Due to its enormously centralized structure, the current food supply system of the U.S. and most of the western world is extremely vulnerable to a myriad of disruptive factors. These include economic downturns, energy shortages, acts of God, unhygienic production practices, environmental disasters, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, etc. Any one of these on its own can cause serious interruptions in the supply lines. Two or more happening at the same time could shut down the entire inflow of food to your area for several months.
How likely is this really, you may wonder. I’m not trying to peddle fear and doom here, but an honest, matter-of-fact assessment of where everything’s at right now and how it got to be so shows that the odds aren’t exactly in favor of rose-colored glasses. There’s no denying we live in “interesting times”. Of course I fervently hope that such extreme circumstances won’t come to pass. But what if….how will you cope with a challenge like that? How much do you currently rely on the centralized system for sustenance? What alternatives are available to you in your situation?
Am I preaching to the choir, or is this a new concept to you? Are you young or old, living alone or with a family? In the city, the ‘burbs, or the country? What kind of resources are you able to invest in the peace of mind and positive outlook that come with knowing you’re prepared for challenging times ahead?
What would YOU consider the most challenging or frustrating part of kicking dependence on the system and achieving resiliency in terms of your food needs? (Sourcing, purchasing, bartering, growing, preserving, storing, securing, etc.) Which resources do you have plenty of, and which ones are you short on in this context? Money, equipment, knowledge, skills, indoor space, land, like-minded people, local producers…
Whether you agree or disagree about the likelihood of a food crisis or the importance of personally preparing for one, whether you are just beginning to take some steps at this or are a dyed-in-the-wool self-sufficiency pioneer, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Going into my garden these last three mornings, I have been a-maize-d at the buzz of bees up in the tops of my Cherokee corn. Corn relies on wind, not insects, for pollination. But that doesn’t stop the industrious honeybees from seeking out the male inflorescences in my corn patch. You see, bees don’t live on nectar alone. They also collect considerable amounts of pollen to serve as a food supply stored in their hives.
It was fun to observe the bees at their important work really close up. This was no problem, as they were way too busy to worry about me standing there watching them and taking a few pictures. They seemed particularly excited at having stumbled upon such a bonanza of pollen in their neighborhood and were collecting it with great enthusiasm, if the loud hum from just a handful of bees is anything to go by. The pollen gets formed into little clumps that the bees carry back to the hive with them – quite a feat, if you ask me! If a bee were as big as a human, the clumps of pollen would be at least the size of a football, and carried in a similar manner to how a football player runs along with the ball. But instead of a bladder filled with air, these bees are carrying a solid mass of nutrients.
As I had never considered that bees would go beyond the attractive nectar-bearing plants in search of sufficient pollen, seeing them go gaga over my corn made me think about all the recent news on Colony Collapse Disorder, the name given to the strange die-off of honeybee colonies happening in many places. Given that the majority of corn grown in the world today is genetically modified, and that evidently bees consume corn pollen, it doesn’t take a big leap to wonder if GMO crops are a factor in the perilous plight of the honey bee.
This is something that needs to be very seriously and honestly looked into, as bees play a crucial role in pollinating many of our food crops as well as many ecologically important tree and herb species. It also raises the question whether it will be possible to keep harvesting bee products for human consumption that are not contaminated with GMO materials. Bee products such as Raw Honey, Bee Pollen, Propolis, and Royal Jelly are of such perfect nutritional composition that their absence from our repertoire of medicines and healing foods would be a great loss to human health and wellness, provided we could still even grow enough regular food without our heroic little helpers from the insect world. And honey is the archetype of all that’s sweet in life – if it were to disappear from the world, it would take a good part of our souls with it.
Bees have given us humans such great gifts for such a long time, it’s time for us to give them some appreciation in return. We can do that by casting our dollar votes in favor of clean foods that are grown without synthetic chemicals and GMOs, which will clear our own as well as the bees’ living and working environment of the hazardous, toxic substances that threaten their – and our – existence. As soon as enough people unwaveringly refuse to swallow the poisons, it will no longer be profitable to produce them, and so they will be dropped and the real healing can begin.
In the previous post, I provided a guideline for avoiding some of the most toxic foods when doing your grocery shopping. Now I’d like to add a bit of background to that, with a rundown on the following:
what’s been happening to our food supply system
how you can gain more control as a consumer over the quality of the food available to you
and how to not just avoid the worst, but also get your hands on the best without breaking the bank
Again this is an area that can seem like a confusing maze. I’m going to be frank here and cut right to the heart of the matter. We currently have a food supply system that is almost entirely controlled by a handful of very large politically connected corporations that are in the business of producing toxic garbage masquerading as food, and that wrote the very rules that allow them to do this. These same rules also lay many large obstacles in the way of anyone wanting to produce or consume real, sustainably produced, clean, healthy food.
In other words, the idea that there is an agency watching over your interests, your health and safety, is an illusion. You are basically on your own. I repeat: You are on your own. In fact, every additional new round of food regulations is insidiously designed to tilt the playing field even further against you and against those suppliers who just want to make an honest living by selling you the excellent foodstuffs you really want.
This means that the only way for you to secure a trustworthy food supply line is to withdraw all of your support – moral, legal/political, and especially financial - from this deadly system, and to personally seek out the clean, honest, transparent purveyors of real food and lavish your support on them instead. But how? Where to start?
It will be clear that the smaller the distance between you and the producer, the easier this is to do. So start by frequenting farmers’ markets, culinary festivals, and other foodie hangouts and getting to know as many farmers, artisanal processors, and chefs as possible in your local community and maybe a few neighboring ones. Most of them will be more than willing to educate you about their methods of production and how those impact the quality of the products they offer. There will be many opportunities for taste-testing and comparing how you feel after eating real food vs. garbage. If you’ve been balking at the price labels in organic produce sections of supermarkets and health food stores, you may also be pleasantly surprised at how affordable things can be when purchased direct from the producer.
Of course not all types of food can be efficiently grown in all places and seasons, so you are probably still going to want some part of your diet to be sourced further afield. With these items it would take way too much of your resources to personally go and make sure that everything is up to scratch at the other end. This is where that amazing internet technology comes to the rescue. With a proliferation of farm e-stores, trade and consumer associations, provenance tracking systems, social networking sites, and other useful initiatives, here too it really isn’t too difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. It may look overwhelming or chaotic at first glance, but it really means you stand a much better chance of having your needs met than with that monolithic, one-size-fits-all behemoth I’m urging you to drop like a hot potato. Here again the pricing will generally be lower than in a conventional retail setting thanks to the lower overhead costs.
The real cost saving comes in the long run in the form of a drastic reduction in medical expenses and suffering. Bear in mind that the biggest cause of the bad kind of stress that makes you ill is having too many important areas of your life where you depend entirely on external factors and have no control over the situation. To avoid this painful misery you need to take responsibility for the quality of what you put into your body. Voting with your wallet rather than your ballot is by far the most effective and enjoyable way of achieving this.
Currently we are bombarded every day with news about eating disorders, obesity epdemics, contaminated food supplies, and other indications that all is not well with how we relate to food and eating, especially in the United States. At the same time, we have had for decades an army of “experts” equally bombarding us with their prescriptions for specific diets, exercise regimes, supplement pills, one-size-fits-all food regulations, etc. Can you see the irony in this picture?
Problem: much of the available advice is rife with contradiction, controversy, and conflict of interest. How do you make sense of this overload of confusion being poured out? How do you choose from the myriad of diet and food access options to arrive at a nutritional pattern that will sustain the unique human being that you are at your ideal body weight and optimal wellness?
In order to help you successfully find your way through the nutritional quagmire, I have drawn up a very simple set of blueprints. No matter what your background, genetic makeup, or personal preferences, you can use this as a guideline for discovering what kind of eating habits are the most beneficial to YOU. Somewhere deep down, your body KNOWS exactly what’s good for it, and what’s not. Unfortunately, access to this knowing has been socialized and conditioned right out of most people. However, with a very small amount of dedicated effort every day, it is possible to reconnect to this amazing resource inside of you.
I’m going to start by outlining a basic boundary within which you can safely experiment to your heart’s content. It is a very short list of hazardous things to avoid when food shopping, much shorter than the typical avoidance list out there with most diets. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy, because these few items on the list have become extremely common ingredients in most of the processed foodstuffs you can buy today. If you’re new to this, take it easy, practice one point at a time until you feel comfortable enough with it to move on to the next one.
Avoid all GM (genetically modified) crops. In practice this means anything that contains corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, sugar beets, or a substance derived from any of these, UNLESS specified as “certified organic” or “guaranteed GMO free”. Beware of “vegetable oil”, vegetable protein”, “vegetable broth” – usually telltale signs of soy, and “sugar” without any further qualifications is now likely to be from GM sugar beets.
Avoid monosodium glutamate, the popular “flavor enhancer”. Watch out, due to the bad rap this additive has been getting, it often hides behind names such as “nutritional yeast”, “Torula yeast”, and “hydrolyzed vegetable protein”.
Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup. It’s what sweetens many things nowadays, from sodas to ketchup.
Avoid all artificial sweeteners.
By now it will be clear that this part of the exercise requires a good bit of label reading at shopping time, especially in the beginning. The good news is, you can skip that part of the label you may have been trained to read in the past. That’s right. Skip the calorie count. Skip the carbs, protein, and RDA counts. Go straight to the list of ingredients. If you see anything there that was mentioned above, or anything you don’t know how to pronounce, put it back on the shelf.
Another great food assessment technique is this: while you’re turning the item over in your hand, imagine taking a trip with it in a time capsule to go and visit your great-grandmother 100 years ago. Does she recognize the thing you have in your hand as food? If yes, you’re good, if no, put it back and try something else.
Now that the hard part is out of the way, let’s have a look at the really fun part. As you go through your day, whenever you’re hungry, eat whatever you have in the house that you feel like eating. But only if you find you really are hungry. That means that whenever you feel the urge to eat, first check yourself to see why you feel the urge to eat. If it is because of boredom, nervousness, sadness, or any other reason that is not tummy-rumbling hunger, don’t eat yet, go do something active: take a walk, start decluttering a room in your house, call or write a relative or friend and express your appreciation for that person, do a business task you’ve been putting off doing…anything that will keep you actively occupied for a little while.
Keep going until you feel real hunger in your body. Then prepare and eat whatever you fancy. Eat slowly and savor every bite. Take your time to really enjoy your meal, without anything else to distract you. When you start feeling full, stop. Sit back for a little yet to let the food settle in your stomach. From here on, it’s basically “rinse and repeat”, throughout the day, throughout the week. If you find that an urge to eat without being hungry more often than not coincides with a certain behavior, it may be sending you an important message as to whether or not that behavior is a good fit with your unique, authentic life path.
After the first few weeks of doing this, you will have opened up a vital line of communication with that part of your body that knows best what is good for it. Your body will have started telling you its secrets because you are bothering to listen to it. No matter what kind of eating habit ultimately emerges from this process, whether you become a vegetarian or vegan, or a carnivore, whether you end up eating one big meal a day or frequent small meals throughout, or the middle-of-the road 3 square meals, it will be the eating habit that is right for you. And since the emphasis is on awareness and acceptance of what is rather than forcing changes according to some contrived external ideal, it is very likely to become an enjoyable and empowering journey towards radiant health and happiness.
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foods would be a great loss to human health and wellness, provided we could still even grow enough regular food without our heroic little helpers from the insect world. And honey is the archetype of all that’s sweet in life – if it were to disappear from the world, it would take a good part of our souls with it.
