Photo courtesy Familyfarmed.org
March 2006 | Choice News
Increase Your Organic Options By Meeting Local Farmers
For many health-conscious shoppers, watching organic foods pop up in local grocery stores can feel a lot like being on a treasure hunt. While a growing number of mainstream supermarkets are beginning to provide more organic and locally farmed food, it’s not happening fast enough for some consumers. Others are frustrated with the sometimes limited selection.
Organic food sales represent approximately only 2 percent of all U.S. food sales, according to the Organic Trade Association. However, organics is one of fastest growing sectors of the food market, increasing by 17 to 21 percent more each year since 1997, compared to total U.S. food sales, which grew between 2 and 4 percent during the same period.
If you want to increase the number of organics on your dinner table, you have a couple of options. A good bet is to talk to the produce manager in your small neighborhood grocery. For instance, at Big Apple Finer Foods in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, manager John Gendics explained that while there hasn’t been a large demand for organics there, he’s willing to accommodate any customer request. “We have a very established clientele and most of them feel comfortable to ask us for products,” said Gendics.
While a number of larger chains appear receptive to increasing their organic repertoire, some require customers to petition the company at the corporate level to add to their produce selections.
Or, if you want to remove the middleman altogether, you can get even closer to the foods you eat by attending the 2006 Family Farmed Expo in downtown Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. on March 10 and 11. This is the second year for the Expo, which is sponsored by Sustain, a non-profit group that aims to bring together consumers, farmers and politicians. At the expo, besides learning about things such as organic lawncare and how to buy organics on a budget, you can meet and greet local farmers and sign up to receive their produce directly.
“It’s important for people to know that not only should they buy organic foods, but locally grown organic produce,” said Vicki Westerhoff, of Genesis Growers, a small St. Anne, Ill., farm located just southeast of Kankakee.
Westerhoff and her two sons specialize in salad greens, but also grow more than 60 varieties of vegetables, many of them heirloom. She pointed out that it’s best to buy organics from local producers because that allows you to support the local economy and reduce transportation costs and pollution.
Much of the organic produce that you find in large local chains is supplied by the local firm Goodness Greeness, which is a sponsor of the expo.
Among the stores the company supplies are Cub Foods supermarkets and Stanley’s Fruit and Vegetables, 1558 N. Elston Ave. These grocers are good places to buy organic food that won’t break your budget and are receptive to customer requests for more variety, according to Pat Bayor of Goodness Greeness.
Meanwhile, federal measures may also boost the number of organics available for sale. The Organic Trade Association is lobbying to have the 2007 Farm Bill include initiatives to increase organic production in the U.S.
The Organic Consumers Association also is pushing for the measure to include measures that help family farmers, protect the environment and phase out all “non-green” U.S. farm subsidies.
To learn more about the Farm Bill, visit ota.com and organ icconsumers.org. You can also comment on the bill by sending an email to farmbill@ota.com by April 24. For information on the Family Farmed Expo, call 312-951-8999; or visit familyfarmed.org where you can register online for $15. Admission at the door is $20.
— Christen DeProto
Breathe Your Way
to a Better Brain
STILL NOT SOLD on the wonders of meditation? A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital might change your mind, literally. “Regular practice of meditation appears to slow down the rate at which certain areas of the brain thin with age,” says study author Sara Lazar, Ph.D., who used MRIS to look at the brains of 20 people who averaged nine years of meditation experience and practiced about six hours per week.
Compared with a control group, parts of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing were significantly thicker in the meditators. “The thickness of these regions was correlated with amount of experience, which suggests that this is a cumulative effect,” Lazar points out. Los Angles Dharma meditation teacher Juliet Soopikian concurs on meditation’s attention-boosting powers: “Meditation helps us to be present in a situation, which brings focus and heightened awareness,” she says. “It’s a natural process that comes about after years of regular practice.” To begin breathing your way to a better brain, start out by meditating for 10 minutes twice a day, Soopikian suggests.
— Elizabeth Barker
Intelligent Design?
Use Your Noodle
THE KANSAS SCHOOL Board’s recent decision to teach Intelligent Design in science class caused the biggest local dust-up since Dorothy was blown into Oz. “Why not teach Hopi Creation stories?” critics asked. “If you can teach creationism in science class, why not teach haikus in auto shop?” others queried. And then came Bobby Henderson, the self-appointed head of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM).
Henderson professes a belief that the world was created by a levitating bug-eyed bowl of pasta, and he has petitioned the Kansas School Board to request “that this alternative theory be taught in your schools.” Otherwise, he adds: “We will be forced to proceed with legal action.”
His website is getting 2 million hits a day, and the number of people converting to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism tops 10 million worldwide. FSM believers call themselves Pastafarians. They hold that their supreme deity guides the universe with His Noodly Appendage. They consider every Friday a religious holiday and insist that FSM Heaven is “way better” since it features “a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano!” FSM is the only faith with its own online animated video game.
Major newspapers around the world have heralded FSM — including Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet (“Pastamonster intället för Darwin”) and Der Spiegel (“Mein Gott, ein Nudelmonster!”), and The Taipei Times.
Henderson’s emails reveal a clear consensus: “95 percent [are] in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools; 5 percent [are] telling me I am going to Hell.”
FSM-ism has won the support among religious thinkers. “If supernaturalism be called for,” professes Stephen D. Unwin, (author of The Probability of God ), “the pasta family of theologies seems the most plausible and, unquestionably, the tastiest with cheese.” And Religious Anthropologist Susan Johnston praises FSM for honoring “aspects of both male and female, with both ‘noodly appendages’ and two round meatballs which clearly represent the Breasts of the Great Mother Goddess.”
Not to be out-noodled, Kansas City School Board member Sue Gamble wrote Henderson: “I will add your theory to a long list of alternative theories I intend to introduce when it is appropriate. I am practicing how to do this with a straight face.”
And how do devout Pastafarians end their prayers? “Ramen.”
— Gar Smith
Protecting the Great Lakes
A SECOND ELECTRONIC fish barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Romeoville — designed to prevent the spread of Asian carp, round gobies and other invasive species in the Great Lakes region — is slated to be operational this spring.
The newest $9.1 million barrier is “the largest of its kind in the world,” according to Chuck Shea, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project manager.
However, Great Lakes activist and retired ironworker Eddie Landmichl is still not convinced the apparatus is going to be effective and he has resorted to outlandish publicity stunts to prove it. Last summer, the 72-year-old Korean War veteran outfitted his walker with Asian carp carcasses in a protest outside the Corps of Engineers downtown Chicago office. Landmichl claimed the first electronic fish barrier was not working and constructing a second one was futile.
More recently, in January he stuck his hand in the water near the first barrier to demonstrate that it had stopped functioning, leaving the Great Lakes’ $4.5 billion sports fishery vulnerable to the invasive species.
He said he felt “nothing, absolutely nothing. They (the Corps) tell you, ‘Don’t put your hand in there, you’ll get shocked.’ … (But) they just don’t want anybody to know the first barrier’s not working at all. This whole project is a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.”
However, Shea said, field tests “do not indicate declining performance” of the first barrier and corps personnel also have stuck their hands in the water with no dire consequences. “Typically you would feel a tingling, but not a shock,” he said.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources also insisted the first barrier is operating properly, but both agencies acknowledge construction is running slow on the second.
“It’s certainly behind schedule, but fortunately we haven’t seen any further upstream movement (of Asian carp) because of the Starved Rock lock and dam,” said Mike Conlin, director of resource conservation for the Natural Resources department.
“The first barrier was intended to keep the round goby from entering the Illinois River. It took five years for the Corps to build it because of the bureaucracy… By the time the operation was up and running, gobies had long since gone downstream.”
Together, both barriers will cost $1 million a year to operate, he said.
Meanwhile, Landmichl — who for years has inundated sports fisherman, journalists and environmentalists with paperwork on invasive species — has gone into PR overdrive duplicating a letter written to him by Mayor Richard M. Daley. The mayor noted Landmichl’s devotion to preserving the Great Lakes, citing news reports of Landmichl’s protest outside the Corps of Engineers office. (See Choice News, August 2005).
Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich may be next on Landmichl’s hit list, despite the fact that Blagojevich signed a bill allowing the state to regulate Asian carp imported to and transported within Illinois and also wrote to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, urging a federal ban on Asian carp, according to a news release.
However, Landmichl is upset that Blagojevich has approved a $100,000 survey to study Asian carp populations and assess the possibility of harvesting the carp commercially. Carp Protein Products, Ltd. of Havana, Ill., will conduct the study with funds provided by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. The firm also is considering establishing a carp processing plant in north central Illinois, according to a Blagojevich news release.
“You can’t trust those carp harvesters as far as you can throw ’em,” Landmichl said. “They want to see carp in Lake Michigan.”
— Susan DeGrane/copy and photo
Ecological Rehab for Calumet Area
THE ABANDONED industrial sites and garbage dumps that surround the Lake Calumet region on the city’s far South Side serve as a reminder that industrial progress does not come free. However, the abundant wildlife, flowers and endangered bird species indicate nature’s capacity to endure.
Even with the intense industrial activity, this area remains a critical stopover for migrant birds and perhaps offers the greatest concentration of threatened and endangered species in Illinois such as the Black-crowned Night, Great Egret, Double-crested Cormorant, and Pied-billed Grebes. This extraordinarily natural gem also allows habitat for 700 plant species including the Illinois State endangered Grass Pin Orchid.
Since 1980, protecting and restoring the important remnants of wetlands, wooded areas, and prairie in southeast Chicago has been a cause for various environmental groups.
Their efforts were answered in February when Mayor Richard M. Daley and Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn accepted $750,000 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Coastal Wetlands Grant program. Since all the water from that site flows directly to Lake Michigan, the marsh is considered a costal area. The grant will be used to conduct the Hegewisch Marsh Restoration Project, one of the first large-scale wetland restoration projects in the Calumet area.
The restoration project will include removing invasive species, installing native plants, and executing other habitat changes to benefit coastal wetland-dependent plants and animals, such as the endangered colony of yellow-headed blackbirds that nest at the site. The site will also be home to the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, a 24,000-square-foot environmentally friendly building that will focus on blending nature, industry and community.
— Mary Boldan
Organic tidbits
IF YOU’RE ON a limited budget, but still want to eat organic, start by buying certain fruits and vegetables. Your best bet is to go for the ones that have the highest pesticide levels, according to the Organic Consumers’ Association: apples, bell peppers, celery, cherries, imported grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, potatoes, red raspberries, spinach, and strawberries.
Produce with the lowest pesticide levels include: asparagus, avocados, bananas, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet corn, kiwi, mangoes, onions, papaya, pineapples, and sweet peas.
— CC
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