Living-Deliberately.com

I debated: should I write a review of this while it’s fresh or should I sleep on it? I’m here now, at 9:30 pm, so you know which one came out on top.

I’m stunned. I’m gagging on corn products…corn and soy that I know sneaks into our diets everywhere. I’m invigorated to plant the biggest garden I can next spring, with seeds from Seeds of Change and Seed Savers. I want to loudly outcry the fact that life (food, things that grow) has been patented, that so many of the government officials have worked for or accepted money from companies like Monsanto, that so far there is no mandatory labeling for genetically modified foods and seeds.

The movie points out that if they label, they can trace the adverse effects, and if they can trace where it came from, they can hold corporations liable. Did you know that these companies are allowed to voluntarily conduct and submit their own research to the FDA?

And yes, the thought occurred to me more than once that those yellow fields of corn are also being hailed right now as the next best thing: biodiesel. But I fail to agree that GM corn is necessary to use corn oil products for fuel. It’s one thing to compromise that it might be a better way to use monocropping than say, using foreign oil. But it’s another to say that these lengths need to be gone to in order to get there.

Okay, heads up: the movie is not unbiased and doesn’t try to be. It an expose type documentary on the way science is changing how we eat, who grows it and how, and where. Little researchers with budgets of 2k stand up against corporations with 25 million and sometimes get heard. The wind blows GM canola over to another farmer’s field and if it grows, he’s infringed on the patent law. The only way to tell if it’s GM or not is to spray it with the Round Up the same company produces. What will die is his own crop and what will not is the “round up ready” canola. Plant diversity and individual farmer’s rights are what’s gone and super weeds that require even more spraying with even more toxic chemicals are what’s left.

Breathless moment: watching a slug ingest corn and die. The corn itself is classified as an insecticide (thanks to it’s modification) so if it eats the corn, it dies. NOT: it was sprayed and it died. But IT ATE THE SAME CORN I ATE and died.

The biotech companies sell their product’s image by saying it can feed the world. But think about that. Much of the third world countries were once ag-rich. They kicked small farmers off their land to grow exports so they could pay debts to 1st world countries. The problem is more accessibility to food, not growing methods, as food regularly rots in abundance in this and other countries.

“Go Local” has simple wisdom behind it that can be applied in just about every setting. This movie shows what happens when an approach, that has never been voted on by the people (and the majority of people do not want GM food, or at least want labels on it), for global methods takes over. When four companies control ALL of the food supply. The seed supply. The retail. Sound free to you?

Never mind how much better something locally grown tastes. That isn’t the primary focus of this film but it will leave you longing for something grown in your own yard. The beauty of a variety different than the beige monotony of a typical produce section is mentioned at the end, when the counter-movement is emphasized: farmer’s markets, CSA’s, and organics. When the reminder sounds that the “consumer is still king”, that we have power with our dollars and how we spend them, hope springs. I remember that I can refuse to buy canola oil (not good for you anyway), items with high fructose corn syrup, soy-everything, and non-organic grains.

Even if you read most of this and thought, “blah, blah, blah”, or felt overwhelmed at something that might cause you to pause more in the store, or simply thought it didn’t interest you, it’s still an important film to watch. It will take one hour of your life and will leave you more motivated to support what could save our future, our children, our food supply. It will dawn on your mind what a world-economy controlled by a few could look like. It occurred to me how ironic it would be for the apocolyptic kind of world catastrophe that we sometimes hear predicted to come from not a big bomb and nuclear power but from corn seeds….little kernels of science fiction.

The movie: The Future of Food. I got our copy from Netflix. I’m wondering what my friend the botanist would say….I think I need to watch Path To Freedom’s new video brochure again for a little inspiration and encouragement.

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