A Truce in the Crop Wars

Grow all the food that you can for your table. Persevere and just see how much it can replace what you have been buying. You get better at it in a couple of years. Work leaves and grass clippings into the soil. Find someone who raises cattle, sheep, goats, hogs or fowl. Get rotted manure from them that they don't need and work it into composted material from your yard. Never throw a leaf away. Pile them up, mix with manure, and put into your garden soil. Lettuce, spinach and other greens will grow all winter in much of the country. Even some ice will not kill them. You'll be surprised. And well nourished.

For the love of God, mimic nature, DON'T re-arrange it. There is a perfect system created for growing and delivering food to our tables and that system was in place long before the food scientists and GM came along. Genetic manipulation produces short term results that seem positive, but we have no idea of the long term implications to our bodies, our culture, and to our environment considering that we've only been tinkering with this science for the last 150 years or so.

I am a solid believer in research science and because of my faith in this I also understand its imperfections and fallibilities. It took millions of years for nature to develop foods the way we know them today (or at least before the 1960s when GM began to boom,) therefore why should we be so egotistical to think that our incomplete understanding of food science and the application of those understandings will be so much better than what has been in place for thousands of years?? In almost every example of the application of science to improve our lives something else has been sacrificed or compromised. This is because we are always trying to re-arrange and manipulate rather than mimic natural processes. Instead of rolling back our application of science we continue to use science to "fix" these new problems which lead to even more problems and on and on...

If you can not understand what it is or where it came from, why would you put it into your body? And if it couldn't survive on its own, why waste money, and energy to force it to occur? Most of these GM plants can not re-produce because all of their energy is redirected into pest control or resisting harsh chemicals that are sprayed on them to prevent pests and to help them to grow in an (non natural) monolithic culture despite everything.

Going beyond this, our inclination towards this type of food culture separates us from the essential interactions that occur when we visit a local food market or sit around the table with friends and family eating a home cooked meal. A GM food culture tells us that food is a commodity and not an all important part of life which is evidenced by the decreasing portion of our paychecks that go towards feeding ourselves. Do we value the experience surrounding food, or do we value money and the increase of money in our pocket books when we don't have to spend it on crazy things like food? What if cheap GM/ cheap food causes an energy war (fertilizers and pesticides are both made from refined petroleum.) What if GM food/ cheap food implicate our health in ways that we only barely understand? It is true that we are an adaptable species, but how much and over what period of time?

Why can't science help us develop smart, sustainable local food economies that enable us to support our neighbors and establish lasting relationships that foster quality communities while effectively caring for the species and creatures that nourish our bodies?