Near my daughter’s apartment in the Midd Cities, Texas, there is a small pond next to a highway. It is the only place to walk in an unconstrained natural landscape, though the pond has the feel of a very damaged place. There are few waterfowl to be found on the water, though I saw a beautiful bluebird (sialia sialis) in a tree the other day. The flora is the sort that propagates in disturbed habitats: a couple of black willows, Roosevelt Weed (bacchais neglecta), common sunflowers, asters, goldenrod, and a field of Silver Nightshade (solanum elaegnifolium), their silvery stems now carrying tiny tomato-like seeds.
There is no signage anywhere, and as the property appears neither connected to the neighboring apartment complex nor to the golf course across the street, it is fair game for trashing. In this place, at this time in history, to most people this small piece of the Earth-unappropriated, unowned, and unprotected- is unconnected to them, so they feel free to dump on it. (This is a problem for the whole area. Tarrant County is attempting to control it with citizens’ help: https://access.tarrantcounty.com/en/transportation/environmental/illegal-dumping.html)
I have been cleaning up the trash since I began using the walk around the pond for exercise and started using the leaf piles for clandestine composting of my kitchen scraps. It is clear that the majority of garbage is from food and drink containers: soda cans, plastic juice bottles, liquor bottles, styrofoam dishes, plastic silverware, Starbuck cups, plastic bags of every size, most advertising some sort of fast food: chicken wings, fries, burgers, tacos, etc. And while this pollution is degrading the landscape, it has already done the damage to the people who have bought and eaten this cheap and unwholesome food (diabetes and obesity are diet related and increasing in Texas: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Obesity/state/TX)!
This is my point: every one of us, every human being is an integral part of the environment in which we are embedded. Our own personal environment is as susceptible as the greater enveloping environment to being exploited and ruined, and by the same forces of greed and ignorance.
A society like the one here in Texas which denies climate change and supports the exploitation of the land is the same one that sees people as being only a means to make money, without taking responsibility for the destruction of people’s health or well being.
Without a connection to the natural world, without an understanding of the laws of Nature, how do we instill in ourselves, our society, and our culture a love and care for the natural world and for our bodies which are just an extension of that world?! To be blind to the interdependence of the land, the air, the water, the insects, the birds, the plants, the microbes, and ourselves is to be blind to the reality of life itself!
Charlotte enjoying her bottle! Watercolor pencils on paper. copyright J.Hart
Food, as I have mentioned in past posts, is one of our most fraught choices in the present climate. Most of us are eating foods created by the industrial agriculture corporations, with little governmental oversight here in the States and less transparency of what is in these foods. The majority of doctors are clueless (or worse, misinformed) about what constitutes healthy eating as many of them have had almost no training in nutrition! So that leaves us on our own about the best choices to make about what to eat.
For my family, with a newborn in our home, the question of what to eat has become particularly important! My daughter is breast feeding, but she goes back to work shortly and needs to supplement the baby’s diet with formula. I have been eating a mainly organic low carb & high fat diet for the past three months (more on that in a future post) so we have organic produce and pasture raised meat & eggs in the house, but the question of what to get for formula has been more challenging.
We bought a supposedly organic formula as our first choice, and upon checking the ingredients, found that corn syrup was the first (and therefore main) ingredient, so that went back to the store! Next we went for HIIP, a cow’s milk formulation for newborns, which is imported from Europe where the governmental oversight is more rigorous than here in the U.S.
Unfortunately the baby began to fuss and to have reflux, so we switched to a goat’s milk formula, which she tolerated better. However, it was not specifically for newborns, so our pediatrician sent us home from our doctor’s visit with a corporate popular brand which was designed to help reflux in newborns and had, yet again, corn syrup as the main ingredient! She also suggested that if the baby continues to have reflux, we should give her antacid medication ranitidine, so much easier than struggling to find the best nutrition (sic).
Now, just to be clear, I trust this pediatrician to give the baby medicine and her shots. I am not an anti vaxxer. The science has shown that vaccines do not cause autism. However, there seems to be a strong correlation between the increase of autism in children and the increased use of glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup) in our food supply, which is why getting an organic formula is so important! https://www.drperlmutter.com/gmo-and-autism/
We are also in the middle of an epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity, and I can’t help but wonder why a pediatrician would encourage parents to use a formula in which corn syrup is the first ingredient?! Of course, as Dr. Robert Lustig has written and shown, sugar acts as a natural pain killer, so it would make sense to put it in baby formula to help “relax” a fussy baby, wouldn’t it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE&t=1637s
Anyway, we came home from the pediatrician’s still without a good idea about what to feed the baby. We needed to find some reliable information so I, of course, went on the internet, which brings me to our basic problem in trying to get accurate information: whom can we trust and what information is unbiased by the profit motive?
You can think of information as a continuum: at one end is the corporate media that supports corporate agriculture, pharmaceuticals, mainstream nutritionists, etc. Any information from this source is going to be hopelessly simplified and distorted. At the other end of the spectrum are the single issue groups using emotion, morality, and shallow correlation to support their ideas about what is healthy (and what is not). Vegans, Seventh Day Adventists, Paleo dieters, etc. would be my examples.
Somewhere in the middle are the folks I find more trustworthy: Functional Medicine doctors (Dr. Atkins, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Perlmutter, et al) and the citizen scientists and journalists who have done the heavy lifting of learning the new theories or resurrecting forgotten useful ones, and reading all the papers on the relevant clinical trials unbiased by corporate money. In this group belongs Ivor Cummings, Gary Taube, and Nina Teicholz.
So with these criteria in mind, I found a resource that inspires confidence. It is Dr. Bridget Young’s https://babyformulaexpert.com/ Dr. Young is a specialist in baby nutrition who gives parents the information and tools to make their own informed decisions. She explains things like what is the difference between whey and casein and why the percentage of each is important; and which are the healthiest added fats and why (good discussion about palm oil). She does make recommendations, but with the caveat that parents should do their own research and check with their own pediatrician before deciding, though Dr. Young provides summaries for harried new parents!
We chose an organic formula after studying her site, and baby seems to be having less reflux (fingers crossed!) drinking it!
The take away, for me, is that if we want to make better choices about our children’s health and especially their food, we will need to understand the science behind eating, and what our options for healthy food are in this difficult time!
In the first incident, almost no one even noticed the meteor as it happened in a very remote part of the world. (It was unexpected though Nasa is supposed to be tracking large space objects heading our way.) The cyclone* in Mozambique left 1.5 million people affected, wiping out the town of Beira and killing 215. Three young people were died at the St. Patrick’s day party; and in Hong Kong, 6 million commuters were stranded for the day.
For me, the interesting but difficult part of reading the news is how to prioritize the information; how to sift out the noise; and how to take note of the information that is most important and/or useful. It is a very mixed blessing to get the “news” from all around the globe. But we live now in a globalized economy and how we live impacts people all over the world!
There are a couple of filters I use presently. First there is the idea of scale. Three people killed in a party in Northern Ireland shouldn’t make my radar; one and a half million people suffering after an extremely large cyclone should.
Second, the depth of suffering is a filter for me. Six million Chinese being inconvenienced for a day is noise; over a million and a half Africans (cyclone hit Malawi and Zimbabwe too) whose homes and towns were destroyed is news.
And finally, really global news, that is, news about Earth, interests me. The cyclone in Africa could be connected to the large hurricanes we are experiencing in the Americas due to climate change (the article did not say!); and the meteor is a constant and good reminder how random our safety on this planet actually is!
*A cyclone is the same as a hurricane or typhoon. The name differs depending on where the weather phenomena occurs geographically.
For other ideas about how to negotiate what passes for news today, I am reposting the 2017 ‘News vs. Noise’:
After a break of almost ten years, with the election of Trump I began once again to watch “the news.” I read two newspapers (The Guardian & The New York Times), check out the headlines of one other (The Washington Post) and visit a couple of online sources: The Rachel Maddow Show (for her historical slant on the news); some online magazines (Treehugger ; Orion; and Facebook (in order to follow Bernie Sanders, Rep. Guiterrez from Chicago, & March for Science).
In the U.S., my news choices are considered left of center politically, but to most of the rest of the industrialized world, they are very much centrist. What becomes apparent after a few weeks of following the news, is how little actual information in presented, and how repetitious the stories and commentaries are. After a news story has peaked, it often disappears even if the event itself is still in play.:
The news is also very generalized and homogenized, much like our food, housing, and clothing. During this past horrific hurricane season, all the news outlets carried the same story describing the storms themselves with barely a mention of the global warming that was responsible for their ferocity and size:
The other thing about the news is that almost all of it is “noise” not really news. My daughter the other day asked me how to differentiate between news and noise; in other words, with the limited time we have, what subjects should we pay attention to and what should we dismiss?
My answer to this is in the present climate is the following:
1. If the news is about an existential threat, it should be followed and understood.
So the recent information about the demise of flying insects is newsworthy:
while Trump’s tweets or speeches (for instance, his inability to make empathetic condolence calls or his dislike of football players’ civil disobedience) are not.
Existential threats include problems with our food supply:
2. If the news is about action taken, it is worth knowing. This is more difficult to find out about as the government becomes less transparent and more secretive. Rachel Maddow is good about following underreported stories. With the foxes in charge of the henhouse in the present Administration, these stories become more important:
3. And finally, and most difficult to find (hence this blog!) news about what to do under these difficult circumstances both politically as the federal government is dysfunctional and dangerous:
Better choices, for me, begin with the actions I take including resistance to information, much of which comes under the heading “news,” that is distracting, anxiety-provoking, and/or unhelpful. In this blog, I want to show you how I am deciding on the best actions to take in these hard times, and hopefully it will help you in your planning too!
The choices we make as individuals, to grow our own food; to curtail our shopping; to live a zero waste life, might seem beside the point, especially when seen against the horrific worldwide rise of abusive authoritarian governments. For me, the question becomes: what is the engine that is driving these disastrous governments; and where is the point at which we can effect the most pressure? As I understand the system, most of the necessities we buy (one of the most basic is food) are provided by giant corporations whose sole reason for being is profit. It is the money from these corporate entities and owners that supports our present politicians.
Once profit becomes the only goal of every action taken, the more humane and real needs of people such as health, safety, and peace are ignored or even actively destroyed! But conversely, if we, as individual consumers, also make our individual profit and comfort the end all and be all of our lives, we collude with the corporations in our own destruction and support our own impoverishment! The corporations and the billionaires who own them can only exist if we buy what they are selling! (For a concise repeat of this message: http://realfarmacy.com/the-woody-harrelson-video-message-the-mainstream-media-does-not-want-you-to-watch/
Surprisingly, we are not captives to the status quo, especially here in North America; (some other occupied and exploited parts of the world are not so lucky). We can disengage from the corporate stranglehold by refusing to buy what we don’t honestly need, and by creating ourselves what we do need. I feel that the most basic way to disengage from an unhealthy economic system is in the foods we chose to buy, and the foods we take the time to grow.
Our industrial profit-driven economic system views resources (soil, fossil fuel, and, yes, people) as unlimited. ( This link by a car engineer who now “builds” forests, gives a very clear description of the difference between industrial and natural uses of resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjUsobGWhs8&t=17s) It sees soil*, our most important strategic resource, as merely another material to be used and used up (without any thought being given to replenishing the soil!) to grow massive amounts foods that we can buy very cheaply at home and export abroad.
Because we are all habituated to look for the “biggest bang for our buck” we happily buy the inexpensive wheat, soy, and corn which make up most fast foods and commercial food products. The actual costs of these foods-pollution, government subsidies, and the ruination of the soil- are hidden from us, but their health costs have been directly linked to the obesity and diabetes epidemics in the States!
But how do I convince you that what seems profitable is not; that buying food which saves you a couple of bucks will, in the long run, ruin your health? How do I show you that by buying food that is fast and convenient-ready made, widely advertised, and easily accessible- you are profiting large corporations, wealthy stockholders, and billionaire owners that have neither your health nor your well-being at heart? How do I encourage you to learn to grow your own food and not assume that large farms will do it for you? (The methods that agroecology are utilizing to grow food on farms are the same ones that will allow you to grow food in your backyard! )
How do we, who are eating better, choosing organically raised produce, raising our own foods (even if only on windowsills and balconies), convince friends and family that taking the time and money to support local organic farms or grow food themselves will profit us all in ways that cannot be expressed simply as the bottom line? Or perhaps health should be the real bottom line!
Better Choices 