Good Food is Everybody's Business
Big Food, Big Ag, Big Org(anic), and Big Business have all convinced us that the “American Food System” is a wonderful thing to be maintained at all costs.
Maintained on the backs of farmworkers, meat processing workers, food service workers, and other “invisible” workers, our food system delivers cheap strawberries from California, Mexico, and Chile year ‘round, and chicken nuggets and hamburgers by the barrel full.
Regenerative Organic Certification adds criteria and builds off the USDA NOP standards and other standards in the areas of soil health and land management, animal welfare, and farmer and worker fairness. Beyond organic as it stands today.
In Columbia’s strategically located region Montes de Maria, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) roamed the countryside and destroyed entire irrigation systems, stole kilometers of pipelines, and stole or destroyed the pumps that fed the system from large water basins. Fear and destruction dissuaded many farmers from returning to their lands.
The conquistadores virtually erased chia from Mayan cultural awareness as part of their campaign to subjugate the Mesoamerican peoples to Church and King. But today, even as ordinary Guatemalans are engaged in a massive ongoing popular campaign to throw off the rule of a corrupt and brutal elite, chia may be ripe for rediscovery.
Most of the Ethiopian farmers in the Lelistu Ogda farmer cooperative struggle with soil fertility. That’s why Ayelech Bekele and 19 other women now embrace beekeeping as an alternative method for increasing their incomes.
New businesses launched by transborder migrants are not limited to farms and ranches and many small shops are also finding their place in the inner cities where they are revitalizing Main Street. They include specialty (ethnic) grocers and small market operators; restauranteurs, bakers, and caterers; tailors and cobblers; dry cleaners and other service providers; pharmacists and botanists; notary publics and accountants; the list is very long.
Leymah Gbowee is a peace activist in Liberia. She led a women’s movement that was pivotal in ending the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, and now speaks on behalf of women and girls around the world.
Twenty years of globalization have shown us that a model based on corporate greed cannot sustain society and it cannot sustain the earth. It cannot …
