The beginning of reclaiming our lives and freedom, we must proclaim food independence by buying local through farms that grow food in a sustainable fashion and, if possible, growing our own. Weston Price is an organization that can help lead us to this goal.

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The Way of Nature is Wisdom. What is counter to natural process is a prescription for disaster. This planet and the universe have worked quite well for the past several billion years, without human technology. Perhaps it has even done well more years than that. Who is to say how old the universe is. After all, science is always changing its theories. Like religious institutions, and, indeed all of Nature, change is the process that is most stable. Yet this change does not happen just because of some Master Mind up there. Rather, the process of Nature is Mind. Nature works well and has done so for several billion years without humankind or some external judgmental God.

Let's take the planet as an example of working well. The planet does not evolve life due to some external command agent. No, She does so in relationship to the Sun. In this fashion, the Sun does not create life. Rather it is the interaction between the Sun and Earth that entices life to form. And, the life that the planet unfolds does so from the inside out, from center to periphery, from single-cell to complex organisms, in relationship to everything else. Thus the gazelle evolves in relationship to the lioness, and that relationship evolves in relationship to the well-being of the grasslands in terms of keeping the population of gazelles in check. Likewise, the availability of gazelles and grasslands keeps the lion population in check. Everything works towards the well-being of the functioning whole. Unless you are a self-centered, psychopathic manifestation of the Corporation, that is!

Its the same in fetal development. If a baby is to be conceived, sperm drive themselves against the watery currents in the woman, towards the fallopian tubes to seek their Queen, the unfertilized egg. Once the lucky sperm gets in, the egg begins to divide exponentially and becomes a fetus and, eventually, it manifests as you reading this article and me writing it. (See reproduction video below to reinforce this idea.)

As the egg exemplifies, our unfolding is from the inside outward. However our cultural conditioning has led us to believe in and place our fate in the hands of external powers. We need to reframe this power structure. Like the sun, the external world may stimulate the evolution of a potential within us. But the potential lies within us, and it unfolds from within by its own impulse in relationship to the needs of the whole. Because the universal essence--manifest on earth and in everything, everywhere, at all times--contains the potential for life when it comes into relationship with its lover within a supportive ecosystem, we experience the Beauty we call Nature.

The Female is the agent that does most of the labor in creative acts. In our surrender to the external, the Corporate Man, the metallic monster manifested as the chemically addicted Adam, we have surrendered that power. Yes, women are suppressed for the same reason the "labor" classes are suppressed. They want to control the production of Labor. The powers-that-be wish to dominate us by having their hands wrapped around our petrified throats while they force themselves upon our Psyches, or Souls. Rape is the modus operandi of the Corporation. Thus we have genetic engineering. Just another means of control and domination! And, the human race is next in line! Prepackaged children are on the way! Line up at Wally Mart!

In surrendering our power to the Corporate Man, we have surrendered our power to something that is not beneficial to us. Indeed, this power wants to use us for its own greedy purpose. Thus we are all rape victims. An aspect of that desire to rape and manipulate us is how we feed ourselves and how we are conditioned to think that ancient ways of farming and, even before that, hunting and gathering were not beneficial. Beneficial to whom, we should ask. To us that eat the food, or to those in the corporate world that feed us? The reason to ask this question is because upon deeper questioning, you'll find that the way food is currently grown and shared is beneficial to the Corporate Man and not to the health of you and me, nor our families. Indeed corporate food is devastating to our health (see link "Don't Buy Any Food You See Advertised" below). We are all abused housewives as are our children.

In tribal cultures, there are a variety of eating patterns. According to Renegade Health, these cultures have a variety of eating styles and tend to be quite healthy and do not contract many of the diseases common to modern day humanity.

"The food you eat, based on the evidence above, cannot be the only factor when it comes to living a healthy life. This is important, because it means that we may not be able to demonize certain foods and proclaim they are the cause of this disease or that when faced with the evidence of what these people used to eat. So, for example, if you believe animal fat and protein contribute to heart disease and cancer, then why were the Eskimos cancer and heart disease free? (Please note, they have high incidence of cancer, diabetes and heart disease today, since their native diet has changed.) If you believe that high carbohydrates contribute to blood sugar issues and eventually diabetes as well as liver, kidney, pancreas and other related diseases -- why do the Q'ero have no incidence of these illnesses?"

There are two conclusions that you can draw from this:

1. Specific foods and food groups cannot be the only factor for longevity and health. In other words, look at lifestyles while also looking at what foods are NOT in their diets?

2. A few things that are not in the aboriginal diet are:

Excess Sodium
White Sugar
White Flour
Boxed Foods
Food Coloring
DDT
Industrial Toxins

Basically, everything these people ate was organic, fresh and unadulterated -- mineral and nutrient dense.

There are organizations such as Weston Price Foundation that advocate this type of eating pattern. Weston Price was a dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, whose 1939 book, Nutritional and Physical Degeneration, describes the fieldwork he did in the 1920s and 1930s among various world cultures. His goal was to record and study the dental health and development of pre-industrial populations, including tribal Africans and Pacific islanders, Inuit, North and South American natives, and Australian aborigines. The book contains numerous photographs of the people he studied, and includes comparison photographs of the teeth and facial structure of people who lived on their traditional diet those of people who had adopted or grown up on industrialized food. In certain instances it was possible for Price to examine and photograph traditional and industrialized eaters from the same family.

More than 50 years after Weston Price's death, food activists Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enif founded the Weston A. Price Foundation to "disseminate the research of this nutrition pioneer." For them, Price's research demonstrated that humans could achieve perfect physical form and perfect health, generation after generation, only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.

The foundation's recommendations include the consumption of unprocessed or minimally processed foods including: traditional fats (animal fats, dairy fats, olive oil, cod liver oil, and others), organic fruits and vegetables, raw dairy products, soured or lac to-fermented dairy and vegetables (such as sauerkraut), whole grains (soaked or soured to neutralize their phytic acid), and bone stock. The foundation is also known for its positive stance towards the consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol from traditional foods, its support of local foods and farms, and its opposition to veganism and some aspects of vegetarianism.

In July of 2007, the Weston Price Foundation helped to create the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which aims to help protect the rights of farmers to provide meat, eggs, raw dairy products, vegetables and other foods directly to consumers. According to Pete Kennedy, the president of the fund, this includes protecting consumers' "freedom of choice to consume raw milk". In the first year of its operation, the Fund raised over $350,000 and receives around three requests for assistance per week from farmers across the United States who are facing legal or bureaucratic challenges, or both in relation to sales of raw milk.

The raw milk issue so dear to the foundation, was put to the test when residents in eight small Maine towns voted to declare "food sovereignty". These ordinances explicitly allow local farmers and ranchers to sell their food--meat, eggs, unpasteurized milk, honey, veggies--directly to consumers within town borders, without state or federal licenses, permits, or regulations. Towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and California have all replicated these experiments. The URL for a template of the food ordinances is listed below.

In the early part of last century, clean, raw milk from grass-fed cows was actually used as a medicine. Milk straight from the teat was a sort of "stem cell" of foods, and was utilized as medicine to treat, and frequently cure some serious chronic diseases. From the time of Hippocrates to until just after World War II, this "white blood" nourished and healed uncounted millions. (White blood is exactly what milk is; it is blood transformed into milk).

According to Cree (1929), clean raw milk from pastured cows is a complete and properly balanced food. You could live on it exclusively if you had to. Raw cow's milk has all 8 essential amino acids in varying amounts, depending on stage of lactation. About 80% of the proteins in milk are casein- reasonably heat stable and are easy to digest for most people. The remaining 20% or so are classed as whey proteins, many of which have important physiological effects (bio activity). Also easy to digest, but very heat-sensitive, these include key enzymes (specialized proteins) and enzyme inhibitors, immunologists (antibodies), metal-binding proteins, vitamin binding proteins and several growth factors.

Thus according to some of the old-timers, raw milk and naturally raised foods are healthier for you and your family. Popular author Michael Pollen is in agreement. In his Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollen states that the healthiest style of living is through hunting and gathering followed by local organic (eg., family farms, free range chickens, etc), followed by industrial organic and last and very much the least healthy, corporate farms. Local organic is the diet that the Price Foundation is primarily orienting us towards. Since most of us are not proficient at hunting and gathering, the best option remains using local organic that allows free range as well as natural diets for its animals. This doesn't mean we should not consider becoming reacquainted with any of the small parcels of woods that have not been destroyed by corporate greed.

Regarding raw milk, Pollen states:

"You do have to wonder about the Food and Drug Administration's priorities. Why is the government putting its resources into shutting down raw-milk producers, a teeny-tiny "industry," when there are many more serious threats to food safety on factory farms? (In fact the overwhelming majority of illnesses tied to milk and cheese come from pasteurized products.) While Amish dairymen are being raided by the F.D.A., Jack Defroster, the notorious Iowa egg producer whose filthy, salmonella-infected eggs were linked to an outbreak that sickened more than 1,500 people last year, received a mild warning letter from the F.D.A. What is going on here? Sounds like political theater to me."

It's really more than political theater. The fact is large corporate farming companies such as Monsanto and Cargill have the government in their back pocket. The government does not work for the people. It works for the Corporation. It subsidizes them, it routinely approves their inadequately tested products, and it skews its "food safety" policies in their favor.

According to the regulations in the European Union, all raw milk products are "legal" and considered "safe for human consumption", and can be sold without any price, variety or quantity restrictions. However, the European countries are free to add certain requirements, usually special sanitary regulations and frequent quality tests (at least once per month).

Raw milk and especially raw milk cheeses are considered the standard for high quality dairy products. Many French cuisine traditionalists consider pasteurized cheeses almost a sacrilege. Many traditional French cheeses have solely been made from raw milk for hundreds of years.

In Germany, raw milk is sold as Liebfraumilch. This means the raw milk has to be packed before vending, with the necessary information (producer, durability etc.) written on the product. The distribution license has severe quality restrictions, and so just 80 farmers in Germany have one.

Unpacked raw milk can only be:

• bought at the farm itself

• only milk from that farm

• only from today or the day before production

• must have a warning label "Raw Milk - boil before usage"

For babies, it appears that nothing less than Mother's milk is the healthiest. All mammals produce milk, but the composition of milk for each species varies widely and other kinds of milk are often very different from human breast milk. As a rule, the milk of mammals that nurse frequently (including human babies) is less rich, or more watery, than the milk of mammals whose young nurse less often. Human milk is noticeably thinner and sweeter than cow's milk.

Whole cow's milk does not contain sufficient vitamin E or essential fatty acids for infants. Whole cow's milk also contains excessive amounts of protein, sodium, and potassium, which may put a strain on an infant's immature kidney. In addition, the proteins and fats in whole cow's milk are more difficult for an infant to digest and absorb than the ones in breast milk.  Evaported milk may be easier to digest due to the processing of the protein but is still nutritionally inadequate. A significant minority of infants are allergic to one or more of the constituents of cow's milk, most often the cow's milk proteins. Thus it appears mom's milk is the best for babies. But, the question is, "Is mom focusing on her diet?" After all, what she feeds herself, she feeds her baby. My wife discovered this when she was nursing her first baby, after drinking diet cola to stay awake on a 10-hour drive. The baby, normally quite calm and sleeping through the night, screamed in agony through the whole night that followed.

Aside from the milk issue, our modern industrialized farming system is a disaster to the environment and to our health. Industrialized or monoculture farming is the agricultural practice of producing or growing a single crop or plant species over a wide area and for a large number of consecutive years. It is widely used in modern industrial agriculture and its implementation has allowed for large harvests from minimal labor. However, this ratio remains true only if the accounting for labor required is limited to the number of workers employed on the farm. If the indirect work of employees involved in producing chemicals and machinery are taken into account, the ratio of labor to output is higher. If the energy in the form of petrochemicals that is expended is accounted for, you end up with an astronomical imbalance. Only through very skewed and myopic accounting practices does industrial, commodified food appear to be cheaper and more efficiently produced.

Furthermore, monoculture techniques can lead to the quicker spread of diseases, where a uniform crop is susceptible to a pathogen. 'Crop monoculture' is the practice of growing the same crop year after year, without normal eco-friendly companion plants. Thus, when you are driving down the highway and see acres and acres of corn, then you are looking at an example of Crop Monoculture. If you contrast that to a stretch of woods, you'll find the woods are full of variety. This variety helps to keep the system healthy. For example, if a disease comes about that destroys the oaks, then if the forest contained only oaks, the entire forest would be gone. If a disease attacks a certain crop that we typically raise in a monoculture environment, then we are at risk for losing a large portion of our produce which will then affect our diet. Standardization makes us vulnerable. But, in our modern world, standardization is the norm for everything from raising food to education (teach to the test) to psychotherapy (e.g., evidenced practices such as MST, Multi Systemic Therapy).

The Dust Bowl of the 1930's is a good example of the disastrous effects of monoculture cropping. Or as the amusing ad for Parkay Margarine once said, "it's not nice to fool Mother Nature." While using that slogan, I don't think Parkay really understood the implications of this line for our health and the health of our planet in terms of how processed food is affecting our lives. After all, it does appear Mother Nature's thundering lightening bolt may be aimed at a tender part of our anatomy for eating corporate food. Unfortunately it's our guts that suffer while the Corporations continue to prosper. It really isn't nice to fool Mother Nature.

Dare we blame the external powers-that-be for this? Who gave over our own natural, inborn power to them for the sake of falsely claimed productivity, efficiency, safety, and cheap prices? What are natural consequences other than what we do to ourselves?

We have a choice. We do it to ourselves.

There is no externalized Woman-Goddess out there ready to zap us into a life-containing fried and smoking buttocks. The consequence is natural. As wives (more accurately concubines) to the Corporation, we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on a sociopathic husband who is a physically and sexually abusive drunk. How much longer do we tolerate this?

Are you prepared for a divorce and the chance to become independent?

The Weston Price Organization is designed to acclimate to this divorce by helping people choose healthier diets and lifestyles. To help you further evaluate how useful Weston Price can be in your life, listen to the interview with Kimberly Heartke, a representative of the organization, by this author's wife and the author. We'll look forward to hearing feedback from you. The interview is at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/envision-this/2012/10/10/weston-price-restoring-nutrient-dense-foods-to-our-diet

 

Kimberley Hartke                                                                              Kimberley's Blog

Nursing Baby

Links and References

Kimberley Hartkey's blog

http://hartkeisonline.com/

Video introduction to the work of Weston Price

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b79YOawBg-U

Wikipedia on Weston A Price Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_a_price_foundation

Raw Milk as curing agent: Cree, J., 1929. Raw milk cures many diseases. Certified Milk Magazine, January:3-6.

How Can the Diets of Indigenous People Be So different

http://renegadehealth.com/blog/2011/01/27/how-can-the-diets-of-indigenous-people-be-so-different

Wikipedia on Raw Milk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_milk

Wikipedia on Breast Feeding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breastfeeding

Article on raw milk and local food ordinances

http://grist.org/food/raw-deal-maine-residents-fight-for-unregulated-food-draws-crackdown/

Gumpert, David, The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Merging Battle Over Food Rights

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781603582193?&PID=25450

For a copy of Maine's Local Food Ordinances, go to

http://savingseeds.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/localfoodlocalrules-ordinance-template.pdf

Pollen, Michael, Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin Press, New York, NY 2006. http://www.amazon.com/The-Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History/dp/0143038583/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349975982&sr=8-1&keywords=Pollan%2C+Omnivore%27s+Dilemma

Quote from Michael Pollen from http://www.clabbermouth.com/2011/10/05/michael-pollan-on-raw-milk/

Don't Buy Any Food You See Advertised: Amy Goodman Interviews Michael Pollenhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV6z_ANDvdY&feature=related

Reproduction Video

http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play?p=movie+conception+egg+sperm&tnr=21&vid=&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3Dv.4881493058060301%26pid%3D15.1&tit=When+Sperm+met+Egg

Holographic Universe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuANDlrTHyI

Authors Bio:
Burl Hall is a retired counselor who is living in a Senior Citizen Housing apartment. Burl has one book to his credit, titled "Sophia's Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature." For more information, search the book on Amazon.

Burl's philosophy entails the idea that "everything effects and causes everything thing else." His spirituality of Sophia i.e., Wisdom is universal as well as within each of us. He also sees the idea of Chaos as not being "all over the place" but as infinite relationships.

The question I present in my articles speak not so much towards the politicians, but how WE the people can empower ourselves within a planet that is healthy, wealthy and wise.