Amarosia Organic Garden

OK, so I can understand people in many developing countries taking part in activities that we would never consider because they are fighting to survive.

BUT I am completely unable to understand how a Wal-Mart employee could be crushed to death by crazed shoppers. I know that crushing deaths occur at concerts and in football stadiums where you have crowds surging forwards at intense moments in the show or game, but shopping?! Really?

The idea of queuing from 4am to buy something that is likely 25% packaging, 70% promotion and  only 5% actual thing, and getting SO hyped up about it that you don’t notice when you are walking over the top of a person is just grotesque.

I wonder whether these shoppers will even consider that their passage to a great Christmas gift for their child was paid for with a human life.

There are no short cuts to producing, safe, healthy, nutritious food. If the food is cheap, someone, somewhere is doing something that you would rather they didn’t. It could be

• spraying the food with pesticides to reduce labour costs
• adding ‘filler’ to the product in the form of genetically modified waste products such as corn starch
• using poorly paid migrant labour
• adding toxic chemicals to baby milk and animal feed to make them appear to be more nutritious

As if we didn’t already have enough positive reasons to buy local, sustainably grown food, China keeps providing us with even more negative reasons.

“Chinese Melamine Scandal Widens” 

This Globe and Mail article had me fuming! It talks about how the cost of grains has increased dramatically recently making home baking unaccessible to some. Rye flour has increased to $25 for five kilos of flour, up from $10, over a very short space of time. Relatively speaking this seems like a really dramatic increase until you take the following into account.

1. Food has been really cheap for a long time. We’ve just gotten used to cheap prices. The $10/ 5kg was a great deal. $25/5kg is probably a more appropriate cost for good quality flour.
2. Most of that cost still does not go to the farmer. Some goes to the flour mill and a lot goes into marketing… plus of course the supermarkets make a big profit for placing the flour on their shelves. Buy direct from the farm or a local mill if you really want to keep your prices down, but remember good food takes time and costs money to produce and farmers need to be reimbursed for their hard work.
3. The cost of fuel, labour, farm equipment, inputs etc etc have been increasing steadily for years while the cost of food has remained constant or even dropped. Farmers have been suffering as a result. Price increases like this are long overdue.
4. These price increases are only really affecting grains and oils because they have alternative uses as automobile fuel. Farmers can make more money growing for cars than for people. The current relative scarcity of food grains and oils makes them a great commodity to speculate on, pushing their prices even higher.
5. In a typical box of cereal, the grain itself is only a tiny fraction of the cost. Most of the cost goes into packaging, processing, shipping, marketing and storage. The increased costs of packaged cereal are to pay for all of the ‘other’ expenses as much as for the grain itself. Also, apparent grain shortages are a really good excuse to put prices up. Think about what happened before Hurrican Ike. Gas prices went up even BEFORE it happened. The same market forces are now influencing the price of food.
6. If we increased our prices in a similar fashion our salad and beans would cost $10/bag, our tomatoes $7.50/lb, our zucchini $2.50 each.  Suddenly $4 salad sounds like a great deal!

From the day we are born we have one purpose, to consume. Not to be happy, do good, save lives, love our families or anything so positive. We are just here on this planet to buy stuff, throw it away and then buy more stuff.

Sounds depressing, eh?! Annie Leonard explains eloquently in this short video of ‘The Story of Stuff’  just how the politicians and mega-corporations see us. My favourite clip was this little guy going to work to make money, coming home exhausted, collapsing in front of the television where the shows and advertisements made him feel like he wasn’t good enough, then going to the mall to shop…. after which he needed more money, so had to work harder….

There are simple ways to break the cycle at any point. The most important and fundamental being to love and respect yourself and your family enough to know that the ONLY thing you need to buy on a weekly basis is food. Good quality, sustainably produced food. Then share it with family with the TV turned off.

The majority of people in developed nations would become instantly happier by following this simple step.