You might wonder how food and politics come together in a blog. In everything I write, I am always trying to 1. not go past established boundaries, 2. not speculate too much, and 3. separate the truth from the lies. I want to be gracious as well as wise. So, with that in mind, I will attempt to write what is on my heart today.
In the olden days, people grew their own food, and ate their own food. Early Americans bartered for food and other products. The bartering system worked well and some places actually still use this method today.
Science and technology have brought about unbelievable advances in medicine, agriculture, and other necessities. One of the advancements is in our agricultural system.
Several factors are involved in this. We have a growing population of people. We have desire to expand our businesses. We have people starving in third world countries. We have an economy based on the principle of convenience. The human nature is greedy. The lust for money can never be satisfied, for when we make enough money, we always want to make more. Also, this desire, if allowed to develop, will require us to stop our consciences from working as we will have to compromise and make some unethical decisions at some point.
Farming is becoming passe. Even farmers are being discouraged. You are not cool if you are a farmer today. But really, all of this depends upon your perspective. If you base truth on what most people think is right, then you will not want to be a farmer. But if you understand a little of how the human body works, and how nourishing food helps the body stay healthy, you would reconsider your attitude about farmers.
We have a lot of people to feed, so agricultural authorities who are pragmatic are coming up with shortcuts to produce a lot of food in localized places, using as little money as necessary to feed the animals and plants. If we go a little deeper, we realize that many of these agricultural agencies are sponsored by the government. Before you decide to exit this page, realize I am trying to be objective in what I see. I believe we can critique things without being critical (although it takes a skill to do this properly).
In days past, we had small and large farms, run by skilled farmers who sold their food (or bartered) to either a middleman or to a local store. The food is grown with a lot of care. The farm didn't have to be overly huge either, because there were several farms. These farms produced enough food for everyone in the area to eat and be sustained by. The soil wasn't depleted much, and the food that was produced was nourishing. The farmers took pride in what they had done. And society was sustained by what they had done, as well.
Today, we esteem science. We hold science and technology in high honor. But in doing that, we have less appreciation for the farmer. Agriculture has now turned to science to help grow bigger, prettier, more uniform food. Much of what is being done in agriculture today is really an artificial way of producing food.
Big companies like Monsanto use methods such as genetic engineering, or genetic modification, which is a fancy way of saying that seeds are altered genetically to produce vegetables to have certain characteristics. I actually saw a blue strawberry in a magazine. At first, I thought that it looked really cool. I looked a little further though, and found that the way it was designed to be a blue strawberry was done by genetical engineering. It was a GMO product.
You are probably thinking, 'So what? a blue strawberry? Come on. What's the big deal?' Genetic modification began probably around 50 some years ago, and started with the idea in mind to produce a plant that was resistant to herbicides, and one in particular called, 'Round Up'. Soy beans were genetically modified in order that they would be resistant to dying from being sprayed with 'Round Up'. Other plants were also being genetically modified so they would be resistant to dying from being sprayed with 'Round Up'. Ultimately, this would mean that those who use Monsanto's patented soy beans could spray the herbicide around their plants and the plants will still grow, and the weeds around the plants would die. They also claim that Round Up is safe to use around food. But there are more problems with this than we could have ever imagined.
If the theory goes like Monsanto would have it, those farmers who bought the patented seed would ultimately be safe in growing their plants. Round up could be sprayed on all plants and only those that are patented by Monsanto will live. That means if it is possible to spray Round Up from a plane, the pilot could go all over the city and spray Round Up, and all the Monsanto patented plants will be ok, but others won't. Local farms will be destroyed. This might sound absurd, but the potential is there for it to happen.
Because we are a pragmatic people, and are used to convenience, we gladly use fast food restaurants as if they were going out of style. They won't go out of style though, because at almost any given hour of the day, there are long lines at the drive throughs. But all this requires a special type of farming, that can't be done on local farms. You have to have meat that will be a certain texture, and that will have a specific, appealing taste that everyone who patronizes these fast food restaurants will enjoy. So, commercial agriculture must be employed. That means that there will be big farms, with a lot of animals which have no room to move around in, and are tied up in one place. These animals eat and go to the bathroom in the same place. They are not necessarily healthy and unhealthful meat is produced as a result. But wait one second. They do spray the meat with bleach water. Do you want your piece of meat sprayed with bleach water? Animals that live on commercial farms are given antibiotics to protect them from getting sick. If you can add 2+2, you will figure out that if you eat meat from animals which come from commercial agricultural farms, you will be getting antibiotics into your body as well. Could this be a problem though?
Antibiotics can be good and life saving, if used right. When I was six, I caught Scarlet Fever and was very sick. The doctor came to the house and gave me penicillin. I was able to recover from Scarlet Fever because of the antibiotic, but once I was well, I stopped taking it. People should not take antibiotics unless they are sick and need to recover, and if there is no other means to get well. If a person continues to take antibiotics, a couple of things happen. One is that the antibiotics not only kill off the bad germs, but also the good ones. In a normal, healthy body, we refer to the good germs as our resistance. We build good immunity to fight off sicknesses. Our good immunity will be gone though if we are taking antibiotics. So if you take antibiotics, you are interrupting nature's way of staying healthy. If you eat meat from an animal which was given antibiotics, you will be compromising your immunity system.
Another thing done on these farms is to give animals growth hormones. They are given these hormones to help them grow big and fat, and to help cows produce a lot of milk. Once again, if you are eating meat or poultry which was given growth hormones, guess what? You now have growth hormones in your body as well. Could this be a reason why today, girls are going through puberty earlier than their moms did?
The problem with this also is that these subjects have been brought up to those in charge of commercial agriculture and they are unwilling to acknowledge these facts, nor do they want to do anything to change what they are doing. If they do change what they are doing, they will go out of business (and they know that). The fact of the matter is, you can't mass produce food, no matter how good technology is, and how much science you know. It just won't work. Or maybe a better way of stating this is that, it will work, but the price everyone is going to pay will be really, really high.
Commercial agriculture is much supported by the government, but it is also supported by the people. We choose to go to McDonald's, for example, even though we have seen the hamburgers that were left out for months. We choose to laugh at farmers and relegate them as primitive. Could there be a correlation between the way we eat, and the amount of sicknesses we are experiencing as a people today?
Years ago, diabetes and cancer were almost unheard of. Both diabetes and cancer have sugar as a contributor to their causes. Do you realize that almost all processed food contains some form of sugar, and many times sugar is the first ingredient listed? The FDA is who we trust to give us good guidelines on what kinds of ingredients should go into our foods and what should not be allowed. Once again, the FDA also is very liberal in their guidelines. Sugar is in almost all processed foods, yet sugar is addicting. Enough sugar and you will be sick with something. But the FDA already has your problem solved. They are always coming up with new medications to make you feel better. The FDA backs the pharmaceutical companies as well as food production companies. They seem to work hand in hand, if you can see what I am trying to say.
I can go on and on and make this post many pages, but for now, I will just leave it at this. This blog is to encourage us to pray, and I am trying to inform us of how we can be praying for the church and the country. We have allowed many wrong people into our government and now they call the shots on what we can do and what we can't. There are actually laws in the making that are going to try to stop people from being able to garden. We are ignorant of what is going on, because we are not inside the government, but as people report different things happening, the Internet is good at exposing these things. This is all stuff we can be praying for. We can pray for our farmers. We can pray for good crops and rain. We can pray that Godly men and women will be appointed into governmental positions where they can call the shots and make decisions.
If we don't pray, we could see the end of farming and gardening as we know it. We will not have any choices of what we eat. We will have to eat processed foods, and we will hear lies from authorities who say that processed food with dangerous ingredients is fine for us to eat. We could go to jail if pollen from a plant patented by Monsanto comes to our plant and produces a seed which would be a product of Monsanto, even though weren't aware of our plant being pollinated this way. Thousands of undesirable ramifications can come about, and many will unless we turn this over to God. I hope you will consider what I have written here, and I hope this article will give deeper insight into the potential problems we might have in the future.
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| Do you want to eat food sprayed with this stuff? Workers who spray plants must wear special clothing/attire for protection. Yet we eat the food they spray. Does this make sense?
This is not written to be critical of any group or person. We need to know the facts in order to be informed or life will go by, and we will wonder 'what happened?' We need to pray for those in governmental places. We need to pray for Godly men and women to run our nation and to run businesses and farms, as well as a number of other things people can be doing.
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