How to change the world by buying organic and supporting sustainable farming

Wednesday, September 28, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: organic farming, dangerous ingredients, metabolic disruptors

You have the power in your hands to change the world. This change ripples out from you in concentric circles, and it all starts with decisions you make at the grocery store because what you choose to buy and consume impacts the world in many powerful ways that you may have never been aware of. Every purchasing decision you make changes the world, but that's a sort of nebulous idea. It's kind of big idea to grasp, so let's start with something a little simpler. Let's start with how changing your decision at the grocery store changes you and your life, and then we'll move out from there.

How foods affect your physical existence

Let's start with talking about how you exist as a human being. You exist at many different levels and one of them – of course, the most obvious one – is the physical level. In other words, you have physical matter, you have mass and you have substance. This makes up your body and your organs. For a moment, we'll ignore the argument that all your physical matter is just energy, which it is, and stick with the Newtonian view of reality here and talk about the physical you.

This physical you has certain needs. You have to put a certain amount of food through your body. It has to physically move through your body in order to be digested and utilized, so you also have a physical need for certain types of food. These food decisions, the purchasing decisions you make at the grocery store, can alter your physical body. If you begin to avoid purchasing foods and products that contain poisons or dangerous ingredients that I call metabolic disruptors, you can avoid the chronic diseases that most people are experiencing because those diseases are caused by those ingredients.

For example, we know that hydrogenated oils cause heart disease and nervous system disorders. We know that monosodium glutamate and excitotoxins promote obesity and migraines. We know that sodium nitrate, a common preservative found in most meat products, causes pancreatic cancer and colon cancer. We know that artificial food color ingredients promote attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, learning disabilities and so on. There are many other ingredients that cause physical problems as well as problems that go beyond the physical you, but again, we're just talking about the physical, so that's the first level of impact.

Imagine there is an outline of your body which represents the physical impact of the foods that you choose to buy. So, if you're at a grocery store and you're trying to decide between two different crackers -- one cracker product is made with hydrogenated oils and another cracker product beside it is made with zero trans fats, no hydrogenated oil and no MSG -- then by changing your decision right there at the point of purchase, you're changing the physical impact on your body. Now, that physical impact may not be experienced until a day or two later, and it may not really be obvious unless you make this decision thousands of times over and over again over a period of years, but it does make a difference. It is choosing a different path in your life.

How foods affect your chemical existence

Now, that's just the first level, so what happens next? You also exist at a biochemical level, so you have all this physical matter, but what's actually making this physical matter work is chemistry. Inside your body, you have chemistry that breaks down the amino acids found in foods. You have chemistry that moves water and sodium through the cells of your body. You have enzymes and various enzymatic reactions taking place throughout your body during every living moment. There is a lot of chemistry going on.

Today, most chronic diseases are described in terms of chemistry, even though that's not necessarily the level at which they originate. Cardiovascular disease can be described as a chemical disorder, as something wrong with the lipids in your blood, for example. Poor digestion might be said to be chemically caused because you're not making enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach, for example. Cancer is also often described in terms of its chemical nature, with the explanation that the chemical molecules in your body or your immune system aren't functioning correctly.

You have all this chemistry that is taking place in your body, and what you choose to eat modifies your chemistry. If you choose to buy a grocery store product that contains a lot of white flour and refined sugars, that's going to alter the chemistry of your body when you consume and digest it. It will make your body more acidic and deplete it of certain nutrients -- like vitamins, minerals and other nutrients -- that are necessary for enzymatic reactions. However, if you make good decisions at the grocery store and choose, for example, to purchase healthy oils -- like macadamia nut oil, olive oil, flax seed oil or even unprocessed coconut oil -- then your chemistry is going to be much healthier. Your blood chemistry profile will be positive rather than negative. It will indicate health rather than disease.

All these biochemical effects take place and, of course, affect your mental function because the brain is an organ that depends on chemistry for its function. When you have the right foods based on the right decisions you make at the grocery store, you end up with the right chemistry. I think my own health statistics demonstrate that if you make the right decisions, you can create outstanding chemistry that's very easy to verify in a laboratory analysis. It's a direct cause and effect relationship. If you stop eating the foods that are heavily advertised and ignore the advice of nutritionists, dietitians and doctors who are still pushing old-school nutrition, and instead start eating natural and organic foods, healthy oils and plant-based fats, while avoiding toxic ingredients – including red meat, dairy products and excitotoxins – then you, too, can create healthy blood chemistry that you can verify with simple laboratory analysis. It's very straightforward.

To represent this chemical level around your body, Draw a larger circle around your body, a second outline; this is the biochemical layer of effect that you're creating by making new decisions at the grocery store.

Bioenergetics: Homeopathic foods enhance your body's energy

The third level is what I call bioenergetic. Just as you are a physical and chemical being, you are also an energetic being. In fact, everything that is chemistry is really just energy, and everything that is physical is really just energy, too. From a physics point of view, there's nothing really there. There is no physical matter in your body; it's all just energy vibrating at certain frequencies with certain interactions.

However, I'm not talking about that type of energy here. I'm talking about the energy of foods, because foods have a homeopathic quality. Every product you choose to consume has an energy; you could call it a feeling. A food that is grown in nature -- that has been born in the soil and grows up under the sun with clean air, clean water, clean soils and under the care of small organic family farmers who used care and honesty -- creates love, health and connection in your body. Just as homeopathic water has a scientifically proven effect in living systems (including humans and animals), the homeopathic quality of foods also has such an effect. This is not something that has been well studied. The information you're getting here is probably 10 to 15 years ahead of science, but someday I have no doubt that the homeopathic qualities of foods will someday be recognized and measured and will ultimately be found to be very important to the health effects of those foods.

You can create positive energy in foods by praying over them or even chanting over them in a mantra, the way Tibetan monks would do, for example. You can create positive energies in food by giving them clean, pure water, such as unpolluted rainwater. You can use organic soils that have microorganisms in them, so that they're living in balance with the natural ecosystem. You can create positive energy by having the foods harvested by people who are happy to be doing this work, who are not slave workers and who are making a fair wage, either by farming or wild harvesting these foods. This is how you create healthy foods, and when you purchase something at the grocery store, the closer you can get to that vibration of happiness, the healthier the energetic effect is going to be on your body. This is one reason to buy organic foods; not just because they don't have pesticides, but also because they are literally happier foods. They're healthier for your mind, your body and your entire energy system.

In contrast to that, most of the foods that are available in grocery stores (and certainly at restaurants) are really unhappy foods. They are foods that have been grown in unnatural environments. They've been bombarded with pesticides or herbicides. They have not been given clean water and, more importantly, have been planted and harvested under a system of greed, exploitation and corporate farming. Then, they've been processed and had their nutrients stripped away. They've been reformed and combined with various chemicals, such as preservatives and taste enhancers, and have been packaged in pretty boxes and put on the shelf in the grocery store.

That is a very unhappy food and, if it comes from unhappy animals, then it's even less happy. If it's from cows that have been fed the ground up parts of other animals, which are routinely fed to cows today, and if these cows have been slaughtered in an inhumane way -- which is the way virtually all cows, pigs and chickens are slaughtered today, cooped up in tiny compartments and not being given access to fresh air, sunlight and fresh water -- then they are not just unhappy animals; they are probably insane animals. They are what I call mad chickens or insane cows. Even though this makes it easier for animal ranchers to make money, it creates a problem with the final food product: The problem is that that beef, chicken or pork has been imprinted with emotions like anger, greed and terror because of the slaughtering process, and these traits of the food are passed on directly to the consumer.

It's not listed on the box and it hasn't been scientifically proven yet -- again, this is years ahead of the science -- but it is very much true that if you eat angry red meat, you're going to become an angry person. (You are what you eat, remember?) In fact, this part of it is not so difficult to confirm. You can go out and question a thousand people, find out who's more peaceful versus who's more angry about anything in the world or in their own lives, and you'll find that the really angry people tend to eat a lot of red meat, while those who try to propose solutions, are all about helping people and who give more than they take, are people who don't eat red meat. Vegetarians tend to be happier, more pleasant, less aggressive people than meat eaters, and for years, people have wondered why. Well, I think this is the answer: It's because of the energetic quality of the foods.

The costs of buying non-organic go far beyond money

Again, when you're making that purchasing decision at the grocery store, what you're purchasing has an energetic effect. If you have two pieces of beef on the shelf in front of you, and one piece is $3 a pound and from a cow that has been raised in a terrible environment -- that has been fed chicken litter, pumped up full of hormones, has had no access to the outside and has been abused in an inhumane way by corporate ranching operations -- then that's going to have a very destructive, negative effect on your energetic health. But if beside that package you have a piece of beef that is $6 a pound and from a free-range, organic cow that has been fed fresh grass, has been able to run freely in open fields and has been treated with a degree of respect by the rancher, then that piece of meat, even though it costs twice as much, delivers so much more in terms of its energetic qualities to you. Yes, you're still eating red meat, and there are still negative health effects from the overconsumption of red meat, but at least you're not poisoning your energetic system as you would be with the conventionally raised meat that's only $3 a pound.

So, that's the energetic effect of the foods you choose to purchase from the grocery store and consume. However, there's a much bigger ripple effect from all of this. Think about it: When you purchase a piece of meat and you choose the organic, free-range cow over the conventionally raised cow, you actually create demand for organic free-range beef and reduce demand for pesticide-laden, conventionally raised, abused red meat. You see, every time you purchase a hamburger that has not been raised organically and ethically, you are in effect partly responsible for the raising, slaughtering and abuse of a living, breathing mammal -- a cow.

That beef didn't come out of the sky; it came from the flesh of a living animal. When you purchase that flesh, you create economic incentives for people to keep raising those animals -- to give birth to another cow, raise it, slaughter it and put it on the shelf to replace the beef you just bought; whereas, if you buy organic beef, you create demand on the organic side. You reward the organic farmer for treating the cattle in a better way. So, you vote with your dollars; you create demand curves that are then met by supply. Everything you purchase has a ripple effect that goes way beyond your physical, chemical or energetic self and goes into the community and planet at large.

How your buying power influences your community

If you haven't done so already, draw a third circle around yourself; that's the energetic level. Now, draw a fourth, much larger circle; this is the community level. This is where you're affecting your local community and the demand curves for various foods and ingredients. By changing what you buy, you change what farmers will grow and how they will grow it. You change what ranchers do to their animals. You change it all, just by choosing what you buy. It can literally be a product right next to another product on the shelf. They can be two inches apart, but they can make a world of difference. If you move your hand six inches to the right and pick up that organic beef, you are making a huge difference in the lives of organic farmers, in saving the planet from pesticides and reducing the revenues for companies that manufacture bovine growth hormones. You're also making the difference in the quality of life of the animal that has been sacrificed to provide you food. In my view, the only way to honor that animal is to choose the best possible existence for that animal. If you're going to consume their flesh, you should at least honor them enough to grant them an organic, free-range existence.

Your choices affect the sources of those foods as well. If you buy from small, local organic growers, like you might find at a farmer's market or local co-op, then you are supporting sustainable farming and local families who have the knowledge and the determination to work close to the earth in an honorable profession. When you purchase from these local organic farmers, you are supporting a way of life that is truly sacred; a way of life that, frankly, more of us would do well to emulate. That way of life includes farming organic produce from the earth in the local sustainable way that honors nature. That's a miracle in action, and every time you purchase those foods, you support those local community miracles.

If you want your community to be made up of farmers who know the land, who can deliver fresh organic produce and who honor the earth, then that's what you need to buy because you support whatever you buy. On the other hand, if you want an earth that is scorched with pesticides, with polluted rivers, increasingly unlivable oceans, polluted produce and heavy metals in your soils, and if you want a system of corporate greed and exploitation, then go ahead and buy the non-organic fruits, vegetables and processed foods because that's what you're going to create by making that decision.

Corporate farming isn't sustainable farming

This brings us to one more level -- the corporate level, or the business model level. Everything you choose at the grocery store is a vote for a certain type of business model. If you choose small organic family farms, then that's what you create. If you choose mega-corporations who sell food only because it's something that makes money, just the same as drugs make money or cigarettes make money, that's what you choose to support, as well. In fact, Phillip Morris owns Kraft, a food company that makes thousands and thousands of processed food products. A cigarette company owns a food company that sells you all those processed foods, and I think that's bad for the environment. I think it's bad for the world, and it's the bad corporate model for producing and delivering food products. I don't think it's a sustainable model.

You have so much influence by making these simple decisions at the grocery store. Just by choosing one box over another or one package over another, or picking apples from one bin instead of the bin next to that, you literally change the world because you shift the demand curve. You vote for a type of product. You vote for the way animals should be treated if there are animal products involved. You vote for a business model. You vote for the model of environmental protection that is practiced by these organizations. You affect each and every one of these things just by making a simple purchase decision.

You see, the world becomes what you consume. If you look at it collectively, the products that each of us purchases and consumes amount to the corporate world we have created. It's as if the consumers have created all of this because they have been blind to the effects of what they are doing. The mistake consumers make is that most of them shop based on price. There's no question that the mass-production, corporate-farming, pollution-creating system of producing food is very efficient in terms of retail economics; that is, if you only consider the direct costs. They can give you a slab of meat, a box of cookies or a bag of breakfast cereal more cheaply than organic farmers or small family farms can ever do, and they can probably have a prettier box and make it taste a little better with artificial flavors and more visually appealing with artificial colors. They have a bigger marketing budget because there's so much profit in those nutritionally depleted foods that they can spend literally billions of dollars a year on advertising to convince people to buy these foods, making sure that those people never learn the true implications of what their purchasing decisions mean.

Now, I got to thinking, "What if products actually showed the effects of what they cause right there on the box, anytime you purchased them? What if every box of cereal, for example, had a little video screen on it, and when you purchased the box you would see a little video of what it causes?" You might see really angry farmers plowing in the field, or if you purchase some canned soup with some meat in it, you might hear the scream of a dying cow. You might see some dead fish floating through the surface of a polluted river, or you might see ocean life or coral reefs dying. You might see a dark, polluted earth with polluted sky and water; that's what really should be on the fronts of these food boxes, because that's the effect.

You might see exploited farmers in Mexico, Brazil or other countries who are essentially working under slave conditions to bring you these foods at prices that generate profits for these corporations. You might see an image of Mother Nature herself, screaming, horrified at how her gifts to humankind are being exploited and stripped away of all their healing powers and packaged into these pretty boxes so that you, the consumer, could buy them. If the product itself really told the truth about what it caused, people would be horrified.

Consumers are unaware of the consequences of buying non-organic

The only reason people continue to buy these things is because they don't know the indirect consequences of what they're doing. When they pick up a package of meat, they don't hear the scream of the terrified cow that has been slaughtered in inhumane conditions -- the cow who hardly ever saw the light of day, was separated from its mother at a young age, never given any sort of humane treatment and fed ground-up parts of other dead animals, including dead dogs and cats, road kill and chickens. All of these things are fed to cows today (in fact, they are USDA approved).

If you saw that on the package of meat, you'd throw it away in a hurry. You'd never buy that package. If you saw the greedy look in the eyes of the CEOs of corporations that were harvesting this meat and growing these cows for nothing but profit, with no sense of ethics and no sense of honor in these animals, and you could see pictures of them stuffing dollars in their pockets and laughing while you consume products with detrimental health effects, you'd never buy that product. You'd put it down in a hurry.

If the packages really told the truth, you'd change your grocery shopping habits in an instant because when you bought fresh fruits, like organic blueberries from a local, family-owned farm, you'd see an image of Mother Nature smiling. You'd see health sprouting out of this package and into your body, as blueberries help enhance your cardiovascular health, provide antioxidants, fight cancer, protect your eyes from vision loss and offer a whole host of other benefits. You'd see happy farmers working with their families, who have created a sustainable revenue model, who honor the earth, who love the soil and who are doing this because they feel passionate about farming and working close to Mother Nature.

That's what you'd see on the package, and you'd say, "Yes, this is the kind of food I want to feed myself, my family, my children and my community. This is what we need." You'd see images of clean running rivers and streams because there are no pesticide runoffs. You'd see oceans thriving with life because there are no poisons coming from the land being used to grow these blueberries.

If the packages really told the truth, you'd see the horrifying images of what the non-organic, corporate-created products do to you and the world, and in contrast to that, you'd see the beautiful, wondrous, creative, positive effects of organic foods and organically-raised animals and how these foods create a positive, healthy impact on you, your community and your world.

That's what I mean when I say you can change the world by making a different decision at the grocery store. When they first hear that, a lot of people think it couldn't possibly be true and that I'm just spending an extra $2 on an organic product. "Why would you do that?" They say. "Why would you spend twice as much money just because it says 'organic' on it?" Well, here's the reason: It's because of everything that it impacts. It's all those concentric waves emanating out from your decision like ripples in a pond. What you do in that moment of decision in a grocery store affects the entire world. You have the power within you to change the world, to vote with your dollars for the kind of world that you want to create -- the kind of world that treats animals ethically, that honors nature and its gifts to mankind and that has the kind of sustainable farming methods that don't make the rivers, streams, soils, oceans and air toxic. You have the power to create the future based on what you consume right now.

Do you see why price is the least important of these factors? What's the good of saving a dollar or two on the package of so-called 'foods' if you're poisoning the planet and supporting a corporate empire of exploitation and destruction that would bring you this food a couple dollars cheaper at the expense of the very planet that brought you that gift in the first place? When you buy non-organic, you're not really saving any money; you're dooming the planet.

When you buy organic, on the other hand, you are saving everything that matters. You're saving the small family farms, sustainable farming methods, your own health and the rivers, streams and oceans; you're saving a whole system of honoring Mother Nature. So, the best savings at a grocery store can only be experienced if you're buying organic because, if you buy non-organic, corporate food or processed foods, you're not only getting ripped off yourself; you're ripping off the community and the planet, and you're ripping yourself off at every level -- physical, chemical and energetic. However, when you buy organic, you're saving yourself at every level, and you're giving yourself these intangible benefits that are priceless.

Remember: You have the power to change the world inside you right now, and I urge you to exercise it the next time you are at a grocery store making a purchasing decision. The world and its oceans, animals and revenue models are all at stake. The responsibility for making the right decision rests on your shoulders, on my shoulders and on the shoulders of all consumers everywhere, because the only way we are going to change this modern food system is to shift the demand curves. We must force companies to stop poisoning our planet by making it unprofitable for them to do so, and the only way we can do that is by changing our purchasing habits at the grocery store. Change what you buy, and you will change the world. Thanks for reading. This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.