The swallows begin their evening hunt, sweeping the sky in scalloped strokes. A catbird lands on a nearby lamppost, revealing its white wing and tail bars. In the east, low gray clouds are brushed with the sunset’s red reflections. Turning my gaze slowly to the right, I make out the distant contours of the Berkshires. Turning further, I see the dorsal fin outlines of the Catskills, rising, hazy blue in the distance. Then, the nearer ridges of the Helderbergs. Finally, looking even further to the west, I’m startled by the beauty of a gorgeous pink, gold, and red sunset splashing color across both clear sky and the massive gray cloud formations.
I have to smile because this moment of intensified reality and broadened perspective is playing out in the most mundane of places: the top of an empty parking garage in the middle of Albany.
I seek out such a view periodically, when life in my part of this thickly-settled river valley begins to make me yearn for the horizon. It feels like a return of some sort, a coming back to both myself and the larger world. I can walk to this view. Other times I get in the car and go to the overlook at Thacher Park, or to a couple of other hilltops that allow me a bird’s eye view of the river valley. However I get there, it’s always a form of homecoming, of re-finding my place between heaven and earth.
That’s a place easily lost in modern daily life. Personal considerations — work, finances, schedules — often loom large. Meanwhile, the processes and cycles that sustain us are, it seems, more and more hidden from view and driven by distant, impersonal forces. It’s hard to stay informed, maintain perspective, and make good choices. Even from my perch on the parking ramp, it’s hard to see how we’ll integrate the needs of this human settlement into the fabric of the non-human landscape.
One of the areas of daily life where this question becomes most pressing is in our relationship with food. Numerous recent films and documentaries provide a graphic and compelling picture of just how much we have lost our way and how we, and our ecosystems, are paying for it.
Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 movie “SuperSize Me” documented the rapid deterioration of his health when he embarked on a 30-day fast food diet. “Fast Food Nation”, based on Eric Schlosser’s book of the same name, depicted the many inhumane, unsafe, and unethical practices associated with the fast food industry.
Then, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, two freshly minted college graduates, made the documentary, “King Corn” (www.kingcorn.net), about current agricultural practices and the effects of our corn-based diet. And nutritional biochemist, Dr. Shawn Talbott brought us “Killer at Large” (www.killeratlarge.com), an unflinching look at obesity, particularly as it is affecting more and more children.
I was reminded of “Killer at Large” during some of the more gory slaughterhouse scenes in the new documentary, “Food, Inc.” (www.foodincmovie.com). This film features Eric Schlosser, and author Michael Pollan, whose books “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food” address many of the same issues surrounding how we now eat.
I had the same urge to avert my eyes from the scenes in the packing plants as I had during the opening scenes of “Killer,” in which we watch, up close, a liposuction procedure being done on a 12-year-old girl. A 12-year-old so obese, that 16 liters of fat are removed in one session. Sixteen liters we also get to view, stacked in transparent containers on a table.
It is the suffering of children and animals that tends to stand out for me in these movies. The same practices that produce horrible squalor for chickens, cattle and pigs, contribute to the obesity of the children in “Killer” and to the death of little Kevin from a mutant strain of E.coli, described in “Food, Inc.” Confined in close, filthy quarters, and fed an unnatural diet of corn, antibiotics, and sometimes growth hormones, the livestock that will become meals for the masses literally struggle to stay on their feet until their rough transport to huge slaughterhouses.
Where there used to be thousands of slaughterhouses across the country, and tens of thousands of inspections each year, there are now 13 main slaughterhouses, receiving less than 10,000 inspections each year. The largely unchecked power of giant corporate food producers leads to unsafe, unhealthy products, aggressively marketed to an unsuspecting and susceptible population.
As Michael Pollan points out in the film, a high corn diet results in an acid-resistant strain of E.coli in cattle (and also makes the meat more fattening for humans). Standing shoulder to shoulder and up to their knees in their own manure, feedlot cattle are constantly exposed to infection. When meat from thousands of different cows ends up in a single hamburger, so are we.
Interestingly, a return to their natural diet of grass can work wonders for cattle. According to Pollan, if cornfed cattle are put out on pasture for a mere five days, they “will shed 80 percent of E.coli” in their systems, yet producers are unwilling to take this measure.
It is a testament to the intelligence and power of natural systems that even after prolonged abuse, the bovine digestive tract can rid itself of the majority of infection just by doing what it was made to do — digest grass. The healing power of this simple return to one’s rightful place between heaven and earth impressed and haunted me. It reminded me of something similar I’d read about indigenous people’s health gains with a return to traditional diets.
According to Winona LaDuke, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Native Harvest, the Ojibwe people of Minnesota are counteracting diabetes and other nutrition-based diseases through renewed cultivation of their native rice, corn and other produce, much of which has been shown to be higher in fiber and nutrients. The Arikara squash, for example, “contains more than twice the calcium and magnesium of commercial varieties.” (Click here for more.)
In “In Defense of Food,” Michael Pollan also cites a study, done in the 1980s, in which 10 aboriginal Australians with diabetes and other metabolic problems made significant health gains after a mere seven weeks of returning to the bush to live solely on their traditional diets. These results have since been replicated with other groups of native people.
Perhaps most of us don’t really need drugs, surgery and special weight loss programs. Perhaps we need a homecoming, a return to ourselves and the larger world, that puts us back into a real relationship with what we eat.
Whatever grounds you, whatever helps you extricate yourself from the commercial forces that drive you towards the drive-through, will help to heal you. It might be cycling to work, working in the garden, or sitting under a tree in your yard. It might be swimming in a lake, or doing walking meditation in the park. It might be sharing a cup of tea on the porch with a neighbor, or chatting with the clerk in the post office. It might be buying your food from a farm stand or market, and making a meal of the most simple, whole food available.
These seem like small things, but we can only give up or overlook so many of them before we begin to rend that fabric of connection between ourselves and the non-human world. We need a steady diet of them.
It also helps to feel connected by taking action on a larger scale, whether it is helping to get better food into school cafeterias, becoming a member of a food co-op, or donating to organizations that bring fresh produce into inner city areas (Click here to find out about the Capital Region’s Veggie Mobile).
You can start by finding out more about the issues. Various organizations, such as the Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association, provide related media content and offer action alerts and letters to lawmakers.
Other social action sites include www.truefoodnow.org, www.takepart.com and www.slowfoodusa.org.
I’m sure our readers will also know of many other valuable resources. Please share them with us, by adding a comment below or emailing greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
About the author: Ruth Ann Smalley, Ph.D., is an educator and a certified Eden Energy medicine practitioner with a practice in Albany. She’s also an Honest Weight Food Co-op member worker, and writes a monthly column for the co-op’s newsletter.
