Amerindia US Blog

Malawi has gone in a few short years from being a starving nation to one that has an abundance of food for its people, and a surplus to assist other African nations. This was done by good government, sidestepping corruption, and instituting good land management practices that match their environment. GMOs were not necessary to reach this outcome, but good government was. There are a couple of great short videos on this link.

http://johnkaranja.com/2009/09/14/malawis-food-revolution/

The fight is on about salt in processed food. This article is an interesting light on how processed foods taste without it. It should raise alarm bells about not only the amount of salt in processed food, but what we’re eating underneath all that salt. First fat and sugar, now we find out how much salt is covering for nutritionally deficient food. It’s the usual line up of Cargill, ConAgra, Kraft, and so on and so on. What we know is that most of our processed food comes from a few major food ‘producers’, with a multitude of brands that are subsidiaries of the major food companies. And we are certain that more is invested in finding out what flavors are appealing than in what nutritional value is being delivered.

The major food producers are fighting back, and the latest argument is that without high amounts of salt, the Processed food “will disappoint the consumer and it won’t sell.” We are not against salt – we need small amounts of salt, and we use unbleached sea salt for the trace minerals we need and a little zip to top off a good, fresh, organic, whole foods. But salt should be the addition we choose; salt should Not be in our food as a cover up for the nasty flavors and textures that we shouldn’t be eating anyway. Take salt away from processed foods, and our primitive taste instincts would tell us – “oh, nasty, don’t eat that stuff.”
We recommend a small amount of unbleached sea salt, and no processed food.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/health/30salt.html?pagewanted=1&hp

We just found this on Twitter. A variety of useful tips on how to save money, and also have an eco-friendly lifestyle.
http://twitter.com/Rubbingnickels

Monsanto, Sygenta, Dupont, Bayer, the “gift” of GMOs and pesticides. The gift that makes us sick, ruins small farming (if they don’t sue you to economic death first). This “gift” that is talked of as what will solve the world’s need for food, is on the march to eventually starve us all. We can’t believe that the executives of these companies eat anything they produce.
Changing their tag line from “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible” to “Imagine.” Oh, we can imagine, and it’s a nightmare in the making. We in Amerindia think these companies are propagating a crime against the people. All people.
This article really sums it up:
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2927

The Queen of Amerindia

“If you have an interest in sustainable living, then we’d like to invite you to join the Permaculture Guild in our mission to support the permaculture community and encourage the spread of more conscious ways of growing and distributing healthy, nourishing foods and promoting the use of renewable sources of energy.”
http://www.permacultureguild.org/

From this article:
“EEB has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion, dwarfing costs of the banking crisis.

“Many economies remain blind to the huge value of the diversity of animals, plants and other lifeforms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (Unep).

“Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050.”

The more that ecosystems become degraded, the UN says, the greater the risk that they will be pushed “over the edge” into a new stable state of much less utility to humankind.

For example, freshwater systems polluted with excess agricultural fertiliser will suffocate with algae, killing off fish and making water unfit for human consumption.

The launch of GBO-3 comes as governments begin two weeks of talks in Nairobi aimed at formulating new measures to tackle global biodiversity loss that can be adopted at October’s Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Japan.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10103179.stm

The NYT article says discusses this article with a question mark. They haven’t been paying attention to the state of Vermont, which has outlined what a socially responsible business is. They question profitability, when we should be moving toward a world in which “profit” has a different meaning. Rather than huge returns to investors (who in the high stakes games are just gambling, with their finger on the roulette wheel), return can be interpreted to be ‘benefit to the community.’ So yogurt to children isn’t a hugely profitable enterprise in the now rather distorted sense, but it is a high return for the health and benefit of a community. So maybe we get healthy communities we no longer have to beg charities to chuck huge amounts of relief money into where ‘high rates of return’ have sucked it out. We hope this book makes it big, and creates prosperous communities, not just individuals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02shelf.html?emc=eta1

High Fructose Corn Syrup is just that. They are going to change the name so you don’t suspect the chemicals used in it’s making, and this is a highly subsidized genetically modified crop. Bad science can’t defend it. HFCS Not!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02syrup.html?emc=eta1