Farming Is So Romantic...While you're still driving your car to the grocery store...the people who you are sodomizing are walking to the food bank...a

...and the cupboard is bare...

You know, when I suggest people avoid starchy crap to eat...they think I'm insane. I've always wondered why people like to eat prison food.

Seriously, I've been called insane so many times when it comes to food and particularly food production I just kind of laugh. Some people act when I suggest that corn, noodles and bread are some of the most wasteful farm products and have almost no nutritional value...that I have asked them to drown puppies.

It's like telling an addict they need rehab. The addict is in denial and simply doesn't want to hear it...often becoming agitated or angry.

Continuing to glut ourselves on corn, wheat, noodles, bread, potatoes is just plain ignorant behaviour and we might as well admit to being junkies with no brains.

Or...begin to set aside our romantic attachment to "farming" as some kind of superiour method of economy and start thinking about how we can send water to Darfur (lack of water is why they are killing each other...not this bogus media idea of "tribal warfare") and how we can provide food to food banks and live eating less and differently in so-called affluent nations.

We're not affluent anymore.

In a 100 years, now that we've passed peak oil production, only the very rich will be able to afford petrol.

1) Maybe we should consider not growing and eating food that has no nutritional value
2) instead consider letting farmland return to wilderness.
3) Consider growing food with high nutritional value in urban parks and on city rooftops
4) Eat food that hasn't been grown with petroleum based fertilizer...(corn, wheat and high yield starches all use oil to grow each of them in order to speed growth cheaply)
5) Use parking lots, school yards, boulevards, bank rooftops for growing high nutritional food
6) Eat less...and eat organic...


Bill Moyers has been doing some incredible investigative journalism on the topic of food production.

1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm"
The largest annual subsidy, called direct and countercyclical payments, is given to farmers regardless of what crops they grow � or whether they grow anything at all. The POST found that, since 2001, at least $1.3 billion was paid to landowners who had planted nothing since 2000. Among the beneficiaries were homeowners in new developments whose backyards used to be rice fields. Read here at Washington Post

"No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid"
A 2002 program aimed at helping those facing a serious drought gave $635 million to ranchers and dairy farmers who had moderate or no drought. Some ranchers got money because they lived in counties declared disaster areas after debris fell to earth from the space shuttle Columbia.

For the 2005 corn crop, the federal government spent about $4.8 billion to compensate farmers for low corn prices. That was $3.8 billion more than needed to give them the government-guaranteed price. The program has cost taxpayers $29 billion since 1998. "Most smart farmers are cashing in on it," says one expert. (July 3, 2006)

The news at the grocery store is grim for many. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices rose by 4% last year, the largest increase in 17 years. And, the USDA predicts they will rise another 4% this year. Eggs are up 40% in the past year; milk up 26% a gallon; a loaf of standard bread, 20%.

All across the nation families, government agencies and food banks are feeling the pinch. So many people are in precarious straits our government figures 28 million Americans will be using food stamps this year, the highest level since the program began in the 1960s. Almost one in l0 people in Ohio get food stamps; one in eight in Michigan, and one in six West Virginians. The rising food prices make that assistance worth less and less and food banks and pantries are facing increased need and those same higher prices.

The government has specific terms to quantify the nation's access to food — recently removing "hunger" from its designations.

* Food security People have access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members.
* Low food security: Reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
* Very low food security: Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake. Bill Moyers