Good Food is Everybody's Business
Living in what he affectionately calls “the stinkin’ hot desert,” in Patagonia Arizona, along the Mexican border, Gary Paul Nabhan is exploring ways to grow food using traditional sustainable methods, careful water collection, and seed saving.
This comprehensive report extols the multiple societal benefits of organic farming in North America. To partner with stakeholders who share in these benefits, OFRF produced this document for policy makers, educators, researchers, healthcare professionals, business leaders and families, like yours and mine.
Jim Riddle is the Organic Outreach Coordinator for University of Minnesota – Southwest Research and Outreach Center. He answers the question: “What does it mean when produce and meat products are labeled organic?”
Are we being forced to eat? There are more than just marketing and advertising pressures at work. We are bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages every day and food “manufacturers” spend about $11 billion a year promoting their products. But there are other ways that we are “encouraged” to consume more.
Environmental justice is also about our state of mind; biophysical and mental wellness are interrelated!
Big agriculture is big business; too big, too distant, too reliant on the latest technology, and too focused on profit over good food. Expecting complex technology and genetic engineering to solve the problems of climate change, extreme weather patterns, water shortages, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, is not the answer. It is time to go back to the land, to restore our natural resource base and re-invest in our people.
Genet dreams of creating a cooperative with her Group Garden and diversifying the agriculture portfolio by adding animals and a possible dairy farm. “I don’t want my life to happen to my children. I want their life to be greater than mine,” she says.
Now I’m not new to eating healthy real food, and I know good food ought to cost more, but I admit my knee-jerk response to local blueberries was not to be paying $5. I’d expect that in winter when they’d come from South America perhaps (I don’t buy them then), but from my home in the Garden State? What’s up with that?
