Mad moms to food police: We'll eat what we want

Protest to focus on state demands in fight with consumers

by Bob Unruh  - WND

Moms in Minnesota are preparing to defy state dictates over when and how they can access food supplies for their families, with a rally scheduled Monday to coincide with the beginning of the trial of the manager of a farm buying club, according to the Farm Food Freedom Coalition.

WND previously has reported on disputes between farmers and consumers on one side and federal regulators on the other. They have involved the purchase by consumers of raw milk, the rights of consumers to access milk from their own cows, a radio program that offered natural products and a blogger who wrote about his battle with diabetes and was threatened with jail.

The newest development comes from the Farm Food Freedom Coalition, which is assembling a protest at the Minneapolis trial of Alvin Schlangen, a farm buying club manager.

The group said that mothers in the state who act as hosts for “drop sites” for farm buying club members now have been threatened with criminal charges.

The May 14 protest will be at 7 a.m. outside the Minneapolis courthouse where Schlangen’s trial is scheduled, officials said.

“At the rally supporters will sign a ‘Declaration of Food Independence’ and demonstrate non-compliance against what they deem ‘unjust’ regulations,” the organization announced.

Another supporting organization, the Raw Milk Freedom Riders, said that Schlangen founded the Freedom Farms Coop, which simply connects people with the foods of their choice from local producers.

“Over the past two years the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has illegally raided Alvin’s van, warehouse, and farm. The state has now brought four charges against Alvin related to food distribution; all are misdemeanors counts. If convicted, Alvin faces up to a year in jail and hefty fines … just for helping to connect consumers to the producers and foods of their choice.”

Organizers confirm that “several Minnesota mothers who organize community access to local fresh farm foods plan to risk criminal charges by openly and publicly defying warnings from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.”

“The MDA has threatened several mothers, conducted investigations against them and sent them warning letters that if they continue helping provide fresh food to their friends and neighbors, they will be subject to criminal charges and prosecution. The MDA alleges the mothers are violating food-handling regulations.”

Hundreds are expected to join the rally, organizers estimate.

“It is absolutely outrageous that during this time of economic crisis our state government is investigating and sending warning letters to mothers and putting farmers on trial who are helping provide communities with fresh foods. It is my right to contract privately with a farmer for the food of my choice just as it is the right of every American,” said Melinda Olson, a mother and recipient of one of the MDA’s warnings.

“The MDA’s harassment against mothers will not work. We plan to ignore this warning and continue operating as we are. MDA should not waste taxpayer money investigating, prosecuting and jailing peaceful farmers and mothers for helping their communities secure fresh foods. Our time to stand up against this tyranny is now!” she said.

Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, who tracks such issues nationally, said, “Nowhere in the country at this time is state action against food freedom and consumer choice more oppressive than in the state of Minnesota.”

Plans posted online for the event explain that the court has allowed three days for Schlangen’s misdemeanor trial.

The Farm-to-Consumer Fund also confirmed that once the Minneapolis trial for Schlangen is over, he’ll face six more charges of food rule violations in Stearns County.

“While this is going on, there is a pending administrative hearing in which MDA is seeking an order to suspend any further food sales by Schlangen,” the fund reported.

“In addition to selling poultry and eggs produced on his farm, Schlangen manages the Freedom Farms Coop (a private food club formed in July 2010, serving more than 50 families) and delivers raw dairy products and other nutrient dense foods to club members, most of whom live in the Twin Cities.”

The organization documented Schlangen’s perspective, who said: “It must be legal to privately support farms that grow quality food and provide for the health of our growing children and seniors. This should be a model for today’s agriculture. Connecting kids with natural food production is vital to their future.”

He explains he believes private arrangements to purchase such food are not under the jurisdiction of the state.

It was nearly two years ago when the MDA raided warehouse space Schlangen leased. In the warrantless search, state officials seized food at the facility.

Then in 2011 deputies accompanied state agency officials when they impounded his truck and goods while he was delivering farm eggs to students at Macalester College in in St. Paul.

He has argued he doesn’t need a state “food handler’s permit” because he delivers only to members of the buying club through private contract, not the public.

The organization also reports the state agency “has tried” to put farmer Mike Hartmann out of business in recent years, bringing charges against him, his wife Diana and others.

WND reported several months ago when protesters distributed an estimated 100 gallons of raw milk in front of the offices of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration near Washington during a rally that prompted the federal agency to issue a statement defending its crackdown on the product.

The event was organized by the Farm Food Freedom Coalition. A spokesman for the rally, Max Kane, told WND that a caravan of vehicles collected the supplies of raw milk, then traveled to Silver Springs, Md., to the FDA offices for the protest.

The distribution there was in violation of a federal law that prevents people from moving raw milk across state lines for delivery to others. The rally participants were met by officers from the Department of Homeland Security and others.

But Kane said there were no conflicts, no arrests and no violence.

The FDA said there have been there have been reports of illnesses from raw milk, but a report from the Weston A. Price Foundation revealed that from 1980 to 2005 there were 10 times more illnesses from pasteurized milk than from raw milk.

Today, 30 states allow the sale of raw milk and 20 forbid it, but the federal government forbids it in interstate business.

In California, three people are facing trial following an investigation of the Rawesome buying club. In that case, one of the defense lawyers was stunned by the militancy of the prosecutor, declaring, “She doesn’t want raw milk. … She wants blood.”

The federal government has a long history of cracking down on those who produce raw milk and make it available to consumers – even when the consumers are the ones who own the cows and milk.

In that recent case in Wisconsin, a judge ruled that Americans do not have a right to choose their food, not even when they own the cows and the milk.

Kimberly Hartke of the Campaign for Real Milk, a project of The Weston A. Price Foundation, has told WND as the cases have developed the government’s “heavy-handed” tactics simply have gone too far.

“As more consumers seek greater access to local farm fresh milk to feed their families, our federal government is working overtime to curtail freedom to feed your family the way you deem necessary. Since most seek raw dairy for health reasons, this is a serious concern,” she said.

It was a ruling from Circuit Court Judge Patrick J. Fiedler in Wisconsin that said the families who reported they were boarding their cows for a fee and then getting the milk instead were running a “dairy farm.”

“It’s always a surprise when a judge says you don’t have the fundamental right to consume the foods of your choice,” said Kennedy.

Fiedler’s decision said, “Plaintiffs argue that they have a fundamental right to possess, use and enjoy their property and therefore have a fundamental right to own a cow, or a heard (sic) of cows, and to use their cow(s) in a manner that does not cause harm to third parties. They argue that they have a fundamental right to privacy to consume the food of their choice for themselves and their families and therefore have a fundamental right to consume unpasteurized milk from their cows,” the judge wrote.

Bunk, he concluded.

“They do not simply own a cow that they board at a farm. Instead, plaintiffs operate a dairy farm. If plaintiffs want to continue to operate their dairy farm then they must do so in a way that complies with the laws of Wisconsin.”

He continued, “The court denied plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, which means the following:

“(1) no, plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a diary (sic) herd;
“(2) no, plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;
“(3) no, plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to board their cow at the farm of a farmer;
“(4) no, the Zinniker plaintiffs’ private contract does not fall outside the scope of the state’s police power;
“(5) no, plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice; and
“(6) no, the DATCP did not act in an ultra vires manner because it had jurisdiction to regulate the Zinniker plaintiffs’ conduct.”

Technorati Tags: Moms,Minnesota,farming,food,food police,food choices,food Nazis,stand-up,farm buying clubs,Big Brother,Big Agri,Big Government,Agenda 21,natural food,raw milk

Berries…

Berries are delicious, but they're also kind of delicate.  Raspberries in particular seem like they can mold before you even get them home from the market.  There's nothing more tragic than paying $4 for a pint of local raspberries, only to look in the fridge the next day and find that fuzzy mold growing on their insides. 

Well, with fresh berries just starting to hit farmers markets, we can tell you that how to keep them fresh!  Here’s a tip I’m sharing on how to  prevent them from getting there in the first place: 

Wash them with vinegar!!

When you get your berries home, prepare a mixture of one part vinegar (white or apple cider probably work best) and ten parts water.  Dump the berries into the mixture and swirl around. Drain, rinse if you want (though the mixture is so diluted you can't taste the vinegar,) and pop in the fridge.  The vinegar kills any mold spores and other bacteria that might be on the surface of the fruit, and voila!  Raspberries will last a week or more, and strawberries go almost two weeks without getting moldy and soft.

So go forth and stock up on those pricey little gems, knowing they'll stay fresh as long as it takes you to eat them.

You're so berry welcome!

h/t to Deonia Copeland

Michael Pollan's prescription to President Barack Obama — and you: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants’

Michael Pollan visited the UBC Farm recently.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER — He’s not as famous as his brother-in-law, actor Michael J. Fox, but Michael Pollan has a captivated audience that can change a nation. One, in particular, is Barack Obama.

Last October, Pollan wrote an open letter to Obama in The New York Times Magazine, citing how the presidential candidate could put the nation’s food system on the right track if he became president. In short order, an Obama aide phoned requesting a summary, but Pollan declined, basically saying if the story could have been shorter, it would have been. Undeterred, Obama quoted Pollan’s article at length in an interview with a reporter from Time magazine.

At the consumer level, Pollan is changing the way people eat, first with Omnivore’s Dilemma, which stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for 91 weeks. In his latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he coined a phrase, summarizing the book’s message: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” (Perhaps Obama should have asked for a seven-word summary.) Anyway, the phrase has legs and is working its way onto T-shirts, coffee mugs and the bottom of e-mail signatures. Some Pollan fans have created a web petition, appealing to Obama to appoint Pollan as secretary of agriculture (www.thepetitionsite.com).

Pollan’s shorthand summary of the book is like a semaphore for eating whole, local, mostly vegetarian foods in lesser amounts (like the French, eat less, but more sensually). But the background history, politics, culture and science woven into the book are what makes you sit up. “Food” in his mind does not include “food-like substitutes,” the 17,000 new ones that appear on grocery shelves every year.

I had a chance to sit down with Pollan when he was in Vancouver on a speaking engagement recently. (About 700 people showed up at the University of B.C. Farm.)

“I spent two years looking at the whole question of what we really know about diet and health,” said Pollan, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., where he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Usually, the deeper you drill into questions like that, the more complicated and ambiguous things become and it’s not as simple as you thought. With this question, the opposite was true. The further I went, the simpler it got. After two years of research, I had seven words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

That’s his prescription for health and well-being.

When Pollan talks about food, he means the kind our grandparents and great-grandparents used to eat.

“The modern way of eating leads to chronic diseases. As soon as you get away from the Western diet, you are going to be healthier.

It’s the elephant in the room that the food industry would rather not pay attention to,” he says.

In his book, he raises the irony of North American orthoexics, referring to an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

“The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food,” he says in the book.

“The rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the super-abundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn and soy.

These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except vegetables, fruits and whole grains.”

Humans, he says, have adapted to a multitude of diets around the world. The Western diet, however, is not one of them and we have higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity than people on culturally traditional diets. By the 1960s, he says, it was all but impossible to sustain our grandparents’ way of eating. Synthetics had entered the food chain, as had meats raised on grains (not pastures) and pharmaceuticals.

The thing is, the big profits are made in cheap, easy, processed food. “It’s easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or carrot.”

However, those health claims often crumble like vanilla wafers. “The low-fat campaign,” he says, was an abject failure after 30 years of linking dietary fat with heart disease and cancer and weight gain.

“It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences,” he says in his book. He points out that the human brain is about 60 per cent fat and every neuron is sheathed in a protective layer of fat.

Ironically, Americans got fat on low-fat diets because they turned to carbs to avoid fat.

There’s evidence that carbs interfere with insulin metabolism in ways that increase hunger and promote overeating and, thus, fat storage in the body.

Grandma food, the simple, unadulterated food made of vegetables, fruits and grains, can’t be broken down into reductionist science, he says.

These whole foods are a wilderness of chemical compounds and interactions that science doesn’t understand, just like the workings of our digestive system which has as many neurons as our spinal column.

“But,” he says, “you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.”

Pollan is optimistic. “There’s a revolution going on and I’m very encouraged. The fastest growing segment [in the food sector] are farmers’ markets and organics. It’s important on the health level because there are no processed foods at farmers’ markets. Anything that gets people to cook more tends towards a healthier diet.”

And that, he says, is happening despite $32 billion a year spent marketing processed foods in the U.S.

BY MIA STAINSBY, VANCOUVER SUNJUNE 23, 2009

Sorry for the bad fit - full story - vancouversun.com

Click here to listen to the interview with food author Michael Pollan

Related Resources:

• In Defense of Food
• The Omnivore's Dilemma