Florida Urban Homestead

I was was gone from the garden for a long time; I slipped up and fell off the wagon because of my bad back.  I thought it would be cheaper to just eat junk, and it was, but  I didn’t count on all the weight I would gain, or the pain and misery that would come with it, much less the cost in bigger clothes and medical bills.  I stopped thinking altogether.   I just might still be lost feeling sorry for myself if it weren’t for a film I watched called “Food, Inc” I watched it on my Netflix account, and it reopened my eyes as to what I was eating.  I won’t go over every last point the film made but I got two big things out of it.  One is how unhealthy most of the meat is in our grocery stores is today.

I saw another film called “King Corn” that was also very good.  We all are eating corn whether we want to or not.  Not that corn is bad, just that everything is now corn.  Our gum, candy, sweeteners, starches, peanut butter, bread, cereal, in fact 80 to 85% of everything in a typical grocery store is made of, or includes corn as a major ingredient.  Corn is fed to cattle, pigs, chickens, and even fish to fatten them up.  What is it doing to us, or to me?  Cheaper is not always cheaper!  Corn is encouraged to be raised by our government and subsidized so it can be sold at below the cost of production for a good profit, but for whom?  The buyers for this type of corn are the meat producers like Tyson and Cargill, and of course the people that make the High Fructose Corn Sweetener that is in almost everything we eat. Companies like Pepsi, Kraft foots ect.  I don’t necessarily feel we should subsidize food that is good for us just to get us to eat it, but we shouldn’t be subsidizing corn so it can be made into stuff that is unhealthy either.

Natural radishes plumping up in my garden.