Occupy Our Food Supply Day!

I just found out that today is Occupy Our Food Supply Day nationwide. How appropriate, then, that I am to appear on Sacramento & Co. on Channel 10 at 11 a.m. today to talk about the Sacramento Food Film Festival. The many diverse films will talk about a lot of the issues that we need to be aware of on Occupy Our Food Supply Day.

I'm not going to write on what so many others are better equipped to do. I will suggest that you read this article from Civil Eats -Why We Must Occupy Our Food Supply.

Just this one paragraph from it says a lot:

Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than 90 percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto. Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

The last few weeks I've been pre-viewing the Sacramento Food Film Festival films. Our feature film is Farmaggedon and I was only a third of the way into it and I was outraged. The USDA killed an entire flock of European imported sheep for fear of Mad Cow disease when there has NEVER been a documented case of Mad Cow in sheep. 

There is more outrage when you consider that just like banks, Wall Street, and pharmaceutical companies, agricultural corporation executives cycle into high positions in the the USDA and other federal government agencies. Forget separation of church and State, we need a separation of corporate execs from government positions!

How can a person take action?

• Continue to buy your food from local, small purveyors and farmers markets.
• Buy organic when you can and if you can afford it.
• Stop buying packaged and processed foods and cook from fresh, whole ingredients. (There's a lot of easy recipes out there.)
• Sign petitions against genetically modified foods!

There are a lot of other things you can do too, but I think those are a good start.

And to learn more about genetically modified foods, organics, plights of small farms, loss of farmlands, food waste, and many other issues, come to the Sacramento Food Film Festival on March 10th and say hello to me.