I have long been a fan of Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard and similar programs, and perhaps it’s really catching on. No sooner did I post earlier today about a New York State farmer’s work to get his carrots into New York City schools than I got this month’s issue of Growing for Market newsletter in the mail. The editor’s letter focused on this trend all over the country.

In one school she highlights in Leavenworth, Kansas, the cafeteria was shut down in favor of students eating healthy meals with their teachers in class, and recess was abandoned for structured exercise. (I’m all for unstructured play, as I think it’s crucial for development, but in many cases this means the kids get no exercise.) The behavior problems in the school vanished, and the school went from having 41 percent of its students rated “unsatisfactory” on state math assessments to 0 percent given the lowest rating, in two years. The number scoring “exemplary” jumped from 3 percent to 48 percent. (Click here for details.)

The challenges mentioned in this particular article were virtually the same to the ones revealed in the New York Times article mentioned earlier, but the successes are amazing, and worth it.

A few other things in this month’s edition relevant to what we’ve been talking about:

* Cover crops (or green manuring) is an incredibly efficient way to get nitrogen. According to the Main Organic Farmer & Grower, hairy vetch (one of the common cover crops that uses a symbiotic bacteria in the soil to fix nitrogen from the air) is only $0.13 per pound of N. By way of example, cottonseed meal (full of pesticides and GMOs engineered to express Bacillus thuringiensis toxin) is $25 a pound. Alfalfa meal costs $46 per pound of N. Blood meal is on the cheaper end of the organic fertilizers at $12 per pound of N. By way of comparison, I found commercial per-pound N costs for petrochemical (read: petroleum-based) fertilizers to be about $0.30 in 2007. That price, of course, doesn’t include the costs of externalities (destruction of wetlands from runoff, cancer rates, toxic production byproducts of manufacturing the fertilizers — incidentally where the fluoride in municipal water comes from) and the heavily subsidized cost of the U.S. military to protect U.S. access to overseas oil. To think that these farmers could be getting their nitrogen fixes for $0.13/pound (or likely less for large-scale operations)…

* According to The Organic Broadcaster, the National Organic Program (part of the USDA and the agency responsible for organic standards) is sending its first auditors to China to supervise organic operations there. Apparently the U.S. government has absolutely no idea how much of our organic food is imported.

* This issue also has a great article on growing food in the city and inter-suburbs (”Lettuce not lawns”), proving once again that you don’t have to have a farm to farm.

As it turns out, quite a lot. I normally can’t read the NYTimes without having serious bones with at least a portion of just about any story. But yesterday’s piece in the Dining In section about a New York state farmer’s heroic efforts to get New York City kids to be able to eat NY carrots was incredibly well done and illustrated by anecdote so much about what is wrong — and right — with our food system.

Richard Ball had a not so audacious idea. He realized his farm was 2.5 hours away “‘from the largest appetite in the country,’” New York City. But his ability to get NY carrots into NYC schools has been thwarted by myriad factors endemic to our food culture. Just slicing fresh carrots and handing them to students was too labor intensive for a cash-strapped school system (no doubt too busy dealing the behavior problems that ensue when we feed kids garbage), and USDA regulations are such that it is easier to get federal subsidies for bagged/canned/boxed/packaged food because the serving size and nutrition information is printed on the side. But that was only the beginning of the up-is-down quandaries.

Kids used to processed food are much more likely to eat a carrot if it’s in a fun shape/size. That layer of processing added a whole other dimension to Ball’s efforts to get the local carrots on the local lunch tables. The variety most often used for the bagged baby carrots (really a big carrot reconstituted into a small shape) didn’t grow well in New York, and farmers understandably weren’t willing to stake out their livlihoods trying for a market that might not be there. Another requirement for this experiment to work was that somehow the school system needed a year-round supply, but carrots don’t grow year-round.

But this good-hearted farmer pressed on. The tale of his personal commitment to making this happen is worth reading the story for alone. And ultimately he may just be successful, although currently he has to send the “local” carrots to Michigan or Vermont for processing into crinkly shapes before they are sent to the schools. But if the program takes off, he and other farmers may be able to go into together for the equipment to do it locally.

There is so much more to putting local food on our tables and in our lunchboxes than just putting crops in the ground nearby, as this story so well exemplifies.

One of the big issues with local meat right now is access to processing plants by local farmers. The big industrial feedlots have glommed on to most of the local slaughterhouses in the United States, and those that haven’t been monopolized by Big Farm have closed because they can’t make money. This is just but one issue facing small-scale growers. We are literally remaking our food system from the ground up. In my area, local growers are getting together to form a coop to run a poultry processing plant — it’s an incredibly expensive and cost-intensive endeavor, but without it the options are drive hundreds of miles away or deal with processors that really have no interest in working with small-scale growers (a couple of hundred birds at a time is “small-scale”).

But the effort to remake our food economy is well worth it, and the commitment of Richard Ball and others are what is making it happen. “We spent the last 40 years getting out of the local food business so I figure it’s going to take a few years to turn that around,” he told the Times.

More and more, I am finding the farming world is full of Richard Balls.

One of the things I find most remarkable about people’s attitudes about holistic therapies is that the general consensus seems to be that they are great for minor things but when the situation gets serious, well, you better be “safe” and go to a mainstream doctor. It’s like routine aches and pains are fine to deal with holistically, but when your life is on the line…

Why I find this so fascinating is that it seems to be so disjointed from reality. The reality is our lives are always on the line. Suppressing eczema with steroids will sure as the day is long cause deeper and more perfidious dysfunction — in babies it often manifests in the form of respiratory disease, usually asthma, which of course is rarely connected with the original complaint, which has now “gone away.” Yes, it left the body’s elimination organ, the skin, for somewhere more crucial to our survival, breathing — not a good trade.

The quintessential retort by those who are to one degree or another dissociated from the body’s innate healing mechanisms is, “What if you get cancer?” Firstly, cancer doesn’t just show up one day like some uninvited guest. There are always signs, symptoms and clues that the body is out of harmony, and many well-trained practitioners of the healing arts are able to recognize those red flags for the warning signs they are, address them by helping the body to heal itself, and thereby avoid a path of nasty, brutish and short.

HIV/AIDS syndrome is another area of sufficient seriousness that sends even the more holistically minded to conventional meds and treatment plans that often kill the patient long before the symptoms would. But it doesn’t have to be that way. And that’s why programs like this one (”AIDS, HIV and Homeopathy”) on Voice America are so crucial:

Hosts Melissa Burch, CCH and Dr. Tim Stryker, and special guest world renowned homeopath Jeremy Sherr will present his successful findings of treating AIDS and HIV in Africa. He started a clinical project in Tanzania, which highlights all the benefits of homeopathy in a Third World Country, including the fact that the homeopathic medicines for one patient for a whole year is less than $1. His English patient, Gareth Jones, shares his experience of homeopathic treatment for HIV and encourages everyone to think of homeopathy for AIDS and HIV. Since homeopathy is so effective in difficult conditions like Africa, Sherr reminds us we can expect even more positive results in the West.

This issue, of course, is inextricably linked to health freedom, because when most states in this country ban anyone without a medical license from talking to you about your health, the medical-industrial complex effectively shuts out discussion of a host of other therapies, most of which are cheaper, more effective and far less toxic.

There has been an effort by the Natural Solutions Foundation to get the presidential candidates to take a stand on issues relating to health freedom. The responses have been interesting, and telling. So far only Republican Ron Paul (an OBGYN who opposes mandatory vaccination and supports access to whatever kind of medicine you want) has outlined a platform on this issue that has earned the support of NSF.

I came across a statistic yesterday that I found pretty eye-opening. It’s from a decade ago, but still. I found it in the archives of The Independent (Durham, NC):

A seminal Harvard Medical School study found that in 1997, Americans made more visits to “complementary and alternative” health care providers than to all primary care physicians. Out-of-pocket spending on such therapies that year was $12.2 billion–higher than expenditures for all U.S. hospitalizations.

That doesn’t seem to make holistic therapies “complementary” or “alternative” to me. I just call it medicine. But in all but a handful of states, a practitioner calling it that constitutes either a misdemeanor or a felony. For shame.

Well, almost all the fall crops are in the ground or near so. The summer crops have now all been cleared out, although the compost pile could use some attention. And I’ve seeded all but one row with its winter cover crops/green manure (non-cash crops grown for what they contribute to the soil, fixing nitrogen from the air, improving soil structure, adding organic matter, etc.). For fall, I am planting a variety of greens (lettuces, spinach, arugula, collards/kale/mustards, bok choy) that I will hopefully eat throughout the winter, as well as garlic for next year, carrots to overwinter and a few other things. It’s certainly late to be getting fall crops in the ground, even for Zone 6, but the horrible drought and heat has made it quite difficult.

It’s been a fascinating learning process growing in such an intensive way for the first time in my life. The physical labor is awesome yet exhausting. But it’s amazing to me how small-scale farm tools (e.g., seeders) make the operation efficient and within the reach of just about anyone with desire and a little know how. I manage about 1,800 square feet (6 50-foot rows, each 4-feet wide, with an aisle) in about one to two days per week, total, including my learning time. That would easily feed a family of four if managed correctly. I didn’t get to can and freeze as much as I would have liked this year, firstly because some crops I didn’t plant enough of, and secondly because a human only has the capacity to do so many new things in one year, but I do have several cases of tomatoes canned (friends, I just gave away your Christmas gifts).

One of the many, many things I have learned (my education is a combination of books, sustainable ag. classes — which are delightfully offered in my area — and experience) is that the temperature shift is not the biggest challenge to raising crops in the winter. Especially where I live, row covers and small-scale tunnels with wire and plastic are sufficient, the biggest challenge is day length. So that’s why I am concerned about getting in my fall crops so late (a month ago would have been optimal, but it was 100 degrees and desert dry), not because of the cold, but because they know when the days get shorter to stop robust growth and hunker down until spring. In many ways, I can use that to my advantage. For example, I planted garlic now with the goal of just getting some good root growth so it can take off in the spring. But it’s a disadvantage for the crops grown for their foliage, as they, too, stop growing when they get less daylight, and so I’m just hoping to get enough growth to get them going into winter. Then the cold temperatures will be to my advantage, as salad greens will “store” on the plant under row covers for weeks or longer as fresh as if they just popped up.

What I am doing on my farm is in some ways diametrically opposite of what I’ve been writing about. I just wrote a piece for The Independent on all the things food labels don’t reveal about how our food is grown, processed, sanitized and treated. Or least all the things not revealed that fit into 3,000 words, which is shockingly constraining for this subject. One of the goals in my writing these days is critique and vision. It’s not enough just to say processed food is bad. What now? Providing an alternative to the industrialized food system — a primer for the new and curious — was what I was trying to accomplish in the “what you can do” section.

I wrote about the recent organic standards modifications and what they mean using hops as a case study in another sidebar. I found that piece especially gratifying to write because I actually shifted my own perspective quite a bit while reporting it. I am usually a purist about most things relating to food and health, but in this case I actually saw quite a bit of value in letting conventional hops in “organic” beer for a while, with restrictions and a ironclad commitment to revisit the regulations once the market changes. I told my editor that it’s not often that I write a piece and really see both points of view (partially that’s because there are usually far more than just two, not something well-reflected in the he-said, she-said journalism constraining most reporting). I really didn’t feel that there was any false debate in that piece. I would be curious what other people thought about the exceptions list, as I definitely started to see nuances, but maybe there aren’t any. Maybe “organic” should only be organic.

One of the things I pondered this week as I thought about how my writing is interacting with farming is how I more and more feel like I live in a parallel universe of sorts. The feeling first arose when I read a piece in the New York Times about a household sealant that remained on store shelves more than a year after it was determined by federal regulators to be quite dangerous and the cause of a least two deaths. The parallel universe comes from my disassociation from the notion that things that are on the shelf at the local big-box store, drugs and “foods” we inject or ingest, chemicals that we spray on the lawn are de facto safe until someone tells us they’re not. I still can’t get away from the disturbing idea that our whole culture is grounded in the unexamined assumption that someone is watching out for us. When are we going to break that spell and wake up to the fact that we are solely responsible for what happens to our bodies, our communities, our planet?

Maybe this is already happening. The more I get my news and information from sources out of the mainstream, the more and more it’s starting to seem to me that the “mainstream” isn’t. I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had recently with people who are much more in tune than I would have ever imagined if I assumed, as I used to, that our media culture is really holding up a mirror. It’s starting to look like a very funny mirror to me indeed. Everywhere I turn I am finding people more aware, waking up, asking questions and taking things into their own hands — owning what’s happening to their bodies and to our planetary body. Then again, one of my agriculture classes has diet cola, yoohoos and scary orange “peanut butter” crackers out on the table while we discuss sustainable and pasture-based poultry. And people actually eat it. Sigh.

I had to muse again at this parallel universe when I read an intro into the otherwise great interview Salon did with epidemiologist Devra Davis, who wrote the very worthwhile The Secret History of the War on Cancer. The headline (”Life Will Kill You”) is irritating enough, but then we get to the meat of it — cell phones, diet soda and makeup constitute “life.” I am not making this up. Davis maintains, quite rightly, that holding a cell phone to your head is like microwaving your brain. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to a country that microwaves much of its food, but how we get from that to “life will kill you” is quite beyond me. (Despite the swarmy intro, the piece is definitely worth a site pass.)

To antidote this whole absurdity that “life” consists of cell phones, diet soda and makeup, I thought I’d end with this awesome Barbara Kingsolver quote that’s been on my mind all week: “Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.”

The mood in vaccine awareness and informed-consent circles last week was downright joyous. Although the coverage has been far from perfect (read: Barbara Walter’s denying the reality in front of her face), a mother’s tale of how her son recovered from autism — which also mentions the “v” word in describing when he started to decline — seems to have broken many of the considerable blockades getting this issue on Good Morning America, The View and, yes, Oprah. Oprah even told Jenny McCarthy and Holly Robinson Peete that they were “warrior moms.” We have arrived at the national dinner table. On national television, on the most-watched talk show ever, Jenny McCarthy said clearly and without being interrupted by a representative from the FDA/CDC/Pharma:

What number will it take for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children who have seen autism have been saying for years, which is, ‘We vaccinated our baby and something happened.’

This has obviously created quite a little firestorm. Good. In the CDC’s statement given to the Oprah show, the agency said:

We simply don’t know what causes most cases of autism, but we’re doing everything we can to find out. The vast majority of science to date does not support an association between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. But we are currently conducting additional studies to further determine what role, if any, thimerosal in vaccines may play in the development of autism.

Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center had a very apt description of that statement: “curious.” Why is it so curious? Because the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine — the one that sent Jenny McCarthy’s son into a tailspin like so many others before him — does not and has not ever contained thimerosal.

More and more I am starting to see the wisdom in one of the many thoughtful things Judy Converse’s fantastic book When Your Doctor is Wrong alludes to: The whole controversy about thimerosal is very curious indeed. Mercury has been in vaccines for decades and decades. But it was only recently that we started to see an explosion in autism. Certainly, it the fact that the number of vaccines administered to children before they are six almost quadrupled in the past quarter century has something to do with the total mercury load. And mercury in the air from pollution is now omnipresent and scary. But Converse, I think rightly, points at one vaccine in particular, Hepatitis B, as the one that threw autism into epidemic proportions. The allegation she barely alludes to is the whole thimerosal controversy, while a serious one in and of itself, is at the very least a distraction, and at worst an engineered one. Now I’m taking it a little further than she does, but the curious contradictions and discontinuities are on the table for anyone with the stomach to research them.

Back to McCarthy. Rescue Post has a wonderful piece of satire on how the CDC could handle the mom not towing the line on autism. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that “we have no idea what causes it” (lie), “we are looking very hard” (lie) and that “autism is incurable” (the big lie). Why McCarthy’s message is so powerful — and why the PTB have so much interest in shutting her up — is precisely because she is illustrating quite readily that those things aren’t true.

What is especially heartening about the McCarthy story breaking right now is that it comes on the tails of a comprehensive and unnerving survey done by a nonprofit called Generation Rescue that looked at the incidence of neurological and respiratory disorders among vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The results are stunning, and confirm what many have been aware of anecdotally for some time, namely that there is a huge correlation between vaccines and chronic illness — autism, asthma, ADHD and other troubles now almost ubiquitous among our youngest generation.

The survey found that vaccinated boys had a 155 percent higher incidence of neurological disorders than their unvaccinated peers. Overall, vaccinated boys and girls had a 120 percent higher incidence of asthma. (Read why vaccines may cause asthma here.) The fact that the neurological incidence among vaccinated boys was much more pronounced than among vaccinated girls is not surprising, given that boys represent about 80 percent of neurological disorders.

What I think is really interesting about the way the survey was conducted was that it is almost above honest reproach because the methodology was exactly the same way the CDC conducts its surveys to determine the incidence of autism. And what’s fascinating, although not all together surprising, is the deafening silence from the CDC about it. They have been saying for years that comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated populations was impossible — not enough of a sample size. But this survey — with data gathered on almost 18,000 children — threw that hypothesis out the window.

Here is the co-founder of Generation Rescue on what it all means. Awesome post.

Your move, CDC…

+++

Also in vaccine news, a George Washington University study has reaffirmed what a study last year in the British Medical Journal The Lancet already determined: The flu vaccine is NOT effective in reducing deaths among the elderly. This from the BBC:

Researchers from George Washington University, led by Dr Lone Simonson, say that in the US — despite an increase in vaccination coverage from 15% to 65% since 1980 — excess mortality among elderly people actually increased during the 1980s and 1990s.

They also cited an Italian study, which found no decline in flu-related mortality rates, even as vaccine coverage rose from 5% to 65%.

But no matter, the vaccine campaign must go on:

But despite its reservations about the quality of the available evidence, the team nonetheless recommended that people over the age of 70 should continue to be vaccinated until better data could be collected.

How many studies to we need to confirm this inconvenient truth?

A while back I posted about the California Almond Board’s decision to seek a “marketing order” with the USDA to require that all almonds sold in the United States be “pasteurized,” which really means treated with a chemical fumigant that is banned in most of the industrialized world because it’s a suspected human carcinogen. (Organic almonds will be steamed, instead, as the National Organic Standards prevent the use of the fumigant.) Well, the regulations have gone into effect, but a concerted effort is underway to roll them back.

In addition to being a health-freedom issue, this is also about supporting family farmers over the huge corporate agribusiness who wanted this regulation in the first place. The equipment to sterilize the almonds costs $500,000 to upwards of $2.5 million, so the effect of this regulation may be to squeeze out the little guys. Ironically, it was the large farms that were responsible for the two Salmonella outbreaks that prompted this whole mess in the first place.

The outstanding Cornucopia Institute is leading a campaign to get the USDA to reconsider. Click here to send them a signed letter that the organization will hand-deliver to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johannes. A financial contribution is welcome but not required.

I came across a new blog the other day with a focus on eating and living well. It’s great to see more and more people breaking through the diet dictocrats (as Sally Fallon calls them on the cover of her great cookbook, Nourishing Traditions) and telling the truth about cholesterol and debunking other nutrition myths. Bryan, the author of the site, recently put together a nutrition calculator that’s pretty cool (see his Monday, Aug. 13 post).

But while such tools are invaluable in many respects, there is so much they don’t say. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the USDA revealed the difference in nutrition between a factory-farmed egg and one from a chicken raised on pasture, with all of her creature comforts and full access to the forage material and bugs that make the yokes from those eggs so amazingly orange and delicious?

I have long advocated avoiding all corn and soy products unless you are certain that they are not genetically modified (read: engineered to withstand frightening amounts of herbicides), as the majority of those two crops grown in the United States are the Roundup Ready varieties. Add sugar to that list. This from the Organic Consumers Association:

American Crystal, a large Wyoming-based sugar company, who ironically have launched an “organic” line of their sugar,and several other leading U.S. sugar providers have announced they will be sourcing their sugar from genetically engineered (GE) sugar beets beginning this year and arriving in stores in 2008. Like GE corn and GE soy, products containing GE sugar will not be labeled as such. Since half of the granulated sugar in the U.S. comes from sugar beets, a move towards biotech beets marks a dramatic alteration of the U.S. food supply. These sugars, along with GE corn and soy, are found in many conventional food products, so consumers will be exposed to genetically engineered ingredients in just about every non-organic multiple-ingredient product they purchase.

The GE sugar beet is designed to withstand strong doses of Monsanto’s controversial broad spectrum Roundup herbicide. Studies indicate farmers planting “Roundup Ready” corn and soy spray large amounts of the herbicide, contaminating both soil and water. Farmers planting GE sugar beets are told they may be able to apply the herbicide up to five times per year. Sugar beets are grown on 1.4 million acres by 12,000 farmers in the U.S. from Oregon to Minnesota.

Meanwhile candy companies like Hershey’s are urging farmers not to plant GE sugar beets, noting that consumer surveys suggest resistance to the product. In addition the European Union has not approved GE sugar beets for human consumption.

Certified organic is one way to avoid GMOs entirely, or sometimes products will be labeled “non-GMO,” although that designation is not regulated. As it stands, food companies do not have to label genetically modified foods, even though independent studies have shown them to be significantly detrimental to animals and we have no long-term data on safety in humans.

Here is a list of processed foods, as of 2003, and their GMO content. It’s probably best to avoid food that comes in a box, bag or can as much as possible anyway.

It’s been a long time since I posted. The summer just got away from me, and I hope to be back to this site more often now that fall is coming around. I just couldn’t let this story slide — if ever there was a wake-up call that our actions have consequences…

The Independent (UK) newspaper reported last week that environmental chemicals such as PCBs and other pollutants are skewing the gender ratios of children in the Arctic Circle. The startling tale is likely an indication of the way the rest of the world is headed because despite its pristine surroundings, worldwide weather patterns cause the Arctic to be the dumping ground for human folly. But the saturation of these chemicals is getting so profound that even in the U.S. and Japan more girls are now being born than boys, whereas the numbers historically were tilted slightly in the other direction. According to a peer-reviewed U.S. study, about 250,000 boys are already missing from the U.S. and Japan.

The researchers suspected that this linked widespread exposure among pregnant women to hormone-mimicking pollutants. But Danish scientists examined 480 families in the Russian Arctic and found high levels of the hormone-mimicking pollutants in the blood of pregnant women, and twice as many girls being born as boys.

They are now studying similar communities in Greenland and Canada and although full results will be published next year, their initial findings exactly match those in Russia.

Lars Otto Riersen, a marine biologist, pollution expert and an executive with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap), says: “When you see such things happening in the Arctic, it may happen here first, in the same way as climate change did.”

It has seemed to me for some time that the issues that are crying out for our attention get the least in our upside-down cultural wasteland at moment. This story confirms this.

Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said they were trying to raise the alarm internationally but nobody was listening. “People don’t want to talk about such a critical question. We are talking about our people’s survival which is very alarming.”

Right now, everything everyone does makes a difference. Talk to your neighbors and friends, avoid chemicals of any kind whenever you can. Inform yourself. We can do this, but we have to work together and we have to start now.

Oh, the things we don’t want to know.

I consider myself a well-informed consumer, citizen, activist and human-being. Sometimes keeping oneself informed is no small task, which partially explains my recent absence. That and it’s the height of the growing season, and I am knee-deep in trying to figure out how to be an organic grower. Thinking about soil fertility and vitality is a much more all-encompassing than simply replacing petrochemical inputs (commercial fertilizers, say) with biological inputs (bloodmeal, manure and the like).

The fundamental difference is in the conventional model, and even in many large-scale “organic” operations, the primary objective is to feed the plant. The plant needs nitrogen, so give it nitrogen, either in the form of a petrochemical fertilizer or and natural material. The small-scale farmer will fail if she relies on such inputs, which is one of the reasons so many small farms are being turned into subdivisions. The only way to be successful in the long term is to feed the soil, and the soil will feed the plants. That means paying attention to the breakdown of organic matter, adding mineral amendments as the only inputs, “fixing” free nitrogen from the air from legumous crops such as peas and beans and using the residues from one crop to feed another. It’s a fascinating and totally captivating process, and also one that takes an enormous amount of my time at the moment.

I just finished planting my last bed (winter squash, which I’ll harvest in October), and so now I should be just doing maintenance for a month or so. But since we’re in a horrible drought, that’s no small matter. I’ve even had to water my cover crop several times, not a good position to be in. (A cover crop is also known as “green manure,” because it is grown for its benefits to soil fertility, production of organic matter which will later be decomposed in the soil and ability to fix nitrogen from the air and put it in the ground — free fertilizer, with no runoff.)

Anyway, back to discovering more that I didn’t want to know. The time it has to do with deodorant. I gave up antiperspirant years ago because of the harmful aluminums, even in natural varieties. That was sometimes not fun when I had to wear a suit to work, but it’s no big deal now that I get to wear tank tops everyday. But until pretty recently, I was still reliant on deodorant. I had heard that if you’re eating only foods you should be eating and digesting them well and otherwise not pumping yourself full of toxins, you don’t smell. I didn’t really believe it, but it has finally come true for me, especially since I started more closely adhering to a Weston A. Price-style diet. But sometimes, I still want to wear deodorant when I’m wearing nice clothes, so I selected a brand from the health foods store that bragged that it didn’t contain parabens, which have legitimately gotten a bad rap in recent years for their toxicity and links to breast cancer.

Then a few months ago I came across an article in Alternative Medicine that mentioned in passing how when people start avoiding a particular ingredient in food or personal care products, what they are replaced with is often worse. The author specifically mentioned sodium benzoate, which is used to prevent bacterial growth in the product. I came home and looked at my deodorant bottle and found the ingredient listed, but suddenly questioned whether I had remembered it correctly and tried to put it from my mind. And this is coming from someone who is vigilant about her own health. There must be part of the human psyche that just doesn’t want to know…

Then I recently came across an article in The Independent (UK) about sodium benzoate. Not good. Apparently, it can mutate DNA. And it’s in sodas, in addition to many personal care products. That is the big, dirty secret about today’s food and pharmaceuticals and body-care products. Virtually none have ever been tested for mutanogenicity, or the ability to alter DNA. If you read the fine print on any vaccine insert, it says the same thing. This product has never been tested for carcinogenicity or mutanogenicity. Good times. The testing actually gets done on an unsuspecting public, and after enough people die, the product sometimes gets pulled by the regulators. Sometimes.

I have a little bit higher standard, and the deodorant just got pulled off my bathroom shelf. I’m now using some product from Germany that doesn’t seem to have any offending ingredients, but it’s possible that I just haven’t discovered them yet. This product from Dr. Hauschka will probably be my next choice. In the meantime, I’m finding that the less I wear anything (and the better I eat), the less I need deodorant at all. Wonders never cease.