Nutrition Information

Evolutionary Philosophy of Biodiversity
& Organic Food Production from Nature

Truth Reality of Organic Biodiversity not Monoculture-Agriculture-Genetic-Modification (GM)

Our bodies were designed over the course of millions of years for lives spent in small tribes hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa. Natural selection has not had time to revise our bodies, nor minds, for coping with fatty diets, cars, drugs, most of city living. From this mismatch between our design and our environment arises much, perhaps most, preventable modern disease. The current epidemics of heart disease and breast cancer are tragic examples. (Nesse, Williams, Evolution and Healing, 1995)

Our disconnection from the Earth is epitomized by our relationship to food. Most urban people associate food with supermarkets but fail to connect it with the land. (David Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies, 1999)

In an urban setting, we live in a human-created environment, surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and animals, as well as the pests that have overcome our defences. Living among such a dearth of species, we no longer recognise our dependence on the rest of life for our well-being and our very survival. It is simpler to assume that the economy delivers our food, clean air, water and energy and takes away our sewage and waste. We forget that the Earth itself provides all these services, and so makes economists and the economy possible. We are biological beings, as dependent on the biosphere as any other life form and we forget our animal nature at our peril. (David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies, 1999)

Introduction

Humans have evolved to consume Plants and Animals from Nature i.e. Biodiversity & Organic Gardening, Not Monoculture - Agriculture. Philosophy teaches us the importance of the Middle Way, of moderation and harmony. Thus the current over consumption of the western world in the food we eat and the nature we use to produce this food is ultimately damaging our health and the health of the planet upon which we depend. Philosophy also teaches us that to be wise we must know the truth and this truth comes from understanding reality (what we are and how we evolved to exist).

The central theme of our Philosophy of Health web pages is very obvious - we must live in harmony with nature and consume food which we evolved to eat. We hope you enjoy reading the following quotations on health and nutrition and links.

Kindly & Sincerely,

Geoff Haselhurst, Karene Howie

Quotes On Consumption

In order to bring everyone on the planet to the same general level of consumption and well-being of the average Canadian, we would need 4 or 5 more Earths - right now! (Suzuki, 1999)

The point is, Holland and countries like it, most of the developed nations, for that matter, are often used as models for the Third World to follow. But... it's not possible for the Third World to follow these models because in many respects the Third World is providing the surpluses that these countries exploit in order to have their extremely high standards of living. So for every country that has an ecological deficit, there has to be another part of Earth that has an ecological surplus. If every country runs an ecological deficit, then we are quite literally consuming the Earth. And in fact... that is exactly what we are doing. (Suzuki, 1999)

While there are far more people in poor countries like India, China, Kenya or the Philippines, more than 80% of the planets resources are being consumed by countries like the US, Japan, Germany and Canada. If you are a Canadian or an American with only one child, that child will consume more than forty times what two little Bangladeshis will. The problem with overpopulation is not just numbers. It's a factor of both population and per capita consumption. (Suzuki, 1999)

If we got rid of 80 percent of the worlds population tomorrow by eliminating all of the poor people, we'd still be in the predicament we're in now. That's because those of us who live in the First World, although we make up only 20 percent of the world's population, consume more than 80 percent of the planet. (Suzuki, 1999)

Genetic Modification & Agriculture Quotes

Genetically engineered products are alive, so they're inherently more unpredictable. Because they are alive, they can reproduce. And they can mutate. They can proliferate. They can spread quickly across the world. How can you recall a virus, a bacterium or even a transgenic plant or insect [ which carries genes of another species] back to the laboratory? Even if a small percentage of these transgenic creatures become pests, we're talking about enormous genetic pollution. (Rifkin)(Suzuki, 1999)

Rabbits in Australia, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, cats on tropical islands, purple loosestrife spreading across North AMerican waterways - all these species were benign or useful in the places in the world where they belonged, but out of the surroundings in which they evolved, where they existed along with other organisms to keep them in check, they have become pests that are devastating native wildlife and costing billions of dollars a year in lost crops, eradication programs and restoration. If that's what wild creatures that are displaced from their natural habitats can do, what can be expected from life forms with genes spanning species barriers, life forms that are therefore exotic anywhere on Earth? (Suzuki, 1999)

We are destabilizing nature's balance to accommodate a sophisticated but, one can argue, largely unnecessary technology. There are simpler mechanical ways to deal with weeds, including no-till farming, mulching and companion cropping. But none of these Earth-friendly methods can be patented to make big money. They are not splashy, high-tech, instant fixes. They evolve over years and generations because methods have to be developed at a local level by individuals who care about and observe the crops, soils and wild plants of each locality. (Suzuki, 1999)

Herbicides and pesticides are powerful metabolic inhibitors- that's why they are used. And most have been shown to be carcinogenic. Roundup is supposed to be a relatively mild compound, but it has been shown to be associated with illness, poisonings, and serious allergic reactions, and is highly toxic to fish. In fact, it's rated the third most poisonous agrochemical in California. The crops engineered to be resistant to this herbicide are repeatedly dosed with it throughout their growing period; conventional plants would die if they were sprayed with such chemicals. So we are now eating, in our soy and canola, season-long residues of this herbicide, and no tests have ever been performed to find out if that's safe. (Suzuki, 1999)

The testing systems are inadequate. It's a conflict of interest. We are expecting the people who are going to gain profit from these organisms to be honest about the dangers and the difficulties of those products. If they do want to make a huge, enormous profit, it's an immense conflict of interest to expect they are going to be honest about it. (Elaine Ingham, Soil Pathologist)(Suzuki, 1999)

Farmers who find that stray GM seeds have blown onto their land from neighbours' fields could face massive fines if the agrochemical giant Monsanto wins a test case in a Canadian court. Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Saskatchewan, is being pursued by Monsanto for damages and the profits from his fields because the company claims that the patent on its genetically modified seeds has been violated.
(Marie Woolf, The Independent, March 14 1999)(Suzuki, 1999)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American seed company Delta and Pine, an affiliate of Monsanto, were granted a patent on a genetic technique that sterilizes seeds for all time. Sterile seeds produce only one generation of plants. The new seeds are sterile because the patent holders want to be sure that farmers have to pay for new ones each year. (Suzuki, 1999)

Information on Patenting

When a private or public biotechnology company isolates a gene then inserts it into another organism, it can then claim ownership of the resulting "new" gene and start making money. That means all life - every bird and dog and bee, every bit of tissue in our bodies - is up for sale. Genetically modified mice, sheep, fish, insects, plants and bacteria have already been patented, and companies are claiming royalties on them whenever they are used. Even people are fair game - the government of Iceland recently sold the DNA sequences of all 70 000 Icelanders to a private company. (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)

In 1980 the United States Supreme Court, by a ruling of 5 to 4, said the General Electric could claim a micro-organism that had been created in a laboratory as a patented invention. That set the precedent for companies all over the world to begin to control the entire genetic commons in the twenty-first century. Only seven years later, in 1987, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a chilling policy statement in which they said, 'Any organism on this planet, any gene, any cell-line, any organ, any tissue, is potentially patentable as a human invention'. Here in one regulatory stroke, the U.S. patent office reduced the entire living kingdom, the genetic commons, to the possibility of private property owned and controlled by a handful of multinational corporations. (Rifkin)(Suzuki, 1999)

The notion that you can patent life has now gone global. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation passed sweeping new rules under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that have changed lives around the world. Under these rules, countries can not use national laws to prevent anyone from patenting living organisms within their territories. (Suzuki, 1999)

Patents are a wonderful mechanism of collecting incomes from things that nature does freely, that people do freely. [ They force ] people to make payments for what has been theirs, and their right: the public commons. In the 1920's the British placed a tax on salt, salt-making, as a way to finance their armies. And Gandhi went out and said, "No, this has been given freely to us by nature. We make it with our intelligence, we need it for our survival. We will not pay you the taxes you want, because you have not created the salt, and we must have it to live". In a way, life patents are 5 000 times worse than salt taxes of the British regime of those days. It's like patenting air! Because, after all, it's the biodiversity in life forms that make all life possible. It's as vital to life as air itself. It's a condition of our life process. And when our life process and elements of our life process start to get patented, and someone can make money every time we try to use them, it is really the ultimate of organised greed. It has [not only] generated.. an ethical crisis, but is really threatening to generate a crisis of survival.
(Vandana Shiva, Physicist and expert on food issues in the 3rd World) (Suzuki, 1999)

As things stand, the responsibility for any damages that biologically engineered products may cause falls upon the human victims or their governments. In fact, the current wording of the unfinished international Biosafety Protocol, which is being negotiated under the auspices of the UN's Biodiversity Convention, specifies that the importing country, not the patent holder or even the exporter, is liable for any problems that may arise. And if those problems affect nature or wild creatures- well, no one is responsible at all.
Some of the reasons for this situation are those familiar concerns: free trade and global competitiveness. Countries that have become signatories to GATT and the WTO are forced to reduce trade barriers and open themselves to new products in order to remain involved in international trade. One example of what can happen involves the hormones used widely in Canada and the US to make cattle beef bulk up faster. A European Union wants to keep the hormones out of its citizens' diets. The case was taken back before the WTO, which found against the EU. In June of 1999 the EU said they would not accept the hormones, so they are subject to sanctions. The EU will lose about $128 million in trade concessions each and every year these hormones are kept out. If this cost proves too much, and the EU does allow the products in, and it then discovers that in fact they are dangerous after all, the manufacturers won't be liable. The regulatory agencies that tried to keep the products out in the first place will be held responsible for having allowed them in. (Suzuki, 1999)

..we need to see nature as the true capital on which our lives and economy depend. And if we learn to value nature, our real wealth, we will take better care of it. Our economic system works for no one, except maybe the one percent at the very top. Our system wastes the environment. It wastes people. And it's very, very expensive. We need a radical change in how we relate to resources and people and the environment. (Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce)(Suzuki, 1999)

Our disconnection from the Earth is epitomized by our relationship to food. Most urban people associate food with supermarkets but fail to connect it with the land. (Suzuki, 1999)

Related Links

http://www.truefoodnow.org/ - Learn the facts behind Greenpeace's True Food campaign, with fact sheets on genetically modified foods and details on how to shop for True Food.