If you are my age, let’s keep it at over 50, you may remember tomatoes being juicy and flavorful. In season fruit was always sweet and messy to eat? The juice from the peach or the orange running down your chin and your arm as you’re eating it. I get so disappointed when I bite into a fruit and it’s dry. What has happened? Is it that fruits and vegetables have been modified?
All fruits and vegetables used to come from heirloom seeds. Heirloom seeds are a seed that grow naturally in a fruit that has not been unnaturally modified and the fruit has been around for generations; about 50 years at least. Fruit and vegetable seeds used to be modified over 6 to 10 generations by farmers using seeds from the plants that were the strongest. Those plant seeds that survived and thrived in adverse weather, insect predators and diseases were used for the next growing season. Then, there came the hybrid seed. These are modified with the human hand by cross pollinating two different varieties of the same fruit or vegetable species.
GMO’s are modified in a laboratory creating a whole new kind of tomato or corn and etc. The question is, is this healthy on a long term basis? The GMO foods are fed to the animals we eat and are in almost everything else we eat that is processed. The hybrids and GMO’s were created with the best of intentions to help those in countries where people were starving due to long time droughts or other devastating conditions. They were purchased and are owned by large companies like Monsanto. The heirlooms are not being planted by the big farmers. Monsanto owns many of the hybrid and GMO seeds and they’re buying up the heirloom seed companies. To own the food in the world is to have POWER.
Our little garden where we give the poor Non GMO, organically grown vegetables is our activism against domination of food. Food domination affects the poor first because they can’t afford to buy the more expensive non GMO, non hybrid foods. Our little garden is part of many little gardens doing the same thing we’re doing. The little garden needs a lot of attention.
If you’re interested in our act of activism, please contact Ginny.