cakeaustin

Last night Suzanne and I trucked it up to Killeen for the TOFGA TCOOPS banquet featuring Joel Salatin, the farmer made famous in part by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. What an immense pleasure to hear him speak – and an honor, really, to be in the same room. I’ll be writing a bit more about it on The Dirt, but for now, wanted to mention how engaging Salatin’s read on Romans 13:3 was – For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. It gave me goosebumps, then sweats, as I sat listening to him recount the government’s cripplingly bureaucratic and at times, hostile, confrontations with him and Polyface’s workers and animals. Confiscating pastured meats because they weren’t processed in a “sterile”, government-sanctioned facility? Forcing workers who tend poultry not to rotate onto tending pigs and cattle? All done, by the way, in the name on cleanliness and avoidance of “bioterrorism” – nevermind the fact that Salatin’s meat registered drastically lower in bacterial content than feedlot meat.

And all done, by the way, to squelch the profitability of an alternative and viable closed-loop food system which threatens – even on a small scale – the industrial food establishment, and thereby, the government which takes its money. If you doubt that this is the case I would urge you to read at least one of these articles and watch the video below. I adore the “farmer-as-stage-manager” metaphor…

The sandwich war rages on. Click here for the latest silliness.

Honestly, Subway has done a lot in the way of helping truly obese people grasp what reasonable meals – or at least foodlike substances, as Pollan would say – might resemble. The “Jared” craze had my attention, if for no other reason that for people genuinely struggling with their weight, Subway offered an affordable, convenient and minimally processed way to control portion size. Still, the 6-inch sandwich, no matter its contents, remains closer to 2.5 serving sizes. We’ve just been lulled into complacency by the multi-billion dollar food marketing spend targeted at each of us every year.

About five years ago the futurist on staff at my marketing agency in New York began warning of rampant greenwashing which would take place during and after the green movement had peaked, culturally. Although practically every object one can buy these days has something “green” or “sustainable” about it, which consumers have done well to begin popping the hoods of, there are quieter, more sinister PR land grabs being made and I wonder how many of us are aware.

This morning CFS reported on the USDA’s approval of a new first generation of pesticide-promoting GE crop designed to survive spraying with multiple herbicides. “This GE corn variety was developed by DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred International to tolerate applications of  glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) and acetolactate synthase-inhibiting herbicides (ALS inhibitors).  This latest petition to deregulate a new, untested, and complex GE crop poses food safety, environmental, and agronomic concerns that were not adequately evaluated by the outgoing administration’s USDA,” writes Jenny Huston, Dir. of Culinary Social Enterprise at Bay Area Community Services.

So, back to greenwashing: last year’s Green Living Home & Products Expo at Austin Convention Center, there were numerous green building and sustainable living products, unquestionably. Several local businesses and some nonprofits were featured. There were also corporations who ought not to have been there, most notably DuPont.

I will not be attending the 2009 Expo in a few weeks, however I’ve already seen it posted on some of the local sites and event calendars I frequent. I am urging that we each be vigilant in questioning everything which calls itself green. As the words “organic” and “sustainable” become co-opted by Wal*Mart and Monsanto, the responsibility of speaking up is ours. Complacency is the force which has slid America into the state she finds herself in today.