by natalia | Jan 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
As you might remember from grade-school American history, Manifest Destiny was the 19th-century U.S. claim that its settlers were divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent. This was the defense for the cold-blooded extermination of countless natives, whole communities that had been thriving on this land for at least tens of thousands of years.
Peace was never an option with the European settlers, who treated human life as cheap and disposable. Nothing short of complete possession and power over the land would satisfy the self-declared new owners. This was implicit in the “blessed” mission. Besides, once they secured ownership of the land, the settlers aimed to “civilize the redskins” and allow them to pay taxes.
A kind of poetic justice has come to pass. By a series of events, this land–once rich in minerals, metals, and fecundity for millions of years–is now comparatively lifeless. After just 250 years in the hands of “civilization,” the land has none of the lifeblood and resistance to disease it had when the settlers claimed it from the natives. With all of our science, higher learning, and so-called breeding, we’ve thoroughly leached the land of its vitality. Gold stars all around, my fellow Americans.
Mother Immunity
But contempt for this dark side of U.S. history is not the point. The point is much more fascinating. It is the story of “mother immunity” and what happens to her – and to all of us – when greed and egoism, in pursuit of fame and fortune, assume leadership and don the hat of public service.
Let’s start at the beginning. It all begins with topsoil and something called humus (not the kind you eat with pita). Humus is the precious substance that ensures nutritional balance in the soil. Humus is waste metabolized by soil–not the compost itself, but the compost that the soil has metabolized. Plentiful humus guarantees natural protection from disease. The absence of it guarantees disease, pests, and weeds.
Unadulterated, pre-colonial North American soil was as fertile and rich with humus as any that you could find anywhere. Plant life flourished in it and the animals that consumed those plants received protection from the soil as well. Nature was just doing what she does best–conferring her immunity on her creatures, just as a mother’s milk confers her immunity on her baby. This is all normal in an interdependent, mutually sustaining system of life.
But when lust for ownership and domination comes swaggering in, the system breaks down.
“The Father of Chemical Agriculture”
Let’s go to Germany in the early 1800s where we’ll find Justus von Leibig, a scientist who managed to convince farmers that humus was not actually the source of highly fertile soil. He presented a compelling theory to suggest that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash (potassium carbonate) were the basis of soil fertility. Consequently, widely distributed propaganda convinced European and American farmers that nothing would grow without this German-mined blend.
During the First World War, U.S. farmers had to resort to finding the potash cocktail on their own shores. It turned out that the elements were abundant in the States, and they were mined so successfully as to become a profitable export.
Leibig’s theory spawned more chemicals that made him and his supporters rich while rapidly impoverishing the soil in Europe and North America. When Leibig finally realized his mistake and retracted his theory just a short ten years later, admitting that the organic extract, humus, was indeed the secret to soil fertility, it was too late. Companies were growing rich on these chemical fertilizers, and they were not about to relinquish their projected future profits.
Our Bodies
Given the importance of humus to soil and plant life, it should be no surprise that chemical farming practices result in devastating, irreversible effects on our bodies. Any good organic farmer will tell you that humus is the source of a plant’s disease resistance. Artificial fertilizers not only fail to restore immunity and fertility to plants and soil, but poison the whole food chain.
By charging recklessly ahead in the name of Manifest Destiny, we have decimated the soil, robbed ourselves of our greatest survival tool, and rendered the human body helpless. By eating food grown in chemically treated, nutritionally devoid soil with low immunity, we are not getting our share of balanced nutrition.
As a greedy superpower, we took over 3.79 million square miles of fertile soil and squandered it. Now the majority of the remaining farmland is home to fields of inedible GMO corn and soy, and filthy factory farms where animals are raised on GMO crops, antibiotics, and hormone injections. And the corporate-governmental Goliaths are working hand over fist to perpetuate the madness that keeps us eating what they feed us.
Now consider this analogy: vaccinations, antibiotics, and synthetic growth hormones are to human tissue and blood what chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers are to soil. We’ve raped the land, and now we inject poisons into our children’s bodies–denaturing them and causing mutations to their cellular structure and DNA–and call it disease prevention. Yes, companies are getting rich off of this, too.
Our Destiny
We manifested our destiny, no doubt. We are reaping in tears what we sowed in tears. Call it karma or cultural comeuppance, but it’s really just Nature doing her thing. Far from setting out to hurt anyone, she is simply sending the decomposers (pests, fungi, bacteria) to break down that which is not viable so she can self-clean. We are the ones who have created a non-viable cultural organism and living with the consequences: widespread cancer, disease, mental illness, and infertility.
Frank Kafka once said, “You may not destroy someone’s world unless you are prepared to offer a better one.” Sure enough, we’ll have to shimmy our way out of this deadly agricultural system through reeducation and a major reshuffling of our priorities. We need to focus on what works for the earth, water, air, plants, animals, and humans–not what works for satellite dishes, SUVs, Pop-Tarts, and countless other products and technologies that do not generate life.
Agricultural health is our health. We cannot separate the two. We need to think not only like scientists, but also like organic farmers to understand how our bodies interact with what we consume. The Renaissance man and woman who will survive and seed the future will have to come home to the basic facts of life: biology.
This land is your land, this land is my land–for better or for worse. We must understand the land before it’s too late, before we lose it forever.
by natalia | Jan 13, 2010 | Uncategorized
What humanity came up with and held onto during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn’t work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn’t work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That’s what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products—which just keep getting better and better every year—but very poorly for people, except for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. Our ancestors lived in societies that every anthropologist agrees were nonhierarchical and markedly egalitarian. They weren’t structured so that a few at the top lived lives of luxury, a few more lived in the middle in poverty, just struggling to survive. They weren’t riddled with crime, depression, madness, suicide, and addiction. And when we came along with invitations to join our glorious civilization they fought to the death to hold on to the life they had.
— Daniel Quinn, from If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways
You know the parable of the frog: If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. But if you put a frog in a pot that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant, and gradually heat it until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late.
This is a pretty good illustration of how our culture, through slow but steady changes away from ancient communities that worked for humans for millions of years, now finds itself in acute distress—on the verge of snuffing out human life.
Undertaking the cleansing lifestyle is a little like reversing this process. As the accumulated waste with its accumulated toxins and bi-products leave the body, the proverbial boiling water gets turned down. What a relief to escape the jaws of death! However, the cooled water is a gateway to another stage: although the water temperature is no longer a threat, you look around and realize that you’re still in a pot!
The roots of our suffering are in this pot—in the civilization in which we find ourselves. The towering, cylindrical walls rise up around us and separate us from our home in the natural world. The pot isolates us from the interconnectedness of the greater living world, which our pre-technocratic ancestors simply took for granted. The best I can determine is that this isolation is the cause of all modern psychopathology. As long as we are cut off from our interdependent relationship with the living world, we are like a plant cut from its roots—roots that would otherwise generate and regenerate us. Cut off, we become madmen, consumed with ourselves, our fears and shortcomings, our need to possess and protect ourselves against this world in which we’re stuck.
If you have escaped the boiling water by successfully cleansing your cells and tissues, you’re sensitized now to the myriad other injustices to the human organism that most people just accept as normal life. People, like frogs, don’t belong in pots. They are a part of the whole natural world. This is the reality beyond the immediate peril of the murderous water temperature. Frogs and people belong in nature doing what frogs and people do best—leaping across stones and streams, creating life-generating communities, and bathing in sunlight at the break of day.
At this stage, seekers may look for respite in spiritual or philosophical systems, while isolating themselves further, suffering in silence and antisocial behavior because the world doesn’t make sense to them. Or they may just ignore the internal unrest and tell themselves that this better place they have reached is the best one can expect from life—that it’s the end of the road, a dead end they should accept. Only when it dawns on them that they are in a place they don’t belong will they initiate the next cycle of growth and liberation.
The next step toward more gratifying life experience is to leap out of the pot, regardless of the water temperature. The more we respond to things that disturb us, instead of writing them off as normal, the more we discover that we can make liberating changes.
The wonderful thing about life and growth is that there is no endpoint. It’s nice to stop boiling, but even tepid water can’t make the pot our home. It’s a tomb. Frog or man, being buried alive in a pot is far worse than suffering a short, painful death.
The beauty is that with every cycle of growth another one awaits, as illustrated in the upward spiral of the double helix—the very promise of human life, past, present and future! Life-generating challenges satisfy and vitalize the mind, body, and soul. (Hell is stagnation and decay, the opposite of alchemy.)
If we think of heaven as an adventure of greater vistas, greater knowledge and creativity, and the opening of gateway after gateway, we can begin to create heaven on earth.
Time to jump the pot, turn it upside down, and play drums froggy-style!
Ribbit!
by natalia | Jan 8, 2010 | Uncategorized
That’s when a smoke was a smoke and groovin’ was groovin’… — from “Cherry Bomb” by John Cougar Mellencamp
Before I left for my trip to South Africa last month, I went to at least ten different groceries and farmers markets trying to find a carrot that tasted like a carrot instead of a piece of crisp cardboard. All I wanted was a simple bunch of tasty carrots—a request that should not have been so hard to come by in a culture that is meant to be so advanced, in a city admired the world over for affording its residents access to anything at any hour. Turns out you can get just about anything just so long as it’s not one of the hundreds of plant species that are made obsolete every hour by our “civilized” way of life.
In the end, I was only mildly successful, having found a farmer in the Union Square market that offered something that vaguely reminded me of why I liked carrots in the first place.
A week later I was consuming locally grown carrots in a remote beach village in South Africa like they were going out of style. They may not be going out of style, but it seems they are going out of print! That’s because their BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL, or BIOMASS for short, is deteriorating.
First let’s do a little Biomass 101 and then we can see how it’s affecting our food. Here’s how the biomass cycle works:
1) A species with its unique DNA composition proceeds through life in the conditions that formed it. As long as the environment stays the same, that species will continue to self-replicate, renewing its biomass from its sources of nutrition, air, sunshine, etc.
2) Changes to the species’ environment means changes to its biomass. Every adjustment made to that which it consumes and in which it’s immersed is manifested in its renewing cells (which consequently make minute changes to the DNA as well).
3) This is how all life adjusts and changes with its environment and explains how life is ever-evolving, never stagnant. On a healthy planet and in a life-generating world, species will develop and evolve. In an unhealthy environment, species will deteriorate or devolve (only the rogue bacteria and decomposer species will be strengthened by such an environment).
Take the orangutan, for example. The orangutan is a frugivore (fruit is the mainstay of its diet). The orangutan consumes fruit and its body transfers that “sun food” into its biomass, creating new bone cells, new muscle-tissue cells, etc. The same thing happens with the herbivorous horse, cow, and elephant, animals that simply eat fruits and grasses to maintain their enormous muscles and skeletal systems.
4) All changes to the quality of the air, soil, water, and sunshine will have an effect on the biomass of the animal that consumes it. Devitalized environment = devitalized biomass of the animal. As our environment becomes exponentially more acidic, all factors become devitalized. If, in addition, there are synthetic chemicals introduced to the environment, the subsequent new biomass will be made up of that too.
5) So the constant renewal of biomass for the species is subject to the environment. If that which the species is exposed to changes, the biomass of that species will change to reflect that. So the old saying “You are what you eat” is a lazy way of saying “Your biomass is what your body converts from your environment and consumption into your renewed flesh and blood.”
6) Every species on the planet is subject to what its biomass is renewed from.
This is why my beloved carrot, along with all our favorite edible pants are going the way of the passenger pigeon. The carrot we used to know is becoming extinct because of the enormous shift in its environment. No more is it developing its biomass from nutritionally sound, balanced seed and soil. Quite the opposite: it’s losing its vitality, which is all too evident in the taste and smell of the vegetable (as is all the Earth’s bounty), ipso facto.
Even organically grown carrots are losing their “carrot-ness.” Sure, there may still be orange-colored, carrot-shaped substances coming out of the ground comprised of carrot-y biochemical components, but the generations of carrots to come will be a sadly compromised version of their former, proud carrot lineage.
The biochemical composition of an organism (the chemical components that make up the plant’s cellular structure) is affected for better or worse by:
1) The integrity/purity of its seed;
2) The composition of its soil (the earth and water);
3) Its time in the soil and/or connection to the soil through its vines and branches (i.e., its time left to ripen);
4) The quantity and quality of direct sunlight it receives; and
5) The quality of the air in which it grows.
All of these things that I list as seemingly separate pieces are actually one factor: the plant’s agricultural sphere, or, if you prefer, its “incubator.”
As most of you know, modern soil is tragically nutritionally deficient and the water that flows through it is contaminated with chemicals (only less so if organically grown, as we must remember that air, soil, and water mix no matter how much we would like to think we can isolate a piece of land and its production). But this is why our beloved vegetables are literally endangered species, arguably already extinct in many regions!
In addition, the air quality is vastly more acidic than ever before. The plant that breathes acidity and is rained on by acidity is going to suffer deterioration of its biochemistry. Our produce is in crisis.
How do the FDA and USDA help prevent further deterioration or address this crisis? It supports destructive genetically modified (GMO) farming and deplorably rank animal raising/slaughtering conditions. The governmental agencies are working hand-in-glove with the food industry Goliaths as part of a juggernaut of corporate-government greed. The promotion of this kind of decimation of plant and animal (and ultimately human life as well) is born of either an extremely low intellect or extremely perverse agendas (serving, for example, the pharmaceutical industry).
Consider that in 2007 the USDA mandated the irradiation of green leafy vegetables (with the exception of organic leafy greens). How do laws like this get passed? Fear. The FDA/USDA convinces the masses of the dangers of raw produce. I would not be surprised if they staged the E. coli contamination in spinach. Raw dairy products are also largely outlawed in most states. Slowly but surely, our freedom to consume life-generating substances is being taken away.
If you want to be able to eat real carrots, greens, and almonds (another irradiated U.S. product), you’ll need a good “dealer.” If you want to eat them in a few years’ time, I suggest taking up a new hobby: start collecting unadulterated seeds—and please let me know if you find a good source!
If you know which farms to buy from, you can still get your hands on fairly tasty produce, but with every passing harvest the fruits of the earth are deteriorating—losing more and more of their vitality and alkalinity, as evident in their smell and taste. Think about that for a moment: the biochemistry of the plant is not just in its material component, but also in its smell and taste. We can detect the biochemical deterioration, the loss of integrity, with our noses and palates. If we could see the plants’ energetic/vibratory fields, we would see that they, too, are continually dimming.
Meanwhile, the sloppy, filthy way of raising animals for the mass production of meat and dairy continues, but no one is getting immediately sick from it because they are pumped with antibiotics.
This finally brings us to Fung-eggs and Corn-fish.
As you are well aware, today, the average store-bought eggs come from factories filled with hens that are injected heavily with hormones and antibiotics so they can grow big quickly, produce copiously, and not carry disease despite the deplorable filth they are raised in. But what you may not have realized is that the very biochemical composition of the animal’s flesh, eggs, and milk becomes those substances.
To put it another way, what they consume today becomes their flesh the next day. When you eat the flesh or offspring of the unfortunate, tortured hens, you are not eating an egg: you are eating a fung-egg, an egg combined with fungus, puss, synthetic hormones and antibiotics that come to comprise the hen and the egg. You might call it “the incredible INEDIBLE egg.”
Fung-eggs are what you’ll find in your local grocery store. Your average store-bought eggs are rife with the fungus that developed from the biomass of the hen’s diet of GMO corn, hormones, and antibiotic injections.
These are not eggs; they may come in an egg-shaped shell in a cute retro carton, but they are a biochemical aberration!
I used to be able to recommend eggs to yeasted dieters all the time. Not only were they non-yeast feeders, but they were filling and familiar. Eggs once seemed so gosh-darned normal and made this lifestyle seem so easy. “Have a four-egg omelet with goat’s cheese and sundried tomatoes—just have it with a salad instead of bread or potatoes,” I would enthusiastically offer. “Throw a few raw egg yolks into a veggie juice and shake it up for a body-builder elixir,” I would tell my male clients.
Up until a few years ago, eggs made an excellent transition food for people getting into this lifestyle. Now, they must be consumed only if raised free to range on pastureland, eating what chickens should normally eat: bugs, greens, and whatever else they scrounge up.
The same is, unfortunately, true for all animal products, including fish, another previously ideal go-to food for yeasted transitioners and nearly everyone else; fish is light and easy to digest, easy to get in restaurants, easy in social situations, and just so delicious and satisfying. However, today, the normal store-bought fish is raised on CORN! And not just any corn, GMO corn—the stuff that is taking over most of the farmland in our country (along with GMO soy)! When you take a fish and feed it corn, its biomass will become starchy. You are not longer eating fish but a biochemical composite of corn-fish!
All the animals that are raised on soy, corn, and other starches (which is an utterly foreign diet for all beings, including the human variety) and injected with antibiotics and hormones are no longer what they were originally. They are replacing their old cells with these substances, and these substances create copious amounts of fungus and gas pressure as bi-products in their flesh, so what you eat is their meat or milk or eggs mixed up with hormones, antibiotics, fungus, and noxious gasses. You may as well be mainlining antibiotics and hormones yourself and eating the GMO starches in cookie form. The irony of the Atkins Diet should not be lost on you!
In the past, an egg was an egg and fish was fish. If you bought and cooked eggs, you were actually consuming amino acids and fats of the offspring of a chicken. If you bought, caught, or ordered a fish, you were getting the flesh of a fish composed of the environment of the ocean.
Today, fish, eggs, and all animal products are quite another thing. Today, what you are getting when you bite into an omelet, filet of grilled fish, rotisserie chicken, filet mignon, rib eye, etc. is a mixture of the GMO starches that animal was raised on, the antibiotics and hormones it was injected with, and the fungus those substances created in the cells and tissues of the animal when you take that bite.
So look before you bite. And don’t shoot the passenger pigeon!
Your free-range, grazing friend, Natalia
