If Food Is Our Medicine,

I would like to emphasize what Hippocrates said in 431 B.C. “ Food should be our medicine, and our medicine should be our food” and it is not like we have to look that far back, our grandparents would tell us that an apple a day would keep the doctor away. Did you eat an apple today ? I know that the apple is not the cure-all, and I know my grandparents did not think it was. What they did know was the healing powers of fresh fruits and vegetables, and without them there would be no vitality or longevity of life. I can steal hear my mom telling me to eat my vegetables or I would not get some fresh fruit after diner. Now days I hear parents asking their kids to eat fruit, how can this be? Maybe kids are smart and if the fruit is not delicious why would they want to eat it. So if it is not delicious is it even nourish in most cases no, so are they bad kids or is it bad fruit I think it is more on the fruit than the kids. If it was delicious we would have to tell them same kids to not eat too much fruit. I work with a young man in his 30s one day on the farm I gave him a strawberry he said he did not like them, I must have given him the look because he ate it, and with a big smile he said that it tasted like strawberry jam. It hit me he had never had a fresh strawberry and if he did it was a bad one for 30 years no fresh berrys! so we picked blueberry and he told me he had never tried them before, big smile and so on with all the deferent types. Good news after 30 + years he is enjoying the fruits of life I am happy for him. To thank that he is not the only one to live so long without eating berrys. So two days went by before I went to a few stores to buy some berrys to see how they tasted it been a long time since I ate someone elses. All this time people had been telling me they will only eat my berrys I always tout they were just being nice. Now I know why kids grow up not eating fruit, it’s not delicious, why would they? So back to why we need to grow our own, so our kids will know the gifts of life, you see when we put the load of growing our food on a few farms they have to grow for food miles shelf time to make a profit. So it is not about it being delicious it is about making a profit and we can not blame farmers for wanting to make a living, if they picked when ripe there would be no shelf life and no profit. So now days we have a big movement for local foods and I love it. I have been working with a lot of good people to get the word out about buying local supporting local biz, farmers markets, small stores, and so on. I work with new and old farms to try to help them make it and to help to get the word out that we need to grow quality fruits and vegetables to feed our community. And in doing so they will pick up a following of famleys who will reward them for doing right. But I also see a lot of farms starting up just to cash in on the local food movement not to grow better fruits and vegetables, but just to say it is local, This is not the way to fix the food crisis in the USA or the world. So as always do not think that if it is locally grown that it is better, it might be better for the local economy but not for your body. How was it grown in a envomently friendly way with organics and biologists, or is it being grown with snthics, hormones, pesticides, fungicides, mildacides, growth reagaleters, GMOs and no care about the nutritional role that food should be in our life. And all it is just a way to take avenge of a movement to profit from a play on words “ locally grown” you will see them in our so-called health stores, I think if food grown from GMO’s pesticides and so on it is just as bad as food from 1000s a miles away, and we do not have the environment mess to deal with in our back yard. So it is always up to us to look at who is growing our food and how. Are they part of the fix or our they the ones we need to fix? And how can we fix what we do not know for sure, they seem like nice people they used the words natural, organic, locally grown and so on. It comes down to awareness and if we support, The California Right to Know, Genetically Engineered Food Act. And if passed this ballot initiative would make it mandatory to label all foods that use GMOs that are sold in California. We need to let our voices be heard, we do not want unwanted dangerous ingredients in our food supply. We spend are hard-earned money on what should be pure food for our baby’s and loved ones, we should have the right to know if we are about to buy contaminated food before we spend our money to purchase it of all things we should have the right to know what is in or food. So we as California’s can start to fix the future of our food, but as always its urgent that we work fast to get this measure on this November’s ballot, and the gathering of signatures will only last two months, FEB 18,2012 to APRIL 22,2012 we have a short time to do some work, to get involved go to (www.labelgmos.org) to get started. It is just a step in the right way but it is a big one, so we should make it. Why because if we can get a GMO label on our food, it is like putting a skull and crossbones on it, and most of us will not buy it in stede of true local organic agriculture, and Hippocrates could feel good about saying that food should be are medicine, and medicine should be are food, pure whole food from the earth not a lab.  That is how isee it, The Bio-Farmer

Hippocrates: a conventionalized image in a Roman "portrait" bust (19th century engraving) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)