Sustainable Food Movement Encroaching on Washington!

For the past few years we have all seen the rise of the movement towards organic foodstuffs in the United States. However, despite this movement there are still legal discrepancies surrounding labeling and processing that make it hard for American's to get a healthy diet even with the mission of staying true to organic foods. Some of these problems include the following:

• A product can be labeled as Organic whether it is or IS NOT actually organic as long as it does not contain the USDA Certified Organic label. Many newcomers to organic foods make the mistake of buying so called "organic" products that in all actuality have been grown and processed with conventional means.


• Products can be labeled trans fat free or have a label stating that the contain "0 grams transfat" and STILL contain up to 0.5 grams per serving.


• Genetically modified foods are not required to be labeled so Americans are consuming mass quantities of GM foods without the knowing the actual repercussions of such practices. When you mess with the DNA of our food, no one knows for sure what that does to our health...but then again Washington hasn't pushed for research on the subject either.

It has become more and more obvious, to those that are aware of the situation, that eating organic foods is not enough. In order to truly have the maximum amount of control over our diet and our health we need to go back to sustainable living practices. This means eating whole, non-processed foods...vegetables, fruits, non GM grains (sprouted if possible), meats, healthy fats and non-processed oils such as coconut oil, butter, flax seeds, and more. This means going back on the practices of the 20th-21st centuries and returning to the nutritive practices of our forebearers.

And hallelujah, Washington is slowly but surely starting to catch the drift as is shown in this NY Times Business Article...

The most vocal booster so far has been the first lady, Michelle
Obama, who has emphasized the need for fresh, unprocessed, locally grown
food and, last week, started work on a White House vegetable garden. More
surprising, perhaps, are the pronouncements out of the Department of
Agriculture, an agency with long and close ties to agribusiness.
In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.” Two weeks later, the Obama administration named Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a longtime champion of sustainable agriculture and healthy food, as Mr. Vilsack’s top deputy.

For more information on how to live sustainably visit http://www.slowfoodusa.org/

Sustainable Food Movement Encroaching on Washington!