On Friday 19 January 2007 14:53, Jed Rothwell wrote: > leaking pen wrote: > >Well, besides the issues that have been shown with too much corn > >syrup . . . > > As I said, one third of the people who will do not get enough to eat. > Too much corn syrup would be far better than starvation. > > >shipping foods grown here overseas not really all the econmocal. > > Most US food is shipped overseas. > > >I fail to see how it uses more fossil fuels than fuels it produces, > >please share. > > See: Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Revised > Edition. 1996: University Press of Colorado, chapter 19. (Or Google > "Pimentel") > > >And it will also help push new techniques and higher efficiency > >growing, so that will help. > > Not good. "High-efficiency agriculture" in the US means the rape and > permanent destruction of the land. See Pimentel, and chapter 16 of my > book. Essentially, U.S. corn production is a form of strip-mining, > where we destroy the topsoil and the water table. If we keep doing it > for a few hundred more years Iowa will look like present-day Iraq. > The arid US Great Plains are already in environmental peril. See: > > http://www.gprc.org/index.htm > > As I said in my book, agriculture is the most destructive industry on > earth and the sooner we get rid of it the better. We need to grow > food indoors. For one thing, this would use up thousands of times > less space, and with recycled water and nutrients from sewage, that > would consume no land or water. We need to get human beings out of > the ecosystem loop. Nature should only have to support wild animals, > not people or domesticated animals. > > Fishing and growing meat in live animals is also backwards, > dangerous, cruel and grossly inefficient. This kind of primitive > technology is long overdue for replacement, like the internal > combustion engine. > > Fortunately, the people at the New Harvest Research Organization > report progress in replacing meat: http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php > > - Jed
Yer right Jed, and a fellow redneck told ya that! Hey there is nothing wrong with bein a redneck. Some of our best citizens are rednecks. I live in the heart of seed corn country and my equally redneck wife and I know first hand what happens when good land is ruined by contract. Here is where good farmers are offered a contract by a seed corn company to grow their 'intellectual property' year after dreary year. When the soil bank was effective, fencerows were allowed to grow. With the demise of it or the use of it, fencerows are destroyed. Even roads are encroached on. The usual excuse is that the fifty ton tractor with the eighty food plow array needs 'room to turn around'. Soil under corn cultivation year after year changes color. It may start out a deep rich brown or even black in mucklands, but it gradually lightens to a dull whitish tan with a high sand content. Also a high chemical fertilizer and chemical pesticide and herbicide content. It is not for nothing that sprays are advertised as having 'low atrazine carryover.... and now you know I live what I am talking about. I have seen the signs, in spanish only, warning the illegal immigrants that deadly danger "muy peligro......muerte...." lurks in the fields where they 'trabajo'. The signs there in english only say: "no trespassing or we will prosecute"! We have seen the farmhouses that sit empty as an unseen force vacates the countryside of all human life except for its lowest forms. The blank windows that used to frame young farm children now stare out at a wavy green desert of 'intellectual property' watered by expensive aluminum monsters that deliver water laden with poisons and biologically engineered and equally proprietary chemical fertilizers that water crops and roadways alike. It is against the law to spray over roads here in Michigan, but the law is ignored by both law giver and breaker with equal equanimity perhaps in the interest in keeping out the prying eyes of a perhaps 'overeducated' public. A way to clean up this mess may be exceedingly simple. A simple law that prohibited and criminalized the ownership of farmland in America by corporations and other foreigners. Another law that criminalized the ownership of more than a certain amount of land by one individual or partnership of individuals however tenuousely related would break down the large holdings. A third law that addressed the inhumane conditions of animal husbandry existant in our cattle and hog 'factories' and felonized this would go a long way toward concentrated waste source abatement. A fourth law that felonized the feeding of antibiotics to farm animals who were not sick, or to bioengineered new species with little or no disease resistance (germ farms), or to dairy cattle fed hormones to increase milk production at the price of lower immune systems.....would start to keep the specter of antibiotic resistance among pathogens a little more at bay. And a fifth law that would felonize the failure to vaccinate all livestock against a published and necessary list of preventable diseases for which those vaccines should be readily available. Perhaps another law would be required as well: make it a capital crime to export American food as long as there was a hungry American that needed it, and a felony to import any foreign food if any American farm could grow it or raise it. O yes, and corporations subject to these penalties could simply have their assets expropriated...seized...along with the assets of the corporate officers and major controlling interest stockholders. Maybe then Americans would return to run their own farms, confident that their markets would not be taken by foreign imports produced by slaves, or by domestic corporate ecoterrorists bent on raping ruining and running from what was good land in their shortsighted chase of monopoly profiteering. And the jobs and futures of their children would not be stolen by illegal immigrants. Did I say corporations are foreigners? Certainly! What corporation is recent memory has ever hesitated to ditch its American workers and/or facilities if a profiteering monetary ill gotten gain was available anywhere in the world. Corporations have no nationality! The sooner Americans and citizens of other nations realize that, the better off they will be. Corporations are ruining our land. Overconcentration of production and/or ownership is doing the same. For an instant lesson in both, go to your nearest 'hog factory' and see how our food lives before it gets to your table. Better than that, that is probably not your food! Your food is being grown in China, South America, or some other cheap and unsanitary 'low cost country' and imported here to be sold in grocery stores under a hidden label. "Distributed by _________corp" is common. You see, most Americans are too poor to pay for the high price commanded by real American food products. This is why so much American beef is exported to the wealthy of the world, and why your local meat merchant hides the meat cases in the back of his shop that say 'China' or 'Uruguay', etc. Beef in Japan can fetch over a hundred dollars a pound! Whale meat there is much cheaper. My local fast food sit-down restaurant with a sports bar and miniskirted underaged waitresses serves spicy spare-ribs. The ribs are almost as flat as a sheet of paper. I know of no pig or cow that has flat rib bones that have edges sharp enough to cut a dinner roll and a thickness no more than three milimeters and a width of twenty five millimeters. Some reader out there knows and is free to visit these places with apples on their signs as see for themselves.. Maybe some Australian but that is only a guess. In case some restaurant is considering lawsuit... the bones were saved! Perhaps a judge will find a bone of truth in that.
