Monsanto

The Setup
I haven't published anything in quite some time because I've been extremely busy with work and in my off-time the last thing on my mind was blogging. However, among my New Years resolutions is a pledge to manage my time better, re-arrange and balance my priorities, and consequentially spend more time learning about practical skills, nature, survival skills, and lastly the topic of this blog, growing our own food.

Among the many systems of dependence we have, our dependence on others for food is among the most dangerous. If you think about the basic human needs you'll probably come up first with things like food and water, then maybe shelter(both housing and clothing) and so on.
The fact that if we were suddenly stripped of the convenience of restaurants and supermarkets to feed us, most of us would barely know the first thing about procuring our own food, is alarming and frankly should be a bit frightening to you.

Realistically that's obviously not going to happen, but there is something else just as dangerous going on right now, and has been going on for some time.

I would hope that by now most people know that the food you buy is largely in some way genetically modified. They may not have messed with a cow's genes through science but you can bet they at the very least bred them to have a high milk yield. I'm not even going to get into the treatment of most farm animals, that's something I could write another, very large blog on. But hopefully you also realize that the the healthy fruits and veggies you eat are quite different from what our grandparents and great-grandparents were eating. This too can be attributed to the way the plants are bred but there is something going on that I don't think most people know about.

The Meat of the Situation
Before I start let me make it clear that this is not some crazy conspiracy theory. It may be a conspiracy, but it's not a theory. Even our national news stations have tried to get this story out, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been publicly exposed to the degree that it's had very much influence on people yet, partially because this company pays people off to keep thier mouths shut.

To get to the point, a company called Monsanto has been screwing with our food in ways that should give you legitimate reasons to be both scared and pissed, in ways that would require every one of us to be dependent on them for food and be absolutely incapable, even if we tried, of producing our own food, which goes WAY deeper than a violation of HUMAN rights, and enters the realm of being a crime against any and all living creatures.

For a very long time they've been going to work on the agricultural industry, modifying agricultural products to have a high yield, which sounds good if that's the only part you hear. Unsurprisingly that's the only part they advertise. The rest of the story is that they genetically modify many of these fruits and veggies to work hand-in-hand with the pesticides which Monsanto also owns patents on.

They actually started as an insecticide company, and have worked with their plants to make them work together with the insecticides they produce. The genes sequences in their plants are then patented so they own it indisputably.

They also work toward creating crops that stop producing after X number of yields unless they are treated with the right chemicals, in order to make sure they're constantly collecting royalties, and to make sure people don't take their patented plants and grow them independently without giving Monsanto any money. By genetically engineering the plants to die after a time, Monsanto wants to ensure that anyone who wants to grow their plants have to keep buying the seeds and/or pesticides from them.

You've probably heard of the insecticide called Roudup right? Well that's the insecticide that they own, which they've genetically modified thier plants to NEED to be treated with in order for those plants not to kill themselves.

While that's pretty bad in itself that they're basically trying to dominate an entire industry, the fact that they have no way of controlling their crops is where it really goes over the edge. Thanks to the natural system of cross pollination, the pollen that naturally distributes through the air or is taken from plant to plant by bees and other pollen carrying birds and insects (or the wind) makes it so that the patented genes from Monsanto's plants will inevitably spread to the crops of independent farmers. Once this occurs and Monsanto's genes are present in the small farmer's crop, Monsanto now OWNS that farmers crop because his plants have Monsanto's patented genes in them. Bye-bye independent farmer.

And again, that's NOT a theory either. They have done this. They have ruined the livelihood of many farmers in this way already and successfully payed them off to shut up about it. Thank God not all of them take the money.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the fact that the plant is made to terminate itself has the potential for that gene spreading to every one of those kinds of plants in the world, forcing the entire global population of lets say, tomatoes, to be not only owned by Monsanto, but impossible to be grown independently. Imposible for mother nature herself to even grow successfully without some kind of unprecedented and dare I say impossible natural mutation to fight it off.

Corn, Soy and Cotton are the crops Monsanto says are their three core focuses. So don't think you're safe drinking soy milk. You're still contributing to this company. Even the very clothes we wear, almost all made from cotton, is in danger of being completely controlled by Monsanto.
They're also after Beets and if you're wondering why you should care about beats, it's because that's where a very larger portion of our sugar comes from, not traditional sugar-cane.

Beyond plant-life, Monsanto has also been hard at work on bovine (cow) growth hormones that are harmful to humans. They've also tried to patent a gene in pigs that they claim to have developed through breeding which makes the pigs more meaty. The problem here is that this gene has been in pigs naturally for probably as long as pigs have been around. If Monsanto were allowed to patent the gene sequences they want, it could mean that some small farm in Europe who's pigs had this gene naturally would now be the property of Monsanto, requiring the farmer to pay licence fees to Monsanto.

I think this entry has gotten long enough as it is and hopefully you get the idea.

I've you'd like to know more about what this company is up to there are a TON of videos on YouTube about it. Below I'll provide a link to a series of videos concerning their attempts to patent pigs, which in it's "more info" section contains a multitude of links to videos about similar atrocities by Monsanto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ouf_gmA5o&feature=PlayList&p=BEF350CD4595E87F&index=0&playnext=1

Botanical Gardens, Pt. II

Yeah so here's the continuation of some of the pictures I took at the Botanical Gardens this weekend.
It was a really cool experience to check out different plants and see which ones were used as food or for other purposes by the native Americans. One thing I'd like to stress though is that this is in California, I can't guarantee that a plant that looks like one of these is the same thing in other climates or parts of the country, so always do the research and find out about the plants native to your area before taking it for granted that something is safe to eat!


This is the California Bay tree. The trunk looked to me like a sort of grayish color, rough, but not cracked deep at all, I'd actually almost call it smooth but that would be confusing after I said it was kind of rough, there's a little picture down there within the pic. Anyway, Native Americans used to burn the leaves in their sweat lodges in order to mask their scent when hunting. People who aren't hunters probably don't think about how unbelievably easy a deer (or many other animals) can smell a human, so this could be very important in the wild if you needed to hunt discretely.


This one is the Sword Fern. It's differentiated by the tubers, stolons, and rhizomes it produces, the last of which are edible. A Rhizome is a root-like stem that creeps along underground. Stolons are stems that creep above or barely right below the surface of the ground, popping new plants out of their nodes. Tubers, which are roundish-to-oblong food-stores for the plant. A potato is an example of a tuber. As far as I've found, only the rhizomes of the Sword Fern are edible.


This guy is the Black Hawthorne. It's characterized by being a very bushy vertically growing shrub (sometimes even a very small tree) with thin thorny branches and leaves that are serrated (not smooth). The serration can vary from large to small serrations. It also grows little white flowers with green-tinged centers.
The cool thing about this one is that it grows berries that are edible. The berries are reddish when growing and eventually become a deep purple or black when ripe.

The Dwarf Oregon-grape (the darker green plant in the picture below) as you can see attracts animals with it's dark blue grape-like fruits. They're not real grapes, though they resemble them, and while they are edible to humans, they're very bitter. The importance of knowing what plants attract animals is that animals can be food. Considering that most animals have a huge advantage over us as far as self defense mechanisms and the ability to detect and evade us with their heightened sense, it can be a big help to be able to locate a food or water source where you know animals will eventually come around. Anyway, these can also be distinguised by the fact that they bloom yellow flowers in the spring.

Didn't see much wildlife, just really really tiny lizards and a mob of crows...

Botanical Gardens

Last night I went to a concert and got drunk... but today I shook it off and headed out to my local botanical gardens. I went there with the intention of starting to learn about the plant life native to my state (California) and what the native people used to use these plants for. I did learn a few very interesting things and I picked up a couple books on the subject as well.

I took some pictures so you can check stuff out now, but as I read these books I'll be sure to mention anything particularly cool that I find.

Here's the pics: (if I start doing this often I'll have to get myself a flickr account


This is Oregon Iris. According to the little placard it's fibers can be used for cordage. I guess you'd have to strip off the many leaf-stems on one of the main branches first and somehow strip that into fibers. I'm very interested in learning how this is done!


This is the California Buckeye. It blooms fruits in the summer and has snowy-white pink flowers. ATTENTION! This thing is TOXIC==POISONOUS!!! Good thing I saw it here first. If you were lost in the wilderness wouldn't you test out a fruit as harmless looking as this? According to the placard this was used by the natives as fish poison. I don't understand exactly what that means though. Used to poison a fish to kill it? Wouldnt that make it inedible? I'm very interested in finding out the specifics about this.


Ahhh the California Juniper. I'm used to seeing Juniper bushes used as hedges in front of many houses and in other public places. What I didn't know is that the branches and especially large dried-out trunks were prized for bow-wood, and the leaves were used as medicine, which is definitely something I'd like to learn more about.
More California Juniper. Up there is the leaves, down here is the bark.

Yucca Whipplei, aka "Our Lord's Candle." This is a very awesome plant. According to the sign: "Indian uses: food, stalk for tinder, leaf fibers for cordage & sandals." Again a plant I'm very interested in learning more about, specifically how to make it's prepared as food, and how to make sandals out of it's leaves! You know us Californians with our beaches and our sandal-rocking in February, haha...


That's all I've got time for right now but I'll try to post more tomorrow or the next day. Lots of studying to do though so we'll see...

One interesting thing to note: No palm trees anywhere. I remember hearing from a friend at some point that Palm Trees are not native to our area so I'd like to find out if this is true. It's just kind of interesting considering that the rest of the country probably associates Palm trees with California and Florida... I wonder if they're native to Florida for that matter...