Posts tagged ‘Food’
Drop that Corn Chip! – Scary GMO studies
Two days ago, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urged doctors to “educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks.” Further, they’re calling for long-term independent studies, labeling, and “a moratorium on GM foods.”
The findings of negative health effects of GMOs in animal studies are frightening and diverse: “There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects.” A quick scan of the article’s end notes shows more than 20 cited scientific studies.
“There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation,” as defined by recognized scientific criteria.
Here are some highlights of the effects in animals:
Rats:
-Death of most offspring of rats fed GMO, compared to 10% mortality in control group.
-smaller, fewer babies of GMO fed mothers, and those babies are also less fertile
-even the embryos “had significant changes in their DNA”
-Testicles of GMO fed rats turned colour from pink to blue (what?). Sperm was altered.
- “Even Monsanto’s own research showed significant immune system changes in rats fed Bt corn.”
- “7 of 20 rats fed a GM tomato developed bleeding stomachs; another 7 of 40 died within two weeks.” Oh, and by the way, Monsanto’s own study also showed evidence that major organs were poisoned.
Sheep:
-death of “all sheep fed Bt cotton plants…within 30 days”, compared to healthy non-GMO cotton eating sheep
Buffalo and Cattle:
- “premature deliveries, abortions, infertility, and prolapsed uteruses” and high mortality rate in those calves that were actually born.
-Infertility in both cows and bulls
- “On January 3rd, 2008, the buffalo [who usually grazed on non-GMO cotton plants] grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All 13 were sick the next day; all died within 3 days”
Pigs:
-sterility, false pregnancy, “others gave birth to bags of water” (yikes!)
On a completely unrelated note, “the incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating” in the US population.
Here’s the really scary thing:
The only published study on humans revealed that when you eat GMO soy, the inserted gene “transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function.” That gene? It’s a pesticide. Sure, it’s a organic-approved natural bacteria pesticide (fatal to caterpillars that eat it), but the difference is you can’t wash off a pesticide that’s inside your food’s DNA. (Read “The ABC’s of Bt” on Dave’s Garden.)
Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.
Our lightbulb powering friend David Suzuki adds, “Anyone that says, ‘Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,’ I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying.”
So how do you avoid eating GMO? You really can’t. If you check the lables of any packaged food, it invariably contains soy or corn (or it’s sneaky friend high fructose corn syrup, sometimes listed just as “fructose”). Almost all of that is GMO. Although many fresh fruits and veggies at the grocery store are less likely to be GMO, the tomatoes most likely are (you can improve your chances by buying organic). Of course, you’ll never know, because the GMO folks have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure your food isn’t labled. Because it’s safe, of course, so you shouldn’t have a choice. I try my best to avoid them by growing my own food from herloom seeds, but even these I can’t be sure are 100% GMO free, because unintentional GMO contamination happens all the time, through natural pollination, and pollen drift, by which the wind causes pollen to float “in from fifty miles away”.
How long before our entire food supply is contaminated? Give your MP a call and ask them. If you think you’d rather not eat GMO food, read the “Pocket Shopping Guide to avoiding GMO foods”, and let companies know if you’ve dropped them for a (hopefully uncontaminated) non-GMO brand.
In the mean time, read this article for more details.
“Wild Girl”: Urban Foraging
Any blog that starts with: “Both the white and blue flowers in the photo above are camas. The white one will kill you, but the blue one is food,” is a blog worth reading, regardless. But what’s even cooler is when that blog is about a woman living off nothing but urban foraging for a week: finding food in sidewalks, parks, and natural areas in the heart of Portland. I am very happy when I get the chance to add foraged food to my meals (it’s like a free food treasure hunt!), but it takes moxy to eat nothing but.
“I’m interested in foraging as a way to connect with the land and explore a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human,” [Becky] Lerner said. “It’s also a valuable survival skill: Should the trappings of modernity become unavailable to us one day, knowing how to find food without grocery stores or even farms will surely come in handy.”
Here’s the photo of the deadly/tasty plants, in case you’re hungry:
I’ll try to identify as many local wild foods as I can photograph for you this summer 
Stay tuned. But in the mean time, here’s a gem from the press release:
Lerner readily admits that her pesco-vegetarianism is in question. She will face the decision of whether to endure a vegetable fast — or else eat insects, go fishing or even consider dining on roadkill.
Check out the article on City Farmer, or the press release.
Handmade Pasta
I don’t have a pasta press, and it’s much lower on my wish list than a pressure canner, but how wonderful it would be to make herb pasta with fresh herbs from the garden! Or spinach/sun dried tomatoes/peppers.
This article on Dave’s Garden makes it sound so easy, I will try to make a batch by hand this summer. The author said his hand crank pasta press only cost him $25, and hand made pasta is cheap to make, while giving you control of the ingredients (all you REALLY need is flour and water). Also, chocolate pasta?
First Harvest!
In spite of the fact that it got down to -1 this weekend…
Last night I made what I call Kitchen Sink Salad, which consists of me going outside and picking everything that’s ripe or needs to be thinned: radishes+greens (radish greens are a lot like spinach in taste/recipe potential), buttercrunch lettuce, red leaf lettuce, mesculin mixture, kohlrabi sprouts, borage, mizuna, sweet allium leaves, plus edible weeds like dandelion (only young leaves, which I think are less bitter), and shamrocks. Then I added herbs for a tasty suprise: anise hyssop leaves, oregano, summer savory, and lemon balm. Plus purple cabbage and crazy twisty baby cucumbers from the market. Yum!
How To Grow Uber Tomatoes, even when you start them too early
…by using recycled coffee cups to maximize root size. Every year I start my tomatoes in February. I don’t have a south facing window–I am totally reliant on shop lights to help them grow. But instead of being leggy, my tomatoes are crazy drought-proof beasts that take over the world. Last year, my Matt’s Cherry tomato grew about 9 feet wide, and the neighbours had to cut it back just to figure out where the fence was so they could park their car. That’s because the root ball was deep enough to support it. My secret is using recycled coffee cups to help gradually build up the root ball.
Step 1. Get everyone you know (and their office) to collect coffee cups. Sort them by size, because you will want to start with the small ones. Poke drainage holes.
Step 2. Remove your leggy tomato seedling from the cellpack (I plant all my seeds in cell packs recycled from past years, because most greenhouses won’t recycle them), and place at the bottom of a small cup. See the first leaves at the bottom? Carefully pinch those off.
Step 3. Bury the tomato up to where it branches, stem and all. Around the root ball, you can use compost to give it a healthy start, but when you are burying the stem, a soil-less potting mix is best. (I prepare my potting mix by soaking it first, to make sure it has absorbed plenty of water.) This is how deep you should plant it.
Roots will grow out of the part of the stem that you burried, to become part of the ever-growing rootball.
Step 4. When the tomato grows up out of the pot again, remove it from the small cup, put it in the bottom of a medium sized cup, and bury it up to the branch again. (In these stages, you can make a doughnut of compost around the outer edges of the cup, and use potting mix for the rest.)
Repeat until you have a root ball as deep as extra large coffee cup. You can keep moving them up into larger planters, but by XL I run out of space to keep all my seedlings.
Using coffee cups also makes it easy to give away tomatoes to friends and neighbours. Share the heirloom love.
When it’s finally safe to plant everything outdoors, I’ll show you how to use drought-proof planting to make your tomatoes (and other plants) survive between rains without the need for watering.
Is Your Lawn Worth Someone’s Ability to Live?
How about desert produce?
According to this disturbing article, America’s largest reservoir is drying up. It’s really simple math: the amount of water being removed from Lake Mead every year excedes the amount being fed into it by the Colerado river.
In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.
This is bad news for the million acres of crops being irrigated by the water source accross the U.S. and Mexico. Oh, and the tens of millions of people who depend upon the reservoir for their water supply, and the half-million homes that are powered by “its mighty Hoover Dam”.
How did this happen?
Well, for starters, there’s the farmers who flood arid farmland with water to grow rice (what?). There’s the fact that we depend on veggies grown in the desert (how much are those California strawberries worth to you?). And then there’s the fact that residents of desert communities maintain beautiful green grass lawns, and “golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit”.
Is the status of a green lawn or the convenience of out-of-season food really worth “turning the tap off for 800,000 households”?
At least they’ve started “grass buyback” programs to convince people to consider drought-tolerant landscaping. They’re offering tax incentives to people who use pool covers. Lovely.
Of course, when Las Vegas residents tried to pass a bill to allow homeowners to install graywater systems, Southern Nevada Water Authority blocked it, saying that “legalizing graywater will cause people to use more fresh water and return less dirty water to the reclamation plant”. Sorry? It’s like the laws making rain barrels illegal.
Instead of considering a shift in thinking/lifestyle, the best solutions that the Big Thinkers could come up with for the problem are either to pump water in from eastern states or to de-salt seawater.
The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?
Pardon me?
Garden Warfare: Squirrels
As I moved my artichoke and pepper seedlings outside this morning, I was greeted by a horrible sight. My beautiful beet babies were tossed about and buried. My mizuna roots were lying bare.
Squirrels.
Bane of my existance! Oh why do you torment me so?
So, I reached for my handy dandy secret weapon. Cayenne Pepper. Yup, just plain old cayenne pepper. You can sprinkle it right on your young plants, the soil, and even mature leaves, without harming anything. My only problem is remembering to reapply after rain and waterings.
The Brooklyn Botanical Garden suggests a more peaceful method: Feed the squirrels. They claim that squirrels are territorial, so it won’t increase your squirrel problem, and if they’re well fed, they won’t bother digging in the dirt. It’s a lovely thought, but I don’t negotiate with terrorists.
The WHO Farm Project
You’ve probably heard by now that Michelle Obama has planted a 1100 sq ft organic vegetable garden on the Whitehouse Lawn to supply the White House kitchen. But do you know where the idea originated?
Although Michelle Obama had her own reasons for starting the garden, it started with a non-partisan, petition-based initiative called The WhoFarm (White House Organic Farm) Project. The Project, lead by Daniel Bowman Simon, 28, and Casey Gustowarow, 27, acquired the WHOFarmMobile, (two school buses fused together with an organic edible garden on the roof) and drove across 25 states to raise awareness and gather signatures for their petition.
As the first harvest comes off the garden, we can see a positive example of how a grass roots movement made a huge difference. Now “every single person from Prince Charles on down” are talking about it:
More on what people are saying later.
Think about The WHOFarm the next time you think, “why bother, the government isn’t going to do anything”.
EDIT:
evidently the WHOFarm wasn’t the only group petitioning for a Whitehouse garden. Roger Doiron started a project called Eat The View in Feb 2008, which gathered 100 000 signatures.
Raingutter gardens
I am stunned by the ingenuity of these re-purposed rain gutter gardens. They are an excellent way to increase your gardening space. They’re perfect the perfect size for growing herbs, leeks, and lettuce. Plus they’re beautiful to look at–they’d look amazing with trailing nasturtiums. 
Via homegrown.org.
Spring Makeover: Our expanding Urban Homestead.
This weekend we removed the last of our grass, making way for more food. Grass represents things that I’m not into, not the least of which is mowing. Last year, an old Italian lady asked me, as I offered her herloom black cherry tomatos from my front yard, “Don’t you have a back yard?” Now I can answer that with, “You should see how much food I can grow back there!”
The Urban Homestead says that it’s best to avoid tilling, but sadly, we are too lazy busy to dig it up by hand. This means more maintenance work later, but at least I can get right in there. And it’s so satisfying to look at
Before:
That’s sawdust, not dead grass. Excellent soil additive! You can see the tiny patch of dirt around the perimeter that I used last year.
After!
I was so happy to tromp around in the fresh dirt
