We purchase so few commercially manufactured products. Regular readers of this publication will know that our family tries to make as much from scratch as we can here on our small farm. There is a product, though, that I have been buying for many years. For health reasons, I drink a small amount of cranberry juice every morning, and as we don’t have our own cranberry bog, (more’s the pity!) I’ve depended on Santa Cruz Organic’s berry juice to mix with the cranberry juice so it isn’t too sour to drink.

I am feeling so disappointed and surprised right now by a letter that was published on the Organic Consumers Association website, and which you can read for yourself in full here. A letter was apparently sent to Santa Cruz Organic inquiring about their GMO (genetically modified organism) policies and here is the part of the reply from the company that just has me shaking my head:

In recent years, agricultural science has developed and grown crops using modern biotechnology techniques in an effort to produce a higher quality, more economical and dependable food supply. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have determined that existing “biotech” foods are safe and do not differ in any meaningful way from other food. Due to the expanding use of biotechnology by farmers and the commingling of ingredients in storage and shipment, it is possible that some of our products may contain ingredients derived from biotechnology.

Here is why I am so disappointed:
Savvy organic foods purchasers know that our food system has been so heavily compromised by the unwanted products of biotechnology, that even the organic label does not provide 100% protection from accidental contamination.

But what is this? What is this about quoting the bribed mouths of the USDA, EPA and FDA about the safety of GMOs? Savvy organic food purchasers also definitely know that the revolving door between Monsanto’s biotech empire and the U.S. Government has created the disaster of GMO substances being poured, unlabeled and untested, into the nation’s food supply. I believe the most recent figure I read was that 75% of manufactured food products in the U.S. now contain GMOs.

You probably already know this, and my family definitely knows it. We know that GMOs have not been proven safe and that independent scientific studies have, in fact, linked them to all kinds of really scary health harms. We know that our governmental agencies have given into monetary temptations and have compromised themselves and the American people by allowing the country to be fed these unwanted substances.

But what I’d like to know (and maybe you would, too,) is why I’m reading a letter from a business that is trading on the ORGANIC label, mouthing the lies and rhetoric of the biotechnology industry. Come again? This is coming from Santa Cruz Organic – an organic food producer that’s been around since the 1970′s? They support the idea that genetically modified organisms are safe and no different than actual food?

I want readers to know that I tried to get Santa Cruz Organic’s public relations department on the phone this morning and left my name and number, but had not heard back from them by the end of the day. I wanted to speak to them personally about this, but it will be up to them to make this conversation happen, in which case, I will follow up on this post.

Apparently, Santa Cruz Organic was bought out some time ago by Smuckers – a company with no safety policies in regards to GMOs and whether the people who founded the business have passed away, lost their minds, sold out, been convinced of the safety of GMOs or what have you, the choice for me is pretty clear.

There is absolutely no way I can support Santa Cruz Organic after reading that letter. Now, had the letter been worded along the lines of “we’re as freaked out as you are about GMOs and are making every effort to keep them out of our supply chain, which is getting harder and harder to do as more and more farms become contaminated” I would have understood this honest approach.

My take on the letter is that, like so many others, this company has gone over to the dark side and is using the quotes of compromised health agencies to support their beliefs and policies which I consider to be wholly out of alignment with the ethics of organics.

If you’re selling conventional foods…go right ahead and do this. But not if you’re making your millions off the organic label. I’m expecting a lot more from you than this. And, if your ORGANIC food company has a more intelligent GMO policy than Santa Cruz Organic and you’d like to tell me about your juice, I’d love to hear from you. Lakewood? Anyone?

So, that’s it with buying anything manufactured by Santa Cruz Organic. I hope the reputation management marketers employed by the company read this totally honest reaction by a one-time fan. Folks: I’m closing my wallet and it’s all your fault.

——————————————————-

UPDATE: AUGUST 2nd

Today, we received the following email from the SMUCKERS corporation, owners of Santa Cruz Organic:

Dear Mim,

Thank you for contacting us. Recently, it came to our attention that we
inadvertently shared information on GMOs that did not apply to our Smucker
Natural Foods products. We regret this unfortunate incident and have
already taken steps to provide correct information to our consumers. We
sincerely apologize for any confusion that has resulted from this
miscommunication.

Below for your reference is the Smucker Natural Foods position with respect
to GMOs:

Smucker Natural Foods, Inc. is dedicated to the health and safety of our
consumers. We have taken great care to provide products that are made with
high quality and wholesome ingredients.

We have established a documentation program for all of our natural products
and their respective ingredients, with the goal of utilizing only
ingredients grown and produced without the use of biotechnology.

Smucker Natural Foods, Inc. has an extensive documentation program
verifying that suppliers of our organic raw materials meet the requirements
of the National Organic Program.

Our consumers can be assured that we are in full compliance with existing
Federal regulations and policies with respect to food labeling and product
safety. We will continue to monitor this situation and comply with any
future regulations.

Best wishes,
Diane Silverman
Manager, Corporate Communications
The J.M. Smucker Company
330-684-3672

How To Interpret This Response
You must decipher for yourself how you feel about this. It appears to me that some brouhaha happened as a result of the letter sent to the Organic Consumers Association member and that Smuckers is taking steps to correct this by differentiating their ‘natural’ products from their other lines.

Essentially, what customers who continue to purchase Santa Cruz Organic products must confront is that, like so many other organic vendors, the company has been bought out by a large corporation that is not in sympathy with organic policies and values. I believe we have pointed to this terrific graphic illustrating which organic and natural companies are owned by corporate parents, and it’s worth looking at again because it is incredibly hard to keep track of this stuff.

The Smuckers-Santa Cruz Organic connection isn’t on that particular chart, but the information is doubtless out there somewhere.

To purchasers of organic products, knowing what dollars spent are actually supporting can be of real importance. Some of you, after reading SMUCKERS’ reply, may feel that you are safe purchasing products from their Santa Cruz Organic line. Others will have come away with too bad a taste in their mouth from reading the true policies of the actual owners of the business who clearly support genetic engineering and you won’t want to reward such corporate policies with your hard earned money any more.

What decision will you make? We’d like to know.

The basic point of the article is that we’re more or less bound to fail attempting to fight Monsanto and other biotech empires within Washington. Too many politicians all the way up to the level of president are too compromised to put human rights over money in this area because of bribery and revolving doors.

The author suggests a different approach – grass roots initiatives for mandatory GMO labeling on a state level. Read the article and you will see how this would be possible and the massive power that would suddenly be given back to the people if even one state managed to pass such an initiative. Basically, a domino effect could happen, putting GMO profits out of commission on a national scale. According to the article, 85%-95% of Americans believe GMOs should be labeled. Just imagine what would happen if everyone could clearly see which products contain GMOs and which don’t…it’s very doubtful that ANYONE would knowingly eat this stuff provided other choices were available, and any food supplier wishing to remain in business would need to start sourcing from GMO-free suppliers only. Imagine that.

Well, I won’t get started on this right now. Time to go make our organic supper on the family farm, but please, if you have a moment, read that article. I think OCA has hit on what could be an immensely powerful winning strategy.

This is an important alert to all California readers. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) is preparing a ‘Programmatic Environmental Impact Import’ (PEIR) which will give them advance approval for all future pesticide spraying programs, without any safeguards of public input of any kind.

As I see it, this is the government’s reaction to the massive public protest of the LBAM spraying in 2007-2009 that effectively halted some of the most egregious aspects of that horrific program after the families of the central coast had been aerially sprayed. Remember: this was the first time a state’s residents had ever succeeded in stopping aerial spraying in the entire history of the country. I’m sure it freaked the CDFA out.

The goal of the CDFA’s Pest PEIR is to take away any opportunity for public input on future pesticide spraying by gaining carte blanche approval for anything the agency wants to do. There isn’t a county in California that isn’t already overly-burdened with toxins, and VeganReader views CDFA’s Pest PEIR as being a disaster for human and environmental health. California’s government needs to spend its compromised budget on cleaning up our state – not further polluting and damaging it.

You can read a press release and joint letter of protest to Jerry Brown here and you can get information about writing your own letter to the governor here.

As Californians, we are tired of breathing air that gives us cancer. We are tired of eating poisoned food from monocropping agribusinesses. We are tired of not being able to swim in our rivers because they are toxic, let alone drink water anywhere but from the treated tap. We are tired of a government that closes beloved state parks with one hand, while dumping pesticides on children with the other.

These unwanted scenarios do not align with our need for health and life. California needs to abandon antiquated methods of ‘controlling’ the environment with chemicals. It doesn’t work, and it makes every living thing sick. CDFA’s post-WW II approach to agriculture is a failure and it’s time to move forward towards healthy stewardship of the land, via education and dedication to making this state a place where it is safe to live, eat, drink, breathe, work and play.

If you live in California, please consider writing to Jerry Brown to tell him you do not support CDFA’s proposed Pest PEIR and that you want total reform in the outdated agricultural policies that have turned our state toxic.

Have you noticed the little blue labels under certain products in the aisles of the nearest Whole Foods Market? They read ‘Gluten Free’ and are placed next to specific items to let people with Celiac Disease or gluten intolerance know that a product is safe for them to consume. This is a laudable and humane courtesy on the part of the Whole Foods Corporation – letting people know that some products are safe to eat, while others could cause life-threatening damage to the health of the consumer.

But there’s a label missing from the long shelves at Whole Foods and pretty much every other market in the United States: the one that should read Contains Genetically Modified Organisms. For the love of money, our government continues to refuse to label GMO products, and as the quote accompanying the above image indicates, genetic engineering corporations are fully aware of the fact that alerting the shopping public to the presence of GMOs could cause consumers to flee such products like the plague.

I am not personally hopeful about convincing compromised government officials or Monsanto’s minions as to the suicidal immorality of what they are doing to the world’s food supply, but I can see the sense in approaching Whole Foods and every surviving neighborhood health food store on the subject of GMO labeling, because every one of these markets trades on the idea of a higher quality product and a higher degree of commitment to human and environmental health. Don’t know the ABCs of GMOs yet? Before you read further, spend 1 hour and 50 minutes watching The World According To Monsanto and I can pretty much guarantee, your world view will be forever changed for the wiser and better by this acclaimed film.

“Heath Starts Here,” proclaims my Whole Foods shopping bag, which has also been variously emblazoned with slogans over the years along the lines of, “We’re making a difference,” “Healthy Eats”, “Pack A Healthy Lunch”, “Love What You Eat”, “Stock Up On Healthy Options,” etc.

These sentiments and tips all sound good, but our country’s truth in advertising laws are not compelling Whole Foods to back up claims of ‘healthy’ with any types of studies, warnings or labels regarding the presence of GMOs in a major percentage of the products they vend. Google ‘scientists against GMOs’, ‘doctors against GMOs’ and you will discover just how many non-compromised researchers are speaking out against genetic modification. And, be sure you watch the segment of The World According To Monsanto about the eminent Scottish doctor, Arpad Pusztai, whose discovery of the alarming effects of genetically engineered potatoes on laboratory animals resulted in him being fired years ago.

This is precisely the education every American needs to see beyond the vague and hollow claims of ‘healthy’ being used by markets and manufacturers to promote their strong brands and, very often, offer reason for the higher price tags on their goods.

The bottom line is that if what you put in your shopping cart isn’t 100% organic, and if it contains any trace amount of corn, soy, canola, cottonseed or beets, it is probably genetically modified. Because a major portion of all processed foods contain some form of corn or soy (often listed in techie-sounding ingredient terms that don’t use the words ‘corn’ or ‘soy), doing the math means that most non-organic processed foods are genetically modified. And the manufacturers aren’t going to label this because they make more profit out of doing things on the cheap. And the government is too tied up in profit arrangements to mandate such labeling. And the so-called natural food markets aren’t doing a much better job, despite their self-proclaimed stance of being ‘caring’.

In January of the this year, Whole Foods did something that was so the opposite of caring, it may make writing this article seem rather useless. Their own power truly went to their heads in appointing themselves representatives of the organic movement and urging the USDA to green light the ‘conditional deregulation’ of Monstanto’s genetically engineered alfafa, causing organic farmers, consumers and organizations around the globe to cry, “foul” and “what on God’s green earth are you doing?”.

So, why bother to confront a corporation that would do such a thing? Why bother to suggest that Whole Foods voluntarily begin putting a little colored sticker underneath any product in their inventory that is not GMO-free? I’m dreaming large, surely, but I’m not alone.

Dedicated, educated groups like Millions Against Monsanto and the Organic Consumers Association are spearheading organized citizen rallies and marches, urging companies like Whole Foods to stop claiming to support organics while selling billions of dollars worth of genetically engineered products. If you read the article I’ve linked to, you’ll see that these folks mean business and are forming specific plans for putting pressure on these corporations to start walking their talk. Wide scale boycotts may well be in the offing.

Dollars and ethics
I admire and respect every American who is joining in these rallies and movements. Without a doubt, in our capitalist society, our money speaks loudest to people who hear in dollars and cents. But I would like to put my request more simply, and this goes out to Whole Foods and every other natural foods market in the nation:

“Voluntarily label your products as genetically engineered because you actually do care.”

Take a load off our jaded shoulders, weighted down with the cynicism that comes of dealing with one lie after another, couched in the language of positive marketing. Don’t pretend to care. Care. You people at Whole Foods Corporate Headquarters are sitting in a position of genuine power for good or evil – and I mean of the epic, saga, cliffhanger kind of good and evil.

Just imagine if you were to label all of those GMO products carefully, with a little sticker in the style of the ‘gluten free’ one you already use. You would be able to watch, in action, exactly how many of your customers would stop putting all of that scary junk in their baskets and their bodies, because you’d lifted them out of ignorance into a position of dignified, informed decision making. And then, like watching a hero’s journey unfold, you could witness the live response of the companies who are so far skating by using GMOs in their products. You could watch to see if they face the music and upgrade to 100% organic ingredients or fall off the market into anonymity for failing to meet true consumer demand.

And, you could watch the organic farms grow – the ones putting in the special effort to source and grow organic corn, soy, and other crops. Your corporation is so huge: the money coming down to organic farmers vs. conventional ones really would make a difference – one you could tout with pride on your shopping bags and in your stores. You, Whole Foods executives, could make an absolutely real change in the world. You are in a unique position to do so. See this as your moment in history where you take a stand for what you stand for and know that your decision will be affecting life on Earth for generations to come.

Whew – that’s a lot on your shoulders, but in ethical societies, there has always been a certain obligation of the rich towards the poor. You’ve made yourselves rich, and you are definitely powerful. Your shoppers are absolutely ripe for this experiment – and it’s one without the harms and shames inherent in the GMO experiment going on with Americans’ health. Let your shoppers decide. Give them the choice. Really care. You’ve already got those blue sticker machines that print the Gluten Free labels. Turn on the presses and let them print the truth about what is in the non-organic products.

There are so many good reasons for you to do this, from a business standpoint, because telling the truth to your customers is the only way you will ever truly know what they want. But let me treat you, for just a moment, like folks – and ask you to do this not for money, but for love. I’m watching in faith and hoping to see you do something different – do something right.
———–

Photo Credits: EEK and Austin’s Only Paper

Aren’t you glad you live in Clover country? This TV jingle is one SF Bay Area residents will immediately recognize from childhood, along with the marketed picture we were sold of happy Clo the Cow, enthroned in endless green pastures, endlessly producing milk for human children rather than her own calves. Clo the Cow appeared at pumpkin patches and county fairs, giving away free ice cream to kids, and no local child could fail to recognize the benevolent face of Clo smiling down at them from the sides of milk trucks and billboards across the region. Having your slogan, containing words like Clo or Moo, used by Clover Stornetta Inc. has been seen as a mark of cleverness and decades of these catchy phrases have featured everything from Clo as historic figure to nursery rhyme character. But the latest billboard on view in the North Bay, billing Clo as Eclo-friendly, has gone too far.

In implying that dairy farming is eco-friendly, Clover Stornetta is depending upon public ignorance to smile on this completely misleading depiction, much the same way that the California Milk Advisory Board attempted to foist the unfounded claim that the state’s milk comes from Happy Cows. The CMAB probably did not expect such a fact-filled backlash to their Happy Cow campaign and I have to assume that Clover Stornetta Inc. is similarly insulated in its hopes and wishes that Northern Californian residents drink milk while being totally unobservant of the environmental damage from dairy farming that is so obvious in this part of the country and across the nation.

Rather than simply accept the insult to my intelligence inherent in a marketing campaign that equates the dairy industry with environmental health, I’d like to let Clover Stornetta Inc. know 6 facts I’ve learned about dairy farming.

Fact 1
We’d better hope that Clo doesn’t feel the call of nature while crossing the stream in the billboard image. California officials cite cows as a major source of nitrate pollution in more than 100,000 square miles of polluted groundwater. Drink from a stream anywhere in the Bay Area and you’re likely to wind up in the hospital or dead.

Fact 2
Humans can catch more than 40 different diseases from manure. Cow’s manure includes toxic and fatal pathogens including Salmonella, E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and fecal coliform.

Fact 3
Manure from dairy cows is cited as the cause of the Cryptosporidium contamination of Milwaukee’s drinking water in 1993, which sickened 400,000 people and killed more than 100 of them.

Fact 4
Manure causes algal blooms, depleting the oxygen in water. This phenomenon contributes to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico where the water is completely devoid of life in an area that has expanded to as much as 7,700 square miles in some years.

Fact 5
Ranching destroys the Earth’s top soil, is one of the major causes of global deforestation and is repeatedly cited as a major threat to endangered species due to the habitat destruction inherent in turning formerly wild lands into cattle pasture.

Fact 6
Farm animals, particularly cattle, produce more than 100 million tons of methane a year. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together.

Not So Glad To Live In Clover Country
Clover Stornetta Inc. does business in a part of the country known for its highly educated and generally aware populace. Anyone who encounters this company’s current claims of ‘Eclo’ friendliness has a right to feel insulted by such a baldly misleading ad campaign. Far from being friendly to the environment, the practices of dairy farmers are repeatedly cited by independent journals and books as being key causes of environmental destruction and global warming.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, just ask the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network about the absolute lows they are recording in endangered coho salmon hatching due to water pollution and global warming. Call your local water commissioner and ask him why California scientists are saying that 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. Or, just take your eyes and nose on a drive through dairy farming country in the region. Apart from the unbelievable stench, you are likely to see what I have:

• Dairy cows with uterine prolapse (the womb of the animal hanging outside of its body) while the cow stands ankle deep in her own manure and urine.
• Large numbers of dairy cows confined to small, grassless enclosures, staring through metal bars at passing traffic.
• Dairy cows with some type of skin condition that results in all of their hair rubbing off parts of their hides, revealing raw skin caked with manure.
• The calves of dairy cows taken from their mothers and confined to rows and rows of tiny plastic igloos set atop bleak fields of mud and manure.

The observable facts about the lives of dairy cows are not what Clover Stornetta Inc. will promote, preferring to sell an eerily sanitized picture of a spotlessly clean, grinning Clo, taking a nature hike through pristine wilderness. In recent times, Clover Stornetta Inc. has begun contracting with several organic dairies in order to deliver organic milk to consumers who feel they are making a more environmentally-friendly choice with such purchases. While organic milk production may do something to reduce the growing threat of antibiotic resistance approaching all of mankind with untold scourges of disease, thanks to the massive use of these drugs by conventional meat and dairy operations, organic dairy farming does nothing to reduce the pollution of water and soil, habitat destruction or global warming rooted in the raising of cattle.

It’s time to take off the rosy glasses and face the realities of life in the place Clover Stornetta Inc. has dubbed ‘Clover Country’. Local clean water, land and air was once the life support system of the Ohlone, Pomo and Miwok Peoples who called what we now term the SF Bay Area ‘home’ for thousands of years. But now, the combination of milk and alcohol production has turned ‘home’ into a place where you can’t drink the water, can’t breathe healthy air and are facing a planet that can become a dead zone if it heats up but a few more degrees.

This year, Yale Universtiy researchers released a study demonstrating the harms of marketing products to children via the use of cartoon characters. Studies like this have reached the same conclusions for decades, and I have to believe that the marketers employed by Clover Stornetta Inc. are well aware of such findings. If you see something wrong with an industry that persuades kids to cuddle up to Clo while polluting the children’s most basic need – clean drinking water – then I hope you will tell your youngsters why this depiction of an eco-friendly dairy cow is not telling the truth. Teaching young people to tell the truth and to discern when they may be being exploited are vital duties for any parent who wants to raise thinking human beings rather than compliant consumers.

In the spirit of telling the truth, I’d like to offer my own suggested ‘Clo’ slogan for Clover Stornetta Inc. and while I very much doubt they’ll be plastering it over a billboard near you, that’s what independent blogs are for. I say boo to the fantasy of dairy cows being eco-friendly, and yes to telling the truth:

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” That’s what the simplest, most life-loving element inside me wants to shout when I see our vital SF Bay Area water sources being blasted with a toxic herbicide in the name of ‘controlling’ a weed. But I need to do more than shout. I need to give you the basic facts about the Spartina Project and the ground and aerial spraying that is contaminating some of our largest and most critical bodies of water with an herbicide that has been linked to massive health harms in mammals. If you reside anywhere in the Bay Area, the Spartina Project is being conducted where you live and you have a right to know that you and your family is being exposed to Imazapyr through contamination of the air, ground and water as a result of this terribly misguided project.

I find it especially diabolical that Marin County, with one of the highest breast cancer rates in the nation, is being saturated with Imazapyr, further exposing local women to totally unnecessary toxins that can only derail their ongoing struggle for health and life. None of us should be eating, drinking or breathing this toxic herbicide, but as usual, it is the babies, women, elders and already-ill portions of Bay Area populations that can least afford to be exposed to further toxins. Just last year, Marin Ag Officials had to admit that they had violated their own pesticide laws by allowing thousands of gallons of carcinogenic pesticides to be sprayed over public places for years and years. No need to look much further for an answer to all that Marin County cancer! And now the government is funding the further contamination of this already-compromised area with yet more unnecessary chemicals. I am convinced that this needs to be stopped, but I want you to have the chance to review the hushed-up facts about the Spartina Project and make up your own mind.

What Is The Spartina Project?
Spartina is a grass that, if left unmanaged, can alter ecosystems by filling waterways with weeds and mud instead of water. Spartina grass is found growing in much of the SF Bay Area. A government-funded group has been created to manage the growth of spartina grass, but rather than doing in this in an ecologically-sound manner, the group has decided to partner with an herbicide company to aerially spray and ground spray massive amounts of toxins into our rivers, marshes and other water bodies to poison the grass to death.

It is disgraceful that here in 2010, government agencies are still using these moronic approaches to wild land management – meeting the presence of a few weeds or bugs with an insane barrage of chemicals that assaults all life. In my 2008 article on the Spartina Project, I suggested that these government agencies stop making fat deals with herbicide manufacturers and start using that money to employ our growing population of jobless Californians to manually remove spartina grass where there is too much of it, on an ongoing basis. The harvested grass could then be used in some green business such as basket making. Here in 2010, our unemployment rate is even more drastic, but the Spartina Project continues to funnel funding to bureaucrats and chemical barons while exposing citizens to totally unnecessary toxins because these agencies refuse to embrace green management practices.

What Are The Toxins In the Spartina Project?
Here is the Herbicide Fact Sheet for Imazapyr. Please, read it in full, but to summarize, this herbicide has been linked to the following drastic health harms in mammal studies:

• Increased brain, adrenal gland and thyroid cancers
• Kidney cysts
• Stomach ulcers and lesions
• Fluid accumulation in the lungs
• Abnormal blood formation in the spleen
• Irreversible damage to and corrosion of the eyes and skin

As a woman with Crohn’s Disease, I don’t want to be exposed to anything that causes stomach lesions, and I don’t want anyone I love to be exposed to increased incidence of cancer, tumors or any of the other devastating effects linked to Imazapyr. I’m sure you don’t either. From what I have read in the Herbicide Fact Sheet, Imazapyr cannot be filtered out of drinking water, and in the few studies that were conducted, it was found to be a ‘persistent’ herbicide which contaminated both water and soil and was still there until the farthest out date from spraying for which it was tested. In other words, as long as researchers kept looking, Imazapyr was still there. No one knows if it ever ‘goes away’.

In addition to this, this herbicide, which is being ground and aerially sprayed directly in some fo the Bay Area’s most vital waterways, has never been tested for its chronic toxicity to fish and other aquatic life! As hard as that is to believe, it’s true. The Spartina Project is spraying an herbicide on aquatic animals without having any idea what it will do to them. The only known facts from testing are that the related herbicide, imazamethabenz-methyl, has high chronic toxicity to fish with effects occurring at less than 1 part per million. So much for the Coho Salmon everyone is trying to save in Marin’s waterways.

Imazapyr, which is manufactured by the American Cyanimid Company and is sold under the brand names, Arsenal, Chopper and Assault (don’t those names give you some idea of the danger of this product?), contains 47% ‘inert’ ingredients which U.S. law enables the manufacturer to keep secret from the public. So, we don’t know what these secret ingredients do, but what we do know is that the disclosed ingredients break down into two products when exposed to light. One of these, quinolinic acid, is a neurotoxin that causes nerve lesions and symptoms similar to Huntington’s Disease. This, of course, is only what we know about the disclosed ingredients in Imazapyr. No tests have ever been done on the secret ingredients.

Finally, Imazapyr is deadly to other plants, destroying their synthesis of DNA. Endangered plants and food crops are damaged by this herbicide.

In sum, Imazapyr is extremely dangerous to mammals, may well be deadly to aquatic life, contaminates drinking water for a prolonged, unknown time period, contaminates soil and kills non-targeted plants. This is not something any informed Bay Area resident would knowingly allow to be introduced into our environment.

Where And When Is The Spartina Project Happening?

As of writing this, the Spartina Project is going on near water bodies right now all over the SF Bay Area, including the Bolinas Lagoon, the Petaluma River, Limantour and Drakes Esteros, San Pablo Bay, all over San Francisco and elsewhere. The spraying is being done both via airplane and via ground spraying.

Please look at the 2010 Spraying Schedule to see the locations and dates, but please do not rely on the dates as readers have reported to me that the Spartina Project has not stuck to their own schedule and has sprayed on days they said they wouldn’t. But whether you happen to be walking along a marsh, creek, river or bay trail the day of a spraying or not, it almost doesn’t matter. Once these Spartina Project people spray, the herbicide will be in your air, water, ground and body for a long, long time.

What Can You Do About The Spartina Project?
Here is the contact page for the board members of the Spartina Project:

http://spartina.org/about.htm#staff.

Step one is to let them know that you have taken the time to educate yourself about the toxicity of Imazapyr and do not want it in your water, air, soil or body. Tell them you want this project stopped in the SF Bay Area.

Step two is more open to you, depending on what you think you can do to put a stop to such an unnecessary and dangerous plan. Perhaps you will organize a neighborhood protest group, write to local government officials or to local newspapers telling what you’ve learned about the toxic environment the Spartina Project is creating in the SF Bay Area. I think the main thing is not to be silent.

Government agencies have always relied on quiet and secrecy in order to conduct projects that would cause public outrage and opposition if they were widely understood. Right now, there are people going for their evening run around the local creek or marsh. They’ve got the baby in the stroller, the dog on the leash. And they have absolutely no idea that they are jogging through an invisible fog of carcinogenic chemicals because these chemical projects seldom make the news.

People proudly publicize accomplishments like the founding of a recycling center or the creation of a new green business. Spraying the San Francisco Bay Area with herbicides is hardly whispered about at all and its continuance depends of that weird, unnatural quiet. I started this article shouting, because I’m getting sickened to death by an ‘environmental/autoimmune disease’ while my neighbors are continuing to contaminate the world I’d like to keep living in. I spent last weekend in the hospital with my strange illness, called Crohn’s Disease, becoming epidemic in the U.S., cause unknown, cure nowhere in sight. As I lay in that hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and monitors, surrounded by fellow sufferers with cancers, disorders and disease, I thought about those Spartina Project people, spraying away. We should all be shouting.

Some 50 years have passed since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring – a book heralded by her contemporary society as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of its era. I have just finished reading Linda Lear’s very thorough biography of Rachel Carson’s life and wonder if anyone could contemplate the story of this remarkable woman without feelings of strong admiration. While fighting the final two years of her battle with cancer, Carson released her landmark book on the ecological devastation being wrought by the pesticide DDT and began speaking publicly on the subject; and the more ill she became, the stronger grew her voice in opposition to man’s mistaken efforts to control nature rather than learning to live gracefully within it.

Like the words of any legitimate prophet, Carson’s continue to ring true in our own day, but during my entire perusal of Lear’s biography, I found myself inwardly railing at the things that haven’t changed, despite the life and work of a human being of Carson’s merit. 10 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slavery came to its end in the United States. 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, we continue to befog our nation with billions of pounds of pesticides annually. It would seem that our society is even more dependent upon toxic chemicals than we once were upon slavery. Though DDT was eventually banned in the United States, the ‘peculiar institution’ of self-poisoning with carcinogens, mutagens and endocrine disruptors has only grown since Carson’s lifetime.

What Hasn’t Changed

Essential mindsets
Man as the controller of nature, blind trust in industry and government, and lack of personal accountability for the health of the environment continue to make up the thoughts and mental stances of so many Americans, despite decades of warnings, scandals, failures and disasters. All you have to do is look at the comments section on any news article about any environmental tragedy or disaster to see overwhelming evidence of this. I know I will never forget reading the comments of people during the aerial pesticide spraying of California’s Central Coast in 2007. Someone would write about dead sea birds, children in the hospital or some other tragic outcome of this spraying and there would always be comments insisting that pesticides were safe and the government – the same government that lauded the safety of DDT – would never harm us. These fear-based abdications of reason in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary are as rife as in Rachel’s day when industry and citizenry attacked her as being a communist and hysterical woman.

The Tactics
Having had first-hand experience of industry/government standard operations during the LBAM spray disaster of the past decade, it was almost re-affirming to watch Rachel Carson and her contemporaries face the identical lies, evasions, fact juggling and disregard for human rights that my peers continue to encounter around the issue of pesticides. Proponents of human rights and environmental health continue to be attacked and dismissed as alarmist, anti-government and delusional. In addition to being called a communist, Carson was accused of being – of all things – a ‘peace-nut’. Such a term may sound laughably quaint to us today, but anyone who has worked for peace or justice will easily relate to the ill spirit and underlying threat of slurs like these.

Carson was, in fact, sneered at for what appeared to some people as a ridiculous insistence that there was a careful balance in nature. If you watch this short video documentary about Carson’s work you will see a white-coated scientist explaining that man’s task is to control all nature. This was the very ideology Carson wanted to see abolished and exchanged for a more evolved conception of man’s small place in the grand scheme of the Universe.

Today, when we battle for human rights and environmental protection, we face the same stone-faced government agents who turn deaf ears to our sufferings and pleas to be governed as we wish by the people who are suppose to serve us. We face the same accusations by industry or fellow citizens of being unpatriotic or insane. We sense the same current of danger and threat when we tell the truth. And, we face an industrial-governmental complex even more deeply linked than that of Carson’s day. Industry controls nearly all important areas of our so-called Republic, and when we work for change, we are sharing the experience that Rachel Carson, her editors, publisher, friends and colleagues went through and refused to be discouraged by.

The Players
I groaned inwardly in reading Lear’s biography when the names of Velsicol, DuPont and Monsanto began appearing in the text on the pages of this lengthy book. I was struck with a sudden sense of injustice that Carson is long at rest, but the very corporations who foisted their leftover wartime chemicals on the American people are still very much in business. Monsanto’s absurd parody of Silent Spring – in which bugs are portrayed as the true danger to the earth, rather than DDT – shows up their ethics for what they truly are. Nearly everyone in the chemical industry championed DDT, just as they champion today’s carcinogenic scourges, and though the heads of most of those corporations in Carson’s times are likely in the grave now, company policy remains the same. In a letter to Carson, a colleague wrote:

“There are such powerful adversaries: the U.S Department of Agriculture and the business empires and the ever-increasing practice of monoculture.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we continue to whistle the exact same sad tune today.

This summer, Monsanto has elected itself Trojan Horse by attempting to ‘donate’ hundreds of tons of GMO corn seed to the disaster area of Haiti. This corn, which has been cited as a health hazard by numerous independent scientists, will not only contaminate Haiti’s regional heritage corn but would make serfs of Haitian farmers forever, as the non-reproducing corn could not be saved from year to year, but would force the people to re-purchase their seed corn annually from Monsanto. Visions of vultures are dancing in the heads of Americans and Haitians alike over this latest effort of the very same Monstano Corporation that mocked Rachel Carson when she cited DDT as a hazard. It can be painfully disheartening to contemplate the continuing story of corporations like this and the ever-growing, never-ending list of human and environmental tragedies that continues to be written.

What Has Changed
None of what I’ve written above is intended to diminish the very real accomplishments of Rachel Carson’s inspiring life. On a personal level, as a woman with an environmentally-caused chronic illness, I can’t be anything but moved and incredibly grateful to this one special woman who used her days on Earth, despite sickness and pain, to wake up a sector of the public to the dangers of pesticide use. I feel a strong kinship for Carson in that her motivation to protect the environment stemmed from her deep love of the beautiful Earth – a mindset identical to my own.

On a public level, Carson has done something of inestimable value for every human being who fights for environmental health. Today, at least where I live, I am able to find plenty of company when working on ecological issues. The people of my generation grew up in a world in which parents were at least concerned about pesticides, pollution, recycling, water quality and similar inter-related issues. This is because the parents grew up hearing about Rachel Carson and her contemporaries. These matters became part of the furniture of the human mind, thanks to the work of pioneering naturalists and environmentalists who started the struggle to bring American society back towards the Native ideals once dominant in this land: ideals of stewardship and appreciation of the Earth. We remain so far from the living practices of this country’s true Native forefathers, but at least, in 2010, not everyone I meet will think I am totally crazy if I suggest that there is a balance in nature. There are signs everywhere that we, as a whole people, are becoming less enchanted with our former obsession with ‘progress’.

Again, on a public level, we have Carson to thank as one of the instigators of modern thought regarding farming. Carson is certainly not responsible for the existence of organic farming practices, but she took inspiration from the testimony being given by an organic gardener whose food supply had been contaminated with DDT in the 1950s. All farms and gardens had been organic until the introduction of chemical pesticides and herbicides, but we had gotten so far away from this tradition in the post-WWII era that to be intentionally running an organic farm was something out of the ordinary in the 1950s. In 2010, where I live, it is not longer queer to farm organically. It is, in fact, seen as positive and modern. Certainly, much of the rest of the country has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to this, but when I look at California, I see evidence everywhere that Rachel Carson’s message ‘took’, at least on a small scale. On a large scale, commercial conventional agriculture still dominates, burdening our people and our land with a never-before-seen mixture of utterly toxic chemicals; but, at least I have the option to go to a local farmer, a farm market, a local grocery store and purchase safe, organic food. Rachel Carson’s work is inherent in this blessing, for certain.

Most importantly, perhaps, Rachel Carson’s gift to us is that of independent thought. Nearly all mid-20th-century Americans were shocked to learn that U.S. drug companies had been allowed to market Thalidomide (a sedative which caused horrendous birth defects) in the United States after the drug companies were fully aware of the effects the drug had caused abroad. People were outraged and stunned. Today, I think that less of us are stunned when our so-called regulating agencies, out of greed, fear or stupidity, fail to protect us from danger.

I think that, thanks to Carson and her peers, more 21st century American have learned to think for themselves, rather than placing unthinking trust in government and industry. We investigate. We weigh evidence. We work to make healthy choices despite the breaking of human rights laws by our politicians and the marketing ploys of big business. We may look one another in the eye for a moment and shake our heads about the rampant abuse we suffer at the hands of a government that has chosen profit over humaneness again and again, we may even try a dry chuckle over the fact that our politicians are supposed to be our servants, but while we make these somewhat jaded and socially acceptable gestures, many of us work to develop a private world in which we think for ourselves, build our own organic gardens, and strive to pass on to the next generation the values of environmental respect.

In geological time, 50 years is the blink of an eye, despite the vast human experience it represents. Who can say, over time, whether Rachel Carson’s clarion call, the voice crying in the wilderness, will eventually result in the environmentalists outnumbering the greedy? We’ve added genetic modification and global warming to our plate since Carson’s time. The odds are likely against us. But this is why I would encourage anyone to read Silent Spring and to look for a biography of this admirable woman’s life.

Time and again, the smallest, gentlest, humblest of people have had the most lasting effect on human society as a whole. If Rachel Carson, hampered with sickness and surrounded by a sleeping public, could put her skills to such good purpose, what can I do, what can you do? Simple folk have always and will always greatly outnumber the mighty and powerful. Take courage in the thought that we are now several generations deep in a society that has heard of the dangers of pesticide – a society that is learning to recognize the disease we have created in our loved ones and ecology – and we can do the work that is ahead of us. I am thinking about this today, looking out the window at my family’s organic farm, wondering what else I can do to carry on the work and move it forward, for love of the Earth.

This racist action is being leveled at the Mexican Indian people who are a vital part of life in this country, illegal or not. It is my personal belief that no human being should ever be labeled as illegal on their own home planet, but concepts of legal citizenship aside, this is a law which makes the state of Arizona a place of hatred and fear for all peoples. This law must be flatly condemned and held up as a prime example of those political elements in our nation which seek to destroy American ideals of liberty and equality.

I am feeling tremendous concern for Mexican Indian men, women and children right now who must be feeling extreme anxiety and terror because of this wicked law and I am also deeply worried about the more than 250,000 members of the 21 Native American Tribes who call Arizona home. Unfortunately, the word in Indian Country about life in Arizona has never been good. I have read too many accounts of police and citizen brutality against and even murder of Native peoples in Arizona that have gone uninvestigated and unpunished to feel that the state is a just or enlightened one. I can hardly stand to think that this new law will give police and private citizens further excuse to commit hate crimes against the local Indian peoples whom, with their wonderful dark skin and hair, may conveniently be suspected of being illegal aliens. Can you see this playing out like I can?

My father’s wry suggestion is that Mexican-American police begin arresting white people on suspicion of being illegal Canadian aliens. Others are advocating that all Americans boycott the state for this act of bigotry, refusing to vacation in Arizona or purchase the state’s products until this law is revoked. President Obama is starting an investigation of the legality of the law and national news sources give evidence of the outrage so many people are feeling over this hateful action.

My words – hatred, racism, bigotry, evil – are strong ones in this brief article, but this is a moment that calls for our most strenuous opposition. My family does not want to live in Nazi Germany or the Arkansas of the 1950s. The disgusting mentality of Arizona’s state government and the citizens who supported SB 1070 does not represent our ideals or morals as people who live in America. We do not want anyone to carry papers or live in fear of law enforcement officers or bigoted citizenry. Ugly minds conceive of laws like these and have no place in a land whose people are continuing to struggle to form a society where all human persons are respected. We are still so far from the day when people of every color and creed are equally valued. The immigration law shoves us backward into the territory of rounds-ups, pogroms, concentration camps, lynchings and ethnic cleansing. Let no one stand for this regression into our dark and violent past. Let us love our brother. Let us stand united against this immoral law.

About Me and Why I Was Considering A Raw Food Diet
I am an organic farmer and I have been a vegan for about 20 years. I did not make this decision because of the many promises of perfect health that are often touted as the benefits of a vegan diet – rather, I created a new way of eating for myself for solely ethical reasons. It’s a good thing I didn’t get into this way of eating for the health of it; despite spending two decades eating only organic, home cooked, whole foods vegan meals, I am one of the least healthy people I know.

Environmental pollution and mystery aggressors have left me with a legacy of inflammatory diseases, the most devastating of which has been Crohn’s Disease. Doctors consider my diet exemplary and my poor health a baffling mystery. My own conclusion is that a combination of genetics and environmental factors tend to dictate a person’s health profile. We all know elders who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and are doing fantastically at the age of 85. And, as so-called ‘alternative’ diets have been practiced for many generations now, we are all also likely starting to realize that some of our most good-food-conscious friends may also be our sickest. I have communicated with countless people (predominantly women) who have tried every elimination diet, tried being vegan, gluten-free, raw…you name it, and they continue to suffer from a host of serious environmental illnesses. I also know vegetarians who are incredibly healthy, fit and thriving. My conclusion is that any diet, however exemplary it may seem, is no guarantee of good health.

As I’ve said, I decided to adopt a vegan diet for ethical reasons and have never regretted it, but when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease 2 years ago (after suffering years of unexplained abdominal pain) I began to question my diet. Was there something more I could be doing? Somehow, I came upon the mention of the raw foods diet in connection with Crohn’s Disease and the related condition, Ulcerative Colitis, and this led me buy a book called Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis by David Klein. When you’re desperately ill, you are desperate, but as I read this book and supplemented this with hours of Internet research, my healthy powers of critical thought seemed to kick in for me, and while I’d love there to be a diet that would cure Crohn’s Disease or other conditions, I had to conclude that this isn’t it. It’s time to share my reasoning about this.

The Absence Of Data
Within reading the first few chapters of Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis by David Klein, I began to feel a growing concern over the fact that opinions appeared to be being presented as facts, with no scientific or other research data to back them up. I found this same concerning situation on many of the raw foods websites I visited during my research.

Some books are presented from an opinion standpoint. For example, an author might write, “I believe I feel healthier when I spend at least half an hour in the sunshine every day.” That’s an expression of opinion and belief. This is very different than saying, “The Earth is a sphere and here are the photos taken from space to prove this.” That’s a statement of fact, backed up with fact.

My take on the majority of information presented in David Klein’s book and on the majority of the raw foodism sites I visited was that opinion was being presented as fact without any type of concrete proof. While I consider science to be highly fallible at times, I do depend on research and sound reasoning to verify statements and absence of this in an arena where claims of healing and health are being made is something which concerns me deeply.

I encountered repeat claims that human beings were designed to live on fruit, that fruit contains the same proportions of nutrients as human milk, that cooking foods makes them deadly…many claims, but scant citations or research or proof. Several of the arguments in favor or raw foods deserve, I believe, especially critical assessment.

Man’s Natural Diet
I was puzzled to discover what I considered to be a truly faulty premise upon which the whole raw foods belief system appears to be based. There appears to be a romanticized, vague and golden image of a golden age of early man in which humans ate their perfect natural diet…the inference from this being that they enjoyed perfect health because of this.

It is my understanding that anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 195,000 years ago. Researchers quote the life span of early man as being something between 20-40 years…hardly a peak example of human longevity. Granted, a potentially dangerous environment and lack of modern medicines to fight disease doubtless contributed to early man’s relatively short life expectancy…but according to what I read in Self Healing Crohn’s and Colitis, disease is a myth.

David Klein appears to claim that the symptoms of disease are simply our body trying to heal itself from our assault on it in the form of cooked food or medicines. While I can see the logic and truth in the assertion that fevers, inflammations and the like are the biproducts of our body’s efforts to heal from disease, the whole fantasy of natural man eating some ideal diet falls apart when you ask yourself why early natural man, supposedly eating his perfect diet of raw fruit, was dying of diseases by the age of 40. It just doesn’t make sense.

All studies I have ever seen indicate that pre-fire, pre-tool human-type primates would have been omnivores, eating whatever they could manage to get their hands on be that fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, rodents, bugs…literally, whatever they could find and stomach. And, while human-type primates certainly ate raw food before finding fire, I could not find any credible references indicating that early man was a fruitarian – something frequently cited as some shining ideal of perfection raw foodists can strive to someday attain. Again, lack of citations and support in published works were very concerning to me.

Who is Natural Man?
Many primates use tools to access foods. Several different species of birds do the same – finding perfectly shaped sticks that they can poke into holes in order to retrieve grubs beyond the reach of their beaks. Porpoises carry sea sponges with them to assist them in foraging for meals. Does the use of tools mean that these creatures are eating in a manner unnatural to them, or do these skills and tools form a distinct characteristic that sets their species apart from others in a remarkable manner?

And what about man? Homo Erectus used both tools and fire and this species of human-type being predates our own species, Homo Sapiens, by about a million and a half years! How unnatural can something be to human creatures if beings of our relative kind have been doing it for something like two million years?

A central premise of raw foodism is that cooked foods are toxic and unnatural to us, but I found I could not follow this line of thinking when I considered that, in order to return to some previous mode of eating, we would have to go back beyond the origins of our own species – homo sapiens – in order to find models of ancient primates eating raw foods. I would assert that the use of tools, including fire, has been a characteristic of our people for as long as our people have existed, and that striving to abandon this history would involve ‘aping’ another type of creature.

It is also worth pointing out that while all raw foodists eschew the use of fire for processing food, a considerable industry is being developed to supply raw foodists with blenders, food processors and fancy vegetables slicers in order to aid them in making their meals palatable. These tools were, of course, wholly unknown to early man and yet again, the golden Eden-like ideal of perfect natural man seems to fall apart in the face of a diet which condemns the ancient use of fire while promoting the purchase of the latest in Cuisinart contraptions.

Environment and Survival
Polar bears have dense fur for living in icy climes and snails have built-in shelters wherever they go. Man has neither and just as man’s ability to occupy certain parts of the globe is dependent upon the acquisition of clothing and shelter – our ability to inhabit diverse regions of the planet has been historically dependent on our ability to make the most of the food supply we discovered or farmed there.

Whether you see major civilizations as a blessing or a curse to the Earth, there is no denying that every time man secured a food supply (particularly cultivated grain) population jumped and the mode of living we call civilization appeared. Our ability to make foods digestible by shelling them, pounding them, grinding them and cooking them is a unique skill that has been totally critical to the survival of our species. Even in the arid deserts of the Southwestern United States, Native Peoples (some of them, my ancestors) have been able to thrive for countless ages because of their ability to channel irrigation, dry farm, grind corn into meal and boil beans into a digestible state. This is the factual history of our inquisitive, imaginative species.

There are two issues I encountered frequently in my research of the raw food diet that I found troubling because of their apparent lack of wisdom in regards to both our historic experience as a species and our planet’s overwhelming need for the discovery of Earth-friendly living practices.

I encountered repeat mention of raw foodists experiencing physical coldness…sometimes a physical drop in body temperature. One story of a man attempting to live on raw fruit in Scandinavia and feeling freezing all of the time was especially poignant to me. If you study the historic cuisines of the coldest parts of the world, you will quickly begin to see that most cold climate peoples eat a great deal of fat in order to survive chilly weather. There are tribes in the northernmost parts of the American continents who eat tremendous quantities of pure animal fats and they have been eating this way for time beyond recall.

I would have to say that it seems like man has a good instinct inside to turn towards fat when he is cold. If we all lived in the tropics, perhaps this instinct would never assert itself, but only some of the people on the planet live in consistently warm climes where a diet of raw fruits and vegetables might not produce uncomfortable coldness. So, this was the first of the two things that troubled me about the realities of a planet where people live everywhere and need to eat foods that promote a vital body temperature.

Raw foodism does not necessarily mean a no-fat diet. It’s important to be clear about this. But what it does seem to advocate strongly is the acquisition of fats from fruits that are not available locally in most places. This is the second of my concerns. There is heavy promotion of coconuts and avocados in raw foods recipes, and unless you live in Thailand, Ecuador or some such place, the only way to subsist heavily on fatty tropical fruits is to have them flown to you, at great expense and at considerable cost to the environment. I found this to be a striking contradiction in a diet that is often styled as being ideally eco-friendly. Long distance shipping, when founded on fossil fuels, is not environmentally healthy and I began to feel that a person would need to move to South America to eat a raw local diet with adequate nutrients. Such a move would not be reasonable for most people.

I would assert that it goes against the laws of nature and the history of our species to adopt a diet which fails to maintain appropriate body temperatures in non-tropical climates and which may be largely dependent on having foods shipped in from afar. The Big Ag infrastructure could crumble at any time, and a raw foodist living in Norway might well find themselves in a life-or-death situation attempting to subsist on radishes and dill in the middle of a long winter. Try getting fresh local raw fruits and vegetables in New Jersey in January. Without Big Ag and international trade, you are out of luck, and a diet founded on the trade policies of multinational juggernauts may not be in alignment with a wish to live in peace with the world’s poor, upon reflection.

Our genius as a species, for good or ill, has been in our ability to adapt to nearly all environments and find the means of sustenance wherever we have gone. Homo Sapiens has survived for at least 200,000 years in this manner. I’m not sure it’s wise to make a big change in plans now.

Modern Food
South and Central America are the world’s food basket. In sum, the cuisines of numerous cultures are founded on the foods that were first cultivated in places like Peru and Mexico. Corn, Beans, Squash, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and countless other crops have become staples the world over, but they got their start in Indigenous hands on the American continents. Native Peoples took wild foods and cultivated them into new forms and this has been going on for millennia. I mention this here because it is very important to understand that the modern fruits and vegetables most people in the western world consume are wholly different than those which covered the earth when pre-tool, pre-fire man had his day.

I’m bringing this up because I feel it’s necessary to point out that modern raw foodists are not eating the raw fruits and vegetables of early human-type primates. Pre-homo-erectus cultures never ate a Fuji apple or a Nantes carrot or an ear of Silver Queen sweet corn. I believe it’s important to think about the reality that shooting for a pre-homo-erectus, pre-fire diet will ultimately be impossible, simply because evolution and agriculture have utterly changed the green face of the planet. So, again, I found myself encountering unattainable and romanticized ideals at the heart of the raw food diet. I needed to dig a little deeper.

Natural Hygiene – What is it?
After reading the first handful of pages of David Klein’s book about healing Crohn’s Disease, I began to ask myself who in the world T.C. Fry was. Quotes from this man make up a large portion of Klein’s book, and he is widely cited in the raw foods movement, but I’d never heard of him before. I also began wondering why David Klein’s name was appended with the title of Dr. The answer to both my questions lay in the topic of a set of beliefs called Natural Hygiene.

Natural Hygiene is believed to have been invented in the 1830s by graham cracker-inventor, Rev. Sylvester Graham. He gained a small following of people who were dubbed ‘grahamites’ and who, it seems, agreed with his advocacy of fasting, raw foods, no meat, some dairy and temperance. While many modern people might find Rev. Graham’s efforts to fight alcoholism admirable, fewer would be likely to agree with his extremist stances regarding vegetarianism as a means of controlling human sexuality. Natural Hygiene gradually fell out of favor when Rev. Graham died at the young age of 57, despite having promoted himself as a role model of good health.

About a hundred years later, Herbert M. Shelton resurrected the concept of Natural Hygiene and began publishing a magazine which ran for 40 years and in which Shelton propounded his theories of combining of raw foods for an ideal diet. T.C. Fry, another publisher of Natural Hygiene literature, began to be well-known in the 1970′s, and some attribute to him the popularity of raw foodism today.

I wanted to understand why David Klein (who is called Dr. because he is a Hygiene Doctor) found T.C. Fry to be so important that much of his book on healing Crohn’s Disease is devoted to the teachings of Fry. The more I read about T.C. Fry’s life, the more puzzled I became. Fry advocated a purely raw diet and earned his living by promoting himself and this diet as the ideal of perfect health. The truth is rather more complicated than this, and I found this article containing a series of interviews with people who knew T.C. Fry to be both alarming and illuminating. I can easily feel pity and sympathy for a fellow human who is so caught up in the search for health that he is binging and fasting, propounding the ‘truth’ of the Natural Hygiene raw diet one minute, and hiding in a closet eating junk food the next. He is only a human being. But, what is not honorable, in my opinion, was that Fry billed himself as a strict adherent to raw foods, when he wasn’t, and that, when his health began to fail, he hid this from the public and continued to advocate this diet as the cure for all ills.

T.C. Fry died in 1996 at the rather young age of 69 of a blood clot caused by a pulmonary embolism. He was overweight, had a heart condition and very bad teeth. He was not in good health when he died, and when his followers discovered this, many were disillusioned. Further disillusionment came when his followers learned that he had gone to South America for medical treatments for his health problems, despite the fact that proponents of Natural Hygiene insist that disease is a myth and that all sicknesses go away if the person rests and eats raw foods. I don’t delight in speaking poorly of a man who is deceased, but the bottom line of my research on T.C. Fry’s life and work as a nutrition reformer was that he seemed untrustworthy.

And, having established that conclusion, I’m afraid that David Klein’s whole book, as well as any raw foodism literature I encountered on the web citing T.C. Fry, began to take on a very untrustworthy aura. I don’t understand the appeal of founding a set of personal beliefs on the credos of individuals who are pulling the wool over the eyes of sincere and sick people who are looking for help. Advocating a diet as the secret to health while you are secretly seeking medical treatments and getting sicker every day is dishonest and a tremendous disservice to your fellow man. Frankly, I think it’s a shame that people would continue to cite T.C. Fry as a font of wisdom or an exemplar of living a good life.

After careful thought, I had to conclude that Natural Hygiene was founded by a somewhat peculiar man and then championed by a man whose ethics are what I would consider crooked. I began to feel clearer in my mind, at this point, that these were not leaders I wished to follow.

Fundamentalism and Dogma
I’m a believer in faith. I have the greatest respect for individuals who inquire into matters of faith and follow their hearts when they find something that truly makes sense to them. To me, the glory of all religions, spiritual devotions and lifeways is in the questions. Someone who seeks knowledge is genuine. Fundamentalism, however, applied to any type of belief system, is the end of questions and, to me, is a dark road to travel.

Time and again, very decent people have sought answers, thought they have found them in a person or belief system, and stopped seeking. Cults arise when people stop asking questions and the cult leader is considered beyond questioning, beyond reproach, beyond doubt. These dead end scenarios leave the followers open to abuse and influence for bad, and these situations can only happen when people give up their rights to question what they see, hear and experience.

I am not calling raw foodism a cult, any more than I would call veganism, Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity a cult. But, I am disturbed when people of any kind accept dogma without question. When someone comes to you claiming that Jesus is the Savior of mankind, you should really question this. When someone comes to you and says that our goal in life should be to detach from suffering, you should think deeply about this. When someone comes to you and tells you that all ill health stems from not getting enough rest and eating cooked foods, you should seriously question the validity of such a statement. Does it seem right to you? Does it match with what you know of spiritual things, human history, ethical behavior and the search for truth? What does your spirit feel about blanket statements like this? Do they feel like real solutions, or jumping off points for further inquiry?

My hope is that raw foodism looks like a question to you, instead of an answer. David Klein’s book lists testimonials from people who claim to have been cured of serious diseases by raw foods. He does not include the testimonials of people you will find elsewhere, explaining that they began to have symptoms of failure to thrive on a raw food diet. My chief problem here, in sum, is not that a raw foods diet may/may not be a good idea, but that many people are profiting by promoting raw foods as a cure to life-threatening diseases. It is the promotion and profit aspect of this that gave me the last piece of information I felt I needed to make up my mind about whether going raw was right for me.

I am sincerely glad if going on a raw foods diet has helped sick people, temporarily or in the long term, to feel better. David Klein explains that he was living on a diet of junk food before going raw, and I can certainly believe that this switch might have been exactly what he needed to start to resolve his symptoms of Ulcerative Colitis. It may be that any massive change over from a junk food diet to a more plant-based one (be that vegetarian, vegan, raw, or whole foods) would be enough to put a digestive disorder into remission, possibly even permanently. How wonderful for anyone who has known the agonies of chronic illness, to reach a day of wellness, whether they get there through diet, prayer, medicine or some other vehicle. But blanket statements, applied to all people…these, I found I could not swallow.

I mentioned that, to me, the glory is in the question. I am quite ready to concede here that my conclusions may be wrong. Perhaps miraculous healing was just on the other side of that raw banana for me, and I’ve made a foolish mistake deciding that a woman who has been vegan all her adult life is really already eating about as simply and healthily as any woman has, at any point in human history. I will continue to eat my vegan diet, rich in as many diverse raw and cooked fruits, veggies, legumes and grains as I can grow and find. I will make the most of the food source available to me, in the hopes that a healthy species and a healthy environment are to be found in diversity rather than restrictions.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this and will miss out on a cure for Crohn’s disease promised to me if I’ll only abandon the fire-using ways of all my ancestors. But, somehow, I don’t think so. I’ve really searched my heart about this, done my homework and decided that for me, the raw food diet holds no miracles and very few charms. My hope is that you will also seek answers, especially if you are ill, before making any tremendous changes. When you are sick, you’ve already been through a lot. Take it easy, and look before you leap.

————-

Flickr Photo Credit

The Lytton Band of Pomo Indians would like to make a home west of the town of Windsor in Sonoma County in Northern California. They would like to build 147 homes for their people, as well as a beautiful roundhouse for their spiritual devotions, a community center and a medical clinic. Their very simple wish to make a good home for their loved ones has been met with a self-satisfied, self-entitled, smug and racist reaction from the governor of California, the local government and local people, in keeping with the tune of California’s historical response to Indian people. Opponents are using every trick in the book, from questioning the federal legitimacy of the Lytton People to refusing to let them use local water. I find this so despicable and shameful that I can’t think of a better thing to spend my time writing about in a publication that concerns itself with peace and justice.

The local newspaper, The Press Democrat, has published several articles regarding the situation in Windsor, giving space on their pages to the ire of local officials and the outrageous behavior of the governor who is questioning whether the Lytton Band should be recognized and whether they have a right to build a home for themselves in California:

Press Democrat Article 1

Press Democrat Article 2

Press Democrat Article 3

Here are two telling comments on the Press Democrat articles that offer a disturbing gauge of public sentiment:

“You mean, allowed to carve out chunks of the USA to form their own independent nations and suck up all sorts of tax-free money from visitors? To collect American money by selling to Americans but not to pay a portion back to the US economy in the manner other Americans do?”

“Special rights for people whose long dead ancestors were mistreated by long dead immigrants.”

The first comment encapsulates the tone of accusatory resentment Indian People are often the subject of and the second comment demands a response.

Genocide In This Land In Our Times

The children and grandchildren whose parents and grandparents were killed at Wounded Knee in the Great Plains are still alive. When the majority of Chief Bigfoot’s people were massacred by soldiers on a snowy winter day in 1890, those who escaped with their lives told their story to their children and grandchildren, and those people are still alive. This is not ancient history. It is not something that happened 5000 years ago. It is your grandmother telling you how she ran for her life to a ravine and her mother was shot down right on top of her. It is your grandfather telling you that he was the last survivor of his family, and that he never understood why the soldiers came and butchered everyone, when all of your relatives were just trying to make it through the snow to Pine Ridge Reservation so that Chief Bigfoot could help mediate a problem that was going on there. It is your own family telling you that the gunfire sounded like someone slowly tearing a piece of canvas as it ripped into the huddled crowd of men, women and children. It is your own family telling you how the snow was drenched with your family’s blood, and how the government paid a man 2 dollars a body to dump all of your dead relatives into a mass grave.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Wounded Knee and the killing of 200 innocent travelers. Maybe you have heard mention of the Sand Creek Massacre and the murder of some 130 defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho People, or of some of the other better-known attacks on Indian People by the U.S. government and private citizens that have occurred within just the last century-and-a-half. These things are not ancient history. They are very, very recent, making it small wonder if you have heard of them. But chances are, even if you live in California, you have never heard of the California Genocide that exterminated some 90% of California’s earlier inhabitants. If you manage to find and read the right books, you will quickly learn that even the devastation suffered by the early Peoples of the East Coast, the Great Plains and the Southwest cannot compare to what happened here in California. When you know the truth about California’s recent history, hateful attitudes like those being expressed by the people of Windsor who are attempting to shun and outlaw the Lytton Band make your stomach turn over. You look at the attitudes of precedence and entitlement and you just want to cry.

Terrible times came to the land called California with the Spanish Army and Franciscan missionaries in the 18th century. They kidnapped, enslaved, tortured and murdered the west coast people, all out of greed and a psychopathic interpretation of Christianity that had literally no relationship to the teachings of Jesus Christ. There is no doubt in my mind that if the actual person, Jesus, had gotten to spend time with Native American Peoples, he would have loved them. The intense sense of gratitude for life, the beautiful appreciation of the natural world, the inherent practice of service to one another and respect to higher powers that are the hallmarks of many Native American lifeways are so evolved and splendid that they would earn respect and admiration from any person of goodwill. But the deranged Spanish friars were tragically blind to the spectacular spirituality of Native Peoples and, in their maniacal quest for power, turned the once-joyful inhabitants of California into the tattered and miserable remnant of a people.

Those California Indians who managed, somehow, to survive the disease, enslavement and death brought to the region by the Spaniards then had to face the murderous Americans who poured into the newly-acquired state in the mid-1800s…very recent times. John Sutter, whose name is still given macabre honor in Gold Country towns and place names, kept California Indian male and female slaves locked in a large room at night to keep them from escaping slavery in his gold mines. Frankly, this is the least of the evil things that have happened in recent California history.

The state and federal governments subsidized the murder of California Indians. That is the bottom line. Insane with the self-serving nonsense of Manifest Destiny, those newly arrived in California during the Gold Rush felt entitled to exterminate all Native Peoples in order to make room for ‘civilization’. And the government paid for them to do so. A group of white men would arm themselves and set upon Indian villages, murdering all whom they found living there, and then would be paid by the head for the victims of their killing sprees. These attacks on innocent and defenseless people were documented without a shred of remorse or conscience in California’s newspapers:

“We hope that the Government will render such aid as will enable the citizens of the north to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed. Extermination is no longer a question of time–the time has arrived, the work has commenced and let the first man who says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”
- Yreka Herald, 1853

I will never forget an account I read of Native Peoples being rounded up onto boats in Northern California, taken out to sea and drowned in the ocean, en masse. Such peoples who were not massacred were enslaved by the newcomers and the kidnapping and enslavement of Indian children was common practice during these times, just a couple of generations ago. It is so important to me to repeat that 90% of the early inhabitants of California were murdered by the invading Americans. It is so important for all people now living in California to understand that this is the history of the ground we are now walking on, just the blink of an eye later.

Moving toward the turn of the century, the kidnapping of Indian children continued to be seen as the necessary work of ‘civilization’. Now, they were stolen from their families by force and sent to industrial boarding schools where they were abused and forbidden to express their culture. As I write this, I am thinking of a wonderful elder of the Karok People, Charlie Thom, and his account of being the last child left in his tribe on the rivers of Northern California. The last child.

Meanwhile, the trail of Government interference continued into the 20th century as ‘officials’ took it upon themselves to decide which Native peoples would be federally recognized and which wouldn’t; who could have a reservation and who couldn’t. As if it were up to them. Set against the backdrop of the wholesale murder, the theft of nearly all land once cherished by Indian Peoples and the trail of broken treaties, the spectacle of the U.S. government making decisions about Indians makes me sick, plain and simple.

And this is the setting for my total disgust over what is happening right now, in 2009, in Windsor, California. If you are a Native person whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your family members were murdered, kidnapped and enslaved. If you are a person of European descent whose family has lived here for just a few generations, chances are, your relatives either participated in the California Genocide or, at the very least, read about it in the newspapers while eating breakfast. And, if you are like me, with both Native and European ancestry, and your family has been in California for a few generations, you look at the whole situation with horror and terrible shame.

The Bottom Line
The local government and misguided citizens of Windsor who are trying to keep the Lytton Band from making a home for themselves need to be publicly condemned for their racist attitudes, in no uncertain fashion. I don’t care if the Lytton people are federally recognized. As Native Peoples, their roots in this land go back so far before George Washington that it is simply ludicrous for this to be an argument of any kind. I don’t care if Windsor’s zoning laws say that the Lytton Band wants to build too many houses for the area. I say, thank God! Thank God there are enough survivors of the California Genocide to build a wonderful new place to live in 2009. I wish there were 100 times that many Lytton Band folks.

I don’t care if the Lytton People want to chop down trees to build their houses. We are all living in Indian Country, whether we want to recognize that or not, and what gets done with the land is best decided by Indian People. It is absurd that anyone living in Windsor, where that giant and practically empty downtown section was recently built overnight, would put up a fuss about a housing development. Absurd. It is incredibly repugnant to read of a refusal of water to the Lytton Band. That Americans would refuse the once-clear waters that they have so polluted over the past 150 years…well, it’s just unbelievable to me. Additionally, I am in absolutely no mood to hear worries that the Lytton Band might build a casino in their housing development. Indian gaming is such an old pastime, I don’t think anyone knows when it started and it certainly isn’t up to newcomers to dictate what kinds of games the older inhabitants of California can play. I personally don’t care for casinos, but frankly, if the Native People wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Windsor, it wouldn’t be up to me to tell them they couldn’t. This is their land. No one, and I mean no one, should be walking around in a frame of mind thinking they can tell Indian people what to do in this land known as ‘America’.

And therein, I believe, lies the crux of this utterly frustrating problem. If you think of this land as America, and you attach that idea to this being the province of the U.S. government and your reality excludes the fact that this part of the continent is inhabited by many, many sovereign, independent nations that have absolutely nothing to do with the recent invention of the U.S. government, you are not seeing the picture of what is going on here correctly. If belonging to the Windsor City Council has given you the notion that you can have votes and make laws and govern the lives of Peoples who have called this land ‘home’ since time immemorial, your sense of your own importance in the grand scheme of things is disturbingly distorted.

It is the newcomers who should be petitioning the Native Peoples for permission when they want to build a housing development. It is the ‘Americans’ who ought to have been asking, from day one, if there was room here to share the land and to realize dreams of life and liberty without getting in the way of the already-resident Peoples. Judging by the overwhelming display of generosity and brotherly love exhibited by first-contact peoples towards anyone who showed up on this continent without murder on the mind, my guess is that the people we call ‘Indians’ would have made room for us with kindly hearts. But it didn’t happen that way. The Americans came to California and got it into their smug heads that it would be acceptable to kill every last Native inhabitant of the state…and the U.S. Government paid them to carry out this plan that sits in evil company with the genocidal schemes of Nazi Germany.

This is not ancient history. The assault on and discrimination against California Indians is what has been happening since the Americans first showed up here, and the pettiness, the embarrassing sense of ownership, the belief that racist attitudes will be winked at when it comes to Indian Peoples…these things being evinced by the governor, the local government and the angry citizens of Windsor must not go unchecked. These people should be on their knees, begging the Lytton Band to please come build a home alongside them. They should be pleading with fate to give them a second chance to treat Indian Peoples with the heartfelt respect and admiration they so abundantly merit. They should be asking if they can lend a hand in the building, if they can help at the medical clinic, if they can do anything, anything at all to help the Lytton Band find a peaceful and good home where they can live without threat of violence and dishonor.

Think of those grandmothers and grandfathers, their hearts torn to shreds with the loss of loved ones, their eyes filled with tears for the loss of homes in beautiful forests, on high mountains, on windy sea coasts. Think of them wandering California, the victims of hatred and evil, unbefriended by neighbors, uncherished, uncelebrated. Think of them coming home, at last, in Windsor. Think of how right that would be.

———————-

For further reading on the California Genocide, I recommend this introductory document. It’s never too late to learn.