The Food Chain

Ep. 1347 Farming Children

JESSICA RIDGEWAY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FARM DISCOVERY AT LIVE EARTH

When people moved off the farm into the city, they took their children with them.  What children find on the streets of the city does not appear to bode well for their future nor the future of country.  And so we ask…

How can we lead children back to the farm?

I had the good fortune to having lived on the grandparents’ Montana farm when very young.  I still remember, to this day, driving my first working tractor at the age of six.  It wasn’t anything special.  Grandfather Karl hoisted me up into the seat, put the tractor in gear, and said, “I’ll meet you at the end of the field.”

Every living thing on the grandparents’ farm had a job to do, and nobody– nor anything– got by without doing the work.  It was not a policy laid down by the grandparents, who owned the farm.  It was just life.  If one did not work, one did not eat.  It was true for the people, the animals and the plants in the fields. We all participated in the business of life.

Yesterday I had the privilege of accompanying a couple of Montana boys– Braxton, nine, and Cohan, six–to their first major league baseball game in the big city.  Their enthusiasm for the game was infectious, and all who were seated around them in the stadium took joy in their excitement, especially when the six-year-old won the scramble for a foul ball.

As I enjoyed the boy’s enthusiasm, I wondered how that enthusiasm would be met by life in the city.  On the farm enthusiasm and love of living were always well nurtured by the business of life.  But what in the city can manage and give guidance to the enthusiasm of young boys and girls?    

Not finding a ready answer, I ask…

How can we lead children back to the farm?

contact: www.metrofarm.com

 

 

Ep. 1345 Glyphosate Lab Tomato

DR. JOHN FAGAN, HEALTH RESEARCH INSTITUTE LABS 

There are many ways in which industrialization has served to make food cheap.  One way is to subvert the growth of natural competitors, like weeds, with herbicides, like glyphosate.  This leads us to ask…

What happens to the chemicals after they have been used to made food cheap?

In the 1930s, people began the migration from the farm into the city.   Those farmers who were left on the farm began growing food with money, which they used to buy equipment and chemicals to do the work that people once did.

Thus it became cheaper to grow food with money, than with people.

This industrialization of the food chain has proceeded without pause ever since, and now the world is literally drenched in the agricultural chemicals used to grow food. 

Broadly speaking, two kinds of chemicals are used to grow food:  fertilizers and pesticides.  

Fertilizers provide the nutrient elements plants require to grow and develop, and include the macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.   

Pesticides provide farmers with the ability to fight off natural competitors for the growth and development of their crops, and include herbicides that kill weeds, fungicides that fight off diseases, insecticides that kill insects, and desiccants that manage growth.

The herbicide glyphosate, which travels under the trade name Roundup, is one of the most used chemicals in agriculture.  

• Since 1974, 18.9 billion pounds of glyphosate has been sprayed upon the World.
• Use of glyphosate has increased 15-fold since the introduction of crops genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.

That our world is literally drenched in a chemical that the World Health Organization claims is a “probable cause of cancer,” leads us to ask:

What happens to the chemicals after they have made food cheap?

Ep. 1345 Microgreens - Maximum Nutrition

Ken Kimes & Sandra Ward, New Natives, Microgreens

It is really simple:  Sow some uncontaminated seeds in organic soil.  Add clean water, fresh air and sunshine.  Then enjoy eating the maximum nutrition of microgreens.  This leads us to ask: 

If it really is this simple, why doesn’t everybody eat microgreens?

It seems as though we are running out of food.  That is not to say that we are running out of things to eat.  No! On the contrary, there are many things to eat, and they are cheap, too!

And yet, so many of those things we are being offered in brightly colored packages for so little money have very little food in them.  In fact, one of the ways they make food cheap is to take the food out of it and put it in a fancy package.

And so we eat the cheap food because its cheap and easy.  And yet when we do our bodies cry out for more nutrition.  So we eat more cheap food and yet our bodies still cry out for more, nutrition.  So we eat more cheap food, and our bodies rebel by storing up fat, and breaking down.

Then one day we wake up to the fact that cheap food isn’t!  What to do?

One thing to do is to turn to the essential simplicity of the maximum nutrition we can get from microgreens. 

How simple?  Sow some uncontaminated seeds in organic soil.  Add clean water, fresh air and sunshine.  Then harvest the sprouted seeds and enjoy eating the maximum nutrition of microgreens. 

 

Tending to California’s Golden Agriculture with Karen Ross, California Secretary of Agriculture

Tending to California's Golden Agriculture

Karen Ross, California's Secretary of Agriculture

Begin with a Mediterranean climate; add a long range of mountains to collect and store winter’s precipitation; carve out a deep valley at the foot of those mountains, then add to that valley rich, alluvial soils.

It is a fact, the nation’s Golden State was designed and built for agriculture.

Stand back and have a look:  California’s 77,000 farms and ranches produce nearly $50 billion dollars of revenue a year, and that is nearly double the revenue produced by #2 Iowa.   The state’s farmers and ranchers grow more than 400 commodities, including a huge percentage of the nation’s fruits, vegetables and nuts. 

Though agriculture has done its part in maintaining California’s golden glow, it must now compete with many other interests for the state’s resources.  And this competition leads many to ask:

How can California farmers and ranchers keep growing the gold?

India Joz - Fusion Foodie

Guest:  Chef & Restaurateur India Jozseph Schultz

His India Joze restaurant was the West Coast capital of fusion food-ism.  The taste that lingers of that fusion leads one to ask Jozseph Schultz: 

How can one cook East in the West so the hungry return for more?

Topics include how India Joze served an ever-changing menu of the world’s spicy foods in a commercial restaurant; how that restaurant become a cultural hotspot; and how a restaurant that fuses so many culinary traditions with so many cultural traditions can survive as a business.