Killer Food

Reasons to buy your food from a familiar and friendly farmer in your area just keep on coming.

This week scientists confirmed what science already suspected: the cause of the honeybee holocaust is all those plants embedded with a powerful neocortinid pesticide that knocks out their nervous system. Yet this year 100% of America's industrial corn crop--including supermarket and Walmart corn sold on the cob, planted on enough land to fill 80% of California --will contain it. Without bees busy work, crops cannot pollinate and if they can't pollinate they can't fruit. Bees are crucial to our survival. To save them is to save ourselves and the best way to stop the supply of toxic corn is to stop demand for industrially raised corn. So think about only eating corn in its original summer season and only buying it from a local farmer who used heirloom or saved seeds.

This week methyl iodide, the toxic fumigant fast tracks the killing of insects, fungi and bacteria in the soil low growing strawberries are planted in, was abruptly withdrawn by its maker from the market. We owe this victory to ordinary people speaking up, smacking down corrupt regulators. But it could prove to be Pyrrhic, particularly if demand continues apace in all the off seasons for strawberries.

The lethal dangers of methyl iodide's widely sprayed predecessor, methyl bromide, were publicized a few years back, scaring those who bothered to read the news into only buying organic ones. Methyl bromide not only destroys the ozone layer, it's extremely toxic to the farm workers and those who just happen to live near fields sprayed with it. Then there is what it may do to the strawberry and the person who eats it. For these reasons, methyl bromide was banned in 1987 by the international Montreal Protocol. But US corporations found a way to keep on keeping on by consistently filing for annual "exceptions." Eventually, clinging as they do to lickety split convenience, they took up methyl iodide as the new magic bullet. Now they won't have that poison to play with.

Nobody knows for sure what next quick fix commercial growers will find. The old-fashioned ones used by small, local farmers are simple practices like crop rotation and black plastic. Their strawberries may not be picture perfect, but at least they will not poison you.

News is not much cheerier on the protein part of the food pyramid either. Fish farming is proving to be the same hazard to our health and the health of Mother Earth that industrial monoculture farming is. All those fish packed into pens become a toxic waste site that's killing everything else in the sea. And they're being pumped full of antibiotics whose effectiveness is eroding rapidly. Crowding is Nature's no-no. Say no to farmed fish and get what fresh seafood you can from your local marketeer.

People fighting the good fight against the wantonly indiscriminate use of antibiotics in industrial feedlots and the creation of even more resistant human killer super bugs finally got the Federal courts to force the FDA to stop its 40 years of waffling and ban this dangerous practice. But given the money of the meat industry, nobody is betting it will. So if you don't want to promote the creation of more killer bacteria immune to all that pharmacology has to offer, and are not vegetarian, eat locally pasture raised beef, lamb, pork and chicken. The way to change the world is to change yourself.

Tomorrow is April 1 and I wish this ghastly news was only an April Fool's joke. But it isn't. So don't be a fool. You are literally what you eat.