Government Raid On A Legal FoodShare

More and more laws are being created to take away the right of the people to grow and sell their own unprocessed food. We are told that these laws and raids are for our protection but they are actually for the purpose of government/corporations gaing more money and control. The raid in the videos below affects all Americans. It's time we speak out, turn your lawns into gardens, support your local farmers.We need to stick together and protest with the constructive action of growing our own food.

FOOD FREEDOM

Even with a tiny parcel of land you can grow some of your own food. This brings with it a sense of connection to the earth, healthier pesticide free food and independence from the commercial food chain.We have come to view our relaxing time as sitting in front of the TV. Then we have to pay to work out in an unnatural setting(the gym) to get rid of the weight we could have shed through excercising while growing food outdoors.Growing our own food provides us with many benefits. We even have leftovers to share with others. Watch the video below and see what one person is doing. The book below the video explains how to grow food in small spaces in raised beds.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/1055.html
SQUARE FOOT GARDENING

Tyrannical Control Over Our Food Choices

When the food supply becomes tightly centralized...so does the power over the people. This has happened throughout history. Whenever there is a large centralized agricultural society, this translates into loss of freedoms and serfdom. We need to realize the subterfuge being used to make the public believe that food safety and other restrictive food regulations are for our protection and health. Some regulations are necessary but they are not concentrating on the needful aspects of cleanliness and humane treatment of animals. The main thrust is to bankrupt the small local farmers and to further corporate agricultural dictatorship.

The current USDA food Pyramid is constructed with grains as the central focus or base of the pyramid, with healthy fats and protein playing a very minor role. It is much more profitable for our industrialized agricultural system to promote plant food as opposed to animal food. They want you to think that raising animals on pasture is destructive to the environment and unhealthy to eat. On the contrary......agriculture, with its pesticides and stripping of our soil, is much worse for the environment than animals naturally grazing on grass.When it comes to our diet... Instead of listening to the biased advice of Corporate America, lets be reverent and wise and look to the time honored foods and methods of food preparation that our ancestors used. Their nutritional advice did not shift with corporate interests as our modern profit seeking nutritional guidelines do. We are not healthier from reducing healthy animal fats and increasing the refined oils of commerce....we are sicker...much sicker. It is the strong emphasis on carbohydrates and refined vegetable oil (very subject to rancidity and deterioration with heat) that is making us fatter and less healthy.

The Commentary below is from the Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts Journal and is written by Sally Fallon Morell and Mary Enig.


CARBON TRADING

You thought carbon trading was all about reducing dependence on fossil fuel? Think again. A proposed trial of a personal carbon trading scheme will also aim at getting people to reduce consumption of "fatty foods" in the name of targeting obesity. The three year project will involve giving everyone on Norfolk Island , a small island in the Pacific Ocean located between Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia, a card preloaded with "carbon units". They will pay for their power and gasoline with carbon units - and from the second year also their food. "If people are thrifty," says Professor Garry Egger, an organizer of the program,"and don't buy alot of petrol or power or fatty foods, they will have units to spare, which they can cash in at a bank. If they aren't frugal and produce alot of carbon and consume unhealthy fatty foods, then every year they will have to buy extra units" (www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au  , October 28, 2010 ). Looks like carbon trading is morphing from a plan to "save the planet" into a social engineering and public policy scheme. If carbon rationing becomes widespread, the same system can be used to ration food and make government nutrtion objectives mandatory.
THE WESTON A PRICE FOUNDATION http://www.westonaprice.org/

THREE NECESSARY BOOKS FOR UNDERSTANDING WHAT FOODS WE NEED TO EAT, HOW TO PREPARE THEM, WHY THESE FOODS ARE HEALTHIER FOR US AND THE POLITICS BEHIND CURRENT NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES

NUTRITION AND PHYSICAL DEGENERATION

  NOURISHING TRADITIONS
  THE VEGETARIAN MYTH

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE HEALTHY FOOD

More and more restrictive laws are being created to discourage local and small farm food production. As the video below mentions, the mega food industry is allowed to include poisonous additives to our food and water supply...such aspartame, fluoride, MSG...and the list goes on. The factory farms are allowed to cram cattle into very small areas where they stand in their own excrement and sometimes never move from this confined area until they are slaughtered. They never see the sun, they eat grain instead of fresh grass and they are given hormones and antibiotics. They are sickly.

Then when we hear of these food contamination scares, which may sometimes be orchestrated, more laws are passed to further restrict the sustainable, humane small time farmers.It's a joke. We are told that the government is trying to protect our health with these laws, while the reality is that the government agencies are meshed with the agricultural corporations. These laws and raids on small farms are not about safety but about profit and control. Remember...those who control the food supply, control the people.

We need to educate ourselves so that we can band together and take action to preserve our right to grow our own food. The following is a  book that exposes the politics behind our destructive megacorporate food system. The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights
We must decentralize the food system in order to be healthy and to maintain our freedom. Support sustainable farmers. Buy healthy meat from grassfed animals who are treated humanely and allowed to graze on open pastureland. Grassfed meat provides HEALTHY saturated fat with important fatty acids, such as CLA. We are meant to eat saturated fat and our brains are largely composed of this substance. I buy meat in bulk from local farmers and then I buy my organ and sausage prepared meats from Wellness Meats. Read more about this ethical company. US Wellness Meats sells quality grassland meat products - Visit us Online!
Listen to what is happening to the small farmers and then if you want to learn more about the health benefits of meat from animals raised on pasture, watch the video below this one


Farmageddon Trailer from Kristin Canty on Vimeo.

ILLEGAL TO GROW YOUR OWN FOOD?

When I heard about the massive egg recall and the recent meat recall, I knew something suspicious was being organized  for the purpose of the Corporate Government Monopolies gaining more power and control over OUR food supply.When trying to figure out what their next move would be, I thought that perhaps the government would enact more restrictive laws on farmers...such as possibly requiring that eggs be pasteurized. Most local small farmers are already struggling to survive and our corporate government knows that more restrictions require more equipment.....which will end up financially destroying the small farmer.

Many recent disastrous events have either been orchestrated by our corporate government and/or at the very least, these events or disasters are used to give further control to this entity. If the government really cared about improving the safety of our food supply they would be encouraging local small time food production. Then we would not need elaborate systems of restrictive laws, tracking, monitoring, and the systematic poisoning of our foods with pesticides, herbicides, pasteurization...etc. If we carefully evaluate the current system and do not get swept away by germ outbreak hysteria, we can see plainly what our corporate government is really up to.I cannot emphasize this saying enough....Whoever controls the food supply, controls the people.

The Food Safety Modernization Act makes it much easier to take away our food rights under the name of safety. It is not far fetched to see that in the near future it may be illegal to grow your own food. Saving seed from your own vegeatbles may become a criminal act. They want to track and label every item of food. How bizarre can things get before we all wake up and say...".No More!" What we need is more food diversification NOT more centralization. Further centralization of the food supply takes away our rights to know how and where our food is produced. We have no way of telling what our food has been grown in, whether it has been genetically modified, what has been sprayed on it....or what has been added to it. A centralized food system is destroying the planet.....AND our health. Why would anyone want more of that ....unless it was for profit and control. Please see the video below

To understand this subject better I would recommend The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Food Safety Modernization Act S510  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510&tab=summary

The video below expresses these concerns very well

FOOD FREEDOM......A GOD GIVEN RIGHT

When I talk about food being a God -given right...I don't mean that it is a right in the sense that it is up to someone else to provide it for us but that we MUST NOT BE PREVENTED from growing and supplying our own food or from buying it from those who have small farms and are selling or sharing healthy homegrown food. I will write more on this in the future but now I would like to share an important article from http://www.rense.com/general91/dehe.htm


S510 - Illegal To Grow, Share,


Trade, Sell Homegrown Food


SB S510 Will Allow Government


To Put You In Jail ....

By Steve Green


8-6-10

S510 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510 )

"If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public's right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one's choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God." It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S 510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food." ~ Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower.

Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto's Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create without judicial review if it passes.

S 510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food AND FARMING.

History

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton introduced HACCP (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points) purportedly to deal with contamination in the meat industry. Clinton's HACCP delighted the offending corporate (World Trade Organization "WTO") meat packers since it allowed them to inspect themselves, eliminated thousands of local food processors (with no history of contamination), and centralized meat into their control. Monsanto promoted HACCP.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton, urged a powerful centralized food safety agency as part of her campaign for president. Her advisor was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson Marsteller*, a giant PR firm representing Monsanto. Clinton lost, but Clinton friends such as Rosa DeLauro, whose husband's firm lists Monsanto as a progressive client and globalization as an area of expertise, introduced early versions of S 510.

S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.

1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.

2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says:

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into "the United States." Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, "entry of food into the US" covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and "entering into" it by virtue of being produced.

4. It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food. It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements. Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.

5. It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds ­ How to criminalize them, for more details.

6. It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease. Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents. Animal diseases can be falsely declared. S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.

7. It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production ­ put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety.

8. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer. The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.

9. It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs. This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil- based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe. The five items listed the Five Pillars of Food Safety are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.

10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control. The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied. It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review.

For further information, watch these videos

Food Laws ­ Forcing people to globalize?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PwqUQ_HIlg&feature=related Corporate Rule?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXoJHG-er7A&feature=related  Reclaiming Economies?

TAKING OUR FOOD RIGHTS AWAY IN THE NAME OF SAFETY

The following article illustrates our decreasing rights to grow, share and sell natural organic food products. This unbelievable intrusion on our basic human rights is being pushed forward under the guise of safety and protection. Don't be fooled.

RAIDS ARE INCREASING ON FARMS AND PRIVATE FOOD-SUPPLY CLUBS - HERE ARE 5 TIPS FOR SURVIVING ONE.
BY David Gumpert
http://www.grist.org/article/food-five-tips-for-surviving-a-raid-on-your-farm-or-food-club/PALL

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)


But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."

As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents -- from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture -- took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.

While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.

The same day Sharon Palmer's farm was raided, there was a raid on Rawesome Foods, a Venice, Calif., private food club run by nutritionist and raw-food advocate Aajonus Vonderplanitz. For a membership fee of $25, consumers can purchase unpasteurized dairy products, eggs that are not only organic but unwashed, and a wide assortment of fermented vegetables and other products.

The main difference in the two raids seems to be that Palmer's raiding party was actually much smaller, about half the size of the Venice contingent: Vonderplanitz was also visited by the FBI and the FDA.

In the Rawesome raid, agents made off with several thousand dollars worth of raw honey and raw dairy products. They also shut Rawesome for failure to have a public health permit, though the size and scope of the raid suggests the government officials might have more in mind. Regardless, within hours the outlet reopened in defiance of the shutdown order.

Earlier in June, agents of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, escorted by police and also bearing search warrants, raided and shut down Traditional Foods Warehouse, a popular food club in Minneapolis specializing in locally-produced foods. They also raided two farms suspected of illegally selling raw milk. And in a national first among such raids, agents searched a private home and made off with computers; the family's offense appears to have been that it allowed one of the raw dairy farmers to park in its driveway to distribute raw milk to area residents who had ordered it.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has declined comment on such raids, saying they are part of an ongoing investigation into raw milk distribution in the state in lieu of eight illnesses in May linked to raw milk.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection has launched three raids over the last three months on the dairy farm and farm store of Vernon Hershberger, near Madison. The day after DATCP agents placed seals on his fridges storing raw dairy products in July, Hershberger cut the seals, and announced he was going to challenge the agency's contention he needs a dairy and retail license to sell his products. Obtaining such licenses would be problematic, though, since Wisconsin prohibits sale of raw milk, except "incidental" sales, and defining "incidental" has been a bone of contention for many years. In any event, Hershberger contends he sells only to consumers who contract privately for his food.

What's behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years -- food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public. (For more on what's behind the raids, see this new post.)

In late 2008 and early 2009, the representatives of state agriculture agencies in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois met via phone conferences with representatives of the FDA to map a plan for targeting raw-milk buying clubs in the Midwest. The meetings came to light after Max Kane, the owner of a Wisconsin buying club who was subpoenaed by Wisconsin authorities for the names of his customers and suppliers, obtained email accounts of the sessions via a Freedom of Information request to Wisconsin's Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection department. (Kane has since been prosecuted by Wisconsin authorities for contempt of court for failing to give up the names; his case is under appeal after he was found guilty last December.)

Now, the Midwest program seems to have gone national, and the recent spate of raids suggests a quickening pace and broadened scope. While most raids before the Midwest government meetings had been related to raw-milk distribution, some, like a December 2008 armed raid of Manna Storehouse, an Ohio food club near Cleveland, have been about licensing issues. In that raid, armed law enforcement officers held a mother and eight young children being home-schooled at gunpoint for several hours while they searched the home and food storage areas. A legal challenge to the raid by the family is still tied up in court.

The current uptick has Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund concerned, not only about the spreading of the raids, but about the seemingly easy willingness of judges to hand out search warrants. While the U.S. Constitution's fourth amendment suggests judges should exercise tight controls over search warrants ("no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..."), Kennedy observes, "I haven't seen an agency turned down yet" over the last four years in requests for search warrants connected with raw milk and other food production and distribution.

Given that the targets of search warrants don't get a say in court as to whether they should be issued, legal experts and those who have been raided say the most that food producers can do is take steps to prepare themselves to weather the raids as best they can.
Here are five suggestions they offer:

Be wary of strangers who want to join your private buying group or herdshare: Before they seek out a search warrant, regulators invariably nose around and infiltrate private buying groups or raw milk herdshares to gain information on "probable cause." They'll often make up sad stories as to why they should be allowed to join. Gary Cox of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund recalls how an undercover agent from the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets infiltrated Meadowsweet Dairy LLC, a private organization of 120 Ithaca consumers who bought shares to gain access to raw dairy products, in 2007: "He was insistent. 'I live so far away, and I only come here so very infrequently, so can't I at least have some (milk) today, PLEEEEEEEASE, because otherwise I won't be able to get any for a long time.' Barb Smith felt sorry for him and relented. We know what the consequence was of her kindness." The consequence was an open-ended search warrant that agents used several times in late 2007 and early 2008 to confiscate product, leading up to a legal challenge to the LLC that is currently under appeal following rulings in New York state courts against Meadowsweet.

Have a video camera at the ready: Since search warrants are usually specific as to what can be searched and/or seized, a video recording of events inhibits abuses by regulators and other law enforcement personnel. Regulators and law enforcement officials definitely don't appreciate being videotaped, and sometimes will simply disconnect videos or order targeted individuals to put the videos away. According to Aajonus Vonderpanitz, in the June raid of his Rawesome Foods outlet, "They unplugged our surveillance camera to hide their actions. They threateningly refused video capture of their raid when members commenced filming."

Have a plan of action: Much like planning how your family might escape a fire, decide in advance who will handle the video camera, who will collect business cards or take down the names of all agents, and who will interact with the regulators. The regulators and police count on the element of surprise to sow confusion, and keep the targets from responding intelligently.

Read the search warrant fine print: Sometimes there are limitations on the search warrants that targets can exploit. Vernon Hershberger, the Wisconsin dairy farmer, was able to slow the regulators down because he knew the search warrant in his case likely wouldn't allow forcible entry, so when agents returned a second time, after he cut the seals on his fridges, he locked his farm store doors and they were forced to leave. They eventually returned with an amended warrant that specifically allowed them to take his computer.

Keep computer backups: In nearly all such raids, the authorities confiscate computers so they can document transactions and customer interactions. If you don't have a backup of what's on your disk, you can literally be put out of business. Moreover, it's advisable to monitor what information you keep on the computer in the farmhouse or in your food club. There's something to be said for backing up every few days onto another computer kept off-site.

We Need To Educate Ourselves In The Tactics Used By The Corporate Food System To Take Away Our Food Rights. If We Understand Their Dishonest Ploy Of Using Scare Tactics Of Food Contamination Then We Will Be Able To Stand Strong Together.

The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights