Consumer Confidence?

I think maybe consumer confidence is an oxymoron. I certainly have very little.

My confidence in the foods I buy at the market has reached an all time low. Admitted it has been eroding for some time. In 1981 I discovered rather painfully and almost fatally that the ingredient sulfur does not have to be mentioned on a product label because it is not added to the final product deliberately.

Sulfur, which an alarming number of people are deathly allergic to is a "hitchhiker" on any corn byproduct. It is used on corn to prevent it germinating while it is waiting to become corn syrup or corn starch, etc. And it does not go away in the processing. The incident of the emergency ward alerted me to this little known fact. There has been a very strong lobby to try to get it listed for decades now. Until then I and millions others like me just simply avoid products with corn in them. And dehydrated fruits, and artificial creamers, some sugar substitutes, etc.

I had become used to this process when I discovered a sensitivity to petrochemicals. Also obliquely named on product ingredient labels. Sun block gives me sun blisters of mega proportions. Hand creams cause rashes not heal them, etc. Then came pet food. After losing my aging cat at about the same time my other two got put on an organic diet. The dogs are on the only dog food that has not been named in a recall. I avoid lettuce and spinach in plastic bags and have devoted part of my sun porch to a green house for tomatoes.

When beginning my spring garden this year I discovered the problem with seeds. Burpee and other seed companies are treating their seeds so not only do they not germinate for longer than the one season for which they are purchased but the plants grown from these seeds are sterile. Does this sound like we are painting ourselves into a corner? I live in an area where Anasazi beans discovered in pre-Columbian pottery can be planted and they grow. Now we have genetically altered plants and animals that cannot reproduce.

I am growing my own lettuce, spinach, chard and herbs as well as the tomatoes and sweet bell peppers. I am looking for a good general hunting rifle and have plans with my neighbor for a deer hunt this year. I am also splitting a pig or lamb with her grown by one of our animal raising neighbors. I have my eye on a little chest freezer and thankfully never got rid of the pressure cooker. Back to canning I think. What I don't raise myself I can get from the local farmers' markets. And I buy organic any product I cannot get locally like milk and cheese.

Oh, yeah, they could be mislabeling organic products. But I did read that there is a higher likelihood that organic products will be produced locally. Translate that to mean not Mexico or China. I urge all food producers in Canada and USA to label their products clearly as to point of origin. I find this raises my level of confidence in the product. And I avoid any highly processed food because that increases the chances of some ingredient coming from China or Mexico which does not have any product controls or safety, nor any EPA oversite. That is why the companies moved there to manufacture. It is not all because of low cost labor. Well, I'm not buying.

Now what are you going to do? I am shopping local and shunning global.

It is All Blackmail

I am particularly fond of this image in juxtaposition with the frog below. Frogs you know are vanishing at a concerning rate. And those remaining on our troubled planet are showing deformities in large percentages to the population. Some scientists are calling frogs our canaries in the mine.

And yet GW and his oil buddies want us to suspend all environmental controls on oil refineries and exploration. When he was governor of the state of Texas he made it the most polluted of the 50 and from the day he took office as president of the United States he has wanted to row back all EPA controls.

I have a friend that works in the Environmental Protection Agency and he says GW has virtually gutted the agency. The super fund that was suppose to clean up the worst of the abandoned mines that are leaking contaminated water with heavy metals into the earth was totally suspended. In my neck of the woods alone there is two or three of these major offenders to clean water that cause humped back fish and sick people. Catch and release in western streams has taken on a totally different purpose. No longer let the big wild fish breed but don't eat contaminated fish.

We gave oil companies major tax incentives for exploration and upgrading of their facilities to meet clean air and water standards. Have they used that or any of the huge profits they are currently raking in to build modern refineries that meet EPA standards? Have they searched for alternative fuels? Have they figured out ways to get the oil out of shale? (Incidentally there was a huge oil shale project in Grand Junction, Colorado which was abandoned because it was too costly. At the time they said if oil reached $50 a barrel it would be doable. Are they doing it at twice that?)

No to all those questions. They just sit and rake in the profits while their elected official (we certainly never elected him) berates congress for not passing his bills that would allow the oil companies to ruin not merely our National Parks, but our air and our water just because they do not want to spend some of that money to do it responsibly.

I lived in El Paso, Texas when I was a kid. It had refineries. They dumped sulfuric gas into the air at an enormous rate. It changed the color of the land around it which seemed to grow nothing. And ultimately my family had to move because of the illnesses it caused with my brother and myself. When mother became pregnant with my sister she put her foot down. She did not care where we moved. Just away from there.

The EPA standards developed for oil refineries and coal generation plants and factories in general is so we can continue to breathe. So we still have frogs in ponds and fish we can catch in a mountain stream and eat. And if GW truly agrees that global warming is an issue then why is he fighting to put more carbon emissions into our atmosphere or cut the number of green, growing and living things down.

The oil companies have not built a refinery in 30 years because they were waiting for someone like GW to make it unnecessary for them to care about their neighborhood and the planet earth.