Join the Food Fight and
Take Back Our Right for Real Food

Independence Dayby Melissa Diane Smith

Whether you are aware of it or not, powerful multinational corporations have been exerting undue influence over government and elected officials, and gradually hijacking and taking control of our food system in ways that profit the corporations and sabotage our and our planet’s health. Increasing numbers of people are learning this, getting angry, and taking action against it, and an unprecedented food fight is currently taking place in this country that literally will decide the future of our food.

I wrote about this several years ago, but it’s a message that some people weren’t ready to focus in on then so it bears repeating. What follows is a slightly updated reprint of an article, “An Independence Day Message: Fight for the Right for Real Food,” that I wrote in 2010.


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(Opinion) When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 covering our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, I’m sure they could not foresee that the food that sustains us and is essential for those rights would be changed so drastically between then and now by greedy corporations focused on profit. I doubt they could have ever conceived of the idea that the real food they ate for nourishment would be manipulated in such horrendous, harmful, underhanded ways without the people’s knowledge that it puts our very right to Life, Health and the pursuit of Happiness at risk. Back then who could have ever imagined packaged fake foods made with refined flour, sugar and long lists of chemical ingredients that no one can pronounce, meat from animals pumped up with drugs and unnaturally raised on outrageous amounts of toxic corn, and corn and soy sprayed with harmful chemicals and genetically tampered with to withstand those toxic chemicals when everything else sprayed with the chemicals dies?

(To put things in perspective, large-scale refining of wheat and sugar cane had not even begun in the late 1700s. Most additives and preservatives hadn’t been developed. Animals that were eaten by humans ate grass and whatever other elements, such as insects, that were in the natural environment. Different varieties of lower-carbohydrate corn grew in the wild without the use of any chemicals, and soy wasn’t even eaten in America.)

What has happened with our food since then is hard for even us to imagine and believe. How things could have gone so terribly wrong with the very food that gives us life and health would have been completely baffling and downright horrifying to our founding fathers. If they could understand it, however, they would have an answer for it. In fact, they wrote what to do about forces that hurt our right to a good life in the Declaration of Independence in this sentence:

…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

So, it is our right – the people’s right – to change things when something corrupt (like Great Britain’s government back then) interferes with our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. It’s true that today our government makes the rules (or often the lack of rules) that allow such harmful foods to be made and eaten by the masses. But our government is really controlled by big multinational food and drug corporations that are motivated by profit, not the good of the people. The corporations exert their influence on politicians to get what they want – an obscene amount of money in their bank accounts. But the good news is we can alter this situation far easier and more quickly than we might think. As the movie Food, Inc., points out, we as consumers have a lot more power to change the food system than we realize.

According to pesticide policy expert Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., in The Future of Food, meaningful change in our food system will only happen when the American public and farmers stand up and say:

“Wait a minute. We just don’t want to go any further down this road… We are a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, and ‘Hey, we’re the people. We don’t want to go there.'”

It’s time to rise up and create the change we seek. If we’re unhappy with the grain-and sugar-based, chemical-laden, industrially made, commercially available food we have that is making us fat and unhealthy (and coming with terrible costs to the environment and human rights, too), we need to change the system. Another way of saying this is we need to Occupy the Food System or Occupy the Food Supply, an idea that began to be written about with the Occupy movement several years ago.

How do we occupy and take back our food system? It starts with taking small individual steps in choosing the foods we eat every day. If you haven’t already done so, this Independence Day start declaring your food independence and take any or all of these actions:

  1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (This comes from Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food.) Avoid products with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
  2. Make the effort to purchase organic and locally grown fresh produce. Go against the grain, literally: Avoid the fattening grain-and sugar-based foods that are constantly pushed on us and eat more organically grown and locally grown fresh vegetables and fruits.
  3. Buy more of your food from farmers or at local farmer’s markets instead of at big-box commercial supermarkets. The average fresh food product on our dinner table travels 1,500 miles to get there. Buying locally produced food (or growing some vegetables on your own) eliminates fuel-guzzling transportation costs and helps conserve our limited fuel resources.
  4. Stay away from commercially produced corn- and soy-based foods and ingredients made from corn and soy. They are industrially produced (toxically), and virtually all of them are genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides and, in the case of corn, to often also produce its own insecticide.
  5. Seek out pasture-raised or grass-fed meats and wild-caught, sustainably raised fish. All this really means is getting back to meat and fish the way they were meant to be. Yes, you may pay more for them, but you’ll pay less than you would in sickness and doctor bills.

If we each do our part to take as many of these actions as possible, we the people will rise up and change our food system, plain and simple.

Is it a pain that we have to fight for the simple right to have real food that keeps us healthy? Absolutely. But all the most important fights are worth rising up and fighting. And having the right to food that keeps us healthy is the most important of all because without health, the type of life we want to live is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

This July 4th, let me leave you with the same words I used to conclude a food-independence-related post I wrote in 2009. It’s an excerpt from an excellent article, “Declare Your Food Independence,” by writer Sarah Newman in The Huffington Post:

… each of us has the opportunity this holiday to make a radical political statement by declaring our food independence. What does this mean? Well, it means a lot to each one of us as unique individuals. But, collectively, it’s about saying no to our industrial food system which is feeding us an unhealthy corn-based diet that is contributing to skyrocketing obesity rates, helping to fuel global warming, scaring us with constant food recalls and offering us foods that barely resemble food….

It’s time that we return to our roots. Literally. We need to support a food system that offers us healthy, safe, sustainable, fresh foods. And what better time to begin than on Independence Day?

If you need more help on how to take actions to take back control of our food and at the same time protect your health, get a copy of my book Going Against GMOs. It provides detailed, easy-to-follow instructions. The ebook version of the book will be offered at special discounts (Kindle Countdown Deals) July 6th through July 10th.

Copyright © 2010, 2012, 2015 Melissa Diane Smith

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