's report card included Horizon Organic Dairy, the No. 1 organic milk brand in the U.S., and Aurora Organic Dairy, which makes private-label products for the likes of Costco and Safeway Inc. Both dairies deny they are ethically challenged. But the two do operate massive corporate farms. Horizon has 8,000 cows in the Idaho desert. There, the animals consume such feed as corn, barley, hay, and soybeans, as well as some grass from pastureland. The company is currently reconfiguring its facility to allow more grazing opportunities. And none of this breaks USDA rules. The agency simply says animals must have "access to pasture." How much is not spelled out. "It doesn't say [livestock] have to be out there, happy and feeding, 18 hours a day," says Barbara C. Robinson, who oversees the USDA's National Organic Program.
But what gets people like Kastel fuming is the fact that big dairy farms produce tons of pollution in the form of manure and methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide -- gases blamed for warming the planet. Referring to Horizon's Idaho farm, he adds: "This area is in perpetual drought. You need to pump water constantly to grow pasture. That's not organic."
Aurora and Horizon argue their operations are true to the organic spirit and that big farms help bring organic food to the masses. Joe E. Scalzo, president and CEO of Horizon's owner, WhiteWave, which is owned by Dean Foods Co., says: "You need the 12-cow farms in Vermont -- and the 4,000 milking cows in Idaho." Adds Clark Driftmier, a spokesman for Aurora, which manages 8,400 dairy cows on two farms in Colorado and Texas: "We're in a contentious period with organics right now."
At the USDA, Robinson is grappling with the same imponderables. In her mind the controversy is more about scale than animal treatment. "The real issue is a fear of large corporations," she says. Robinson expects the USDA to tighten pasture rules in the coming months in hopes of moving closer to the spirit of the organic philosophy. "As programs go," she says, "this is just a toddler. New issues keep coming up."
Few people seem more hemmed in by the contradictions than Gary Hirshberg. Perhaps more than anyone, he has acted as the industry's philosopher king, lobbying governments, proselytizing consumers, helping farmers switch to organic, and giving 10% of profits to environmental causes. Yet he sold most of Stonyfield Farm to a $17 billion French corporation.
He did so partly to let his original investors cash out, partly to bring organic food to the masses. But inevitably, as Stonyfield has morphed from local outfit to national brand, some of the original tenets have fallen by the wayside. Once Danone bought a stake, Stonyfield founder Samuel Kaymen moved on. "I never felt comfortable with the scale or dealing with people so far away," he recalls, although he says Hirshberg has so far managed to uphold the company's original principles.
The hard part may be continuing to do so with Danone looking over his shoulder. Hirshberg retains board control but says his "autonomy and independence and employment are contingent on delivering minimum growth and profitability." Danone Chairman and CEO Franck Riboud expresses admiration for the man he considers to be Danone's organic guru, but adds: "Gary respects that I have to answer to shareholders."
The compromises that Hirshberg is willing to make say a lot about where the organic business is headed. "Our kids don't have time for us to sit on our high horses and say we're not going to do this because it's not ecologically perfect," says Hirshberg. "The only way to influence the powerful forces in this industry is to become a powerful force." And he's willing to do that, even if it means playing by a new set of rules.
By Diane Brady
The Organic Myth
Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market
Next time you're in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we've come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.
So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield's organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. "It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house," he says. "But once you're in organic, you have to source globally."
Hirshberg's dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren't enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp -- some of the other ingredients that go into the world's best-selling organic yogurt.
Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT ) to General Mills (GIS ) to Kellogg (K ) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. Hirshberg himself is under the gun because he has sold an 85% stake in Stonyfield to the French food giant Groupe Danone. To retain management control, he has to keep Stonyfield growing at double-digit rates. Yet faced with a supply crunch, he has drastically cut the percentage of organic products in his line. He also has scaled back annual sales growth, from almost 40% to 20%. "They're all mad at me," he says.
As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil -- places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers' wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.
Everyone agrees on the basic definition of organic: food grown without the assistance of man-made chemicals. Four years ago, under pressure from critics fretting that the term "organic" was being misused, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued rules. To be certified as organic, companies must eschew most pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, bioengineering, and radiation. But for purists, the philosophy also requires farmers to treat their people and livestock with respect and, ideally, to sell small batches of what they produce locally so as to avoid burning fossil fuels to transport them. The USDA rules don't fully address these concerns.
Hence the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals. It simply isn't clear that organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale. For Hirshberg, who set out to "change the way Kraft (KFT ), Monsanto (MON ), and everybody else does business," the movement is shedding its innocence. "Organic is growing up."
Certainly, life has changed since 1983, when Hirshberg teamed up with a back-to-the-land advocate named Samuel Kaymen to sell small batches of full-fat plain organic yogurt. Kaymen had founded Stonyfield Farm to feed his six kids and, as he puts it, "escape the dominant culture." Hirshberg, then 29, had been devoted to the environment for years, stung by memories of technicolor dyes streaming downriver from his father's New Hampshire shoe factories. He wrote a book on how to build water-pumping windmills and, between 1979 and 1983, ran the New Alchemy Institute, an alternative-living research center on Cape Cod. He was a believer.
But producing yogurt amid the rudimentary conditions of the original Stonyfield Farm was a recipe for nightmares, not nirvana. Meg, an organic farmer who married Hirshberg in 1986, remembers the farm as cold and crowded, with a road so perilous that suppliers often refused to come up. "I call it the bad old days," she says. Adds her mother, Doris Cadoux, who propped up the business for years: "Every time Gary would come to me for money, Meg would call to say 'Mama, don't do it."'
Farming without insecticides, fertilizers, and other aids is tough. Laborers often weed the fields by hand. Farmers control pests with everything from sticky flypaper to aphid-munching ladybugs. Manure and soil fertility must be carefully managed. Sick animals may take longer to get well without a quick hit of antibiotics, although they're likely to be healthier in the first place. Moreover, the yield per acre or per animal often goes down, at least initially. Estimates for the decline from switching to organic corn range up to 20%.
Organic farmers say they can ultimately exceed the yields of conventional rivals through smarter soil management. But some believe organic farming, if it is to stay true to its principles, would require vastly more land and resources than is currently being used. Asks Alex Avery, a research director at the Hudson Institute think tank: "How much Bambi habitat do you want to plow down?"
IMPOSSIBLE STANDARD
For a sense of why Big Business and organics often don't mix, it helps to visit Jack and Anne Lazor of Butterworks Farm. The duo have been producing organic yogurt in northeastern Vermont since 1975. Their 45 milking cows are raised from birth and have names like Peaches and Moonlight. All of the food for the cows -- and most of what the Lazors eat, too -- comes from the farm, and Anne keeps their charges healthy with a mix of homeopathic medicines and nutritional supplements. Butterworks produces a tiny 9,000 quarts of yogurt a week, and no one can pressure them to make more. Says Jack: "I'd be happiest to sell everything within 10 miles of here."
But the Lazors also embody an ideal that's almost impossible for other food producers to fulfill. For one thing, they have enough land to let their modest-sized herd graze for food. Many of the country's 9 million-plus dairy cows (of which fewer than 150,000 are organic) are on farms that will never have access to that kind of pasture. After all, a cow can only walk so far when it has to come back to be milked two or three times a day.
STEWARDS OF THE LAND
When consumers shell out premiums of 50% or more to buy organic, they are voting for the Butterworks ethic. They believe humans should be prudent custodians not only of their own health but also of the land and animals that share it. They prefer food produced through fair wages and family farms, not poor workers and agribusiness. They are responding to tales of caged chickens and confined cows that never touch a blade of grass; talk of men losing fertility and girls becoming women at age nine because of extra hormones in food. They read about pesticides seeping into the food supply and genetically modified crops creeping across the landscape.
For Big Food, consumers' love affair with everything organic has seemed like a gift from the gods. Food is generally a commoditized, sluggish business, especially in basic supermarket staples. Sales of organic groceries, on the other hand, have been surging by up to 20% in recent years. Organic milk is so profitable -- with wholesale prices more than double that of conventional milk -- that Lyle "Spud" Edwards of Westfield, Vt., was able to halve his herd, to 25 cows, this summer and still make a living, despite a 15% drop in yields since switching to organic four years ago. "There's a lot more paperwork, but it's worth it," says Edwards, who supplies milk to Stonyfield.
The food industry got a boost four years ago when the USDA issued its organic standards. The "USDA Organic" label now appears on scores of products, from chicken breasts to breakfast cereal. And you know a tipping point is at hand when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. enters the game. The retailer pledged this year to become a center of affordable "organics for everyone" and has started by doubling its organic offerings at 374 stores nationwide. "Everyone wants a piece of the pie," says George L. Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the country's largest organic farm co- operative. "Kraft and Wal-Mart are part of the community now, and we have to get used to it."
The corporate giants have turned a fringe food category into a $14 billion business. They have brought wider distribution and marketing dollars. They have imposed better quality controls on a sector once associated with bug-infested, battered produce rotting in crates at hippie co-ops. Organic products now account for 2.5% of all grocery spending (if additive-free "natural" foods are included, the share jumps to about 10%). And demand could soar if prices come down.
But success has brought home the problems of trying to feed the masses in an industry where supplies can be volatile. Everyone from Wal-Mart to Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST ) is feeling the pinch. Earlier this year, Earthbound Farm, a California producer of organic salads, fruit, and vegetables owned by Natural Selection Foods, cut off its sliced-apple product to Costco because supply dried up -- even though Earthbound looked as far afield as New Zealand. "The concept of running out of apples is foreign to these people," says Earthbound co-founder Myra Goodman, whose company recalled bagged spinach in the wake of the recent E. coli outbreak. "When you're sourcing conventional produce, it's a matter of the best product at the best price."
Inconsistency is a hallmark of organic food. Variations in animal diet, local conditions, and preparation make food taste different from batch to batch. But that's anathema to a modern food giant. Heinz, for one, had a lot of trouble locating herbs and spices for its organic ketchup. "We're a global company that has to deliver consistent standards," says Kristen Clark, a group vice-president for marketing. The volatile supply also forced Heinz to put dried or fresh organic herbs in its organic Classico pasta sauce because it wasn't able to find the more convenient quick-frozen variety. Even Wal-Mart, master of the modern food supply chain, is humbled by the realities of going organic. As spokesperson Gail Lavielle says: "You can't negotiate prices in a market like that."
While Americans may love the idea of natural food, they have come to rely on the perks of agribusiness. Since the widespread use of synthetic pesticides began, around the time of World War II, food producers have reaped remarkable gains. Apples stay red and juicy for weeks. The average harvested acre of farmland yields 200% more wheat than it did 70 years ago. Over the past two decades chickens have grown 25% bigger in less time and on less food. At the same time, the average cow produces 60% more milk, thanks to innovations in breeding, nutrition, and synthetic hormones.
It's also worth remembering how inexpensive food is these days. Americans shell out about 10% of their disposable income on food, about half what they spent in the first part of the 20th century. Producing a budget-priced cornucopia of organic food won't be easy.
Exhibit A: Gary Hirshberg's quest for organic milk. Dairy producers estimate that demand for organic milk is at least twice the current available supply. To quench this thirst, the U.S. would have to more than double the number of organic cows -- those that eat only organic food -- to 280,000 over the next five years. That's a challenge, since the number of dairy farms has shrunk to 60,000, from 334,000 in 1980, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. And almost half the milk produced in the U.S. comes from farms with more than 500 cows, something organic advocates rarely support.
What to do? If you're Hirshberg, you weigh the pros and cons of importing organic milk powder from New Zealand. Stonyfield already gets strawberries from China, apple puree from Turkey, blueberries from Canada, and bananas from Ecuador. It's the only way to keep the business growing. Besides, Hirshberg argues, supporting a family farmer in Madagascar or reducing chemical use in Costa Rica is just as important as doing the same at home.
Perhaps, but doing so risks a consumer backlash, especially when the organic food is from China. So far there is little evidence that crops from there are tainted or fraudulently labeled. Any food that bears the USDA Organic label has to be accredited by an independent certifier. But tests are few and far between. Moreover, many consumers don't trust food from a country that continues to manufacture DDT and tolerates fakes in other industries. Similar questions are being asked about much of the developing world. Ronnie Cummins, national director of the nonprofit Organic Consumers Assn., claims organic farms may contribute to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, although conventional farming remains the proven culprit.
Imported organics are a constant concern for food companies and supermarkets. It's certainly on Steve Pimentel's mind. "Someone is going to do something wrong," says Costco's assistant general merchandise manager. "We want to make sure it's not us." To avoid nasty surprises, Costco makes sure its own certifiers check that standards are met in China for the organic peanuts and produce it imports. Over at Stonyfield, Hirshberg's sister, Nancy, who is vice-president of natural resources, was so worried about buying strawberries in northeastern China that she ordered a social audit to check worker conditions. "If I didn't have to buy from there," she says, "I wouldn't."
For many companies, the preferred option is staying home and adopting the industrial scale of agribusiness. Naturally, giant factory farms make purists recoil. Is an organic label appropriate for eggs produced in sheds housing more than 100,000 hens that rarely see the light of day? Can a chicken that's debeaked or allowed minimal access to the outdoors be deemed organic? Would consumers be willing to pay twice as much for organic milk if they thought the cows producing it spent most of their outdoor lives in confined dirt lots?
ETHICAL CHALLENGES?
Absolutely not, say critics such as Mark Kastel, director of the Organic Integrity Project at the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group promoting small family farms. "Organic consumers think they're supporting a different kind of ethic," says Kastel, who last spring released a high-profile report card labeling 11 producers as ethically challenged.
Kastel's report card included Horizon Organic Dairy, the No. 1 organic milk brand in the U.S., and Aurora Organic Dairy, which makes private-label products for the likes of Costco and Safeway Inc. Both dairies deny they are ethically challenged. But the two do operate massive corporate farms. Horizon has 8,000 cows in the Idaho desert. There, the animals consume such feed as corn, barley, hay, and soybeans, as well as some grass from pastureland. The company is currently reconfiguring its facility to allow more grazing opportunities. And none of this breaks USDA rules. The agency simply says animals must have "access to pasture." How much is not spelled out. "It doesn't say [livestock] have to be out there, happy and feeding, 18 hours a day," says Barbara C. Robinson, who oversees the USDA's National Organic Program.
But what gets people like Kastel fuming is the fact that big dairy farms produce tons of pollution in the form of manure and methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide -- gases blamed for warming the planet. Referring to Horizon's Idaho farm, he adds: "This area is in perpetual drought. You need to pump water constantly to grow pasture. That's not organic."
Aurora and Horizon argue their operations are true to the organic spirit and that big farms help bring organic food to the masses. Joe E. Scalzo, president and CEO of Horizon's owner, WhiteWave, which is owned by Dean Foods Co., says: "You need the 12-cow farms in Vermont -- and the 4,000 milking cows in Idaho." Adds Clark Driftmier, a spokesman for Aurora, which manages 8,400 dairy cows on two farms in Colorado and Texas: "We're in a contentious period with organics right now."
At the USDA, Robinson is grappling with the same imponderables. In her mind the controversy is more about scale than animal treatment. "The real issue is a fear of large corporations," she says. Robinson expects the USDA to tighten pasture rules in the coming months in hopes of moving closer to the spirit of the organic philosophy. "As programs go," she says, "this is just a toddler. New issues keep coming up."
Few people seem more hemmed in by the contradictions than Gary Hirshberg. Perhaps more than anyone, he has acted as the industry's philosopher king, lobbying governments, proselytizing consumers, helping farmers switch to organic, and giving 10% of profits to environmental causes. Yet he sold most of Stonyfield Farm to a $17 billion French corporation.
He did so partly to let his original investors cash out, partly to bring organic food to the masses. But inevitably, as Stonyfield has morphed from local outfit to national brand, some of the original tenets have fallen by the wayside. Once Danone bought a stake, Stonyfield founder Samuel Kaymen moved on. "I never felt comfortable with the scale or dealing with people so far away," he recalls, although he says Hirshberg has so far managed to uphold the company's original principles.
The hard part may be continuing to do so with Danone looking over his shoulder. Hirshberg retains board control but says his "autonomy and independence and employment are contingent on delivering minimum growth and profitability." Danone Chairman and CEO Franck Riboud expresses admiration for the man he considers to be Danone's organic guru, but adds: "Gary respects that I have to answer to shareholders."
The compromises that Hirshberg is willing to make say a lot about where the organic business is headed. "Our kids don't have time for us to sit on our high horses and say we're not going to do this because it's not ecologically perfect," says Hirshberg. "The only way to influence the powerful forces in this industry is to become a powerful force." And he's willing to do that, even if it means playing by a new set of rules.
By Diane Brady
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The waitress of manifestation
I watched the movie The Secret a few weeks ago...and feel my life transformed by the power of it...the law of attraction, as well as intrigued to learn as much as I can. I found this explanation of it on www.elijah.cc and wanted to share:
Blessings, fellow seekers of Light! As 2004 comes to a close, and we fly into 2005, it is a perfect time to envision our intentions for this next segment. The greatest gift we were given as human beings is the gift of manifestation. This is available to us all. We no longer need to be slaves to a system that takes all of our energy and gives us back a percentage, and then programs us with the belief that this is just the way it is, and there is nothing we can do about it. Quite the contrary, we can indeed manifest anything “our hearts desire" simply by putting our attention on it.
Here is the mechanics of manifestation, in three easy steps:
1. Get a clear picture in your head of what you want to manifest.
2. Fire it up with your heart (feel emotion for it)
3. Let it go, and Trust that it is coming to you.
It's like we're all sitting in the diner of life. Flow, the Universal Waitress asks us daily: "would you like to order something now?" All we need to do is say "yes, I'd like to have a relationship, and I would like this person to honor me and love me as I love and honor them." Inside of yourself, you're already feeling how good that will feel, and the satisfaction of meeting and being with this person. The Universal Waitress writes down your order, and cheerfully goes about cooking it up. Then, you let go and continue the conversation with whomever you're with, or keep reading your book, or whatever else is there in that moment. The problem with most people is that they order something, but then immediately think "Oh, I don't deserve that" and cancel it out, or perhaps they order something, and then run around the diner, chasing the waitress, yelling and complaining "Why isn’t my order here yet? When will it be here?! Ill never get it will I? This always happens to me!" Sound familiar? Or worst yet, is when people NEVER ORDER ANYTHING. And they can't figure out why nothing is coming to them. And then there are those who order poison, or drama, or abusive situations … The possibilities are endless. So let's all get this manifestation thing down, and realize that we can order ANYTHING WE WANT. Once we know that it becomes fun! Especially when we look in our pocket and realize that we have a Gold card with unlimited funding. All you need to do is B, and all you need to B is U! You wouldn't doubt the waitress at Denny's, so why on Earth would you doubt the Great Goddess, the beautiful, resourceful, Universal Waitress???? She's waiting for your order.
I think I'll take the quinoa salad on rye...with a side of divine wisdom, health and enduring love for my family, and wealth beyond my imagining. Thanks, universe!
Blessings, fellow seekers of Light! As 2004 comes to a close, and we fly into 2005, it is a perfect time to envision our intentions for this next segment. The greatest gift we were given as human beings is the gift of manifestation. This is available to us all. We no longer need to be slaves to a system that takes all of our energy and gives us back a percentage, and then programs us with the belief that this is just the way it is, and there is nothing we can do about it. Quite the contrary, we can indeed manifest anything “our hearts desire" simply by putting our attention on it.
Here is the mechanics of manifestation, in three easy steps:
1. Get a clear picture in your head of what you want to manifest.
2. Fire it up with your heart (feel emotion for it)
3. Let it go, and Trust that it is coming to you.
It's like we're all sitting in the diner of life. Flow, the Universal Waitress asks us daily: "would you like to order something now?" All we need to do is say "yes, I'd like to have a relationship, and I would like this person to honor me and love me as I love and honor them." Inside of yourself, you're already feeling how good that will feel, and the satisfaction of meeting and being with this person. The Universal Waitress writes down your order, and cheerfully goes about cooking it up. Then, you let go and continue the conversation with whomever you're with, or keep reading your book, or whatever else is there in that moment. The problem with most people is that they order something, but then immediately think "Oh, I don't deserve that" and cancel it out, or perhaps they order something, and then run around the diner, chasing the waitress, yelling and complaining "Why isn’t my order here yet? When will it be here?! Ill never get it will I? This always happens to me!" Sound familiar? Or worst yet, is when people NEVER ORDER ANYTHING. And they can't figure out why nothing is coming to them. And then there are those who order poison, or drama, or abusive situations … The possibilities are endless. So let's all get this manifestation thing down, and realize that we can order ANYTHING WE WANT. Once we know that it becomes fun! Especially when we look in our pocket and realize that we have a Gold card with unlimited funding. All you need to do is B, and all you need to B is U! You wouldn't doubt the waitress at Denny's, so why on Earth would you doubt the Great Goddess, the beautiful, resourceful, Universal Waitress???? She's waiting for your order.
I think I'll take the quinoa salad on rye...with a side of divine wisdom, health and enduring love for my family, and wealth beyond my imagining. Thanks, universe!
Friday, September 15, 2006
Community Supported Agriculture
You might say, what the heck is that...well I have definitions for you from my local CSA, Pennypack Farm (pennypackfarm.org)...every Friday afternoon I get to pick up fresh, organically grown, local produce and I love it. You should try it...beats spending your paycheck at Whole Foods (though I do love Whole Foods)...
Community Supported Agriculture
Pennypack Shares Being Packed
What is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)?
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is defined as a mutually beneficial partnership between a farm and the people who consume the food produced there. One of the unique advantages of a CSA is that it relieves the farmer of some of the risk inherent in growing food, and distributes it over a wider community who agree to share the risks along with the benefits.
Sustainable Food Systems
Industrial farming operations produce food for large-scale processing. They aim to maximize yields through the use of artificial soil additives, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large automated equipment, inhumane treatment of animals, inadequate containment of animal wastes, and wasteful irrigation methods. These techniques are known to cause negative side effects: topsoil degradation and loss, underground water contamination and depletion, high fuel and electricity consumption, pollution of air and streams, and the many adverse health and ecological effects that can be expected from these kinds of byproducts. Standard accounting practices defray the negative costs associated with these side effects from the market price of food produced using industrial farming and processing techniques, so in effect the public subsidizes the processed food industry and large private agribusinesses in addition to the price paid for their products at market.
By contrast, community supported agriculture using natural and organic farming methods aims to be ecologically and economically sustainable over long and even indefinite periods of time. By reducing or eliminating adverse side effects we also reduce or eliminate the hidden or delayed costs associated with them, and the true unit cost of food production is paid by the consumer. CSAs also help promote a sense of community and intimate connection with the vital processes that sustain all life.
How CSA Works
Consumers and farmers work together on behalf of the Earth and each other. While the farmer tends the Earth on behalf of everyone, consumers share the cost of supporting the farm and also share the risk of variable harvests, as well as the abundance of particularly fruitful seasons. Membership in the CSA is based on shares of the harvest. Members are called shareholders or customers and they subscribe or underwrite the harvest for the entire season in advance.
What are the rewards?
CSAs foster connections within communities and with the Earth. CSA farming practices improve soil to produce tasty, nutritious, locally grown food. CSA customers purchase season-long shares of flavorful, chemical-free, naturally ripened produce picked up at the farm or at a pre-arranged delivery point each week.
In a CSA, people of all ages gain a close relationship with the soil, the seasons and each other through the ageless art of growing food. CSA families have fun visiting the farm regularly and take pride in belonging to a community of like-minded neighbors who support ecologically sustainable agriculture and preserving open space. CSA share holders are interested in more than vegetables. They know they're working with a professional grower who shares their environmental and social concerns, and they're interested in their fellow share holders.
What are the risks?
Like any agricultural enterprise, a CSA's crops are subject to annual variations in climate, plant diseases and populations of insects, rodents, deer and other crop-loving species. CSA customers benefit most when growing conditions are favorable to crops. While the share price may remain constant from one year to the next, some crop yields may increase or decrease relative to the previous year.
Organization
There are typically three groups involved in the farm: the farmers, core group and consumers. The farmers do all the actual farming work. The core group is a group of 5-12 people that includes farmers and consumers. The core group makes sure that the food is being distributed, and in some cases is responsible for collecting payments, organizing community events, and finding more consumers as required. The consumers group includes everyone (including farmers). Their responsibility is to financially support the farm and see that all the food is consumed.
Cost
The Garden/Farm Plan enables the farmers to draft up a detailed expense budget for the coming year. The length of season, crops grown, labor costs, etc. affect overall costs and share prices. The Garden/Farm Plan may be drawn up with a specific number of consumers in mind. Many CSAs simply take the budget and divide it evenly among the number of consumers to arrive at the average price of a share.
CSA Is About Learning
CSAs also act as training centers for people who wish to learn the skills of farming and management of CSA operations. These "hands-on" trainings are called " apprenticeships ". In addition, CSA members often volunteer their time to work in the garden so that they may informally learn about horticulture or other gardening skills.
Distribution/Delivery
In many CSAs, crops are harvested twice a week. Some CSAs offer full and half (or split ) shares. Pickups are held at the farm on harvest days, and some CSAs deliver shares to other locations for convenient pickup. Customers who come to the farm usually have the option to pick some of their own food right from the field.
Community Supported Agriculture
Pennypack Shares Being Packed
What is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)?
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is defined as a mutually beneficial partnership between a farm and the people who consume the food produced there. One of the unique advantages of a CSA is that it relieves the farmer of some of the risk inherent in growing food, and distributes it over a wider community who agree to share the risks along with the benefits.
Sustainable Food Systems
Industrial farming operations produce food for large-scale processing. They aim to maximize yields through the use of artificial soil additives, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large automated equipment, inhumane treatment of animals, inadequate containment of animal wastes, and wasteful irrigation methods. These techniques are known to cause negative side effects: topsoil degradation and loss, underground water contamination and depletion, high fuel and electricity consumption, pollution of air and streams, and the many adverse health and ecological effects that can be expected from these kinds of byproducts. Standard accounting practices defray the negative costs associated with these side effects from the market price of food produced using industrial farming and processing techniques, so in effect the public subsidizes the processed food industry and large private agribusinesses in addition to the price paid for their products at market.
By contrast, community supported agriculture using natural and organic farming methods aims to be ecologically and economically sustainable over long and even indefinite periods of time. By reducing or eliminating adverse side effects we also reduce or eliminate the hidden or delayed costs associated with them, and the true unit cost of food production is paid by the consumer. CSAs also help promote a sense of community and intimate connection with the vital processes that sustain all life.
How CSA Works
Consumers and farmers work together on behalf of the Earth and each other. While the farmer tends the Earth on behalf of everyone, consumers share the cost of supporting the farm and also share the risk of variable harvests, as well as the abundance of particularly fruitful seasons. Membership in the CSA is based on shares of the harvest. Members are called shareholders or customers and they subscribe or underwrite the harvest for the entire season in advance.
What are the rewards?
CSAs foster connections within communities and with the Earth. CSA farming practices improve soil to produce tasty, nutritious, locally grown food. CSA customers purchase season-long shares of flavorful, chemical-free, naturally ripened produce picked up at the farm or at a pre-arranged delivery point each week.
In a CSA, people of all ages gain a close relationship with the soil, the seasons and each other through the ageless art of growing food. CSA families have fun visiting the farm regularly and take pride in belonging to a community of like-minded neighbors who support ecologically sustainable agriculture and preserving open space. CSA share holders are interested in more than vegetables. They know they're working with a professional grower who shares their environmental and social concerns, and they're interested in their fellow share holders.
What are the risks?
Like any agricultural enterprise, a CSA's crops are subject to annual variations in climate, plant diseases and populations of insects, rodents, deer and other crop-loving species. CSA customers benefit most when growing conditions are favorable to crops. While the share price may remain constant from one year to the next, some crop yields may increase or decrease relative to the previous year.
Organization
There are typically three groups involved in the farm: the farmers, core group and consumers. The farmers do all the actual farming work. The core group is a group of 5-12 people that includes farmers and consumers. The core group makes sure that the food is being distributed, and in some cases is responsible for collecting payments, organizing community events, and finding more consumers as required. The consumers group includes everyone (including farmers). Their responsibility is to financially support the farm and see that all the food is consumed.
Cost
The Garden/Farm Plan enables the farmers to draft up a detailed expense budget for the coming year. The length of season, crops grown, labor costs, etc. affect overall costs and share prices. The Garden/Farm Plan may be drawn up with a specific number of consumers in mind. Many CSAs simply take the budget and divide it evenly among the number of consumers to arrive at the average price of a share.
CSA Is About Learning
CSAs also act as training centers for people who wish to learn the skills of farming and management of CSA operations. These "hands-on" trainings are called " apprenticeships ". In addition, CSA members often volunteer their time to work in the garden so that they may informally learn about horticulture or other gardening skills.
Distribution/Delivery
In many CSAs, crops are harvested twice a week. Some CSAs offer full and half (or split ) shares. Pickups are held at the farm on harvest days, and some CSAs deliver shares to other locations for convenient pickup. Customers who come to the farm usually have the option to pick some of their own food right from the field.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
First Podcast and so much more...
This post is being written by a recent graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrtion-thats me! I graduated last weekend-YEAH!!! I am now officially a Holistic Health Counselor, soon to be certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. I am also the featured nutrition expert for the ezine The Family Groove (www.thefamilygroove.com) which launches on June 18th, and have been asked to do a weekly expert podcast for sheunlimited.com . Wow, thats me! Its such an exciting time, and a busy time. I still have the baby boutique, and my son, now 18 months old, is amazing, a little bundle of male energy, but Im not as young as I once was, and its hard for me to keep up. But enough of that, this is for positive energy only. And in that regard, here is the script from my 1st podcast on June 14, 2006:
Hello everyone… This is Kelly Scotti, Founder and Director of Flying Dragon Wellness, a nutrition and wellness counseling practice in the heart of Bucks County, Pa. I am a board certified Holistic Health Counselor, and my mission in this life is to help my clients and ultimately the world find the wholeness and happiness they deserve. I hope to have the chance to work with each and every one of you. You can find out more about my practice at www.flyingdragonwellness.com.
Before we jump into tough issues like genetic modification of food and widespread pesticide use (the heavy hitters as I like to call them), I first want to define what holistic health is, and my philosophy regarding nutrition and lifestyle change. This is especially important because there is not an accepted standard definition of holistic health, and you might have a completely different idea of what it is than I do. Who hasn’t been confused or maybe a little scared of words like Holistic or Alternative …i'm sure some of you know what I’m talking about. Though this concept is definitely gaining widespread acceptance throughout the country, some people still judge it as “not normal” or a little weird, and I want to show you how “normal” it really is.
Suzan Walter, President of the American Holistic Health Association, has found that holistic health is often defined in one of two ways:
First, Holistic can be defined as a whole made up of interdependent parts. You are most likely to hear this referred to as the mind/ body connection or mind/ body/ and spirit. When this meaning is specifically applied to illness, it can include a number of factors, such as dealing with the root cause of an illness; increasing patient involvement; and considering both conventional (allopathic) and complementary (alternative) therapies.
Holistic also serves as a synonym for alternative therapies, such as acupuncture, reiki, massage, meditation or more extreme things such as bach flower remedies and shamanism. The weird factor comes into play when people use alternative treatment exclusively, avoiding doctors and pharmaceutical medication that we have been conditioned to believe is the only way to be healed.
Many of us in the US are not used to integrating all aspects of ourselves when we explore treatment options for an illness or when we want to lose weight, since how can a disease be caused by the food we eat or how can my weight be related to the fight I had with my husband? In my opinion and that of many others throughout the world, however, everything we do, everything that happens to us, and everything we are influences our health.
A holistic health practitioner may use any variety of natural healing suggestions to work in partnership with an individual toward greater health, balance and integration. This approach to health recognizes the patient as a whole person, not just a disease or a collection of symptoms. In the course of treatment, holistic practitioners address the client's emotional and spiritual dimensions as well as the nutritional, environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to dis-ease.
My philosophy regarding nutrition and lifestyle change is considered holistic because it is rooted in food, but it encompasses everything that causes us to eat…from our body’s basic requirements for the energy and vitamins and minerals that we obtain through the food we eat, to our primary food, that which nourishes us that is not something we put into our mouth. Nutrition is really just a secondary source of nourishment. There are so many other things that nourish us: Love, touch, meditation, fun, exercise, spirituality, self-expression, nature, close friends and lovers, our children, and play all feed our souls and our hunger for living. And the more primary food we have in our lives, the less dependent we are on the food that we put in our mouths to nourish us. Alternatively, the less primary food we have, or the more out of balance we are with our primary food, the more we are likely to turn to what we put into our mouths to find comfort. To define nourishment as a balance of all aspects of our being is truly holistic.
I invite you to explore the primary and secondary foods you have in your life with a free one hour health consultation. I see clients in my office in Bucks County, Pa or over the phone. My one on one counseling sessions guide you in discovering the reasons you eat what you eat, and help you define and reach your goals around food, whether that be finding out what foods are good for you individually, for your blood type, your body type, your ancestral type, to finding out what really nourishes you inside and out. I am also available for lectures, group counseling, and for developing corporate wellness programs. Please visit www.flyingdragonwellness.com to find out more, and to schedule your FREE one hour health consultation.
Until next time, Namaste. I honor the light within you.
Hello everyone… This is Kelly Scotti, Founder and Director of Flying Dragon Wellness, a nutrition and wellness counseling practice in the heart of Bucks County, Pa. I am a board certified Holistic Health Counselor, and my mission in this life is to help my clients and ultimately the world find the wholeness and happiness they deserve. I hope to have the chance to work with each and every one of you. You can find out more about my practice at www.flyingdragonwellness.com.
Before we jump into tough issues like genetic modification of food and widespread pesticide use (the heavy hitters as I like to call them), I first want to define what holistic health is, and my philosophy regarding nutrition and lifestyle change. This is especially important because there is not an accepted standard definition of holistic health, and you might have a completely different idea of what it is than I do. Who hasn’t been confused or maybe a little scared of words like Holistic or Alternative …i'm sure some of you know what I’m talking about. Though this concept is definitely gaining widespread acceptance throughout the country, some people still judge it as “not normal” or a little weird, and I want to show you how “normal” it really is.
Suzan Walter, President of the American Holistic Health Association, has found that holistic health is often defined in one of two ways:
First, Holistic can be defined as a whole made up of interdependent parts. You are most likely to hear this referred to as the mind/ body connection or mind/ body/ and spirit. When this meaning is specifically applied to illness, it can include a number of factors, such as dealing with the root cause of an illness; increasing patient involvement; and considering both conventional (allopathic) and complementary (alternative) therapies.
Holistic also serves as a synonym for alternative therapies, such as acupuncture, reiki, massage, meditation or more extreme things such as bach flower remedies and shamanism. The weird factor comes into play when people use alternative treatment exclusively, avoiding doctors and pharmaceutical medication that we have been conditioned to believe is the only way to be healed.
Many of us in the US are not used to integrating all aspects of ourselves when we explore treatment options for an illness or when we want to lose weight, since how can a disease be caused by the food we eat or how can my weight be related to the fight I had with my husband? In my opinion and that of many others throughout the world, however, everything we do, everything that happens to us, and everything we are influences our health.
A holistic health practitioner may use any variety of natural healing suggestions to work in partnership with an individual toward greater health, balance and integration. This approach to health recognizes the patient as a whole person, not just a disease or a collection of symptoms. In the course of treatment, holistic practitioners address the client's emotional and spiritual dimensions as well as the nutritional, environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to dis-ease.
My philosophy regarding nutrition and lifestyle change is considered holistic because it is rooted in food, but it encompasses everything that causes us to eat…from our body’s basic requirements for the energy and vitamins and minerals that we obtain through the food we eat, to our primary food, that which nourishes us that is not something we put into our mouth. Nutrition is really just a secondary source of nourishment. There are so many other things that nourish us: Love, touch, meditation, fun, exercise, spirituality, self-expression, nature, close friends and lovers, our children, and play all feed our souls and our hunger for living. And the more primary food we have in our lives, the less dependent we are on the food that we put in our mouths to nourish us. Alternatively, the less primary food we have, or the more out of balance we are with our primary food, the more we are likely to turn to what we put into our mouths to find comfort. To define nourishment as a balance of all aspects of our being is truly holistic.
I invite you to explore the primary and secondary foods you have in your life with a free one hour health consultation. I see clients in my office in Bucks County, Pa or over the phone. My one on one counseling sessions guide you in discovering the reasons you eat what you eat, and help you define and reach your goals around food, whether that be finding out what foods are good for you individually, for your blood type, your body type, your ancestral type, to finding out what really nourishes you inside and out. I am also available for lectures, group counseling, and for developing corporate wellness programs. Please visit www.flyingdragonwellness.com to find out more, and to schedule your FREE one hour health consultation.
Until next time, Namaste. I honor the light within you.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Limiting Nutrasweet/Equal
II have encountered many new things through my studies at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition...and have found that many of the foods and food additives we eat every day, knowingly or unknowingly, have tremendous effects on our day to day functioning. And yet, when we go to the doctor to get treatment for chronic illness, or take over the counter medicine for headaches and the like, we don't always dig deeper into our eating habits for the cause.
Most people looking to lose weight consume sugar free products instead of the sugar full to save on calories. Those who want soda drink diet soda, thinking that they are doing better for their body since they are avoiding the calories of regular soda. But many of the sugar free processed foods include nutrisweet as an ingredent (especially diet sodas), and there have been numerous studies that show the extreme effects nutrasweet (aspartame) can have on a person's health. The following article from newswithviews.com states the many effects of nutrisweet toxicity:
DONALD RUMSFELD AND ASPARTAME
Aspartame is an additive found in diet soft drinks and over 5,000 foods, drugs and medicine. It was approved in 1983 for use in carbonated beverages. However, there may be more sour than sweet when it comes to aspartame.
In reality, aspartame is a drug, not an additive in the sense many people associate with that word. It interacts with other drugs, has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG, and is a chemical hyper-sensitization agent. Dr. John Olney, who founded the field of neuoscience called excitotoxicity, attempted to stop the approval of aspartame with Attorney James Turner back in 1996. The FDA's own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and violated the Delaney Amendment which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause Cancer. Detailed information on this can be found in the Bressler Report (FDA report on Searle).
Dr. Olney isn't alone in attempting to reach out to the medical community and warn the American people about this drug. Dr. Ralph Walton, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine has written of the behavioral and psychiatric problems triggered by aspartame-caused depletion of serotonin.
According to the top doctors and researchers on this issue, aspartame causes headache, memory loss, seizures, vision loss, coma and cancer. It worsens or mimics the symptoms of such diseases and conditions as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue and depression. Further dangers highlighted is that aspartame liberates free methyl alcohol. The resulting chronic methanol poisoning affects the dopamine system of the brain causing addiction. Methanol, or wood alcohol, constitutes one third of the aspartame molecule and is classified as a severe metabolic poison and narcotic.
Dr. Woodrow Monte in the peer reviewed journal, Aspartame: Methanol and the Public Health, wrote: "When diet sodas and soft drinks, sweetened with aspartame, are used to replace fluid loss during exercise and physical exertion in hot climates, the intake of methanol can exceed 250 mg/day or 32 times the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended limit of consumption for this cumulative poison."
Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD, author of "Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills," wrote about the relationship between aspartame and macular degeneration, diabetic blindness and glaucoma (all known to result from excitotoxin accumulation in the retina).
The medical text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, by Dr. H. J. Roberts is 1038 pages of symptoms and diseases triggered by this neurotoxin. The claim is made that aspartame has even caused the epidemic of obesity because it makes you crave carbohydrates so you gain weight, and the formaldehyde accumulates in the adipose tissue (fat cells) according to the Trocho Study. Further accusations are that aspartame is also responsible for the epidemic of diabetes as it not only can precipitate diabetes but simulates and aggravates diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy, can cause diabetics to go into convulsions and interacts with insulin.
The effects of aspartame are documented by the FDA's own data. In 1995 the agency was forced, under the Freedom of Information Act, to release a list of ninety-two aspartame symptoms reported by thousands of victims. It appears this is only the tip of the iceberg. H. J. Roberts, MD, published the medical text "Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic" -- 1,000 pages of symptoms and diseases triggered by this neurotoxin including the sordid history of its approval. [See Video "Sweet Misery, a Poisoned World"]
Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.
In 1981, the newly appointed FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame for dry goods. As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, then CEO of Searle Laboratories Donald Rumsfeld said that he would "call in his markers" to get aspartame approved. Rumsfeld was on President Reagan's transition team and a day after taking office appointed Hayes. No FDA Commissioner in the previous sixteen years had allowed aspartame on the market.
Dr. Betty Martini has worked in the medical field for 22 years. She is the founder of Mission Possible International, working with doctors around the world in an effort to remove aspartame from food, drinks and medicine. According to Dr. Martini, aspartame has brought more complaints to the American Food and Drug Administration than any other additive and is responsible for 75% of such complaints to that agency. From 10,000 consumer complaints FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.
The history of aspartame and its approval has a political history as well as a scientific one. According to Dr. Martini,
"When Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle, that conglomerate manufactured aspartame. For 16 years the FDA refused to approve it, not only because its not safe but because they wanted the company indicted for fraud. Both U.S. Prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. They were Sam Skinner and William Conlon. Skinner went on to become Secretary of Transportation squelching the cries of the pilots who were now having seizures on this seizure triggering drug, aspartame, and then Chief of Staff under President Bush's father. Some of these people reach high places. Even Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas is a former Monsanto attorney. (Monsanto bought Searle in 1985, and sold it a few years ago). When Ashcroft became Attorney General, Thompson from King and Spalding Attorneys (another former Monsanto attorney) became deputy under Ashcroft. (Attorneys for NutraSweet and Coke).
"However, the FDA still refused to allow NutraSweet on the market. It is a deadly neurotoxic drug masquerading as an additive. It interacts with all antidepressants, L-dopa, Coumadin, hormones, insulin, all cardiac medication, and many others. It also is a chemical hyper sensitization drug so that it interacts with vaccines, other toxins, other unsafe sweeteners like Splenda which has a chlorinated base like DDT and can cause auto immune disease. It has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG. Both being excitotoxins, the aspartic acid in aspartame, and MSG, the glutamate people were found using aspartame as the placebo for MSG studies, even before it was approved. The FDA has known this for a quarter of a century and done nothing even though its against the law. Searle went on to build a NutraSweet factory and had $9 million worth of inventory.
"Donald Rumsfeld was on President Reagan's transition team and the day after he took office he appointed an FDA Commissioner who would approve aspartame. The FDA set up a Board of Inquiry of the best scientists they had to offer who said aspartame is not safe and causes brain tumors, and the petition for approval is hereby revoked. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, over-ruled that Board of Inquiry and then went to work for the PR Agency of the manufacturer, Burson-Marstellar, rumored at $1000.00 a day, and has refused to talk to the press ever since.
"There were three congressional hearings because of the outcry of the people being poisoned. Senator Orrin Hatch refused to allow hearings for a long time. The first hearing was in 1985, and Senator Hatch and others were paid by Monsanto. So the bill by Senator Metzenbaum never got out of committee. This bill would have put a moratorium on aspartame, and had the NIH do independent studies on the problems being seen in the population, interaction with drugs, seizures, what it does to the fetus and even behavioral problems in children. This is due to the depletion of serotonin caused by the phenylalanine in aspartame."
According to a press release put out by the National Justice League on April 26, 2004, lawsuits were filed in three separate California courts against twelve companies who either produce or use the artificial sweetener aspartame as a sugar substitute in their products: Defendants in the lawsuits include Coca-cola, PepsiCo, Bayer Corp., the Dannon Company, William Wrigley Jr. Company, Walmart, ConAgra Foods, Wyeth, Inc., The NutraSweet Company, and Altria Corp. (parent company of Kraft Foods and Philip Morris).
The suits allege that the food companies committed fraud and breach of warranty by marketing products to the public such as diet Coke, diet Pepsi, sugar free gum, Flintstone's vitamins, yogurt (including Yoplait) and children's aspirin with the full knowledge that aspartame, the sweetener in them, is neurotoxic.
Dr. Martini recommends that consumers read all labels on any food, medicine or drinks they intend to consume.
Posted: May 9, 200412:18 AM Easternby NWV Staff Writer© 2004 NewsWithViews.com
Please note, The FDA has listed 92 documented symptoms in their reports on aspartame including:
Numbness
Headaches
Fatigue
Vertigo
Nausea
Palpitations
Weight Gain
Dizziness
Irritability
Anxiety
Memory Loss
Blurry Vision
Rashes
Seizures
Blindness
Tinnitus
Joint Pain
Depression
Hearing Loss
Spasms
Addiction
Loss of Taste
Insomnia
Also, aspartame can trigger or exacerbate the following diseases:
Brain Tumors
Multiple Sclerosis
Epilepsy
Fibromyalgia
Graves Disease
Chronic Fatigue
Epstein Barr
Parkinson's
Alzeheimer's
Diabetes
Mental Retardation
Lymphoma
Birth Defects
Systemic Lupus
DEATH
MISCARRIAGES and INFERTILITY
ASPARTAME CAN BE FOUND IN:
instant breakfasts
breath mints
cerealsugar-free chewing gum
cocoa mixes
coffee beverages
frozen desserts
gelatin desserts
juice beverages
laxatives
multivitamins
milk drinks
pharmaceuticals and supplements
shake mixes
soft drinks
tabletop sweeteners
tea beverages
instant teas and coffees
topping mixes
wine coolers
yogurt
Aspartame has also been found in products where it is not listed on the label. One must be particular careful of pharmaceuticals and supplements.
Included below are a few books that will give you more information and statistics:
· Blaylock, Russell L., Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills (Health Press, Santa Fe,
New Mexico, c1994). One of the best books available on excitotoxins. Well worth
reading!
· H. J. Roberts, M.D., Aspartame (NutraSweet), Is it Safe? Available from the
Aspartame Consumer Safety Network.
· Sweet'ner Dearest, Available from the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network
· Mary Nash Stoddard, The Deadly Deception, Available from the Aspartame
Consumer Safety Network.
· Barbara Mullarkey, Editor, Bittersweet Aspartame - A Diet Delusion, Available from
the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network.
· The Aspartame Consumer Safety Network, The Aspartame Consumer Safety
Network Synopsis.
· Dennis Remington, M.D. and Barbara Higa, R.D., The Bitter Truth About Artificial
Sweetners, Available from the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network
Your body is the keeper of your soul. Be aware and take care when putting anything into it.
Most people looking to lose weight consume sugar free products instead of the sugar full to save on calories. Those who want soda drink diet soda, thinking that they are doing better for their body since they are avoiding the calories of regular soda. But many of the sugar free processed foods include nutrisweet as an ingredent (especially diet sodas), and there have been numerous studies that show the extreme effects nutrasweet (aspartame) can have on a person's health. The following article from newswithviews.com states the many effects of nutrisweet toxicity:
DONALD RUMSFELD AND ASPARTAME
Aspartame is an additive found in diet soft drinks and over 5,000 foods, drugs and medicine. It was approved in 1983 for use in carbonated beverages. However, there may be more sour than sweet when it comes to aspartame.
In reality, aspartame is a drug, not an additive in the sense many people associate with that word. It interacts with other drugs, has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG, and is a chemical hyper-sensitization agent. Dr. John Olney, who founded the field of neuoscience called excitotoxicity, attempted to stop the approval of aspartame with Attorney James Turner back in 1996. The FDA's own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and violated the Delaney Amendment which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause Cancer. Detailed information on this can be found in the Bressler Report (FDA report on Searle).
Dr. Olney isn't alone in attempting to reach out to the medical community and warn the American people about this drug. Dr. Ralph Walton, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine has written of the behavioral and psychiatric problems triggered by aspartame-caused depletion of serotonin.
According to the top doctors and researchers on this issue, aspartame causes headache, memory loss, seizures, vision loss, coma and cancer. It worsens or mimics the symptoms of such diseases and conditions as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue and depression. Further dangers highlighted is that aspartame liberates free methyl alcohol. The resulting chronic methanol poisoning affects the dopamine system of the brain causing addiction. Methanol, or wood alcohol, constitutes one third of the aspartame molecule and is classified as a severe metabolic poison and narcotic.
Dr. Woodrow Monte in the peer reviewed journal, Aspartame: Methanol and the Public Health, wrote: "When diet sodas and soft drinks, sweetened with aspartame, are used to replace fluid loss during exercise and physical exertion in hot climates, the intake of methanol can exceed 250 mg/day or 32 times the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended limit of consumption for this cumulative poison."
Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD, author of "Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills," wrote about the relationship between aspartame and macular degeneration, diabetic blindness and glaucoma (all known to result from excitotoxin accumulation in the retina).
The medical text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, by Dr. H. J. Roberts is 1038 pages of symptoms and diseases triggered by this neurotoxin. The claim is made that aspartame has even caused the epidemic of obesity because it makes you crave carbohydrates so you gain weight, and the formaldehyde accumulates in the adipose tissue (fat cells) according to the Trocho Study. Further accusations are that aspartame is also responsible for the epidemic of diabetes as it not only can precipitate diabetes but simulates and aggravates diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy, can cause diabetics to go into convulsions and interacts with insulin.
The effects of aspartame are documented by the FDA's own data. In 1995 the agency was forced, under the Freedom of Information Act, to release a list of ninety-two aspartame symptoms reported by thousands of victims. It appears this is only the tip of the iceberg. H. J. Roberts, MD, published the medical text "Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic" -- 1,000 pages of symptoms and diseases triggered by this neurotoxin including the sordid history of its approval. [See Video "Sweet Misery, a Poisoned World"]
Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.
In 1981, the newly appointed FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame for dry goods. As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, then CEO of Searle Laboratories Donald Rumsfeld said that he would "call in his markers" to get aspartame approved. Rumsfeld was on President Reagan's transition team and a day after taking office appointed Hayes. No FDA Commissioner in the previous sixteen years had allowed aspartame on the market.
Dr. Betty Martini has worked in the medical field for 22 years. She is the founder of Mission Possible International, working with doctors around the world in an effort to remove aspartame from food, drinks and medicine. According to Dr. Martini, aspartame has brought more complaints to the American Food and Drug Administration than any other additive and is responsible for 75% of such complaints to that agency. From 10,000 consumer complaints FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.
The history of aspartame and its approval has a political history as well as a scientific one. According to Dr. Martini,
"When Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle, that conglomerate manufactured aspartame. For 16 years the FDA refused to approve it, not only because its not safe but because they wanted the company indicted for fraud. Both U.S. Prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. They were Sam Skinner and William Conlon. Skinner went on to become Secretary of Transportation squelching the cries of the pilots who were now having seizures on this seizure triggering drug, aspartame, and then Chief of Staff under President Bush's father. Some of these people reach high places. Even Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas is a former Monsanto attorney. (Monsanto bought Searle in 1985, and sold it a few years ago). When Ashcroft became Attorney General, Thompson from King and Spalding Attorneys (another former Monsanto attorney) became deputy under Ashcroft. (Attorneys for NutraSweet and Coke).
"However, the FDA still refused to allow NutraSweet on the market. It is a deadly neurotoxic drug masquerading as an additive. It interacts with all antidepressants, L-dopa, Coumadin, hormones, insulin, all cardiac medication, and many others. It also is a chemical hyper sensitization drug so that it interacts with vaccines, other toxins, other unsafe sweeteners like Splenda which has a chlorinated base like DDT and can cause auto immune disease. It has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG. Both being excitotoxins, the aspartic acid in aspartame, and MSG, the glutamate people were found using aspartame as the placebo for MSG studies, even before it was approved. The FDA has known this for a quarter of a century and done nothing even though its against the law. Searle went on to build a NutraSweet factory and had $9 million worth of inventory.
"Donald Rumsfeld was on President Reagan's transition team and the day after he took office he appointed an FDA Commissioner who would approve aspartame. The FDA set up a Board of Inquiry of the best scientists they had to offer who said aspartame is not safe and causes brain tumors, and the petition for approval is hereby revoked. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, over-ruled that Board of Inquiry and then went to work for the PR Agency of the manufacturer, Burson-Marstellar, rumored at $1000.00 a day, and has refused to talk to the press ever since.
"There were three congressional hearings because of the outcry of the people being poisoned. Senator Orrin Hatch refused to allow hearings for a long time. The first hearing was in 1985, and Senator Hatch and others were paid by Monsanto. So the bill by Senator Metzenbaum never got out of committee. This bill would have put a moratorium on aspartame, and had the NIH do independent studies on the problems being seen in the population, interaction with drugs, seizures, what it does to the fetus and even behavioral problems in children. This is due to the depletion of serotonin caused by the phenylalanine in aspartame."
According to a press release put out by the National Justice League on April 26, 2004, lawsuits were filed in three separate California courts against twelve companies who either produce or use the artificial sweetener aspartame as a sugar substitute in their products: Defendants in the lawsuits include Coca-cola, PepsiCo, Bayer Corp., the Dannon Company, William Wrigley Jr. Company, Walmart, ConAgra Foods, Wyeth, Inc., The NutraSweet Company, and Altria Corp. (parent company of Kraft Foods and Philip Morris).
The suits allege that the food companies committed fraud and breach of warranty by marketing products to the public such as diet Coke, diet Pepsi, sugar free gum, Flintstone's vitamins, yogurt (including Yoplait) and children's aspirin with the full knowledge that aspartame, the sweetener in them, is neurotoxic.
Dr. Martini recommends that consumers read all labels on any food, medicine or drinks they intend to consume.
Posted: May 9, 200412:18 AM Easternby NWV Staff Writer© 2004 NewsWithViews.com
Please note, The FDA has listed 92 documented symptoms in their reports on aspartame including:
Numbness
Headaches
Fatigue
Vertigo
Nausea
Palpitations
Weight Gain
Dizziness
Irritability
Anxiety
Memory Loss
Blurry Vision
Rashes
Seizures
Blindness
Tinnitus
Joint Pain
Depression
Hearing Loss
Spasms
Addiction
Loss of Taste
Insomnia
Also, aspartame can trigger or exacerbate the following diseases:
Brain Tumors
Multiple Sclerosis
Epilepsy
Fibromyalgia
Graves Disease
Chronic Fatigue
Epstein Barr
Parkinson's
Alzeheimer's
Diabetes
Mental Retardation
Lymphoma
Birth Defects
Systemic Lupus
DEATH
MISCARRIAGES and INFERTILITY
ASPARTAME CAN BE FOUND IN:
instant breakfasts
breath mints
cerealsugar-free chewing gum
cocoa mixes
coffee beverages
frozen desserts
gelatin desserts
juice beverages
laxatives
multivitamins
milk drinks
pharmaceuticals and supplements
shake mixes
soft drinks
tabletop sweeteners
tea beverages
instant teas and coffees
topping mixes
wine coolers
yogurt
Aspartame has also been found in products where it is not listed on the label. One must be particular careful of pharmaceuticals and supplements.
Included below are a few books that will give you more information and statistics:
· Blaylock, Russell L., Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills (Health Press, Santa Fe,
New Mexico, c1994). One of the best books available on excitotoxins. Well worth
reading!
· H. J. Roberts, M.D., Aspartame (NutraSweet), Is it Safe? Available from the
Aspartame Consumer Safety Network.
· Sweet'ner Dearest, Available from the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network
· Mary Nash Stoddard, The Deadly Deception, Available from the Aspartame
Consumer Safety Network.
· Barbara Mullarkey, Editor, Bittersweet Aspartame - A Diet Delusion, Available from
the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network.
· The Aspartame Consumer Safety Network, The Aspartame Consumer Safety
Network Synopsis.
· Dennis Remington, M.D. and Barbara Higa, R.D., The Bitter Truth About Artificial
Sweetners, Available from the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network
Your body is the keeper of your soul. Be aware and take care when putting anything into it.
Flying Dragon Wellness is a reality
Greetings, everyone. This mom is now the proud mother of a health and wellness practice called Flying Dragon Wellness (www.flyingdragonwellness.com). I am offering free one hour health consultations in person or over the phone, and would love the opportunity to talk with all of you. If you are interested, please go to the website, hit the contact tab, and email me. I will then give you a link to the consultation form, and we can go from there...hope to speak with you soon!
ps-Baby Connor is getting older every day. He is going to be 15 months old in a few days, and he was featured in a local Chicago magazine advertising the OH BOY! Baby Boutique. We love him so.
pss- OH BOY! is having a huge sale until the end of March. We are offering 20% off every in-stock item...and there are over 250 of them. And we offer free shipping on orders over $100. www.ohboybabyboutique.com
ps-Baby Connor is getting older every day. He is going to be 15 months old in a few days, and he was featured in a local Chicago magazine advertising the OH BOY! Baby Boutique. We love him so.
pss- OH BOY! is having a huge sale until the end of March. We are offering 20% off every in-stock item...and there are over 250 of them. And we offer free shipping on orders over $100. www.ohboybabyboutique.com
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Power to Shape the Future
This is a great poster from dumplinglunches.com regarding getting our little ones to eat, and creating an atmosphere conducive to dining well!
Wes and Willy coming soon!
Though my time is stretched dangerously thin lately, I am still working hard to add new designers to the OH BOY! repetoire. We will be adding Shilav, Wes and Willy, and Cabana Life for Spring 2006. These designers have great clothing for boys, and Cabana Life's clothing and accessories are all SPF50+! So make sure to visit soon, and check out our new lines (and revisit our current ones!).
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Holistic Health Counseling
So I will soon be adding another title to my name, that of certified Holistic Health Counselor. I am currently enrolled at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in NYC, and it is incredible. In June, I will be able to see clients and help them on their path to whole nourishment, body, soul and mind...
If anyone is interested in helping with my homework assignment, and would like to complete a free health history (and have me review it with you for 1/2 hour-thats free too!)...please feel free to comment to this post and I will forward you the form.
Its such a wonderful life, huh?
If anyone is interested in helping with my homework assignment, and would like to complete a free health history (and have me review it with you for 1/2 hour-thats free too!)...please feel free to comment to this post and I will forward you the form.
Its such a wonderful life, huh?
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