I got an invitation to join a Facebook group called Against the Organic Farming Ban. I had a look, and the description seemed to have been cut and pasted from a forwarded email:

> > Please tell everyone who wants organic foods.....
>
> US House and Senate are about (in a week and a half) to
> vote on bill that will OUTLAW ORGANIC FARMING (bill HR 875).
> There is an enormous rush to get this into law within the
> next 2 weeks before people realize what is happening.
>
> Main backer and lobbyist is Monsanto – chemical and
> genetic engineering giant corporation (and Cargill, ADM, and
> about 35 other related agri-giants). This bill will require
> organic farms to use specific
> fertilizers and poisonous insect sprays dictated by the
> newly formed agency to "make sure there is no danger to
> the public food supply". This will include backyard
> gardens that grow food only for a family and not for sales.( Read more... )

This Facebook group has 67,949 members.

I suspected a hoax. I Googled "bill HR 875" and found seeming corroboration like an OpEdNews article which contains the following:

The bill is monstrous on level after level - the power it would give to Monsanto, the criminalization of seed banking, the prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers, the 24 hours GPS tracking of their animals, the easements on their property to allow for warrantless government entry, the stripping away of their property rights, the imposition by the filthy, greedy industrial side of anti-farming international "industrial" standards to independent farms - the only part of our food system that still works, the planned elimination of farmers through all these means.

Then I Googled "bill HR 875 hoax" and found an article dated 17 March 2009 titled Food Bill Hoax (HR 875) Spreads Across Campus: You May Be Arrested Soon for Growing A Tomato. I expected to learn that there is no H.R. 875, but that's not what I found. What the article does present is a defense of the bill from the office of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, 3rd congressional district of Connecticut. Here's a sample:

Myths and Facts - H.R. 875
The Food Safety Modernization Act

* * * MYTH * * * H.R. 875 "makes it illegal to grow your own garden" and would result in the "criminalization of the backyard gardener."

- - FACT - - There is no language in the bill that would regulate, penalize, or shut down backyard gardens. The focus of this bill is to ensure the safety of foods sold in supermarkets.

* * * MYTH * * * H.R. 875 would mean a "goodbye to farmers markets" because it would regulate and penalize "each farmer who wishes to sell locally."

- - FACT - - There is no language in the bill that would result in farmers markets being regulated, penalized by any fines, or shut down. Farmers markets would be able to continue to flourish under the bill. In fact, the bill would insist that imported foods meet strict safety standards to ensure that unsafe imported foods are not competing with locally-grown foods.

* * * MYTH * * * H.R. 875 would result in the "death of organic farming."

- - FACT - - There is no language in the bill that would stop or interfere with organic farming. The National Organic Program (NOP) is under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).The Food Safety Modernization Act only addresses food safety issues under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Like most of the elected officials who would vote for or against H.R. 875, I have not, and in all likelihood never will, read the bill. It has taken me MUCH longer to craft this blog post than it took to find a countervailing presentation on the intent and probable outcome of this House Resolution. I even found other bloggers posting "Is this stuff for real" queries. The discussion thread for one such post lead me to an entry on FactCheck.org which summarized the controversy as follows:

Illegal Backyard Garden?

March 27, 2009

Q: Would a new bill in Congress make my backyard organic garden illegal?

A: A House bill proposes to split the Food & Drug Administration, creating a separate entity to oversee food safety. It's aimed at food sold in supermarkets and doesn't say anything about organic gardening, pesticides, farmers' markets or that tomato plant in your backyard.

By temperament, I'm as inclined to attribute evil intentions to the conspiratorial machinations of government and corporate insiders as the next guy, but I've been burned one too many times by jumping on similar bandwagons, and claims that some momentous legislation will be passed or defeated "next week" sets off alarm bells, but not the ones that the propagators of this meme intended to trigger. This Interwebz doohickie is a nifty thing, and like most electronic gizmos, it has functions that most users never utilize or even know about, e.g. fact checking.

Link: http://www.archive.org/details/ConfrontingAmericanParadox

Justin Ritchie prepared this segment Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto for the C-Realm Podcast.

KMO reads from and responds to editorials from Michael Lynch and Charlotte Allen and then plays the conclusion of his recent conversation with James Howard Kunstler which also touches on those two editorials. Other topics include looking for villains, Y2K, and the outrageously elitist notion that some things are better than other things. Jim reminds us that life is tragic and that history does not care if we make bad choices. Stupidity will continue so long as circumstances allow it, and when circumstances change we will adopt new behaviors.

No, but I might think carefully about what I ate or drank in the hour prior to my hearing the voice of the magic genie.

Michael Pollan sent the following to his email list:

Friends:
I'll be on NPR's Morning Edition, talking about the new Secretary of
Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
What can I say? It's a good day for corn.
Less good for us eaters, perhaps. Perhaps the most disappointing thing
about this morning's press conference is that neither Tom Vilsack nor
President-Elect Obama uttered the words "food" or "eaters." Vilsack
does not have the record of a reformer. He supported the expansion of
CAFO agriculture in Iowa (gutting local control to do it) and is much
loved by the biotech industry, who named him Biotech Governor of the
Year. But this is pretty much what you would expect from a Governor of
Iowa during that period, and we can hope that as Ag Secretary, with a
broader constituency, he will take a broader view. There are, too, in
his record encouraging glints: a record of support for local food
systems, and for a meaningful limit on subsidies, with the saving to
be directed toward conservation programs. The fact that he is Tom
Harken's choice is reason for hope too; Collin Peterson reportedly had
some much worse ideas.
The fact is, real change is never easy and always comes from below/
Now it's up to us to push him, and Obama, in the right direction. This
is just the beginning.
--Michael

"C" stands for consciousness

Episode 79: The Red Queen



First up Dmitry Orlov and Albert K. Bates explore visions of a
post-collapse America, and later KMO talks food, consciousness, and
the forces of darkness with Neil Kramer of the Cleaver.

Dmitry Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, and Albert K. Bates is the author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. In the podcast, Dmitry makes mention of Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende





You can find my appearance on the Chronicles of the Psychonautilus here:

http://the-psychonautilus.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2008-02-24T09_21_36-08_00

I recently spoke with Matt Pallamary in a recent episode of the C-Realm Podcast about the same topics I discussed with Adam on the Chronicles of the Psychonautilus. In fact, both conversations took place on the same day.

And you can find Martin Ball's Entheogenic Evolution podcast here:

http://entheogenic.podomatic.com/

Poll #1145376 Raw Potatoes
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

It's a good idea to eat raw potatoes.