Food Valentines

This is a valentine, sharing the love for two Mainers warming hearts this February as they stand out in the food field standing up for our health and future. May the force be with Jim Gerritsen and Chellie Pingree so the rest of us can eat and be well.

Gerritsen, a farmer from the end of the known American world in Aroostook County, is leading the national charge against that Goliath of chemically impregnated food: Monsanto. Its pesticides and other non-nutrient additives are now embedded in 80% of all corn, soy, canola, sugar beets and cotton grown in this country. Holding the patent, and thus the profits, Monsanto has spread its seed so vigorously, it almost has the whole world in its hands. And it keeps reaching out, planning to be sole creator of the world's plant food supply.

This means God is dead all over again. And some people won't accept that.

In early January protests erupted in Nepal when the American dominated International Monetary Fund tried to force Monsanto's engineered seeds on local farmers as a non-negotiable part of its aid package. On January 31, Gerritsen and his Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association marched into a Federal Courthouse with an alliance of 82 other small farm and seed co-ops to say essentially: enough is enough. “We want nothing to do with Monsanto. We don’t want their seed. We don’t want their technology. We don’t want their contamination.”

Gerritsen was referring to the way Monsanto famously and ferociously sues innocent farmers whose crops get contaminated by its patented plants in fields nearby because wind sprays their pollen. These lawsuits drive farmers to bankruptcy and of course out of the field, conveniently furthering Monsanto's monopoly. Its lawyers investigate and harass on average 500 small farms a year, and have launched 144 lawsuits for patent infringement. Nobody knows how many non-Monsanto farmers crops have also been ruined.

Gerritsen and allies have sued to stop Monsanto from suing innocent people for what Mother Nature does. They're suing to be left alone. It's already bad enough that Monsanto products have contaminated their plants, compromising and threatening the entire base of authentic organic agriculture and all the precious heirloom seeds. It's already bad enough that science has now shown the source of the huge honeybee holocaust to be the toxic pollen in Monsanto's pesticide impregnated plants. It's bad enough experience has now shown that pests rather quickly develop resistance to these poisonous plants, turning them into useless but toxic waste that contaminates our water and soil. It would be good to leave the organic folks to their own devices.

While Gerritsen is in court, Chellie Pingree is in Congress leading the fight of a lonely army of small farmers and farmers' marketeers for a fair share of Federal funds that subsidize the humungous, heartless corporate USDA sanctioned agriculture Monsanto represents. Since the Farm Bill only passes through Congress every four or five years, it's now or maybe never that small change can be diverted from the huge piles of cash traditionally heaped on wealthy individuals in New York, Seattle and Miami who control America's commodity crops and almost all its wide swaths of farmland, comically called family farms.

Pingree is a prime sponsor of The Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act, which would help more young people get into sustainable agriculture and herding by providing loans, training and other support for authentic family farms in the old fashioned sense. If you don't want to end up eating lab created food, you should be worried about getting more young people to get their hands dirty this way because the average of the American farmer today is 56.

Pingree is also behind The Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act of 2011, which would help small farmers and farmers' market associations, in part by helping to set up greater distribution networks for their produce, reaching out to schools, hospitals and prisons as well as supermarkets. It's all about local, sustainable, healthy for soul and soil and community. Of course it has many enemies, well fed by profitable corporate farmers.

If you need yet another reason to give your heart and perhaps a helping hand to Gerritsen and Pingree, here's one. Just last week came yet another food horror story, this one about the discovery of more than 1 million eggs contaminated with listeria, a deadly bacteria happy to grow in the refrigerator. Yes 1 million eggs, a lot of chicken energy and effort wasted ironically in the name of efficiency. It turns out that there are actually machines that hard boil eggs, then cool and peel them as they move along a conveyor, thousands an hour, into huge buckets of salt water, which are sealed and shipped to processing plants that make those egg salad sandwiches and carryout containers you find in supermarkets, airports, and franchised corner stores. Also potato salad with egg.

"The lesson is: peel your own eggs," said Marion Nestle, the voice of food safety and editor of Food Politics. And of course get them from a known trustworthy, local supplier.

If Jim Gerritsen and Chellie Pingree prevail, that would soon be as easy as pie. If not, we may end up eating our hearts out in horror.