Food Is The New Politics: Summer Internships Are Going Organic

New York Times:

Erin Axelrod, who graduated from Barnard College last week with an urban studies degree, will not be fighting over the bathroom with her five roommates on the Upper West Side this summer. Instead she will be living in a tent, using an outdoor composting toilet and harvesting vegetables on an organic farm near Petaluma, Calif.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[PoliticalAmazon]

I'm thinking that part of this big rush is because President Obama has provided for millions for aiding organic farm development.

There are national standards or the label "organic." If a farm violates these rules, they can lose their certificatiion. I don't blame the intern for reporting the sheep-atibioics situation. It's not being "unrealistic" to be concerned about fraud being visited about down-line consumers who are buying somehing certified as organic when, in fact, it is not.

[cucumber]

Those babies wouldn't be being fed by humans if they hadn't ripped them away from the mothers - at great pain to both - so that humans could steal the milk meant for the babies. There's nothing decent about that - it's deeply selfish.

[Cyberoptic]

This article has some good points, and some good information, but since when is food politics? Or since when is being organic being activist? Who is viewing it this way. Some corporations?

We should be able to work on farms, learn about organic food without getting the labels of politics and activism.

Using the same labeling tactics, "Monsanto is so yesterday.­"

[PoliticalAmazon]

It has been turned into a politcal situation by the corporate concerns, such as Monsanto and Cargill, with their billion-dollar lobbying campans in D.C.

Monsanto especially has done much to make farmers dependent on them. They breed pesticide-resistant corn, for intance, so they can douse fields and fields and fieds of corn with Round-Up and the corn plants won't die. They will absorb the Round-Up, however.

Think of that the next time you eat non-organic corn.

Worse, this bioengineered corn, and other crop seeds, are designed so that they cannot reproduce. For third-world countries, saving seed for the next season is how they survive. Now they have to buy it every season.

Unfortunately, sometimes this design is not fool-proof. Some corn seed has been carried offsite by predators, where it has hybrided with local native corn--upon which, for thousands of years, the local people have depended n for food--and now the native corn is tainted with Monsanto's genetic programming, sometimes making the native corn sterile, as well.

I have an ag science degree, and one of my favorite classes was organic crop production.

[Fromageball]

Good for her! I've never heard of a composting toilet.

[blaharumph]

neat!