Beef, pork and love, but most of all love ~ By Kristen Zeiber

A woman's trip back to her family farm, for cousins, cookies and steaming carcasses

"I went through a period where I was embarrassed to mention that my family butchers its own meat, knowing it marked me as the country girl I am, thinking civilized society would be shocked at an educated girl being part of so base a process. But in the past few years, after moving out and discovering what I'd left behind, I decided that the people who are shocked don't have any business picking up those Saran-wrapped Styrofoam trays of beef at the grocery store. This is the reality of eating meat: The animal has to be killed and butchered."

My sister, a vegetarian of 13 years, walked into the garage. She held a knife; we're adults now, and they need us to do this. The pig was on its back in a trough, its legs tucked up high, pink and rounded. We butcher in the winter to preserve the meat, but that means the animals, dead all of five minutes, steam copiously into the December air. "My dog lays like that sometimes," she muttered to me, readjusting her grip on the knife. Deep breath.

Christmas is important, but Butchering, that four-day event directly after, is sacred. This is not an unusual thing where I'm from in rural Pennsylvania, although it seems families scale back more and more over the years. We definitely have: We no longer make lard; we don't save and scrape out the intestines for sausage, buying premade casings instead; we don't boil down the bones to make scrapple, that delightfully Dutchy, suspicious meat by-product. Family tradition is important, but it only goes so far when dealing with us practical Pennsylvania Germans. We buy our chicken at the store now, like most other Americans.

But the cow and the three pigs, whichever makes it out of the stall first, these are the constant, even more essential than the overabundance of dessert and the annual scuffle over how much coriander to put in the sausage. Five days straight of family members coming and going from my grandparents' crooked log-cabin farmhouse, of endless piles of dishes to be washed, of grabbing handfuls of cookies with hands only perfunctorily wiped on greasy, hand-stitched aprons. It's the time to spend time with cousins, aunts and uncles seen too rarely; a special holiday disguised as everyday life. The point is that we get a yearful of meat out of it, even as it is beside the point.

I've never made it out to the barnyard early on Killing Day: I've tried twice now, and each time get out there to meet my uncle and a cousin-in-law or two. They pick up their guns, and I say, "Um ... I'll just meet you in the garage for the skinning." Maybe next year.

I haven't quite figured out why I want be in that barnyard, rather than contenting myself with the meat wrapping like the other girls. Partially it's because my uncle, the last farmer in the family, is getting older and no one in my generation is stepping up to the plate; partially it's because I feel this is a rare opportunity to really see where my food comes from, from start to finish. Part of it is the individualism that's been bred into me, a stubborn Pennsylvania Dutch self-reliance as ingrained as my polite-yet-distant approach to strangers, my repressed Protestantism. There's a certain allure in saying, with certainty, "Yes, in case of the apocalypse, I can feed myself."

It's more than that, too. I take joy in pulling a white lumpy package of family-farm meat out of the freezer, the same way I take joy in the scarf my sister knit me, the journal I hand-bound. It's about creating something I can use, with my own hands, and finding meaning in the process. In this way, butchering is another form of craftsmanship, just ... bloody.

Back in the garage, we start at the hooves, slicing a shallow ring around the first knuckle and then drawing a line down the back of the leg toward the rump. The first time I skinned a cow, slicing and peeling, I overcame my kneejerk revulsion to delight in thinking, so this is why leather feels the way it does. There are five of us, one on each limb, with my uncle tending to the head. We haul the animal up by its back legs with a winch, finish skinning, and then stand around and munch freshly baked cookies while my uncle eviscerates it. It's family bonding time.

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I went through a period where I was embarrassed to mention that my family butchers its own meat, knowing it marked me as the country girl I am, thinking civilized society would be shocked at an educated girl being part of so base a process. But in the past few years, after moving out and discovering what I'd left behind, I decided that the people who are shocked don't have any business picking up those Saran-wrapped Styrofoam trays of beef at the grocery store. This is the reality of eating meat: The animal has to be killed and butchered. If we can do it ourselves, have control over the process, all the better -- especially if we can make some traditions along the way.  ...... more

We're Screwed! Rioting in the streets and devolution to a bartering system ShadowStats.com founder John Williams explains the risk of hyperinflation. Worst-case scenario?

"The key here is to look at a longer range survival package, battening down the hatches, and preserving your wealth and assets during a very difficult time."

Do you believe everything the government tells you? Economist and statistician John Williams sure doesn't. Williams, who has consulted for individuals and Fortune 500 companies, now uncovers the truth behind the U.S. government's economic numbers on his Web site at ShadowStats.com. Williams says, over the last several decades, the feds have been infusing their data with optimistic biases to make the economy seem far rosier than it really is. His site reruns the numbers using the original methodology. What he found was not good.

Maymin: So we are technically bankrupt?
Williams: Yes, and when countries are in that state, what they usually do is rev up the printing presses and print the money they need to meet their obligations. And that creates inflation, hyperinflation, and makes the currency worthless.

Obama says America will go bankrupt if Congress doesn't pass the health care bill.
Well, it's going to go bankrupt if they do pass the health care bill, too, but at least he's thinking about it. He talks about it publicly, which is one thing prior administrations refused to do. Give him credit for that. But what he's setting up with this health care system will just accelerate the process.

Where are we right now?
In terms of the GDP, we are about halfway to depression level. If you look at retail sales, industrial production, we are already well into depressionary. If you look at things such as the housing industry, the new orders for durable goods we are in Great Depression territory. If we have hyperinflation, which I see coming not too far down the road, that would be so disruptive to our system that it would result in the cessation of many levels of normal economic commerce, and that would throw us into a great depression, and one worse than was seen in the 1930s.

What kind of hyperinflation are we talking about?
I am talking something like you saw with the Weimar Republic of the 1930s. There the currency became worthless enough that people used it actually as toilet paper or wallpaper. You could go to a fine restaurant and have an expensive dinner and order an expensive bottle of wine. The next morning that empty bottle of wine is worth more as scrap glass than it had been the night before filled with expensive wine.

We just saw an extreme example in Zimbabwe. ... Probably the most extreme hyperinflation that anyone has ever seen. At the same time, you still had a functioning, albeit troubled, Zimbabwe economy. How could that be? They had a workable backup system of a black market in U.S. dollars. We don't have a backup system of anything. Our system, with its heavy dependence on electronic currency, in a hyperinflation would not do well. It would probably cease to function very quickly. You could have disruptions in supply chains to food stores. The economy would devolve into something like a barter system until they came up with a replacement global currency.

What can we do to avoid hyperinflation? What if we just shut down the Fed or something like that?
We can't. The actions have already been taken to put us in it. It's beyond control. The government does put out financial statements usually in December using generally accepted accounting principles, where unfunded liabilities like Medicare and Social Security are included in the same way as corporations account for their employee pension liabilities. And in 2008, for example, the one-year deficit was $5.1 trillion dollars. And that's instead of the $450 billion, plus or minus, that was officially reported.

Wow.
These numbers are beyond containment. Even the 2008 numbers, you can take 100 percent of people's income and corporate profit and you'd still be in deficit. There's no way you can raise enough money in taxes.

What about spending?
If you eliminated all federal expenditures except for Medicare and Social Security, you'd still be in deficit. You have to slash Social Security and Medicare. But I don't see any political will to rein in the costs the way they have to be reined in. There's just no way it can be contained. The total federal debt and net present value of the unfunded liabilities right now totals about $75 trillion. That's five times the level of GDP.

What can we, the people, do to stop the government from, you know, taking all our money?
We should have acted 20 years ago. There's not much you can do at this point to prevent the eventual debasement of the dollar. This involves both sides of the political spectrum. It's not limited to the Republicans or the Democrats. They've both been very active in setting this up.

What can individuals do?
The only thing individuals can do now is look to protect themselves. I wish I could see a way, but shy of severe slashing of the social programs that is so politically reprehensible and would create such problems and social unrest, I don't see that as a practical solution.

If you're a young 20- or 25-year-old guy or gal, would you move to another country? What would you do?
We still have a great country. We're going through a period of economic pain. It's happened before. This is the kind of thing that's taken us decades to get into and it will take us decades to get out. Although the hyperinflation is going to be limited largely to the U.S., the economic downturn will affect things globally. I can't tell you how things will go with a hyperinflationary Great Depression, which is where I see things going.

It's the type of thing that will tend to lead to significant political change. People tend to vote their pocketbooks. You could have the rise of a third party. You could even have rioting in the streets. I'm not formally predicting that — anyone can run these different scenarios. For the individual, what you need to do, from an investment standpoint, look to preserve your wealth and assets. Don't worry about the day-to-day fluctuations in the markets. What I'm talking about here is over the long haul...

[Gold is] going to be highly volatile, as will the dollar, over the near term, but longer term, physical gold I would look at as a primary hedge for preserving the purchasing power of your wealth and assets. Maybe some physical silver. Get some assets outside the U.S. dollar. I might even look to move some assets physically outside the United States. The key here is to look at a longer range survival package, battening down the hatches, and preserving your wealth and assets during a very difficult time. Once you're through that, you'll have some extraordinary investment opportunities, and I can't tell you what it's going to be like on the other side of this crisis.   ........ From Before its News

Dieting Ourselves Into Stupidity ~ by George Jonas, National Post

"thoughts about dieting, body shape and eating may place demands on limited cognitive resources, leaving fewer available for the performance of cognitive tasks."

This is the week of Christmas and dinner parties and people gorging themselves into oblivion. It's just the way it is. Even diet doctors are resigned to it. "You're only human," my doctor said to me, with a leniency remarkable for someone of her calling.

Her diagnosis may be too optimistic, but assume she's right. If I am a human being, is there anything I could do to resemble one more closely?

Well, yes. Starving myself into a stupor would be a beginning.

As a child in Europe, I took part in a nutritional experiment called the Second World War. It entailed, among other things, going without food for certain stretches of time. It was then that I discovered that dieting isn't very good for the brain.

My discovery has since been confirmed by an Australian study I wrote about some years ago. It found that dieting may be smart, but it makes you kind of stupid. Not eating your fill is likely to make you lose interest in mathematical matters, among other things. For people whose interest in mathematical matters isn't very keen to begin with -- me, for instance -- dieting just about puts them on the road to innumeracy.

Dr. Janet Bryan of Finders University's School of Psychology developed a meticulously designed experiment that had 40 middle-aged women in scenic Adelaide compete against each other adding up three-digit numbers. Half were on a diet, half were not. What was going to happen?

The excitement must have been palpable. You could probably hear a pin drop before the starter's gun went off.

Had Dr. Bryan called me, I could have told her the 20 who weren't on a diet would add up numbers more quickly and reliably than the 20 who were. If you're dieting, you're hungry, and if you're hungry, the last thing you want to think about is three-digit numbers. What you'll want to think about is your next meal. Hungry people and three-digit numbers don't mix.

When I was going without food as a child in wartime Europe, three-digit numbers were remarkably low on my list of priorities. If I had to add up some, my performance would have been disappointing.

The Australian researchers came to the conclusion that dieters performed more poorly on mental arithmetic or word pattern problems than non-dieters because they were preoccupied with dieting. In the researchers' own words, "dieters displayed significantly higher levels of preoccupying thoughts surrounding food, diet and body shape."

I don't know if Dr. Bryan and her crew shouted "Eureka!" when they made this discovery, but even if they were too modest for shouting, they had hit the nail on the head. I'd actually go further and say that if the dieters hadn't been preoccupied with their body shapes, they might never have gone on a diet. And once they went on a diet, it became just about inevitable for them to become preoccupied with food. Food, not digits.

Dr. Bryan's study, when it was published in the aptly-named journal Appetite, offered some further findings. It postulated that "thoughts about dieting, body shape and eating may place demands on limited cognitive resources, leaving fewer available for the performance of cognitive tasks." With this, the researchers laid to rest any suspicion that the dieters were slow in adding up three-digit numbers because, relative to non-dieters, their cognitive abilities were impaired to begin with. They demonstrated that one doesn't need to be stupid to go on a diet; just that going on a diet is stupefying. ...... more

An Economy Running On Chickens ~ Zimbabwe Now, Coming to America in 2010?

Another dam fine reason for keeping "Backyard chickens." ...... cowboss

Mutoko — Every fortnight Makaitei Musakwa, 45, catches one of her chickens, picks up some of the maize she has grown, and sets off for the village mill to have the maize ground into mealie-meal, Zimbabwe's staple food.

"It is difficult for me to raise the money that the miller charges ... I have nowhere to get it from," said the widow who looks after four children of her own as well as two nephews. "He charges a chicken to grind for me twice."

Barter trade has been common practice in Zimbabwe since crippling hyperinflation rendered the local Zimbabwe dollar all but worthless. Economists stopped measuring inflation after it hit 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent - 65 followed by 107 zeros - and in February 2009 the economy was officially "dollarised".

Phasing out the local currency and introducing the United States dollar, South African rand and Botswana pula as legal tender has helped rein in inflation, but those currencies are seldom available in remote areas like Mutoko district, some 70km from the capital, Harare, where Musakwa lives.

A chicken can go a long way
The owners of small businesses in rural areas feel they have no choice but to accept goods in lieu of cash, and a chicken can exchange hands several times. Simplicius Gomo, the miller in Musakwa's village, said he gladly accepted payment in kind because it kept him in business.

"I use the chickens that the villagers bring to me to buy the diesel that powers my grinding mill. If I have a surplus of the chickens, I ask the dealer who brings the fuel to give me some cash that I use to buy spare parts, keep for my children's school fees and uniforms, or buy small items with," Gomo told IRIN.

"Imagine, after my fuel supplier gets the chickens from me, he uses them to buy goats, sheep or any other form of livestock, that he in turn either sells for cash or passes on to the next dealer, who decides what to do with them," he said.

Gomo also sells second hand clothes at the village flea market. He trades the chickens for clothes, which he gets from truck drivers going to and from neighbouring Zambia along the nearby highway, as well as other goods like grain and seed, while some villagers offer to work on his fields.

What is your chicken worth today?
Chickens are also used as bus fare. "Almost every day we hear stories of a passenger being thrown out because they have quarrelled with the driver and bus conductor over the value of the item they have offered," he said.

Barter trade has become "a day-to-day way of coping with the scarcity of cash", but this "inevitably" leads to unfairness and disadvantage to some of the people exchanging the goods  ..... more

America 'Disintegrates' in 2010 ~ by By ANDREW OSBORN wsj

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Igor Panarin Predicts End of U.S.

"Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar."

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."

Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.

Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S. ............. more

*****2010 Food Crisis for Dummies***** ~ by Eric deCarbonnel

I love the "there is no alternative to the US dollar for a reserve currency" argument. Every time I hear it, I imagine someone standing on the deck of the Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912, and declaring, "This boat can't possibly sink because there aren't enough lifeboats!

Thanx Robin for sending me this article, Like you say - "can not do any harm to be ready" .... cowboss

If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports, causing the collapse of the dollar, the treasury market, derivative markets, and the global financial system. The US will experience economic disintegration.

The 2010 Food Crisis Means Financial Armageddon
Over the last two years, the world has faced a series of unprecedented financial crises: the collapse of the housing market, the freezing of the credit markets, the failure of Wall Street brokerage firms (Bear Stearns/Lehman Brothers), the failure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the failure of AIG, Iceland’s economic collapse, the bankruptcy of the major auto manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), etc… In the face of all these challenges, the demise of the dollar, derivative markets, and the modern international system of credit has been repeatedly forecasted and feared. However, all these doomsday scenarios have so far been proved false, and, despite tremendous chaos and losses, the global financial system has held together.

The 2010 Food Crisis is different. It is THE CRISIS. The one that makes all doomsday scenarios come true. The government bailouts and central bank interventions, which have held the financial world together during the last two years, will be powerless to prevent the 2010 Food Crisis from bringing the global financial system to its knees.

Financial crisis will kick into high gear
So far the crisis has been driven by the slow and steady increase in defaults on mortgages and other loans. This is about to change. What will drive the financial crisis in 2010 will be panic about food supplies and the dollar’s plunging value. Things will start moving fast.

Dynamics Behind 2010 Food Crisis
Early in 2009, the supply and demand in agricultural markets went badly out of balance. The world experienced a catastrophic fall in food production as a result of the financial crisis (low commodity prices and lack of credit) and adverse weather on a global scale. Meanwhile, China and other Asian exporters, in an effort to preserve their economic growth, were unleashing domestic consumption long constrained by inflation fears, and demand for raw materials, especially food staples, exploded as Chinese consumers worked their way towards American-style overconsumption, prodded on by a flood of cheap credit and easy loans from the government.

Normally food prices should have already shot higher months ago, leading to lower food consumption and bringing the global food supply/demand situation back into balance. This never happened because the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), instead of adjusting production estimates down to reflect decreased production, adjusted estimates upwards to match increasing demand from china. In this way, the USDA has brought supply and demand back into balance (on paper) and temporarily delayed a rise in food prices by ensuring a catastrophe in 2010.

Overconsumption is leading to disaster
It is absolutely key to understand that the production of agricultural goods is a fixed, once a year cycle (or twice a year in the case of double crops). The wheat, corn, soybeans and other food staples are harvested in the fall/spring and then that is it for production. It doesn’t matter how high prices go or how desperate people get, no new supply can be brought online until the next harvest at the earliest. The supply must last until the next harvest, which is why it is critical that food is correctly priced to avoid overconsumption, otherwise food shortages occur.

The USDA—by manufacturing the data needed to keep supply and demand in balance—has ensured that agricultural commodities are incorrectly priced, which has lead to overconsumption and has guaranteed disaster next year when supplies run out.

An astounding lack of awareness
The world is blissful unaware that the greatest economic/financial/political crisis ever is a few months away. While it is understandable that general public has no knowledge of what is headed their way, that same ignorance on the part of professional analysts, economists, and other highly paid financial "experts” is mind boggling, as it takes only the tiniest bit of research to realize something is going critically wrong in agricultural market.

USDA estimates for 2009/10 make no sense
All someone needs to do to know the world is headed is for food crisis is to stop reading USDA’s crop reports predicting a record soybean and corn harvests and listen to what else the USDA saying.

Specifically, the USDA has declared half the counties in the Midwest to be primary disaster areas, including 274 counties in the last 30 days alone. These designations are based on the criteria of a minimum of 30 percent loss in the value of at least one crop in the county. The chart below shows counties declared primary disaster areas by the secretary of Agriculture and the president of the United States.


The same USDA that is predicting record harvests is also declaring disaster areas across half the Midwest because of catastrophic crop losses! To eliminate any doubt that this might be an innocent mistake, the USDA is even predicting record soybean harvests in the same states (Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama) where it has declared virtually all counties to have experienced 30 percent production losses. It isn’t rocket scientist to realize something is horribly wrong.

USDA motivated by fear of higher food prices
The USDA is terrorized by the implications of higher food prices for the US economy, most likely because it knows the immediate consequence of sharply higher food will be the collapse of the US Treasury market and the dollar, as desperate governments and central banks dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports. Fictitious USDA estimates should be seen as proof of the dire threat posed by higher food prices, as the USDA would not have turned its production estimates into a grotesque mockery of reality if it didn't believe the alternative to be apocalyptic.

While the USDA may be the worst offender, the United States isn’t the only government trying to downplay the food situation out of fear. As one Indian reporter writes, governments are lying about the looming food crisis.

… some experts and governments, in full cognizance of the facts, want us not to create panic and paint a picture of parched crops and a looming food crisis. This, they say, would push up food prices unnaturally, lead to hoarding and ultimately result in a situation where many more millions across the world would go hungry. And whether it is the developing world or the developed, it is those at the bottom of the pyramid who are the most affected in such scenarios.

This leads to a confusing divide between reality and government pronouncements, or even between the perspectives of government departments

Confusing divide between reality and government estimates
For months now, the media has been reporting two distinctly, contradicting realities. One of these realities is filled with record crops and plentiful supply, and the other is filled agricultural devastation and ruin. It has been a mad, frustrating experience to read about agricultural disasters and horrendous crop losses in virtually every state combined with predictions of a US record harvest, sometimes in the same article. ....... read the whole story at Market Sceptics

“LOCAL” – A word worth saving! ~ By Mike Callicrate

It should be impossible for an establishment to proclaim itself “LOCAL” when serving farmed Asian seafood, Tyson chicken, beef from Brazilian corporate giant JBS, Mexican produce and Chinese garlic.

In the newly released food film, Fresh, Russ Kremer proudly proclaims, “They [consumers] want my pigs…they want my product!” Russ is a long time hog farmer who decided that doing what is best for the hogs, as well as the people who eat his pork, is what matters, even though it’s more work and more costly. The day that someone discovers the difference between the pork Russ produces from his family farm in Missouri, considered to be the ultimate in hog heaven, and the industrial factory farms of Smithfield, is a day to celebrate. It has been a long time coming. Since 1980, the struggles have been enormous with more than 90% of our hog farmers and more than 40% of our cattle operations being stomped out of business under the heavy foot of big factory farm conglomerates like Smithfield, Cargill and Tyson and their retail partners.

These global corporations externalize enormous costs onto the public. With their abusive market power they buy livestock far below the cost of production. They don’t pay a living wage to their workers. They use our land and water as an industrial sewer. Farmers and ranchers who care about the land, animals, food quality and the communities they live in can’t compete on price because they pay the true cost of production.

Today, thanks to valuable books like Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma along with compelling and inspirational films such as Food Inc. and Fresh, many more people are making the discovery that good food from real farmers, who they actually know, can make a huge difference in their lives and communities.

More and more people are voting with their forks to support a better food system, and even though the food they are eating costs more than the factory food, it is also more valuable. The food tastes better, is more satisfying and healthier. Also, they can know and trust the farmers and ranchers who grew it.

Of course, the professional marketers for the industrial food companies are working to co-opt the new terms and messages. The multinationals have already stolen, misused and redefined words and phrases like natural, sustainable, organic, family farm and humanely-raised. Attempts to bring better food to the table have been frustrated and bankrupted by the power of big agribusiness, big food service and big retail. From the clean Colorado beef of Mel Coleman to the high quality, humanely raised pork of Bill Niman, to the independent produce growers of Colorado’s Arkansas Valley, all such attempts to differentiate the better quality local food are attacked with false and misleading marketing. The only thing that remains of the once authentic and trustworthy brands of Coleman and Niman are their names — the conscientious and devoted ranchers who launched these companies are no longer connected in any way. These “zombie” brands are a ghost of what they once stood for.

These corporations are now trying to do the same with LOCAL. They simply repackage and dress up the same old products and sell them at cut-rate prices to deceived but excited buyers. Some of these disillusioned consumers will revert back to the same old factory food, and others will continue searching in hopes of finding food they can trust. It is time to put an end to the dishonesty that drives the industrial food system.

Looking Local, Buying Global
From Wendy’s “Better than Fast Food” to Chipotle’s “Food with Integrity” to Whole Foods “I’m A Local,” eaters are being played for fools and family farmers and ranchers with better and healthier food alternatives can’t find A FAIR MARKET. ..... read the whole story at No-Bull Food News