You wrote:
"It is not a question of amount of the contamination. It is a question of
whether we have sovereignty over our own bodies. Do we have the right to
know about and select the type of food we eat or to resist the chemical
contamination of our bodies or have these rights been ceded to corporations
and the WTO and NAFTA trade tribunals?"
I don't mean to disagree with what you're saying but I would add that the
problem is us. We already have the choice. Why are we buying processed
foods, grown and prepared somewhere we've never been by someone we don't
know. Stop it and you won't have to worry about labelling and contents.
Grow and buy whole foods from as near as possible. Get to know the
producers and the local processors. You don't have to worry about Nestles
and Kraft, Gerber's and Heinz, Frito-Lays and Unilever. If you really want
to have control over what goes into your bodies, you won't wait for
governments and corporations to legislate your safety and comfort.
Each of us has to pick out our own comfort level. There was a time when we
went a lot farther toward being self-sufficient then we do now (you know,
like making soap from our own rended beef tallow or using oil from dogfish
(a small shark) livers in the coal oil lamps (it didn't work very well),
and living without electricity. But we still grind organically grown wheat
for our bread and can, freeze, and dehydrate much of the food we grow and
trade with our neighbours. Our wine is homemade from blackberries and
grapes. Our freezers have chicken, pork, lamb, and beef, none of which
ever came near the commercial meat production industry. There's a lot of
canned salmon in the pantry. In the cellar are fresh apples of several
varieties, pears, and Asian apple-pears and the apples will stay fresh
until March. There are dried plums, apples, apricots, pears, tomatoes,
carrots, sweet peppers and hot chilis. There are leeks, brussel sprouts,
and celery still growing outdoors, with broccoli, chard, lettuce,
radicchio, parsley, and other greens in the greenhouse.
We are not certified organic and neither are our neighbours but no chemical
of any kind has come on this property in the 16 years we've lived here. We
are part of the fight against the chemical corporations and their effort to
control the world's food supply. But the truth is we don't really need
them.
Don Maroc
Vancouver Island, Canada
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail