MSG being sprayed on crops??

There's enough food right now for 9 billion people. It would help if the average fat american didn't want 3,100 calories every day, and not feeding grain to animals, which is largely inefficient and wasteful.

You may be right - and I don't dispute that. That's fodder for another discussion.

The reason always given for the 'advancements' in agriculture - gmo, etc., is the fact we will have great need for better production in the future due to population.

My thoughts are there just might be, and I think are, better ways to address the problem of the need for increased amounts of food in the future.

JenaYes, I know the world has long used human waste. My Stepfather never told any stories about WWII, except the funny and unusual. One he told was of being in China and smelling something very bad and hearing a 'thump-thump'. He rounded a corner and there were people standing in pits of human waste, using their feet to work hay and other garbage into the mixture.

It wouldn't be my first choice and certainly not untreated human waste.

I think that would depend on what the human was eating; prescription pills, etc.

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Chemo, Radioactive bladder seeds !

There's been no evidence shown to prove THIS food is "unhealthy"

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OK, is healthy then!

If it has not been proved Unhealthy, then, Well? It has not been proved it is unhealthy. Period.

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Give the consumer the option... and let the market work out it's troubles. Oh wait, that's what we've got now, and the majority of people go for inexpensive.

Only with govt. mandates, backed up with the lash, will people do what is against their nature.

We've got too many people on this planet to farm 'nicely and gently'... so, it's done the way it is. There's no way to feed the masses without big ag. Knock out 90 to 95% of the population and we can get everyone fed the homesteader way... as long as 95% of the remaining 5% are actually working on the farm.

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Aside from an epidemic of obesity, heart diease, diabetes (with people following the "scientific diets" I might add), cancer, etc. Mm, no, there's absolutely no proof.

People are, slowly but surely, realizing the consequences of this diet, cheap, but with many health problems at the end, waiting for them... Some will choose to change. Others will stay on the bandwagon to an unhealthy body. Let me tell you, the organics movement is big now. We've finally obtained the collective voice of power to say, 'No! We want this food. This food, that won't harm me, the farmer, or the environment.' If you've been told that the good-food movement isn't happening... Think again. I'm in the middle of Missouri where people couldn't care less about what they slap on their dinner plates in the evening. And yet, we've got a good-foods co-op forming. Now if THAT doesn't say something about this movement, I don't know what will.

There have been health food stores in this area for 40 years. The Food CoOp about 30 years. The Fresh Farmers Market only 3 or 4 years. Less than one percent of the population is involved in any of this. Hardly call that a "movement", but it does point out the harsh reality. People do not care.

None of that has anything to do with THIS topic about MSG used as fertilizer.

It's just more of your usual rambling

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As a farmer, no way would I want to agrue with #1 - folks wanting to pay more for food isn't something I would oppose.

Cool.

I suppose it's going to be hard for city folk to give up that big screen HD TV perchase & the extra cable fees just to spend the money on expensive food....

I don't have a solution for that, I'm sure you don't either. We can hope, but I don't see that working out.


In my view, the current food that farmers produce isn't unhealthy. I think people are living unhealthy lives, in a whole intermingled deal of exercise, empty calories, bad sleep patterns, and so on down a familiar path there.

I maybe hear your side always saying it is farmer's fault, it is big ag's fault, on & on.

In my view, it is people themselves, they choose a worst path for themselves.

Do we force them to change? Education is good, and there has been a bit more of that of late.

Do we force the suppliers to change?

Is forcing the issue the right way to go?

Is blaming farmers the right place to put blame for all this?

Couple of big questions there, and threads like this shake down to those basic issues.

I might disagree with some of what you say, but mostly because I often see your side (if it's even remotely fair to declare 'sides' on this...) coming at this as blaming the food growers & suppliers for these problems.

I think that's misplaced.

It isn't that I don't see any problems. There are a lot of fat lazy unhealthy people around. That's not effiecient, it's not good, it's a drag on all of us.

Just seems real hard to blame the farmers every time for every part of that.

The solution always seems to be to legislate farming in the USA out of existance & rely on imported food from other lands.

Because your garden isn't going to feed the city of Chicago, and they will need some sort of food from somewhere when someone passes laws banning any sort of affordable food from USA growers.

People _should_ want healthier food from local sources that will end up costing more and if that is what they would buy that is exactly what I would grow and those are exactly the businesses I would sell my crops to.

But to look at the situation and just blame farmers/ big ag as if they were the root cause? Seems very misplaced.

--->Paul

I agree people don't seem to care - I think they do care and would care, but many people have a very blank look on their faces when you begin to discuss the possible dangers of some of the modern methods of farming. The fact is, people who have lived in farming communities, have farmed, or have lived with parents who grow gardens, are the very ones who seem to be disinterested. I think it's because they cannot comprehend that things may be going into the growing of food that may be detrimental to their bodies.

If anyone who is obese raises the question, they are drowned out by the very loud and insulting shouts of 'lazy and gluttonous'. No wonder they hesitate to ask questions, even of their doctors - assuming doctors even know or would say if they did. Not long ago, someone dubbed Type II Diabetes a 'self-inflicted' disease.

That isn't an excuse, it is up to us to attempt to figure this out - but it is pretty hard when it seems to me, there is a very big effort being made to keep us from knowing.

Our government has given the OK for all these things to be used, so I would think it would behoove them to have done some research on the matter. They certainly were willing to denounce saccharin, based on shaky research, in order to get aspartame into thousands of products.

Do I blame big agribusiness as well - yes, I do. I don't think many of these things have been in our diets long enough to really know the full effects. Corporations may not know and continue to operate this way or they do know and are not letting it out. Either way seems wrong to me.

We do have a large number of obese people, cases of diabetes, cancer, heart problems, and other new diseases - something is causing that. It can't all be these people are just overweight and lazy. Think about the people you know who have died of these diseases - in my friends and relatives, just as many - if not more - who have died from them have been normal or underweight - than have been obese. Popular rhetoric aside.

Organic food is not plentiful everywhere. Here we have one chain and Wal Mart - for 60 miles, that is your choice. Wal Mart does have a small selection of organic food - sometimes - I don't believe I have ever seen more than a handful of organic items in our local chain store - and that was the prepackaged salad greens. I have used those, but don't like them because they always smell moldy.

What I would like to see is some public education about this. We are preached at on a daily basis about every politically correct nonsense that comes down the pike - why can't we have more discussion on this. Real discussion - not just insults and blame.

Life cause all those things.

There really isn't any more of it now that before, but just more people and more ways of detecting diseases.

If there are more fat people, it's due to not doing as much physical labor as we used to, but then, too, there have been fat people since the beginning of time

To try and blame it all on modern farming, and present biased, hyped up evidence to "prove" it is laughable.

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I don't accept there has always been as much disease as there is today. Of course, there is no way to prove or disprove that.

We have had obesity since the beginning of time, but not in the younger ones like we have today, and not as much in any group - especially young women. Yes, a lot has to do with the fact we aren't doing physical labor - but not all. When I was a young mother, I was thin. There is no way that I did as much running, going, etc, as young mothers do today. I see young mothers who work and have small children and are overweight. That is definitely not because they are not active.

Something is causing it and there is nothing wrong with looking at all the possible reasons - and nothing wrong with wanting to know if the various additions to not only farming, but the processing of foods might not be causing it.

To simply say it's because they eat too much, don't exercise enough and don't consider other things is not laughable - it's dangerous.

By the way, it seems they want to change the name of high fructose corn syrup to corn sugars. Now there is no way we can say big business doesn't respond to the concerns of the consumers. If something is bothering the consumer and they won't buy it - just hide it under another name!!!!

People are living longer and when the people live longer you will find more things happening to them. It IS Called Aging.
When years ago people didn't life as long so they didn't most of them anyways didn't develop ALL these things as they are today. When you tack on 20 30 years more to a persons life yes things will show up and that then goes into the data base and before long you have more people getting things.
But the original Post was about MSG being USED as a fertilizer ONLY and not being added into foods.
Please stick to THAT, and not just going on about MSG, which at this point is counter productive.

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Rambler:
I do agree, slightly, that is not all the farmers fault. I think it is everyone's fault. It is the government's fault for failing to provide legislature for healthy farming, the farmers fault for growing too much of too few crops, the corporations fault for corrupting the system, feeding bad food, etc, and the consumers fault for listening to the lies of agribiz and the government. Let's look at some reasons why our food may be unhealthy in the first place... I'll be using mostly information from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. This is not plagiarism, it is from memory, so don't expect to find these same lines in his book.
I will add that, he says it is a measure of our confusion of food for a book to be written advising people to simply "eat food". He lays some (a lot of) the blame at nutritionism's feet. Because of reductionist science's ability to look at just about any food and find good results, depending on who happens to be doing the study. (Now, I can't really do the book justice, but I'll try.) For instance, he looks at margarine.... Heralded as being better for you than butter since it didn't contain saturated fats. And then, it was found out that it contains trans fats, fats which happen to be many times worse than the saturated fats they were supposed to replace. Now, notice I wrote "contains", not "contained". They still have them. Stay very far away from margarine, for that reason and the fact that, for all intents and purposes, it is not food.
Another example he uses is that, while the human body is adapted for an astonishing variety of diets, ranging from vegetables to an almost completely meat diet, the Western diet does not seem to be one of them. In one study, a scientist removed a group of extremely unhealthy (heart problems, etc, most of the common American issues) Australians to their natural diet again. Within weeks, they were starting to lose signs of their health problems.
Another example is that while nutritionist science finds bad nutrients and good nutrients, why is it that other cultures that eat what should be a "nutritionally unhealthy" diet, but are very healthy? Perhaps it is processed foods, and the fact that they can put health claims on just about anything. (Notice that the only thing weight watchers sells is high-fat sweet junk food?) So you walk up to a loaf of white wonder bread. And it's got health claims on it, and it doesn't have any saturated fats in it, whatever. BUT, the flour is so fine, and it has so much surface area that is exposed (whole grains have a fiber coating) that it is basically like eating straight sugar, giving you insulin spikes and wearing down your insulin system.
Or perhaps it is the fact that we eat too many Omega-6s and too few omega-3s. Grainfed beef is very high in that ratio, while grassfed beef is high in the opposite, healthy ratio: low omega-6s and high omega-3s.
Then he points out that that is, of course, reductionist scientific thinking. Why not just eat food that has been eaten for centuries before, and people did just fine on it? His advise to to simply eat food, which eliminates about 3/4 of the "food" in the supermarket. His advise is also to eat no animal on the Western diet, and better yet, just get out of the supermarket. When we start to eat at from farmers markets, we will eat a much more varied diet, we will all the healthier, and happier. It is much easier for small farmers to be organic then big farms. (In fact, some farms are automatically organic, and don't even advertise that.) When we gain a healthier relationship with the farmer, we will gain a healthier relationship with food.

You can yell at the top of your lungs. That will do little good in a city with 10 million people. ANd there are many cities with 4 million, 7 million etc.
People in that situation will want and demand foods that are cheap and easy to make. Period. No making those people to go back in time to grow their own food it just isn't going to happen. So science has found ways to make food that not only tastes better when it is grown as fast as it is but people are, and will buy it.

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I'm a bit overweight.

I get less exercise than I should as I age.

Those are _my_ issues.

I do not blame any farmer.

I do not blame any government.

I do not blame any nutritionist.

I do not believe any agribusiness has lied to me.

I'm old, I'm fat, I don't get the workout I did when I was 18....

That's on me.

You start out by blaming other people.

I disagree with that part of it, and this is the one point that probably makes us at odds on these sorts of threads.

Don't mean to beat you over the head about it, just trying to express my view of it, why I might seem dis-agreeable with you on these topics.

It's not big ag's fault. They produce what people buy.

It's not the govts fault. They regulate and legislate in whatever direction the masses push.

It's not some farmer's fault, they grow whatever sells the best - what the masses demand.

All 3 of those are very flexable, do whatever most people want.

I like the little hobby farms, the garden in the back yard, the person selling a 1/2 steer or a hog through the local butcher shop, the farmer's market. Wouldn't hang out here if I didn't!

But those things are already about full. If I turned my whole farm (small, very small by local standards!) to that sort of marketing, I would swamp all those avenues, and wreck everyone's business. There simpley isn't room for me. Not enough demand.

It's not government's fault.

It's not big ag's fault.

It's not some farmer's fault.

--->Paul

Could not have said it better my self! Except I'm only 30 so I am not that old just a little fat! Well said