A Food Revolution

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by Michelle Lasley

Michelle Lasley is a mother, wife in Pacific Northwest learning to balance green dreams with budget realities.

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January 28, 2011

Categories: Family, Food, One a Day, Post a Day 2011

: Image by alexis22578 via Flickr

The Organic Elite Surrenders To Monsanto: What Now? Now what indeed.

I have so many thoughts on this subject, it’s difficult to put into words. This is why I write (blog). To make sense of the senseless.

Noris whole, organic milk, used in my hot cocoa made from my organic Dutch Process cocoa from Hummingbird Wholesale. Image by alexis22578 via Flickr

I co-coordinate a food buying club. (I do not run it on my own, that’d be VERY hard and time consuming. We do this TOGETHER because together, it works a lot better.) In my food buying club, I am in frequent contact with people who have similar food desires that I do. We want our food to come from someone we have met, or can meet. We want to know what goes into our food, so for us it means knowing what fertilizers are out there in the animal feed or plant feed or whatever. We want to know are farmers are more than getting by, and we want to know they are paying their employees surviving wages. We want to know how things are picked and who’s doing the picking. We want to know what temperature our milk is pasteurized.

Taylor-Made Farms chicken. These leftovers yielded more than 7 cups of shredded chicken! I know my farmer. Do you? Image by alexis22578 via Flickr

We want to know all about our food. Why? Because we want to know what’s going in our bodies. We are horrified when we learn about all the chemicals in breast milk. We are horrified about all the environmental cancers. We are horrified that people cannot get access to fresh water because it is being bottled in their backyards and sold back to them. We are horrified at this pathetic mess of industrialization that coops itself as food. It is not food. It is poison. And we want no part of it.

So, how do we get out of it?

Go local. Ask yourself now if Organic is more important than Local. The hierarchy should be, yes should be, LOCAL first. Why? Because you create food security and community. Food security lends itself to the local economy, while community overall helps us be less lonely and more connected to the things that matter.

Food nourishes. Food should nourish. Food is the center of our communities. Food holds us together. We can choose to live on pills, vitamins, protein bars, shakes (Thank you Aldous, our Brave New World is here), or we can enjoy ourselves. We can eat slowly, savor moments, tastes, and experiences. And, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.