Are Town Planners From Outer Space?

Reading Robert Guyton's recent post about a woman who dared to plant a vegetable garden on her front lawn, i am agog at the craziness of this.



Eat The View. if it's good enough for the first lady on the whitehouse front lawn, then what happened to the Oak Park, Michigan town planners?

Yes, this woman could go to jail for planting organic vegetables in her front garden. Never mind getting yourself a permit. Makes the TDC look tame by comparison!

who says GM is ok? say no to contamination of organic produce

Are Genetically Engineered crops grown in Australia? You betcha. 

this was reported recently from True Food Network via the permaculture forum:

"Today, WA organic farmer Steve Marsh revealed that two-thirds of his 
farmland is contaminated by someone’s GM canola crop. The canola 
travelled at least 1.5 km and contaminated 220 hectares. Marsh could 
also potentially suffer huge financial losses, as Australian organic 
standards don’t accept any GM presence.

He is considering legal action, which would be the first case of its 
kind in Australia. The WA Government showed its bias to the GM 
industry when the agriculture minister, in response to Marsh, stated 
that zero percent thresholds are “unrealistic”. Organic certifier, the 
National Association of Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASAA), is 
conducting an official investigation."

Don Hamsford from Warick South East Queensland says "What's the bet 
Monsanto are on his doorstep, looking for their royalties, before you 
can say "substantially equivalent!"

So if you want to know who in your area is GM-free, check out this map. Produced by Gene Ethics, it presents the enterprises who endeavor, through certification, quality assurance and audits, to exclude from their products, services and facilities all GM soy, corn, canola or cotton - and products from animals fed GM feed. Let's hope these enterprises aren't too close to any GM crops that could jeopardise their clean status.

the heat from meat

ho ho ho. seen in Tuesday's Age, this little snippet from crikey.com:

"There is an interesting statistic that is relevant to both the Garnaut report and climate change. It comes from a large European cancer and nutrition study group of about 50,000 meat eaters, vegans and vegetarians in the UK - 41% of vegan are single, compared with 13% of meat eaters and 25% vegetarians. Why is this relevant to Garnaut? We vegans aren't very good at compromise, so living with a non-vegan is unlikely and finding mate is statistically harder for us. Our diplomatic skills are dismal. That little bit of bacon added to a salad tends to make us froth at the mout and protest to an otherwise genial host: "how could you f___ up a perfectly good salad with dead pig?"
This tends to earn us a limited social life so we spend a lot of time reading and thinking and getting really pissed off with hypocrisy and compromise. We are pissed off with people who pretend to care about the planet but won't forego the primary driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss - meat. We are pissed off with people who tell everybody to turn off lights whe they leave the room but conveniently forget to mention that australia's biggest contribution to global warming is livestock." From Geoff Russell, Animal Liberation South Australia.

Hear, hear! Omigod, can i ever relate to this. Vegan and single, but not as uncompromising about others' food preferences. And not content with simply vegan, why not up the ante and live a (sustainable) raw food lifestyle. Save energy in food preparation as well.
As i often remind friends, i refuse to switch to energy-saving light bulbs as long as people around me are still preferring to do that over eating one less meat meal a week. When people wonder why i drive my car in a city with the best public transport system in the country, i ask them to consider why they are still eating meat when food production consumes 14% of our total greenhouse gases compared with 11% for transportation. now that's food for thought.

food facts

Food consumption makes up 20% of an individual's greenhouse emissions.

At a NSW State and Regional Development Seminar on "The Future of Food" last night the focus was on urban agriculture and the fact that more than 20% of an individual's greenhouse emissions are related to their food consumption - mainly because of things like food miles and packaging. The increasing price of food was also discussed with the price of milk going up 31.7% and bread up 23% in the last 4 years.

from Liz Bastian's blog, A Year In A Day - 3 Apr 2008 19:53