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Giving Thanks To America's Good Food Movement
Jim Hightower 11/26/2008
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The thing that I'm most thankful for on Turkey Day is not the abundance of food at my family's table, but the rebels who produced it.

No, not Butterball. And not Wal-Mart, General Foods or any of the other corporate powers that loom large over America's food economy. To the contrary, I'm thankful for the "good food movement" that has arisen all across our country in rebellion against those powers.

It's a burgeoning movement of small farmers, consumers, food artisans, local marketers, restaurateurs, community groups and many others (maybe you) who are steadily creating a viable grass-roots alternative to corporatized, industrialized, globalized food. In the process, these folks are sowing the productive ideas of sustainability, organic, local economies and the Common Good, nurturing them as core values for a new food system.

The origins of the movement are in what I call the Upchuck Rebellion — a steadily spreading revulsion during the past 30 years or so at the damage being done to people, to our land and water, and to food itself by the food industry's singular focus
on ever-larger profit for itself. Folks began to say, "There's got to be a better way," and then they'd set out to do what they could to create it.

Of course, the Powers That Be snickered and sneered, insisting that the corporate way is the only way, that it's futile to try defying the established order. But as one of the enterprising pioneers in the organic business puts it, "Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

Those doing it include farmers seeking a more natural connection to the good earth that they work. Their shift in attitudes and methods coincided fortuitously with a steady rise in the number of consumers seeking something more wholesome than what industry delivers — which includes edibles saturated with pesticides, injected with sex hormones, ripened with gas, plumped with antibiotics, contaminated with feces, zapped with radiation, dosed with artificial flavorings, preserved with carcinogens, loaded with trans fats and otherwise put through the corporate wringer in an effort to squeeze out an extra penny of profit.

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Posted By: Jonathan Colb  on Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Today marks my fourth consecutive Thanksgiving in Bangkok. Thailand is no punk as far as food goes, but I predict that Mr. Hightower would absolutely love eating the natural food in Laos. To my knowledge, there is no fast food of any kind anywhere in the country, and certainly none of the big corporate chains that he would decry: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, etc. Most of the fare in the town of Vang Vieng is produced nearby and is generally fresh and wholesome. The population is relatively small, so there isn't much of the massive-scale agriculture (with all its trappings) that they have in most other countries. Travellers gripe about it because of the perceived monotony, but when I taste it I marvel at its sheer goodness, purity and simplicity. And it's cheap, too! So what is there really to complain about?

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