Lionette's Market

I sold Lionette’s Market.  After this weekend, Lionette’s Market will be Don Otto’s Organic and Natural Market.  All the staff (except me) will remain.  The Otto family will keep the store dedicated to local and sustainable food.  They will bring in fresh energy and new ideas but retain all the standards Lionette’s Market set.  Please come in and meet the Otto’s and continue all your support.  Don Otto’s, like Lionette’s, will still be Boston’s best and only destination for local 100% grass fed beef, and local farm raised meats, as well as an outlet for nearly 200 local farms and producers. I personally thank all of you for all the support and friendships over the 14 years I have been working in the South End in Garden of Eden and Lionette’s Market.

www.donottosmarket.com

Other things of note:

Annie Leonard, who did the story of stuff www.storyofstuff.org now has an even better piece called the story of cap and trade.  She released it just before the meetings in Copenhagen.  You absolutely must see this piece (and if you have not seen story of stuff, watch that too, watch it with your kids.)

www.storyofcapandtrade.org

Last Diatribe.

  In case you missed it, there was a meeting in Copenhagen last month.  It was a failure.  Despite what people (like the president) may say.  Nothing happened.  The cynics like me were correct, government leaders and corporate elites cannot come up with a plan to combat climate change the destruction of our planet.  They are a combination of incompetence and malevolence. People said it was a success because all the leaders of the world came together and all admit we have a problem with climate change.  Success?  They have known it was a problem for a long time, which is why they met in Kyoto in the late nineties.  Nothing happened there, it was a failure, let’s not try to sugar coat it and make ourselves feel good. It is, and always has been, up to normal people like you, me and several billion other people. 

  There is a line that plenty of business and political leaders keep spewing.  We cannot sacrifice our economy to appease the demands of climate change.  The world is not flat, and leaders who say this should be publicly hung by their toes.  What could be more dangerous (other than still denying climate change is a result of our over indulgent society)?  Our economy must adapt to the realities of climate change, we cannot expect the climate to change to suit our economy.  We are not negotiating with another ideology; the climate and our planet have no recognition of our economic system.  The planet and climate do not negotiate; we must bend to the will of the planet.  If our economic system cannot adapt to a new world (one which we can live in some kind of harmony with our planet and its climate) than screw it, that system is a failure.  Get rid of it.  The other option is that the planet and climate get rid of us, and thus gets rid of our abstract creation called economy.

    It is that simple.  There is no argument that economics can trump a sustainable and livable planet.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is suicidal, incompetent, ignorant, or at best malevolent.  And remember who advocates for the economy first the planet second?  A tiny minority of people who benefit most from an unsustainable and fossil fuel driven society.  The biggest polluters in the planet are the biggest supports of a status quo economy and are the biggest detractors from a sustainable planet and society.  That is because there is no place for this tiny minority in a sustainable world.

  The local and sustainable food movement and the movement with regards to climate change and our overall devastation of our planet go hand and hand.

   On both fronts we in the USA absolutely must give up our sense of entitlement.  We must realize we live in a fantasy land.  Americans are really out of touch.  The morning after the earthquake in Haiti, Al Roker (that weatherman from one of the good morning TV shows) gave the weather report for Haiti, clear skies and temperature in the upper eighties.  He said the good news is there will be no rain, but the bad news is that it will be hot, and without electricity no one will be able to use the air conditioners.  That is how out of touch mainstream America is with the rest of the world.  We have this assumption that everyone has the same ‘stuff’ that we do.  It is exactly this stuff that we have an excess of, that most of the world has none of, which is burning up our planet.  This stuff is dangerous, and we are the only ones who have it all, and we fight to keep it all.  It is so easy to shed our extravagance and not die.  Most of the planet (especially in hot climates) do not have stuff like air conditioners and are surviving.  We can too.  We have become so entitled that we forget what a necessity is and what a luxury is.

  Now Food.

  People always say that food at Lionette’s Market or at Farmer’s Markets is expensive.  There is an argument that most people in the USA cannot afford to eat local and sustainable food.  You might say you cannot afford to eat local and sustainable food.  If you have a cell phone, cable TV, a car, lots of fashionable clothes, lots of machines in your house, if you buy alcohol or drugs, if you go out to eat (that includes breakfast and lunch) then you have enough money to eat local and sustainable food.  As much as you try to justify it, those things are all luxuries, only food is a necessity.  And if other people are cooking your food for you, that is a luxury, and it costs more.  If you boss makes you pay for you cell phone for work, or if the boss brings the job outside of the city and public transportation to save money, then you should be compensated for it.  Whatever the justification, you are lying to yourself that you luxuries area necessity, and that food, one of the basic means of subsistence is a luxury that can be cut.

  And then there are those people who work and truly have no luxuries and still do not get paid enough to eat real food (food that is not dangerous to body or planet).  In both cases it is a failure of our economic system.  If our system cannot adapt to promote a sustainable society than screw it, it is no good.

   We have to realize that light bulbs, recycling and wholefoods are not the solution.  They are mirages.  They are sales pitches to get you to buy into something, to make you believe that you can maintain your current state of indulgence and not ruin the planet.  It is as asinine as the claims by Exxonmobil that they are educating Africa and leading the way for a green future.   Marketing and soothsaying, nothing more.

  Our food is painfully cheap in this country.  The rest of the planet pays on average 33% of their income on food, in the USA we pay on average around 17%.  We also have the worst food in the planet.  We are the first society in the history of civilization to make food dangerous.  Where is the rest of our money going?  It goes to junk to fill up our homes and on mortgage/rent.  We are buying more luxuries and too often getting screwed on our property/rent.  The former we can control directly, the latter will take some organizing and work.  Regardless, dump your luxuries and focus on the necessities of life.

  I could go on for pages (and have) about specific examples of how dangerous our food supply has become, but I’ll try to be brief.  In the past year we saw two people die in New Hampshire from bad beef (half million pound recall of ground beef from a source which sold to Trader Joe’s, Price Chopper, and several other chain supermarkets), salmonella in Peanuts, Pistachios, and sprouts. A nearby town lost its tap water because of e-coli contamination!  Reports of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity rates that is not alarming, but downright horrifying.  Kids seem to have it worse than adults (because now cheap dangerous food is pretty much all that exists, at least when we were kids we had access to some safe food).  Our society is only trying to be healthier, safer, and sustainable ONLY if someone is profiting off it.  The truth is, the more we try to cheapen our food the more expensive it gets.

  All over the airwaves, internet and media are articles, books, movies and reports of how dangerous our food supply is.

  For the first time in human history, we have made food dangerous.

   It is up to us to figure out this problem.  Without trying to sound like some conspiracy freak, our government is in the hands of a few corporations that control most of our food supply.  Watch food Inc to get some real connections.  And as for our present president, remember he was a senator from a corn state and is president of a corn country.  With a Monsanto boy-toy in Tom Vilsack as department of Agriculture I wonder what the president has in mind with food policy.  Remember he supported the farm bill and energy bill as senator.  They are two of the most unsustainable bills to come out of D.C. in the last five years.

   Martha Stewart, Oprah, even the cover story of Time magazine (august 31, 2009) are screaming about “The real cost of Cheap Food.”  But everyone is more concerned with this abstract and useless thing called an economy.

   Lionette’s Market is one of the only places in Boston NOT to have any food recalled in the last two years.  I do not know of ANY supermarket that can say the same.  If I was not selling the store that would be our next marketing campaign. 

  Another marketing campaign would be something like “Only and A**hole shops at wholefoods.”  As controversial as this sounds, that supermarket will be the death of us all.  We must get rid of chain supermarkets; we must stop believing in marketing and start trusting our community.  There is absolutely nothing community orientated about a chain supermarket.  Walk into these sterile, lifeless warehouses of cheap food and you will be bombarded with propaganda and vile marketing.  It’s like watching TV and hearing about fuel efficient SUV’s, and Chevron and ExxonMobil being green companies, or that car that is a perfect harmony of man, machine and the planet.

  To believe that the wholefoods, purdues, trader jos, monsantsos, tysons, earthbounds and the rest are not aware of how dangerous their food is, is as naïve as to believe that tobacco companies are not aware of deadly and addictive cigarettes are.  Instead of changing how we live the marketing these criminals bombard us with changes.  But marketing is an illusion. 

  How can you trust people who transform sustenance into commodity?  Just because they start spreading propaganda about how organic they are, the methods of monoculture farming are the same.  Its cheap price tags and expensive hidden costs.

   We can live in a society where local and decentralized food is eaten 12 months a year.  We have only one or two generations of bad decisions to reverse.  It is not as difficult as people think.

   There are some bad habits we can easily reverse.  The idea that we must eat nasty 10 day old raspberries from California or Mexico to survive the winter is one of them.  The natural shelf life of a raspberry is 48 hours.  How can you eat a ‘fresh’ one after ten days?  Is it because the box at the supermarket promotes it as organic?  There is no nutritional value in fruit that old and god only knows what was done to it to keep it ‘fresh’.  Add to that the amount of energy used to hydro cool it, pack it, transport it by a refrigerated truck across country, hold it in a refrigerated warehouse, and finally then truck it (again) in a refrigerated truck to a supermarket.  Is that sustainable?  Even with the ‘sustainable fuel, green trucks, and green……… and other green marketing these criminals spew, it is still burning up our planet and not doing you any nutritional favors.  We seem to think that when a company tells us they are using green this that or the other thing, it means no harm is being done to the planet or climate.  Wrong.  It means less (maybe less).  But it is still contributing to our own downfall.  The better solution is dump the whole system of an international food supply and switch to the tried and true system; a local and decentralized food supply.  It worked for thousands of years of humanity.  It is only the last fifty or sixty years that we tried this suicidal experiment of cheap food from hidden places around the planet.

   Eat New England food if you are going to live here.  If you don’t like the food here then move.  No one is so special that we need to burn our planet and ruin our future so you can get exotic and out of season food.

   Stop believing this rubbish that some of your organic food from around the world is from small farms in Idaho, Florida or Peru.  It is not true.  There are no farmers over there thinking to themselves, “shit I got to send this small crop of mine up to Boston, those people are really important.”  There are factory farms who can slap a nice label on something mass-produced and ship around the planet for cheap money.

  Your kid's DNA is like the DNA of all other young humans.  They are not special, they can eat food that grows locally twelve months a year and survive.  Parents must start teaching their kids to respect what local food is, and learn to eat what the seasons offer, not that you can get what you want whenever you want it at the supermarket.  And you adults, same goes for you.  I hear more adults whine about rutabagas and cabbage then children. Not to sound cliché, but there are several billion impoverished people who not only do NOT have air conditioners, they also would be quite happy to eat rutabagas and cabbage through the winter months.  So get over it, learn how to cook, and eat locally, eat food that is nutritious, and eat food that is regional.  You might find that you feel better, are stronger, are more in touch with your community, are much healthier, and probably are part of something like a real local culture with you local food.

  We have to stop expecting other people to subsidize our food for us.  We are one of the richest countries in the world and we still expect other people to foot the bill on our food?  People subsidize our food by sacrificing their land, community, their health, drinking water, and usually their children’s future.  And all of us are asking our children to pay the difference on our food tab.  As we go to the supermarkets and restaurants and but the cheap food, there is an open tab getting larger and larger for the next generation. 

   Eating can no longer be seen as an individual act.  What you eat affects all of us, and affects the next generation (that means your kids).  This is a new thing.  But that is how dangerous our food supply has become.  The risks of a dangerous food supply have made it so that I need to be concerned with what you eat and vice versa.  Sorry, but our overly self-centered individuality is going to take a beating in a sustainable planet.  But don’t worry, the rest of humanity has never been as individualistic as our country.   It is quite normal to live within a community and not as a collection of self serving individuals.

   At this point there is absolutely no reason that all your perishable foods (meat, dairy and produce) are not from New England twelve months a year.  None. There is absolutely no sane reason why we should allow chain supermarkets and an international food supply to exist one day longer.  None.  The only justifications are those which benefit our current economic system (and really only a handful of people in this system) or benefit our insane decadent lifestyle. 

  We must pay the real prices for real food.  Cheap food, like our decadent-climate-burning-lifestyles will be gone in our lifetime.  How?  Either because our planet is no longer suitable for humans to live on it, because of civil unrest, or because we decide to live a sustainable lifestyle instead of a decadent one.  We know the first option will happen, and soon.  As much as we want to deny or ignore it, we are in the 11^th hour in our planet’s future with climate change and pollution.  As for the second option, we saw a small glimpse of that almost two years ago when there was civil unrest and food riots in 3 dozen countries around the world.  As for the latter, let’s hope we can get it together.  It seems to be the best option.  But for sure, no one will every live a more decadent lifestyle and eat as much crap food as our present society is.  The question is how will it be stopped? 

Jamey Lionette

Greetings, this is the July Lionette's Market Newsletter. 
Enjoy your summer!

I had the opportunity to see Food Inc., last night.  I would highly recommend it.  It comes out in the theatres this Friday.  This movie should change how all of us eat.  I thought that all the salmonella and e-coli outbreaks, climate change, pollution, diabetes and outrageous obesity rates would change how we eat, but they have not.  So maybe a movie will do the trick.  Definitely take the time to watch it.

New Products

We are in the middle of Strawberry season so eat them up!  Ask and we will gladly get you a case of strawberries (or any other fruit in season) and make Strawberry jam at home.  Jamming and canning are really easy.  You need only strawberries, sugar (optional), pectin (we sell Pomona ’s Pectin), some mason jars (sold at every hardware store), tongs, water, a large pot and a stove.  Inside the pectin packages are really simple recipes and instructions.  All the staff at Lionette’s can and jam, so feel free to talk it up while in the store.

We have been getting is some amazing flavored goat cheeses from Valley View Farm in Topsfield, MA.  They will go great on a salad (different salad greens coming in everyday from local farms!) and local radishes.

Greens, Greens, Greens!  Almost every day we get greens from several local farms (Blue Heron, Natural Way , Pete’s Greens and more!).  For salad greens try Pete’s Mesclun mix, some forty different types of edible greens could be in the mix.  Also try the wonderful sour (in a good way, like vinegar) qualities of the various Sorrels coming in, also delicious bitter quality of Mizuna, or pepperiness of Arugula and Upland Cress, also the lemony zest of the Mustard Greens.  And of course heaps of varieties of head lettuce.  So many options for a delicious salad.  Baby carrots, baby beets, radishes, summer turnips all fresh from the ground are all available now and are ideal for salads.

For cooking greens, Pete’s makes a killer mix called Braising Greens full of over a dozen rustic greens perfect for dinner.  Blue Heron Farm (Lincoln, MA) is bringing in wonderful bunches of assorted Kales (Russian Red, Lacinato and Siberian), as well as gorgeous Rainbow Chard.  Look out for Local Collard Greens too, perfect with sautéed onions and bacon.  Also coming in is Boc Choi, perfect steamed with soy sauce and sesame oil.

Tomatoes.  Soon enough, we are almost there.  For those of you unable to wait until tomato season begins, we do carry some Brandywine variety tomatoes green housed in Springfield, MA.  Slice some up with Fiore Di Nonno’s Mozzarella, made all the way across the river in Somerville.

Throughout July look out for new produce as the predominantly green colors turn to rainbow.  Tomatoes, summer squashes, raspberries, blueberries, eggplants, carrots, string beans and so much more!

Cheeses of the Month.

West River Creamery, Cambridge Reserve Cloth Wrapped Cheddar.  So much tang, a hint of earth and some pleasant sharpness all makes for one wonderful cheddar from one of the world’s greatest cheese producing regions; Vermont.  West River creamery is located in Londonderry, just down the street from another glorious cheese producer, Taylor Farm.

Dancing Cow Bouree.  Also from the world famous cheese region of Vermont.   Dancing Cow Cheeses are raw milk and from pure grass fed cows of several different breeds.  The bouree is aged in the cheese cellars of Jasper Hill (Another Vermont Cheese producer).  Bourree is washed rind cheese with an earthy aroma, supple paste and a rich, creamy texture that melts into a beautiful smoky, meaty, lingering finish. Bourree is made from raw cow's milk, un-cooled, from only a single milking.

MEATS.

Grilling Steak? We have every cut of steak, all grass fed, local and clean.  (After you watch Food, Inc, be sure to know that our ground beef contains no Ammonia filler at all, we are one of the few sources left of ammonia free ground beef. And our beef is grass fed, so no fear of e-coli problems.)

Burgers:  We have ground beef from North Hollow Farm and Millbrand Farm (Hardwick Beef).  Both of which are 80/20 and fully grass-fed in Vermont.  We also carry Massachusetts legendary River Rock beef, they are fully pastured animals but not grass fed (There is some corn/soy fed out on pasture, but theses steers were never raised on a CAFO.)

The Easy Steaks.  These steaks need only Sea Salt, Olive Oil and pepper.  To marinade them would be criminal, just enjoy the flavor.

Filet.  Yep, if you want no fat, and to be able to cut your meat with a plastic knife (or one of those corn & soy made biodegradable knives) then this is the cut for you.  Though generally cooked inside, we would not talk you out of grilling it.  Toss some Chatham Ewe’s Blue cheese on for flavor.

New York Strip. Almost as tender as filet, almost as lean, but more flavorful.  A small cap of fat is left on the top.  You can cut our strips steaks with a butter knife.

Rib Eye.  Commonly considered the best grilling steak.  Put away the butter knives and pull out the steak knives.  The fat marbling makes this steak more rugged than the filet and strip, but it is still tender, and needs nothing done to it.  I hardly even cook it.  If you really want to treat yourself, I mean you did something really special, get a River Rock Rib eye, easily the best steak in the city of Boston.  We get a full River Rock rib eye loin every other Thursday; next RR Rib eye day is June 25^th.  We have Grass-fed beef rib eye from local farms usually everyday.

Hanger steak (or Hanging Tender).  The ugliest yet tastiest steaks there is.  A loose fibered cut with a line of grizzle down the middle, this steak just looks awful.  But it is the most special of all steaks.  As most cuts of beef taste the same more or less, they differ only in tenderness and fat quantity, the Hanger just has a bolder and more intense flavor.  Do not marinade it, don’t even think about it.  Cook it with the grizzle on and cut around it after grilling.  This is the polar opposite of filet mignon.  Not for beginners.

The Marinades.  These steaks are delicious and take in the flavors of marinades.  The marinades also soften them up for a more enjoyable meal.  Each steak need different minimum amount of time to marinade (I give an estimate for each one), and no steak should really marinade for more than two days.  If you do not have a marinade in mind, we make up our own marinades which are available at the market.

Sirloin.  (or New York sirloin).  Often mistaken with New York strip, this is a very different cut as it is not as tender as a strip steak.  There is a nice bit of fat marbling for a wonderful flavor, perhaps even more flavorful than a strip steak.  Marinade for a minimum of thirty minutes.

Flat Iron.  Once called blade steak, it is cut from the shoulder.  A skinny (when the grizzle is cut out) steak that sucks up marinades perfectly and grill quickly.  Marinade for at least twenty minutes.

Shoulder Steak.  The only other steak for the grill from the shoulder.  These look like mini tenderloins (the same cut from veal is known as faux tender) and cook up nicely on the grill.  They are usually around 10-12 ounces and are modestly priced.

Tri-Tip.  This cut is famous in California and unheard of on the east coast.  I don’t know why that is.  It comes off the top butt (where the Sirloin comes from).  This steak fattens up on the grill and is really juicy; make sure you have a baguette to sop up the juice from your plate.  Probably not the best choice if using paper plates.

Flank Steak.  This was once the most common cut for London Broil, but marketing from the Beef industry has made it one of the more coveted cuts.  It is a very tight piece of meat, so marinade at least two hours if you plan on grilling.  Feel free to use wild and strong marinades for this extremely lean cut of beef, it will take on anything you soak it in.

Skirt Steak.  A long and skinny cut peeled off the ribs.  I usually Sautee this in a frying pan to make amazing tacos, but you certainly can grill this cut.  It can be considered a little chewy without marinade, but nothing to be scared of if you want to grill it as is.  Get some of Claire’s Corn Salsa (from Alburgh, VT), toss a few tortillas on the grill, and shave some Grafton village cheddar, and make a killer grilled taco.

Next newsletter will cover pork, lamb and sausage grilling!

Jamey’s Diatribe On Sustainable Food.

 As every major corporation in the global food industry is quickly scrambling to mass produce food and market it as sustainable, organic, local, green, organic, naturally raised, whatever, it becomes increasingly difficult to figure what is real and what is just crass marketing from the criminal class of the big corporations.  Our culture has crashed so quickly over the last fifty years that most Americans have a severe disconnect with their food supply.  Aside from some tokenistic local tomatoes at a fancy restaurant, most people in Boston will go another season without really eating anything from New England.

 As much as we want to keep our privileged lifestyles, unfortunately the idea of eating what you want when you want it has to be over.  Tyson, Whole foods, Trader Jo’s, Earthbound and Stoneyfield may try to sell you otherwise.  It is a false compromise. America is waking up to a devastating and dangerous food supply, (the first time ever in human history a food supply has been dangerous).  It is shocking to see our desperate attempts to compromise sustainability with entitlement.  It is exactly the same asinine strategy we are using with climate change.  We feel that somehow and someway nature will have to compromise with us.  Such absurd and futile notions that carbon offsets will appease the climate gods are similar to ‘uncivilized’ people of the past who made sacrifices to the rain gods.  The ever burning climate will not ignore the carbon emitted from fresh figs flown into Boston because you recycle.  Mutated e-coli and Salmonella do not understand your argument that recovering the economy takes precedent to a safe food supply, nor do they care about unemployment rates.  Obesity and Diabetes do not comprehend the injustices of a class based economic system.  And the devastating pollution from our factory farms is not interested in an argument of a kinder, gentler and more reformed capitalism.

People can put up arguments that at present we cannot feed the world with a sustainable, local and decentralized food supply.  This is argument is as arrogant as it is ignorant.  For the ten to twenty thousand years of human history, our species had a local and decentralized food supply.  It is only in the last fifty years that our commodity based, mass-produced, corporate controlled food supply has existed, and all it has done is made food dangerous, scarce, taken out of the hands of farmers and extremely expensive (you have to stop looking at only the price tag when buying foods, the hidden costs of cheap food are enormous.)  According the WHO, in just a decade or so the planet produced enough food for twelve billion people.  Last month National Geographic reported the world no longer produces enough food for our six billion people.  There is a direct connection between the globalization of food and food shortages.  The IMF and World Bank rules have made it so that rich countries can subsidize their commodity crops to be cheaper than developing countries.  So now civilizations that had the ability to sustain and feed themselves for thousands of years cannot even grow their own food.  Worse, they are dependent on the criminals from Monsanto and other ‘western’ corporations.  These corporate leaders are as incompetent as they are malevolent.  If it were not for how dangerous they are to all of humanity, they would be the laughing stock of the world for what they are doing.  When wondering why so many people ‘hate’ Americans, you have no further to look than what this country has done, both directly and through its policies and persuasion, to the planet’s food supply and ecosystem.  There were food riots and disturbances in over three dozen countries last year.  Let’s hope we can regain control of our food system quickly or else civil unrest will be a common reality, and it will hit home.

In the USA we are doing ‘soul searching’ about how we approach capitalism.  We created anti-trust laws so that we no company could have a monopoly on any industry, and so that a few companies could not control all the resources and industries.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Recently our leaders of capitalism really screwed up the system.  We now bail out companies that are ‘too big to let fail’.  Our economic ‘soul searching’ makes us wonder if we should allow companies to get so big that we cannot allow them to fail (see the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section, Sunday, June 14.).  Now a hand full of companies pretty much own the whole food supply from seeds to land and everything in between.  They have made food dangerous over the last fifty years, helped ruin our climate and pollute our world, not to mention the ghastly manipulations to nature.  Are we going to let these companies be so big we cannot let them fail?  Because it is quite clear they have already failed us.  They did not make food cheaper; food is now the most expensive it has ever been.  We are a critical point now.  The companies do not farm food, they manufacture it.  The people who farmed food (known as farmers) are pretty much wiped away or are factory managers for the corporations.  This pathetic food supply for the sake of profit for a few corporations is now the status quo for the whole world.  Contrary to our current approach of big business, we must let these businesses fail; in fact we must be the ones who make them fail.  If we allow nature to determine the fate of the few corporations controlling our food supply, then we will have no food.  It is that simple.  We must realize that nature is far more important and powerful than the ‘market’.  We do not need the market to be on our side to survive, we do, however need to be on the side of nature to survive.

And so the argument that a local and decentralized food supply won’t work? HA! What we have now is a definite failure, resort to what worked for the past ten to twenty thousand years.  There were no Whole foods, Stoneyfields, Peruvian asparagus nor year round vine-ripened tomatoes until the last few decades.  So let’s be smart about this.  The ‘green’ companies (or whatever you want to call them) are merely trying to capitalize on a new market, green, naturally raised, organic, sustainable etc…  They use marketing to convince you to buy their product, but they still are using the same form of production; mass production.  And for globalizing food, it might sound like a good idea for foreign people to grow our food, because aren’t we giving them jobs and welcoming them to the world economy?  These people who used to be able to produce their own food and sustain themselves, this is another example of our arrogance and ignorance.  We are doing no one around the world any favors by making them grow exotic, out of season, and cheap food for us.

So I went to some pre-screening of FOOD INC, the movie, and after was a brief Q&A with the documentary’s director Robbie Kenner.  As per usual with Q&A’s the first question was something like “Where do our Senators stand on this?  What can I do as a concerned citizen?”  It is generally a middle class person who makes such statements.  I have never heard a poor person say “Oh my god, does Senator Kerry know about e-coli yet!  Someone has got to tell him!”   It is quite right to be concerned after seeing Food, INC.  We should all be very concerned about the state of our food supply and not only the complacency, but actual assistance our government has given in bringing us to the awful mess we are in. 

President Obama put former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as head of our department of Agriculture.  Real brief, Vilsack is an agribusiness man, a corn man who ran a corn state, who has the blessing and support of Monsanto (probably one of the most evil companies on the planet, worse than tobacco).  What should we have expected from President Obama?  He, after all, was a Senator of another corn state, and is now the President of a corn country!  Michael Pollan says this in an interview with Mother Jones magazine on the subject of Vilsack, “Putting the most positive spin I can on it: he’s no longer governor of Iowa, and I’m hoping that as a politician, when he senses where the wind is moving, he’ll move with it.”

I understand Pollan’s point.  Let’s be honest with ourselves, the way our government works is to basically do whatever it can to help out a few rich people do things that the public would generally perceives as dangerous, unsavory, illegal, self-indulging, and downright wrong.  Then when the public (all of us) catches on and is outraged, our government then works with specialists (usually from those same rich people’s corporations) to come up with a law that appeals to the concerned and outraged public.  But really the law just compromises a little bit on what those rich people have been doing.  Every few years people vote for one of the two parties and think there is a change, when in fact, Clinton, Bush, and Obama all seem to be doing the same thing.  This is exactly what is going on with our food supply.  Our food supply is now dangerous and devastating our planet, all so a few rich people (who have little to no background producing food) can get richer.  That is exactly what is going on.

So if you want to call your senator, sure go ahead, maybe it will help pass a law or two.  But if you really want to change do this: Change your habits.  Do not ever again eat at a fast food restaurant, do not ever again shop at a chain supermarket (the fast food of retail food) and yes that includes the biggest supermarkets: Whole foods, Trader Joe’s and Wal-Mart’s, the evil trio.  If you go out to eat, only patronize a restaurant that is putting in a real effort to purchase local and sustainable foods, you will be surprised at how few restaurants buy local.  Buy your food from within your community.  There are a few of us left that have not been washed away by chain supermarkets.  Talk with your neighbors, get organized, talk with local shop keepers and ask for local food.  Learn where your food comes from.  We must regain control over our food again. Remember if only a small percentage of us are eating in a sustainable manner, it means that the majority of people are not eating in a sustainable way.  That means we are all still in danger.  Remember we all share this planet, and thus share a changing climate, polluted land and devastated water.  The sooner we put every major supermarket, factory farm, and agribusiness out of business the better chance we have a future where we can eat food every day.  Also remember, for ten to twenty thousand years we had a local and decentralized food supply, it has only changed for the worse in the last fifty years, so do not buy into the arrogance of agribusiness, government and supermarkets that we would all starve without them, because at present we are all in some serious peril because of them.

-       Jamey Lionette

Until we can make the market see all the costs of unsustainable farming, and until we learn how to temper its obsessive focus on ever greater efficiencies, market-driven sustainability will fail.  This reality became evident last August, after Whole Foods recalled ground beef due to an E. coli scare.  The problem was that Whole Foods’ supplier, Coleman Beef, processed its meat at Nebraska Beef, a large, low-cost plant infamous for health violations (including a 5-million pound beef recall in July for E.coli.) In essence, Whole Foods sought to create a new value- sustainability -without changing the food supply.

Paul Roberts