Monsanto

I’m a firm believer in the power of the marketplace, that every dollar we spend on food is a binary vote: either FOR an agriculture system that makes our bodies, our communities, and our environment healthier, or AGAINST it.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day at the largest annual organic farming conference in the US, held just two hours away from the Twin Cities, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. The Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference provided a glimpse into the zeitgeist of today’s organic movement. Although organic food is fully integrated into the marketplace and can be found everywhere from Cub Foods to The Wedge, the small farmers who make up the backbone of the movement don’t lack for revolutionary fervor. They’re still driven by a passion to change the world.

Photo courtesy of RawFoodLife.comLast December, we wrote about ana Sofia Joanes, food policy activist and director of the movie Fresh, and her campaign against BigAg monopolies.

With this morning’s announcement of 2009’s Academy Award nominees, it seems appropriate to look at food from the perspective of a movie goer. Last year, two broadly released movies featured food in a starring role: Food, Inc. and Julie and Julia. We’ll find out today if either of them garners any nominations.

In the meantime, I’d like to look back through the years and pick the films that most successfully incorporate food into the plot. I’ll include the most recent first, then continue moving backwards in time. Then on Thursday, I’ll select the most memorable food-related scenes from the history of cinema.

I’m thinking a lot about food systems these days. Fundamentally, there seems to be collective agreement that ours is broken (unless you happen to work for Monsanto or Smithfield), so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we might fix it. (Jill Richardson’s excellent “Recipe for America” has a few ideas too - that and her La Vida Locavore blog are well worth reading.)

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about food systems that are:

Photo from http://educate-yourself.org/As I type this, I am sick to my stomach.

No, it’s not something I ate. It’s something I read, this headline:

Forbes Magazine named Monsanto the #1 company of the year for 2009

Makes me want to puke.

If you want to read the article yourself, you’ll have to Google it; I refuse to drive traffic to the Forbes Magazine website.

I read it, and then had to create an account to post a comment. Here’s what I wrote:

ana Sofia joanes to DOJ:
"Free our farmers"

Obama campaigning in Iowa, January 2008.

While the debate over healthcare reform continues to rage in Washington, other political news can get lost in the cracks.

Case in point, did you know that President Obama recently nominated two "Big Ag" executives -- with connections to Monsanto and CropLife -- to key posts in the U. S. Department of Agriculture? The story wasn't covered by the mainstream news organizations, so I didn't hear about it until I received an action alert from Food Democracy Now.

Here's the full text:

Dear Friends,