Ditto?

Today the US government decided that food from cloned animals is safe to eat. While I don't doubt that cloning can produce genetically identical offspring, it just makes me uncomfortable t0 think that there are so many chemicals already allowed in our food supply - and now both my vegetables and my beef can be genetically altered. Just seems like playing God a bit to often for me. So much of what I see at work is nutrition related. Don't get me wrong, the body is masterfully designed to have a number of back up mechanisms, so that if one thing is lacking, there is another to help us survive. But I see the effects of poor nutrition in all the inflammatory illnesses - fibromyalgia, diabetes, lupus, arthritis, hypertension, and the list goes on.

Most of what our immune system needs to fight disease and repair the body comes from the produce section - vitamins and minerals and antioxidants we don't even have names for yet. I believe in vitamins ( I hate salmon, so I take fish oil) But the quality of produce is declining - and repeatedly when I harvest my own, or buy locally grown fresh picked produce, the color and the flavor are just incomperable to what I find in the store - since the store stuff may have been in a truck for a week or so before it gets to the store. The same is true of those eggs from my hens - and the meat we've bought from local farms. There is just no comparison.

So for the New Year, I want to ramp up my efforts to make our place sustainable - so that I know where the food on my table comes from - and so that I don't have to worry about all the weirdness that comes from the grocery stores. Now if I could only get past this fixation that meat comes under cellophane, and not from the fields behind my house...