Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple

Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple
By Joel Salatin, Public Affairs Books
Posted on June 20, 2009,
http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/

Excerpted by permission from "Declare Your Independence" by Joel Salatin, part of the book Food, Inc., available now from PublicAffairs. Copyright 2009.

Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging movement is simply opting out. The opt-out strategy can humble the mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, "You do not control me."

The time has come for people who are ready to challenge the paradigm of factory-produced food and to return to a more natural, wholesome and sustainable way of eating (and living) to make that declaration to the powers that be, in business and government, that established the existing system and continue to prop it up. It's time to opt out and simply start eating better -- right here, right now.

Impractical? Idealistic? Utopian? Not really. As I'll explain, it's actually the most realistic and effective approach to transforming a system that is slowly but surely killing us.

What happened to food?
... snip...
The unprecedented variety of bar-coded packages in today's supermarket really does not mean that our generation enjoys better food options than our predecessors. These packages, by and large, having passed through the food-inspection fraternity, the industrial food fraternity and the lethargic cheap-food-purchasing consumer fraternity, represent an incredibly narrow choice.
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Author Joel Salatin at his farm

PharmFree: AMSA Releases PharmaFree Scorecard

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AMSA Releases PharmFree Scorecard Grading Medical Schools' Policies On Pharmaceutical Company Access And Influence

Of all U.S. medical schools, only six received a grade of "A" on the American Medical Student Association's 2007 PharmFree Scorecard. The scorecard, which ranks medical schools according to their pharmaceutical influence policies, is the first of its kind and provides students with important new information about their medical school choices.

"It is important that we work to keep our medical schools and teaching hospitals free of the influence of pharmaceutical companies," said AMSA National President Jay Bhatt. "PharmFree medical students become PharmFree doctors and that commitment to evidence-based medicine benefits our patients and our colleagues."

The PharmFree campaign encourages medical schools and academic medical centers to develop policies that limit the access of pharmaceutical company representatives to their campuses and prohibit medical students and physicians from accepting gifts of any kind from these representatives.

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