By Bob Harris
This past March, I attended the Going Green in Queens event at the Al Oerter Recreation Center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. I wrote about the movie “Dirt,” which told how dirt is created in nature and how the cutting down of forests, paving over of land and use of pesticides and fertilizers by giant agro-businesses is destroying the ability of our dirt to produce food.
I just came across my notes on a film called “Food Inc.,” which was shown on PBS soon after the Going Green event. It is another movie about agro-businesses, which mostly produce our food since small family farms are slowing closing. A handful of companies comprise the agro-business complex, which manages to produce a lot of food at an affordable price, but there are problems.
Chickens are bred to have a lot of meat, but they cannot walk due to the weight of the meat on their bodies. The chicken raisers contract to big chicken sellers so they have to obey the rules of the companies about how many chickens can be kept in a shed and the size of the cages. Even if they want to let the chickens run free, they are required to produce more chickens in smaller spaces and follow the rules of the big sellers they sell to.
Corn is produced in large amounts due to specially developed seeds and the use of fertilizers. About 31 percent of our land produces corn, which is used for food for animals and to make ethanol and corn syrup. In fact, so much corn goes into ethanol that the cost of corn as a food has risen. Cattle eat lots of corn, so E. coli bacteria grow. It is passed out in the feces which the cattle stand in while crowded in feed lots. The E. coli sticks to the animal’s hides and passes to the meat during slaughtering. Some of the meat is mixed with other meat to make ground meat. The mixing of the ground meat moves the E. coli to the center of the meat, so if you do not cook the ground meat well, you ingest bacteria.
Corn and corn syrup are used in everything. You might remember that Gov. David Paterson wanted to charge a 5-cent tax on corn syrup drinks to cut down obesity, but the bottle beverage industry waged a fierce battle to keep corn syrup drinks cheaper. The film said that due to all the corn syrup and other sugars we now have in our food, one in three children born after 2000 will get diabetes.
We are too dependent on fertilizers, insecticides and modified seeds. Our soil is eroding away or loses its fertility and needs chemicals provided by the agro-industry. Our food comes uniformly modified and does not have the vitality which existed generations ago. Our seeds are provided by one company and are at risk from a blight of some kind. The cheap corn syrup is making us obese and diabetic. There are too many different federal and state agencies responsible for the agro-industries.
GOOD NEWS OF THE WEEK: The 2010 city marathon took place Nov. 7 with the usual huge crowd of runners and spectators. One runner was the Chilean miner Edison Peña, who survived a mine collapse where he cut down his boots and ran in the deserted tunnels 6 miles a day or pulled a heavy pallet. He was invited here for his endurance and he asked to run the race.
He finished in five hours 40 minutes 51 seconds after enduring knee pain and walking the last 10 miles. He was compared to the film character Rocky Balboa, who trained his way to win his first fight. He said he ran to motivate people that they can do what they set out in life to do.
There was also the story of Tim Sweeney, who took six hours 55 minutes to finish the marathon. He had a double lung transplant a year ago. He is a personal trainer who had cystic fibrosis.
BAD NEWS OF THE WEEK: Every spring until fall, a dead zone develops in the Gulf of Mexico below the mouth of the Mississippi River. This year, the dead zone covered 7,000 square miles, killing fish, shrimp and other marine life. The cause is the tiles which farmers lay under their fields as far north as Minnesota. The farmers use the tiles or plastic tubes to drain wetlands and create fields where they can grow crops. The water carries fertilizer with it and kills the living things in the gulf.
The solution is to find ways to correct the problem. One solution is to restore the wetlands along the Louisiana coast, which have been permitted to erode away, grow cover crops to absorb the spring rains and the runoff that carries the nitrogen downstream, use fertilizer differently and try to filter the runoff to remove the nitrogen.
