Author: Joel Horst

How to Cook a Chicken When You Don’t Know How to Cook

Leave a comment

By Joel Horst

At age 26, I am a member of the Millennial generation. Like many other Millennials, I am busy. I don’t have a lot of cooking skills. I do want to eat healthy, and I don’t just want a TV dinner or a frozen pizza.

Fortunately, most of the time, I don’t have to cook. The three ladies of our home do a very excellent job of making hearty, healthy meals for our family. However, when Dad, Mom and the girls took a trip and left us guys to fend for ourselves in the kitchen, I got the job of seeing that my brothers had something to eat. Luckily, Mom left a menu with cooking directions for me to follow. Most of it was pretty simple, like wrapping egg burritos in parchment paper and tinfoil and sticking them in the oven. (Except that, after wrapping the burritos, I discovered that I needed another 35-45 minutes to heat them in the oven, so I stuck the burritos in the fridge till the next day.)

When Sunday rolled around, it would be my job to make a big Sunday dinner for four guys. Saturday night, I looked at my menu:

Get chicken out of freezer to thaw overnight.

The next morning, after caring for the laying hens, I prepared to make Sunday lunch. The menu stated:

Put 2 cups rice in deep casserole dish.

I finally managed to find a dish that would hold the 4 1/2 lb chicken and the rice, and added 2 cups of rice.

Add 4 cups water. Sprinkle with Lawry’s salt.


Take stuff out of inside of chicken. Cut off leg tuck flap.


Sprinkle chicken with Lawry’s, onion powder, garlic powder and paprika.

I discovered that the onion powder had disappeared (it had gone on vacation with the rest of the family). I substituted minced onion, but I probably should have just skipped it altogether. Oh, well.

Place on rice.

Oops. The chicken was already in the dish. (Moral of the story: read all directions carefully before proceeding.)

Cover dish. Heat at 325o for 3 hours.

I turned the oven on and slid the casserole dish into the oven. Done! Only about 30 minutes (including 10 minutes spent trying to track down the dish, plus 5 minutes trying to find a photographer).

At lunchtime, I heated up a jar of homegrown green beans and pulled the chicken out of the oven.

It was, if I may say so myself, delicious. Without a whole lot of time in the kitchen, we enjoyed a hearty Sunday dinner, and had leftover chicken and rice to enjoy at a later date. Despite having raised chickens for 15 years, it was the first time I can remember roasting a chicken myself, and I was amazed at how easy it was. If I can do it, anyone can!

Want to try the recipe yourself? Here it is:

Chicken and Rice

Put 2 cups of brown rice in a deep casserole dish. Add 4 cups of water and sprinkle on Lawry’s salt.

Take heart, liver and neck out of the chicken. Cut off the flap of skin holding the legs of the chicken. Sprinkle the chicken with Lawry’s salt, onion powder, garlic powder, and paprika. (If you have other spices you would like to use, feel free to add or substitute them.)

Place chicken on rice. Cover dish. Bake at 325oF for three hours.

Enjoy!

Eating on the Road

Leave a comment

One of the difficulties we face, once we start eating good food, is what to do when we leave the comfort of our homes and don’t have access to our kitchens. After you hear about the effects of eating “store-bought” food and find yourself not feeling good when you eat out, McDonald’s just doesn’t seem so attractive anymore!

Last March, I took a trip out to Chicago for a health seminar. I had recently found out about the effects of glyphosate, and the prospect of eating low-quality food for a whole weekend did not appeal to me. I was flying, so I couldn’t take a cooler. I decided to try to pack four days’ worth of food in my suitcase and make all my own meals! Here’s what I took:


Grilled chicken breasts
Breaded beef sandwich steaks
1 dozen hardboiled eggs
Two heads of lettuce
A six-pack of yogurt
Two loaves of homemade bread
Mayonnaise
Sliced cheese
1 lb Heavenly Honey
Peanut butter
Butter
Homemade cookies
Small brown paper bags

You may be amazed that I was able to pack all that in my suitcase and still have room for my clothes. As I list it out here, I am amazed as well! After packing everything I wanted to take, I set the suitcase on the bathroom scales. It weighed 49 pounds–almost over the limit! I took out a few items and got the weight down to 47.5 pounds. Ready to go!

My room at the hotel had a small fridge, so when I arrived, I put the perishable items in the fridge and walked down the street to the nearby Jewel grocery store. I was happy to find that they had a selection of organic food–I wouldn’t have had to pack so much! Oh, well. I bought a bag of baby carrots, a bag of tortilla chips, and some distilled water. I was all set.


Yogurt made an excellent breakfast, along with a hardboiled egg and whatever else I decided to throw in–maybe a peanut butter and honey sandwich. After breakfast, I would spread out my sandwich fixings on the vanity and prepare lunch, which I took along to class.

Back in the hotel in the evening, I made supper. This could be another sandwich, or a salad with chicken breast if I so preferred.


This worked out well for me. I had nutritious, organic food, much of which was homemade. I didn’t have the luxury of hot meals, but that was a small price to pay for eating real food!

Six months later, Dad took us guys on a Dad-and-the-boys trip to Colonial Williamsburg. This time, we were only gone for two days, and we drove to Williamsburg, so we were able to take a cooler and an electric skillet. We had cereal for breakfast, made sandwiches for lunch, and heated up food in the skillet for supper. It worked very well. The hardest part was washing up the skillet in the bathroom sink!

For an extended trip, one strategy is to find health food stores along your route, and “re-stock” as necessary. You may not even need to take much along. You may also be able to find some healthy restaurants to eat at as well.

You don’t have to resort to eating “garbage” whenever you take a trip. With a little planning, preparation and extra baggage, you can eat nutritious food wherever you go.

When “Antibiotic-Free” Isn’t

Leave a comment

A month or two ago, someone gave us a used egg carton from another egg company. On the front of its full-color label, the company proudly advertised: “No Antibiotics!”

Technically, they were right. Technically, however, they were very wrong. In 2010, Monsanto patented glyphosate (commonly known as “Roundup”) as an antibiotic. Glyphosate is the #1 herbicide in the US, with 180-185,000,000 pounds of glyphosate used in 2007 (the latest year that the EPA gives statistics for). To put that in perspective, “regular” antibiotics used in agriculture totaled almost 29,000,000 pounds in 2009. In other words, over 6 times more glyphosate was used than regular antibiotics.

But glyphosate is no ordinary antibiotic. It might be called a “reverse antibiotic”. It kills good bacteria, such as those that inhabit our intestines—and stimulates harmful bacteria. And it was this antibiotic that was being fed to the chickens who laid the “no antibiotics” eggs!

For years, Monsanto advertised Roundup as “safe” and “biodegradable” and told us it was neutralized when it touched the soil; that is, until they got in legal trouble because the facts didn’t line up with their claims. Roundup is a chelating agent that binds with other substances and makes them unavailable. When glyphosate binds with clay particles in the soil, it is immobilized and remains attached to that clay particle until it either breaks down (a process that can take years) or is released in the soil. Therefore, repeated applications of Roundup have the potential to accumulate in the soil.

In 1996, genetically engineered crops hit the market, and by 2012, around 90% of the corn and soy grown in the US were GMO. Most of these crops are designed to be sprayed with Roundup while they are growing to kill weeds growing in the field, without killing the crop. Now, instead of only spraying their fields prior to planting, farmers could spray Roundup at any time they desired. What this means is that a systemic antibiotic (glyphosate/Roundup) is being sprayed directly on our food, absorbed by the plants and spread throughout their tissues. Roundup is also sprayed pre-harvest on crops such as wheat, barley, sugarcane and lentils to control weeds and to get uniform dry-down of the plants.

And? Does it matter?

In 2012, Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team of researchers shocked the world with graphic pictures of rats with huge tumors from exposure to Roundup Ready foods and Roundup.
Seralini's GMO Maize and Roundup Research
From left to right: a rat fed GMO corn grown without Roundup; a rat fed GMO corn grown with Roundup; a rat given non-GMO corn, with a trace amount of Roundup in its drinking water.

“Séralini designed his 2012 study as a direct followup of a previous study on the same NK603 maize conducted by Monsanto to support its application for regulatory authorization…

 

“Séralini’s findings were alarming: both GM maize NK603 and Roundup caused serious kidney and liver damage and an increased and earlier development of tumours, leading to an increased rate of mortality.

“These serious effects had not shown up in Monsanto’s 90-day test because it was too short. Serious diseases like organ damage and tumours take time to develop and become obvious…

 

“…in Séralini’s study the first large tumours were only seen four months into the trial in the case of males and seven months in the case of females. Most tumours were only detected after 18 months...

“Ninety days in a rat is equivalent to only 7–9 years in human terms – yet human beings could eat a GM food and residues of Roundup over a lifetime.” (emphasis mine)
http://www.gmoseralini.org/faq-items/why-this-study-now/

By the beginning of the 24th month of the study, 50-80% of all female rats had developed tumors in the GMO- and Roundup-exposed groups—with some rats having up to 3 tumors.

It is important to note that increased tumors and organ damage were found in rats who were given Roundup in their water with no GMO feed. In other words, Roundup by itself, without GMO grain, has the potential to do great damage to the body, even at very low doses. (The lowest dose was intended to mimic the minute trace amount found in some tap water.)

But the potential damages of Roundup go beyond tumors. As noted earlier, Roundup is very toxic to gut bacteria, which are important for proper digestion of food. Glyphosate also inhibits enzymes that the body uses to detoxify itself and produce bile acids for digestion of food. This means that, by destroying the body’s natural defenses, Roundup can enhance the effects of other toxins we absorb from our food and environment. It also means that Roundup can cause the digestive system to work less effectively than it should.

In other words, we see a one-two punch here: destruction of gut bacteria and reduction of digestive function. When the bowel is malfunctioning, we are unable to absorb all the minerals and vitamins that we need from our food. This can lead to all kinds of disease. Researchers Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have shown the great possibility of a link between glyphosate and many different diseases, including gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. (See link at the end.)

But is this actually happening in our society? Is Roundup actually causing disease, or is this empty hypothesizing? Nancy Swanson, former staff scientist for the US Navy, has plotted the rise in the use of glyphosate against the rise in various diseases. The graphs are significant:

Graph of children with autism

Graph of deaths from Alzheimer's

Graph of diabetes cases
Compare this graph with the following one showing the total amount of sweeteners used over the same time period (top, purple line). The total amount of sweeteners used has actually dropped while diabetes has risen:

Graph of sweetener use

Graph of deaths from renal (kidney) disease

Graph of the incidence of liver cancer

The last two graphs are very interesting, because they go right along with the findings of Séralini’s rat study: liver and kidney damage. The renal (kidney) disease graph is particularly interesting, because it shows the disease rate dropping right before the introduction of GMO’s and increase in glyphosate usage –with a sharp spike afterwards. I encourage you to look at all the graphs:
http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/gmos-glyphosate-and-neurological-disorders
http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/glyphosate-gmos-and-disease
http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/incidence-rates-of-thyroid-cancer-new-cases-reported-per-year-per-100-000

How much glyphosate are we actually getting in our food? After all, the government has set limits on the level of glyphosate in our food. But how do we know if anyone is actually abiding by those standards? Samsel and Seneff state:

“It is difficult to get information on actual amounts of glyphosate present in foods, due to the perception that it is nontoxic to humans [1,6]. The USDA Pesticide Data Program (PDP) is a voluntary program which randomly monitors agricultural chemical residues in the food supply. A search of the most recent data for 2010, published in May 2012, found statistics for the most popular agricultural chemicals except for glyphosate and glufosinate, another organophosphate. Residue data for the most popular herbicide on the planet were not available, but, interestingly, information on atrazine and other herbicides were readily available. Communication with USDA revealed that no data were available due to lack of monitoring. However, in 2013, for the first time, the USDA will be releasing a small amount of data for glyphosate residues only in soy. Lack of program funding was cited as the reason for this lack of data.” (emphasis mine)

The National Pesticide Information Center confirms this:
“Glyphosate was not included in compounds tested for by the Food and Drug Adminstration’s (FDA) Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program (PRMP), nor in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program (PDP).”
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/glyphotech.html

It’s strange that the government is not testing for the #1 agricultural chemical in America! Obviously, if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. With glyphosate being sprayed all over our food, there’s no telling how much the average American ingests on a daily basis. Those 185 million pounds of glyphosate have to go somewhere.

One thing is certain: we are eating glyphosate. A recent German study found glyphosate residues in the urine of dairy cows, rabbits and humans. These people and animals were not just consuming glyphosate-contaminated food, but were actually absorbing the glyphosate into their bloodstream and circulating it throughout the whole body. Not surprisingly, glyphosate residues were significantly lower in people eating an organic diet than those eating a conventional diet. One very interesting finding was that chronically ill humans had significantly higher levels of glyphosate in their urine than healthy humans.

Furthermore, this study also found that glyphosate accumulates in animal tissue. Tests of kidney, liver, lung, spleen, muscle and intestinal tissue all revealed similar amounts of glyphosate residues. Glyphosate is accumulating in the meats that we eat—to be passed along for our second-hand consumption. The logical conclusion is that glyphosate residues are also accumulating in our own bodies. (See more at http://omicsonline.org/open-access/detection-of-glyphosate-residues-in-animals-and-humans-2161-0525.1000210.php?aid=23853)

What are we to do? If the government won’t protect us, who will? You. We must each take our own health in our own hands and get serious about removing this toxic antibiotic from our diet if we don’t want to be included on those graphs of disease. This starts with the cereal you eat for breakfast, the sandwich you eat at lunch and the chicken you eat for dinner. If it’s not organically raised, assume it has glyphosate residues. This includes the tortilla chips that are made with organic corn and fried in conventional, glyphosate-treated vegetable oil. Since the glyphosate residues are part of the food itself, they cannot be washed off, and they are not broken down by cooking.

It is important to cut through the chatter and find truly organic food. Be discerning and ask questions. One farm about an hour from us claims to “go beyond organic”—yet they told us that they used GMO feed for their animals. Other farms, recognizing the dangers of GMO’s, use non-organic, GMO-free feed. However, GMO-free is not necessarily glyphosate-free. It is standard practice for many farmers to spray their fields with Roundup before planting to kill weeds. According to the National Pesticide Information Center, “Lettuce, carrots, and barley contained glyphosate residues up to one year after the soil was treated with 3.71 pounds of glyphosate per acre.” Given that the Séralini rat study showed increased disease in rats who consumed only 0.1 parts per billion of Roundup in their drinking water (i.e., one drop in over 130,000 gallons of water), even a small amount of glyphosate residue is problematic.

Some organic farms, due to the cost of organic feed, feed their chickens conventional feed. They cannot call the chicken or eggs organic, but they can say it was raised on an organic farm. Take nothing for granted!

Fourteen years ago, during our first year of farming, we switched to organic feed for our chickens. This currently means paying over three times more for our feed than if we used conventional feed, but we don’t regret our decision. It is part of our quest to give you healthy, nourishing food that helps you to live better and stay out of the doctor’s office.

I encourage you to make the hard choices. Stop feeding yourself antibiotics that kill the “good guys” and help the “bad guys”. Buy real. Buy healthy. Buy glyphosate-free!

References and recommended reading
Website about the Séralini rat study:
http://www.gmoseralini.org

Articles by Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/Entropy/entropy-15-01416.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

A Mercola review of Samsel and Seneff’s findings:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/09/monsanto-roundup-herbicide.aspx

Analysis by Nancy Swanson:
http://sustainablepulse.com/wp-content/uploads/GMO-health.pdf

Glyphosate residues in urine:
http://omicsonline.org/open-access/detection-of-glyphosate-residues-in-animals-and-humans-2161-0525.1000210.php?aid=23853

Making Hay – the (Sort Of) Old-Fashioned Way

Leave a comment

One unique thing at our farm is the size of our equipment. Our largest "tractor" is a 14 horsepower Wheel Horse garden tractor, currently sporting dual wheels. We have about 35 acres of pasture, and in the spring, the grass grows like crazy, more than what the sheep and cattle can eat. Eventually, this grass gets more mature and tough than what the animals want to eat and must be mowed off to allow new, tender growth. Obviously, we would prefer to make this grass into hay and feed it in the wintertime when the pasture stops growing. But you certainly cannot run a hay baler with a garden tractor.

Last summer, I (Joel) bought an old-fashioned horse-drawn hay rake at a farm auction. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 80-100 years old. One wheel was frozen with rust, and it needed some other work to make it usable, but after a couple days’ work, the hay rake was ready to go. I welded up a hitch so that we can pull it behind the (appropriately named) Wheel Horse.

In the meantime, we also had purchased an old sicklebar mower, originally designed to be pulled behind a tractor. We modified it and mounted an engine on it to run the sicklebar so that we could pull it behind the Wheel Horse as well. After much trial, error and repairs, the mower was ready to cut hay.

After cutting the hay, the next step was raking it together into piles, then dragging the piles together and making haystacks. We were making hay just like they did before the advent of the hay baler.

After starting a stack, one team used the tractor and hay rake to drag hay to the stack, while the rest pitched the hay onto the stack. The younger ones got the job of stomping down the hay to compact it so that we could get more on the stack.

Forking hay by hand is a lot of work. However, it is actually simpler than if we made square hay bales. In that case, we would first bale the hay and the baler would shoot the bales into the haywagon. We would stack the bales in the wagon until it was full. Then we would have to unload the bales into the haymow of a barn – by hand. At feeding time, someone would have to throw down the hay bales, then take them to wherever we fed it. This adds up to handling the hay four times or more.

By contrast, we drag the hay to the stack by machine. All we have to do is pitch the hay onto the stack. We should only have to handle it one more time – when we feed it to the animals, right there in the pasture.

You have probably heard the old nursery rhyme:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.
Where’s the little boy who looks after the sheep?
He’s under the haystack, fast asleep.

Every picture that I’ve ever seen of Little Boy Blue shows him snoozing beside the haystack. After all, isn’t that the closest you can get to being under the haystack?

We discovered otherwise. One old method of making loose hay was to pile the hay on a tripod that held it off the ground. This allowed the farmer to stack up the hay before it had fully dried, because the tripod allowed air to flow underneath the stack and cure the hay. Another method was to have a slanted rack, similar to a fence leaning over, on which the hay was stacked, again allowing air to circulate around the stack and finish curing it so that the hay didn’t spoil and rot.

 

We tried a similar method with the last cutting of hay that we made. Some previous farmer had left behind a large, long metal hay feeder that had been sitting in our front pasture since we moved to this farm. It was made of heavy steel and was still quite rugged, so we dragged it on out into the pasture where we had cut hay, turned the feeder upside down and stacked hay on it. Turned upside down, with hay piled on top, the feeder made a nice tunnel through the middle of the stack.

If you crawl inside this tunnel, you understand why Little Boy Blue would go to sleep under the haystack. On a hot summer day, the haystack offers a cool, highly insulated retreat from the sun, with maybe a bit of a breeze to stir the air and keep things pleasant. It would be a nice place to take a nap.

Are You Eating Garbage?

Leave a comment

Minerals, as we all know, are vital for life. Getting enough calcium, vitamins and colloidal minerals is essential for keeping our body running well and rebuilding the cells on time, and with all the proper building blocks.

However, we cannot live on mineral and vitamin supplements. God gave us food to eat, not mineral supplements. After all, let’s ask the question: why do we take supplements? Because those minerals and vitamins are not sufficient in our diet. There’s not enough mineral colloids in our vegetables, nor in the grass and grain that the animals eat who provide our milk, butter, cheese, eggs and meat. Mineral supplements are a crutch–a very necessary crutch, but a crutch, nonetheless.

I used to have the impression that we could just give our animals whatever minerals were lacking in their pasture and they would be healthy. However, I realized last year that that is not the true path to health. Those minerals need to be in the soil, so that the soil grows healthy, nutrient-dense plants with well-built proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Then the animals who eat those plants will also be healthy.

The same thing applies with our own food. Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you decide to be really cheap on your food budget. So you go around to the back of the grocery stores and find their old, reject, half-rotten produce that they set out by the dumpster. You load up those boxes into your car. You also find some meat in the dumpster that is past its expiration date, but it hasn’t yet turned to compost in the package. Inside the store, you buy a couple gallons of oil and several quarts of blackstrap molasses, and when you get home, the UPS guy has delivered the package of mineral supplements that you ordered the other day. You cook up the half-rotten broccoli and carrots that you found in one box, making sure to add the right amount of oil and molasses to add minerals, oils and sugars to the food, to make it more digestible. You stick the dumpster roast in the oven, with a mineral-rich herb concoction and some more oil and blackstrap. You make a salad with the limp lettuce and mushy spinach from another box, and make up some salad dressing with oil and vinegar, being sure again to add some more blackstrap. At supper time, you set your offering on the table, and tell everybody to be sure to take their supplements. The rest of the family looks at what you set on the table–and begins running for the bathroom, the back yard and the trash can to empty whatever their stomach may already contain. You eat your concoctions–and are sick with food poisoning for the next two days.

Silly? Let’s say that instead, you buy your veggies and meat inside the grocery store. The vegetables are low in the minerals needed to make healthy, nutrient-dense foods, and the steer that your roast came from was fed low-mineral GMO corn. Not only do they not contain enough minerals to make you healthy, but they were not healthy themselves. The vegetables have free nitrogen that was never turned into protein because there wasn’t enough calcium to make the plant work right. Therefore, the plants do not contain all the building blocks for cells that they could have, nor all the anti-oxidants that they should have. God’s garbage crew–insects- -should have eaten it themselves, but thanks to the insecticides that the farmer sprayed on, the garbage crew is dead and the garbage is on the shelf for you to buy. It is also deficient in natural sugars and oils, important for making food digestible. The roast is deficient, not only in minerals, but also in vitamins and healthy fats like Omega-3 and CLA because it was not fed the diet that God meant for that steer to eat. The apples you buy for dessert are full of reducing sugars, which turn brown when you expose them to the air. This indicates a lack of antioxidants and nutrition in general. You bring all this stuff home and cook it up, making sure to re-mineralize your food, and pass around the supplements at the table. But that does not turn the free nitrogen into protein, or replace the missing Omega-3 and CLA. In short, you add some stuff back in, but you are not dining on healthy food.

Dr. Carey A. Reams, a pioneer in growing nutrient-dense food, said that the Bible is the best health book ever written. We need to go to God’s Word to find out what we should eat. So what does it tell us?

In Psalm 103:5, it says of God that He "satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s." Notice what it says: "good things". I don’t believe that means mineral supplements, or low-quality lettuce. "Good things" means food that is high in minerals and nutrition, high in antioxidants and good fats, and well-built because it received good nutrition while it was growing.

This passage tells us that God satisfies our mouths with good things so that our youth is renewed like the eagle’s. What does that mean? Periodically, an eagle will go off to a secluded spot and molt. Its claws and feathers drop out, and are replaced with new ones. When it comes back, it looks like a new eagle, even though it may be many years old. That eagle can even live up to 50 years of age.

In the same way, our bodies are constantly rebuilding themselves. Every six months, if your body is working right, your system replaces every cell. It has to replace that cell with something. If you are eating garbage, your cell will be replaced with one made from garbage. In order for your youth to be renewed like the eagle’s, you need to consume "good things"–nutrient-dense foods.

Low-mineral food is, according to Dr. Arden Andersen, garbage. He said: "Insects are Nature’s garbage crew… God designed insects to take out that which is not fit to eat. But we’re smarter than God, right? So we kill the garbage crew, and we consume the garbage, and then we wonder why we’re sick…" (Quoted from memory, probably somewhat paraphrased)

So, should we take mineral supplements and re-mineralize our food with things like blackstrap molasses? Of course, if you need to. If you’ve been eating garbage for forty years, you’re going to be mineral-deficient, so it makes sense to take supplements to "jump start" things and get your body back into shape. If the best peas you can find are low in minerals, then by all means, add some oil and blackstrap molasses. But if you want to have true health, you need to eat "good things", not garbage.

I suggest that everyone get a copy of the most recent edition of Nourishment Home Grown by A. F. Beddoe. (The latest one–the 2004 edition–is available from http://www.advancedideals.org/) This is a great book for the backyard gardener. It will teach you how to grow your own nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. It also has a section with tips on how to get the best produce when shopping at the grocery store, how to add minerals to deficient food, and how to test the nutrient density of food that you grow or buy.

Another good place to look is http://www.crossroads.ws. It has a free, online e-book explaining the basics of nutrient density.

If you need a source for soil amendments to add minerals to your soil, a great place is Lancaster Ag Products (http://www.lancasterag.com/). Although they are in Lancaster County, PA, they do some shipping, so you may not actually have to go to Pennsylvania for soil amendments.

Learn what you can about nutrient-dense food. Your health depends upon it.

Why Organic?

Leave a comment

We feed our chickens organic feed. With prices of organic feed close to double that of conventional feed, it is easy to wonder, "Is it really worth it?" Nutrient-density tests of organic produce have often shown that "organic" does not equal "nutrient-dense". Sometimes, organic produce will be as bad as—or worse than—conventional produce. Some, therefore, with good reason, start the chorus: "Why pay more for organic if it’s not higher in minerals?" Of course, we all know that organic has not been sprayed with pesticides, and eating food sprayed with substances whose names end in "cide" (from the Latin, meaning "death") does not seem like a good idea. But another, just as important reason is that organic produce must not be genetically engineered.

Companies like Monsanto engineer corn, soybeans and other plants to make them resistant to herbicides (so you can spray Monsanto’s Roundup on the corn field and kill the weeds, but not the corn) or produce their own pesticide (as with Bt corn). Really? Corn with a built-in pesticide? These genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) seem to be everywhere in our food supply. Much of the corn grown in this country is genetically modified (GM). Due to the use of corn for making high fructose corn syrup, many foods that contain corn syrup (from soda pop to ketchup to fruit cocktail to ice cream to "honey" graham crackers) therefore contain genetically modified ingredients.  So how do they modify plant genetics, and what are the results?

Dr. Arden Andersen, speaking at the Weston A. Price Foundation 2006 Conference, tells, in a nutshell, the GMO story:

(BEGIN TRANSCRIPT)
"Now here’s the big issue, really, that you have to understand, it’s even more severe, or as severe, as the immune reaction, that is that absolutely they have proven horizontal gene transfer into our gut bacteria. Horizontal gene transfer. And the problem is, is part of that horizontal gene is an antibiotic resistant gene. An antibiotic resistant gene. So automatically, we become antibiotic resistant to whatever antibiotic that company is using in that genetic technology, because that’s part of the genetic engineering technology…

"So, how is this process happening? Well, what happens is that they have to take cells of this GM crop and they have to culture them, and then somehow they have to get that gene into that cell. But how do they know if it’s in there? They can’t wait for it to grow out and then determine that. So they have to somehow evaluate those cells in culture for the presence of the gene they have randomly shot in. By the way, this is not an absolute technology. It’s very random. They take a plasma gun and they literally just shoot in this plasma into the cells. It’s a random process. And they hope some of them get into the nucleus of the cell. So what they do is they take, for example, the Roundup Ready gene, and they have to attach to that an antibiotic resistant gene, because they have to have some way of identifying whether or not this gene was implanted. Well, then the other thing is  you have to understand is this is a foreign gene. In our body we have switches that turn on our genes, turn off our genes, all right? And they do that at the appropriate times in our development, embryonic development. But this is a foreign gene, so there’s nothing there to turn it on or off, so what they have to do is put an on switch. So they put an activator gene in there. What is that activator gene? Typically that is a virus that they put in there. A virus that our body has never seen before. Great!

"So then what they do is they shoot that in, and then they have to figure out, "How are we going to identify this?" So since they have the antibiotic resistant gene, they then coat all of these cells in culture with that antibiotic, and typically it’s ampicillin — penicillin. So any cell that survives that antibiotic treatment — "Ah, that tells us that gene, then, was accepted. We got that gene into those cells." But the thing about it is, you have an activator gene there. So every cell in that soybean plant is also going to have ampicillin resistance. And as soon as you eat that? Direct horizontal gene transfer to the biology in your gut. So now all of the gut in your body also has ampicillin resistance. Great! We don’t have enough resistance to antibiotics in this country, so I know we need to increase that.

"So think about it a moment. Take identical twins, and let’s say that one donates a kidney to the other one that has kidney failure. Identical twins! Does the recipient automatically accept that kidney from its identical twin? Absolutely not! We still have to give that person anti-rejection drugs, okay? And those are human to human transfer of identical twin tissue. So think for a moment: so you think that an absolute foreign protein, put into a plant and then into our body, is not going to have an immune response?

"The Swiss Federal Research Station–so remember now, all these organizations, these are not fly by night organizations, these are government organizations–the Swiss Federal Station found out that when you take green lacewings and they eat corn borer caterpillars that are feeding on GM corn, 50% more lacewings die than if you actually hit those lacewings with Bt directly. "Ah, but it’s essentially the same." Ladybugs, the same thing. They looked at ladybugs eating aphids that are feeding on genetically engineered potatoes. What did they find? 30% fewer progeny and lived half the normal life expectancy. And then they tell me that there is no issue with genetically engineered food? There’s no such thing as genetically engineered food. It is not food at all. It is poison. Every level of nature tells us that it’s poison. Tell me that we have a placebo effect with ladybugs and green lacewings. Amazing!"
(END TRANSCRIPT)

Does this sound like something that we should consume every day? It more sounds like a wonder that it hasn’t killed us all. I agree with Dr. Andersen. It is poison!

And so, I support organics, if for no other reason than to avoid GMO’s. I cannot believe that I should put antibiotic resistant bacteria and viruses (implanted into the very genetics of the "food") down my throat. It seems risky, if not downright dangerous!

A very good documentary discussing GMO’s is The Future of Food (http://www.thefutureoffood.com/). It goes into detail about just what Monsanto and friends are doing to our food supply. You can see the introduction to it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNezTsrCY0Q