The Demand for Cheap Food is Fallacious

The demand for cheap food is fallacious. Pressing down the cost of food has one or all of three results on the producers of it (and its effect on the producers is a vital concern with us as citizens of a State): We reduce the standards of living of the producers in our own country; we exploit the cheap labor and cheap lands of new and remote countries; or we live on the products of peasantry in other countries. These three are the same, considered in the human result. If we are glad to meet the problem of maintaining the standard of living for workingmen, we must be equally glad to maintain it for farmers. There are reasons why we should not attempt the same program for farmers as for workingmen: our problem is to be willing to pay as much for food and other farm products as is necessary for the maintenance of the standard of living on the farms. -L.H. Bailey, What is Democracy? 1918

Liberty Hyde Bailey Podcast for July 31st

Olga Bonfiglio: News: South Haven Promotes Agricultural Sustainability

The South Haven area has a rich, 150-year-old agricultural history as the Southwest Michigan Fruit Belt, the largest non-citrus fruit producing region in North America.  It includes the legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey, America’s father of horticulture and founder of the Michigan Pomological Society (later named Michigan Horticultural Society).  He was born in South Haven.

READ MORE: Olga Bonfiglio: News: South Haven Promotes Agricultural Sustainability

Improvsational Farmer Stand-Up More Than Just a Routine

Local southwest Michigan farmers Julie Cowley and Will Hart love what they do; plant food, grow food, provide food for their immediate community all within a half hour drive from their farm in Casco township where 2010's growing season is sprouting cabbages, lettuces, spinach, melons, celery, zucchini, scallions, squash, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, sunflowers, zinnias, radicchio, leeks, and even blue popcorn. Their story of launching their first farm, Improvisational Farmer, was shared at the last 2010 Brown Bag series in the Bailey woodshed. Will spoke in how he rediscovered the longer cycle of the land that goes beyond the one year mindset. Julie shared the challenges of operating a private farm. Those challenges are paying off with a public more aware of their food. Even Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm recently spoke to the value of locally grown food, “Local food is fresher, tastes better and comes from farmland near you,” Granholm said.  “And because many fruits and vegetables can lose up to 50 percent of their nutrients in just five days’ time, buying locally grown food is a healthier choice.” Julie and Will also offer Fresh-Prep food kits, ready for the grill. The farm is part of the Lakeshore Harvest Country which is sponsoring an upcoming local food dinner on August 22nd (see Lakeshore link for more info). Farm hats off to Will and Julie. Keep growing and we'll keep eating and growing.

CONTACT INFO THE IMPROVISATIONAL FARMER: Email:  Fresh@ImprovFarmer.com, 1-866-254-4633, 269-639-1970, Farm location: 991 62nd Street, Pullman, MI   49450 (about 4 miles east of US 31/196 off Pullman Road, 109th Avenue), Mailing address: 876 1/2 Blue Star Highway, South Haven, MI  49090

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to view the destructive practices and assumptions that now dominate the global food economy. The biblical exegesis is wide-ranging and sophisticated; the language is literate and accessible to a broad audience.

Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating:

“Eating is an agricultural act.”

    Wendell Berry’s quote is a simple observation of the reality of eating. So much energy and advertising is expended trying to separate us from what we eat that we don’t stop to realize that over 90 percent of a supermarket is not even food. Remaining blissfully unaware of what we eat and where it comes from is crippling us, but it’s curable.

    Not many years ago, most of our food was produced within a 100 miles of our homes...

Read the entire artilce at: Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating:

It's Slow Good!

Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world. To do that, Slow Food brings together pleasure and responsibility, and makes them inseparable. Check them out.

"Hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; bologna sausage and similar meats until recently usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. "Pancake flour" often contains little if any buckwheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance. Fancy French peas are colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. Japanese tea is colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric. Ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called nonalcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. Candy is commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation. Cheap candies contain such substances as glue and soapstone. The higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. Flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and usually are artificially colored. Jams are made of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and flavoring. Lard nearly always contains added tallow. Bakeries in large cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. Cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. The poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared sweetened products.

   The attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. It is our habit to attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily fare been honest?" Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

The Nasty Tradition of Disconnecting Ourselves from Nature

Despite the rhetoric of green living, Americans live in the wake of an industrialization that has cut us off from our roots of experience. It is so much so that the idea that we can be a part of nature, honor it, conserve it but also participate and use it seems to be a great contradiction. Most recently farming has been interpreted as "profoundly unnatural," in the Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage.

"[Farming] has led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, the displacement of 'natural' wildlife, and the transplant of plants and animals thousands of miles from the original habitats. It involves the genetic modification of plants and animals to create monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often cannot survive without human intervention...Agriculture would surely not be allowed if it were invented today."

Standage's book contains chapters of quick studies one of which is the domestication of corn. Standage makes a strong argument that that human intervention has radically changed this plant from its original roots, making it dependant on humans for its cultivation. The same can be said for the domestication of wheat. How Standage qualifies these alterations puts humans as the Dr. Frankenstein of nature. This may be more of a case with genetically altered foods. But by classifying farming or the process of changing plants to human needs as unnatural, characterizes humankind as a rouge species, alien to its own world.

What Would Bailey Read? An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century Offers Solutions to Food Crisis

Lincoln, NE – “Food and farms are involved in a blitzkrieg of changes,” writes veteran journalist Steven McFadden in The Call of the Land. The book joins a growing chorus voicing a new vision for food and agriculture. Picking up where Food Inc., the recent documentary on industrial agriculture, leaves off, the volume presents dozens of creative responses to the crisis. The sourcebook documents a range of positive pathways to food security, economic stability, environmental health, and cultural renewal. The surging range of responses—from individuals, communities, cities, and institutions—are both imaginative and practical. Steven McFadden is co-author with Trauger Groh of Farms of Tomorrow (1991), America’s first book on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The volume helped inspire the movement to grow from two farms in the late 1980s to thousands, with hundreds of thousands of shareholders, in 2009.

To order The Call of the Land: http://www.norlightspress.com/our-books-cotl.html
Author’s blog: http://www.thecalloftheland.com
Author’s website: http://www.chiron-communications.com
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/The-Call-of-the-Land/158333485770?ref=mf

Local Beef Brown Bag Caps Summer Program

Where does your beef come from? As author Michael Pollan points out in his book, In Defense of Food we have resigned one of the most intimate acts in our daily life, eating food, to an industrialized system. Mike Rainey, of Rainey Farms in South Haven, Michigan presented an alternative at the museum's last Brown Bag this summer; know your farmer and know where your food comes from. Mike raises cattle without the use of synthetic hormones or steroids and are fed only all natural ingredients. As a local farmer who also sells at the South Haven Farmer's Market, Mike is an advocate for buying food locally citing its benefits of spurring local economic growth, knowing what's in your food and where it comes from and basically better tasting food. Put away that marinade! This beef has flavor.

To order from Rainey Farms call: 1-866-655-8855. On the web at: http://www.raineyfarms.com/, E-Mail: mike@raineyfarm.com

Other resources for eating & buying local: http://www.localharvest.org/; http://www.fairfoodmatters.org/; http://www.farmersmarkets.msu.edu/

Farm Fresh Foods Feature on NPR Website

This Morning Edition series takes you to America's farmers markets and roadside stands for a sample of what's growing on its farms, in its gardens and across the countryside.

Check it out at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111309533