Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, December 21, 2007, 5 pm PST
This Week's Show
Food that costs less and solves your health problems AND builds a new world for all of us.
With the economy tanking and the weight of fear hanging over us, the future looks bleak. Right now many Americans are facing the reality of becoming homeless and hunger and malnutrition will most likely become a reality to Americans who thought that impossible for even the poorest among us.
You need to take action now.
Americans depend on the food they get from the grocery store more than ever before. The unpalatable fact is that food from the local, corporate grocery store is going up in price so rapidly that people who have not shopped for a while are having sticker shock. The price you pay is only one issue, however. That food, and how it is produced, is also causing many of your health problems.
The grocery store food has changed since it came from local farms. The advent of factory farming converted the food we eat into the profits of corporations. Looked at from the viewpoint of a corporation, who have only one goal, to make money for themselves, each aspect of production becomes an issue of minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits. That hits you in ways you cannot imagine. Until now. You need to know so you can make an informed decision about what is best for your family and yourself.
We are going to look at what you are buying and what it is really costing you and show you ways to rebuild the economy while you rebuild your health.
Factory farms produce food that is designed to keep for long periods. Therefore factory growers identified varieties of plants that can be harvested green and ripen later. Monsanto has genetically engineered many of the foods used by factory growers to augment their profits and allow them to own what was once viewed as the property of God. Monsanto wants to own the DNA of the food you eat, making the seeds you buy sterile. They have taken steps in court and law to give them ownership through the twisted ideas of privatization, which is really an ongoing corporatization of everything we need to live.
Monsanto leaves no leaf unmolested in its quest for profits as this writer shows. “Monsanto scouts out farmers who it feels have unlawfully planted patented seeds, or who have saved seeds from one generation to the next, and collects damages by threatening legal action (through either infringement or breach of contract charges). The company claims to pursue as many as 500 infringement cases every year. But no farmer can control the wind, which indiscriminately cross-pollinates crops without regard for their genetic makeup. And some farmers, like Schmeiser, claim that Monsanto strong-arms innocent farmers who never wanted to grow GM crops to begin with.”
The seeds sold by Monsanto are not designed for your health. Corporations are not held accountable for the long range impact of what they sell. Factory food has been described as actually growing hydroponically, in soil that has none of the microminerals or organic content that the plants can use to ensure their own health – and yours. Pesticides used to diminish the impact of insects that are drawn to unhealthy plants like wolves are drawn to the diseased deer in a herd and killed through the use of pesticides that remains on the plant and becomes part of your dinner.
What is not healthy cannot nourish you.
Today the residue of such pesticides are everywhere and accumulating in the milk suckled by babies from their mother's breast. Such pollutants are killing us, starting before we are born.
Factory farming, plants and animals, are inherently unhealthy because of these kinds of practices designed to burnish that corporate bottom line.
So you need to know that a revolution is going on in America today. All across the country people who have taken a hard look at the world corporations are creating have said no and are changing how they, and those around them, eat.
You can join that revolution by learning how to grow your own and eat locally. On our show this Friday we will hear from one of the people who are leading the revolution back to locally produced food, Joel Salatin of the three generation Polyface Farm.
“IN 1961, William and Lucille Salatin moved their young family to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, purchasing the most worn-out, eroded, abused farm in the area near Staunton. Using nature as a pattern, they and their children began the healing and innovation that now supports three generations.
Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and invented portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.
Today the farm arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis. Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.
The Salatins continue to refine their models to push environmentally-friendly farming practices toward new levels of expertise.”
The Food Revolt is happening across the country. People who life in large, metropolitan areas are also finding the means to eat local contracting for food with farms not so far away. Local Harvesting, decent respect for the animals we eat, knowing where your meals originate, are becoming part of the direction for Americans who will survive the meltdown just starting.
And the food will be better than any meal you can remember because your body does know what is good for it. We need to remember that while the change over is scary and difficult that challenge is insignificant when compared to the benefits we will all of us enjoy.
You can hear from Joel Salatin, the author of “Everything I want to do it illegal,” this Friday at 5pm on Off the Grids, formerly The Spiritual Politician, the radio show that shows you how to climb out of the meat grinder the Corporations designed to eat you alive. The show is hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster.
Get off all the grids. This is not the vision our founders had for America. What we see today is a fascist state biggest than anyone could have imagined possible.
There are solutions, and those solutions take us back to the foundational values that forged the vision that is America. Because America is not our government and not land or even the people. It is a destination on the horizon that beckons us to find connection with each other through myriad acts of good will.
There are solutions to each of these problems because while they were busy picking our pockets the world was changing. The promise of connection is being fulfilled; transparency in all things is a precondition to the connections now becoming obvious. America will not only survive, it will become the model that will remake the world.
Get started.
Off the Grids
Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.
The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.
It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.
You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.
America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.
On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.
Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.
About being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
