In this Issue:
Wednesday September 27, 6* PM - 8.30 PM, in Novato:
Organic Management of Parks & Sports FieldsHEALTH FOOD, Healthy Foods, Health Food Stores, Local Resources
Lock Up Fauci - Who’s Planning to See him in San Rafael?
The OXYMORON MUSEUM: A Fun Look at Words & Meanings
For more information info@NonToxicSchools.org
Health Food Stores…
When I grew up in the 1950s, we had 2 food markets in town, Finast (FIrst NAtional STore), and later, Waldbaum’s. It was at Finast that pieces of meat were laid nicely on a flat white styrofoam tray and delicately wrapped in saran plastic before being placed on tables on ice. In my teens, I worked at the Waldbaum’s in another town which required a lift from my mom or the mom’s of friends who also bagged and cashiered there. It was at Waldbaum’s when we heard the skuttlebutt that our friendly manager Murray was fired for stealing some of that seamlessly wrapped-in-plastic meat, and we were all devastated because we loved Murray, and he was middle-class like we were, so why would he need to steal meat? A few weeks later Murray was reinstated, so we never knew what really happened, but there was a funny feeling in the market, and I left to go work across the street at Double Day books while I studied for my SATs and Regent’s exams.
When I left for college I met my first Health Food Store. I knew of 2 in Boulder Colorado at that time, or maybe 3 if you include the one at the mall that mostly sold vitamins, and who went to the mall anyway??? Don’t be daft!!! One health food store was the Green Mt. Grainery. The other was Hanna’s New Age Foods. Hanna Kroeger was a healer in town and we often stood in line to meet Hanna so she could heal holes in our astral bodies from psychedelics, or tell us what herbs and things we could take to regain our health or stay healthy. At first she mostly sold supplements and gave us health readings. Eventually Hanna opened a restaurant upstairs where we had all kinds of yummy breads, soups and salads.
Boulder was also the home to The Little Kitchen, the first organic restaurant I’d seen. I soon started my long stint of waitressing there, while listening to the sounds of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison as we worked in our torn bell bottom hip-huggers with belly buttons showing and Mexican embroidered blouses under our aprons with pockets where we kept our tips. That was such a fun place to work. We had Capricorn Jack delivering fresh goat yogurt from his farm, and organic eggs, and Anna taught me to make mayonnaise from scratch in a blender. The organic baker 2 doors down provided the best home made bread, and the bookstore one door over completed the coolness of this block’s businesses in downtown Boulder (before the plaza was built, and before Trungpa arrived and gave birth to Naropa) and before they paved paradise and put up a parking lot (true story).
Green Mt. Grainery was the first place I saw big oak barrels filled with all kind of grains from which I could scoop my own into a glass jar and weight it and pay. I thought white rice came in a plastic bag or box (Rice A Roni). The GMG also sold the mint I picked from the stream by my mountain home and sold to Mo Siegel who went on to create Celestial Seasonings Tea, which eventually got bought by another Big Food Conglomerate (Kraft), leaving carrot-topped Mo and his wife Peggy sitting on a pretty copper penny as they road off into the Boulder Rocky Mountain High with their red locks blowin’ in the wind. At some point, Mo returned, partnered with HAIN, and I have no idea what’s going on with them now!
After I left Boulder, I sought out the local health food store wherever I roamed —working in a few, making avo-gobble sandwiches to enjoy with my carrot juice. Who heard of carrot juice? At my parents home we drank Man-Oh-Manischewitz grape juice (tasted like syrup), Mott’s apple juice, and Tropicana concentrated OJ in a frozen can I used when empty to roll my long red hair and remove the beautiful curls so I could look like Jean Shrimpton or Patty Boyd (in my dreams). But here, we were drinking carrots and turning our hair and fingers orange. Now when people called me carrot top, I knew that they knew, that I was getting my Vitamin A, and they weren’t just referring to my strawberry red hair!
And who heard of avocadoes in the NY Suburbs? Here in the health food store they reigned king of all the sandwiches. The perfect meal was avo & cheese on homemade whole wheat bread saturated with homemade mayo and a glass of carrot or maybe even carrot/banana. Wow, this is before the kale and spirulina rage, and before the food combining charts appeared in my life. Then there was no way I could eat a protein with a potato, or goodness-forbid, a melon (eat them alone or leave them alone). I had that chart pinned on my cork board. Did you?
And so started the adventure with all these rules for health. Macrobiotics, which went along with the tea ceremony I was studying with a master tea ceremonialist from Japan, which went along with the zen buddhist organic zafu I sat on for meditation, which accompanied the several day apple juice fast I broke with 4 ounces of organic olive oil. I even had a chance to eat Oryoki (roughly meaning “just enough”) at my one night at Tassajara in 1970 when a friend and I hiked in unannounced and they gifted us an un-booked stay so my friend could join the search team and spend the night looking for a missing guest. (Oh if Suzuki Roshi could see me now….60 pounds overweight — I’m sure he’d have a koan for that). And now, over 50 years have passed and here I am, reassessing my relationship with HEALTH FOODS in a world where those two words seem to be an OXYMORON (see the oxymoron museum at the end of this article), unless you grow your own or know your farmers.
Welcome to Whole Foods…. where on my first visit, I filled up with organic produce and realized that I would be paying $8 for 2 grapefruits. All those fluorescent lights in the big warehouse of a store near UCSD in La Jolla made me feel strangely activated. I’d never seen so much ‘healthy’ food in one place! Once I realized that there was no way I could afford this food, I left my filled cart in a strangely-lit aisle, grabbed my boyfriend and ran out of the store almost hyper-ventilating. It’s not the last time I ran out of a store leaving a cart full of items. There was something about the huge warehouses with the flickering lights and stale air that my body couldn’t endure. It was even worse in clothing stores. Some strange chemical smell made me feel like I was high on an acid flashback, which couldn’t be, because Hanna Kroeger had healed the holes in my astral body from my previous acid trips.
Now I am hearing that Amazon, the purchaser of Whole Foods (which I call the Food Hole), gets a lot of ‘organic’ produce from China. See more from Dev at the bottom of this newsletter.
So what’s next for us, now that the health food stores have sold out to BigAg?
We have an MFR Food Sovereignty Group
We have had a Food Sovereignty Group in Telegram. Where do you get your food? In addition to local farmer’s markets, I’m buying online from local farmers who ensure that no mRNA is used in anything on their farms. Our garden was a total fail this year - the worst in 13 years. And this is despite the mycelium-infused soil we purchased from Bryan last year. Yes, we didn’t tend it as much, so partially user error, but also the weather was strange, and even the strawberries that have been abundant every year, did not produce, and we did not have any plums on our native plum trees anywhere in our neighborhood. (We did have foxes move in on our deck, and field mice move into our kitchen cabinets).
So let’s make a plan for our food. Please comment in the substack reply to this article what you’re doing to eat clean food? What you’re doing to clean food you get that may not be clean, etc.?
Visit our Marin Weston A. Price Foundation Group
Visit Will Tuttle’s World Peace Diet if you are vegan
Share your Resources in the Comments Section of this Substack (please don’t reply and email me).
This article was inspired by several articles and conversations listed below:
Nanobionics: Spinach that can send emails and plants that detect poison!
Plants are already pretty cool, but imagine what they can do when scientists add nanosensors to them... read on to find out more!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/55920067
7 IoT Smart Solutions in Agriculture Sector [2021]
IoT in agriculture is enhancing farmers' production and efficiency of its land. If you wanna know more about IoT in agriculture, read this article.
https://ubidots.com/blog/iot-in-agriculture/
And thanks to Dev for this resource on the origins of the Organic Movement:
That whole "Small Farms Library" has a lot of the early literature in the Organic movement, which started in the 1910's with the advent of chemical fertilizers replacing "manuring" and mechanization replacing humans/ animals. Here's Dr. Weston A. Price's book, available online:
https://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#price
And more info that I have not vetted but I trust Dev:
Also be aware that all the "organic" food in Amazon (Whole) Foods is from China. There was a video shared on the Food Sovereignty group of someone boiling broccoli and finding what looked like a thin sheet of plastic peeling off.
And while you’re shopping anywhere:
KEEP CA$H ALIVE
DR. FRAUD-XI COMES TO TOWN
Who’s going to See Dr. Fraud-Xi in San Rafael October 5? He’s SOUL’ed OUT.
Love the stories. I volunteer at farms and buy straight from farmers as much as possible. Eggs from school where I work or parents who have chickens. Just started ordering from Azure and for the rest I go to our health food stores and just do my best. The biggest expenses for our family are rent and food. Having one teenage boy and one young twenties means whatever they are eating at home is probably better than what they eat outside the home so there we are.
Thanks for taking readers on this journey and for the oxymoron treat.
Hope to be on the demo/protest scene at the soul'd out Fauci appearance.