Food Safety Problem in Taiwan: excessive pesticide residue of veg and fruits

                                                       

In Taiwan, tests have been carried out on fruit and vegetables sold at supermarkets to assess the pesticide residue on the produce. 69% of the samples tested contained pesticide reside and 12% shows excessive residue.

Forty-five of the 65 vegetable and fruit products collected from brick-and-mortar and digital outlets of the nation’s major supermarket chains, including RT-Mart, Pxmart, Carrefour, Matsusei, Wellcome, A. Mart, Costco and FamilyMart, contained pesticide residues.

Among them, pesticides officially designated as highly toxic by the Council of Agriculture were found in 11 products, while excessive residue levels were discovered in eight products, with a prohibited chemical found in one product.

RT-Mart, Matsusei, Carrefour, Wellcome and A. Mart last year pledged to stop selling products found to contain the officially designated highly toxic chemicals, but some of those chemicals were still found in products sold at these stores.

                                 

Grapes sold by A. Mart’s digital outlet were found to contain a mixture of 13 pesticides, which Greenpeace said could expose consumers to a cocktail effect of harmful chemicals.

Sweet potato leaves sold at a Carrefour outlet were found to contain traces of highly toxic pesticide, Methomyl, while a green pepper was found to contain levels of Difenoconazole residue, that were seven times the council’s permitted levels.

                            

Greenpeace project manager, Lo Ko-jung, said “Local agriculture is still heavily dependent on pesticideS. Major supermarket outlets have failed in their role as a gatekeeper and continue to sell products containing highly toxic pesticides.”

                    

New French LAW: All New Rooftops Must Be Covered With Plants

Do you live in France? If you’re getting a new house, you might have to follow this incredible, sustainable law.

A new law that was passed that mandates that new buildings in commercial lots need to have either plants or solar panels on the roof. Having a garden on your roof sounds like a paradise, one that’s easily obtainable and should be happening all over the world. Plants create an isolating effect to help reduce the energy needed to heat or cool houses.

They also absorb rainwater to help prevent leaks, provide a home to small critters and insects and most importantly it connects us back to nature. Combining modern society with the natural world is exactly what we need to do and this is a good start. Originally, French environmental activists wanted the law to cover the entire roof but they decided to start with participially covered roofs to see how it does.

Solar panels on the roofs of businesses is amazing because it helps reduce the amount of energy they use while creating sustainable, renewable energy instead. It slows down global warming as it cuts down pollution and CO2 emissions. It saves millions of dollars in energy usage.

                                       

It’s renewable, never-ending energy that comes from the Sun, a source that won’t stop anytime soon.
It’s consistent even in cloudy places of the world as the energy still gets through. It creates independence for humanity; we don’t need to rely on paying a government to get power which is inherently free to everyone.\

                        


It helps combine the natural world with our society, helping to integrate us into our natural way of life. It can use recycled materials to build, creating a system of recycling rather than throwing away.
If you plant vegetables, it saves you money as well as increases your health and vitality.

It helps clean the air and filter certain gasses. And much more for both! When we implement these ideas globally, then we can start living harmoniously with our Earth, like we were meant to do.

This concept is already popular in parts of the world like Germany and Australia, as well as Canada’s city of Toronto (which is interesting as I’m from there and never really noticed this.) When ideas like this come out, it’s both exciting and frustrating. Why are there so little concepts like this actually coming to fruition? Many artists, designers, architects and scientists have created incredible, sustainable ideas that corporations just can’t seem to bank on so the attention is never properly given.

If we globally demanded things like this, there would be a greater push to create them. We need to collectively see the importance and demand that our world start shifting into sustainability because we truly are running out of time. Not to worry, there are plenty of people around the world working towards the benefit of humanity.

                                     

Advanced LED home grower

                                                     

     

                     

                   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC6bGBrDDVg&feature=youtu.be

Sugarbaby said: if you live in a place like our friend Jeff Plante, you should have one of this advanced LED home grower to provide organic foods for your family.

                   

Even Monsanto can not ban Home organic food

    

Raymond Boucher, an attorney, said the  "organic" ruling was a big victory for consumers.

2015.12.03, SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Consumers have a right to file lawsuits under California law alleging food products are falsely labeled "organic," the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday. The ruling overturned a lower court decision that barred such suits on the grounds that they were superseded and not allowed by federal law.

Congress wanted only state and federal officials to police organic food violations in order to create a national standard for organic foods, a division of the 2nd District Court of Appeal decided in 2013.

But the state Supreme Court said allowing consumer lawsuits would further congressional goals of curtailing fraud and ensuring consumers can rely on organic labels.

"Accordingly, state lawsuits alleging intentional organic mislabeling promote, rather than hinder, Congress's purposes and objectives," Associate Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote for the unanimous court.

The ruling will have an impact beyond California's borders, said Marsha Cohen, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco."Nothing in here is irrelevant to a parallel case in another state," she said. "The court is simply saying federal law does not supersede our consumer protection functions."

At issue were allegations in a lawsuit by consumer Michelle Quesada that Herb Thyme Farms Inc. — one of the nation's largest herb producers — mixed organic and non-organic herbs then falsely labeled the product "100 % organic." The term "organic" means the food was produced using sustainable practices and without synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, irradiation, or genetic engineering, according to the California Department of Public Health. The department says products labeled "100% organic" must consist of only organic ingredients.

Chicfarm aeroponic grower produces foods with organic nutrients, clean seedling foams, non-irradiation, no genetic engineering, perfectly meeting the term “organic” definition and best part of it is that consumers can grow them at home to get FREE organic foods which even Monsanto can do nothing about it!! Our Sugarbaby said: what he loves the best is that all foods has NO pesticides whatsoever!

                                     

                     

What are you still waiting for? Go to get one now.

Bottle garden of your choices

Thriving since 1960, a garden in a bottle: Seedling sealed in its own ecosystem and watered just once in 53 years.  David Latimer first planted his bottle garden in 1960 and last watered it in 1972 before tightly sealing it shut 'as an experiment' The hardy spiderworts plant inside has grown to fill the 10-gallon container by surviving entirely on recycled air, nutrients and water. Gardeners' Question Time expert says it is 'a great example just how pioneering plants can be'

            

For the last 40 years it has been completely sealed from the outside world. But the indoor variety of spiderworts (or Tradescantia, to give the plant species its scientific Latin name) within has thrived, filling its globular bottle home with healthy foliage.

Mr Latimer, 80, said: ‘It’s 6ft from a window so gets a bit of sunlight. It grows towards the light so it gets turned round every so often so it grows evenly. ‘Otherwise, it’s the definition of low-maintenance. I’ve never pruned it, it just seems to have grown to the limits of the bottle.’  The bottle garden has created its own miniature ecosystem. Despite being cut off from the outside world, because it is still absorbing light it can photosynthesise, the process by which plants convert sunlight into the energy they need to grow.

                              

Bottle gardens work because their sealed space creates an entirely self-sufficient ecosystem in which plants can survive by using photosynthesis to recycle nutrients. The only external input needed to keep the plant going is light, since this provides it with the energy it needs to create its own food and continue to grow. Light shining on the leaves of the plant is absorbed by proteins containing chlorophylls (a green pigment).

Some of that light energy is stored in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a molecule that stores energy. The rest is used to remove electrons from the water being absorbed from the soil through the plant's roots. These electrons then become 'free' - and are used in chemical reactions that convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, releasing oxygen. This photosynthesis process is the opposite of the cellular respiration that occurs in other organisms, including humans, where carbohydrates containing energy react with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, water, and release chemical energy.

But the eco-system also uses cellular respiration to break down decaying material shed by the plant. In this part of the process, bacteria inside the soil of the bottle garden absorbs the plant's waste oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide which the growing plant can reuse. And, of course, at night, when there is no sunlight to drive photosynthesis, the plant will also use cellular respiration to keep itself alive by breaking down the stored nutrients. Because the bottle garden is a closed environment, that means its water cycle is also a self-contained process. The water in the bottle gets taken up by plants’ roots, is released into the air during transpiration, condenses down into the potting mixture, where the cycle begins again.

Photosynthesis creates oxygen and also puts more moisture in the air. The moisture builds up inside the bottle and ‘rains’ back down on the plant.  The leaves it drops rot at the bottom of the bottle, creating the carbon dioxide also needed for photosynthesis and nutrients which it absorbs through its roots.

Water with extreme care (your jar won't need much) and place the finished mini garden in a well-lit spot, but not on a hot south-facing windowsill. Into a cleaned out ten gallon carboy, or globular bottle, which once contained sulphuric acid, he poured some compost then carefully lowered in a seedling using a piece of wire.

He put in about a quarter of a pint of water. It was not until 1972 that he gave it another ‘drink’. After that, he greased the bung so it wedged in tightly... and has not watered it since. The bottle stands on display under the stairs in the hallway of his home in Cranleigh, Surrey, the same spot it has occupied for 27 years after he and his wife Gretchen moved from Lancashire when he retired as an electrical engineer.

He added that this process is one reason why NASA was interested in taking plants into space.‘The only input to this whole process has been solar energy, that’s the thing it has needed to keep it going. Everything else, every other thing in there has been recycled. That’s fantastic.’ 

If you can’t see the point, you can’t smell it, nor eating it. You can try to have a cola bottle short-term garden instead.

Prepare a cola bottle and punch holes on the bottom

Cut out the top part

Soak the green beans for more than 8 hours to get little white sprouts 

Put the sprouting green beans in the bottle and covered with a wet cloth

Put the whole bottle in the dark, and covered with a black plastic bag

Water them 2 times/day, wet and drench

Ready to harvest and get ready for next run

                       

       

It's the first time lettuce officially on the menu for NASA astronauts

                                              

Monday of 2015/8/10 on the International Space Station is a special day for lettuce to be officially introduced on the menu for NASA astronauts. This isn't just any lettuce. It's part of a crop of "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce grown on the space station.

"Fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space officially is on the menu for the first time for NASA astronauts," NASA said in a statement. It’s not the first time food was grown on a space station, it made clear. "For decades, NASA and other agencies have experimented with plants in space, but the results were always sent to earth for examination, rather than eaten," NASA said.

The astronauts get plenty of prepared foods shipped up by supply ships. But NASA needs to figure out how to grow food on spacecraft -- and on other planets -- for future deep space missions such as the one planned to Mars. The space agency plans to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s.Besides, gardening is fun on Earth, and NASA said astronauts likely will use it as a recreational activity on long missions.

                                           

The lettuce was grown aeroponically--in an air or mist environment without soil--in the space station's Veggie plant growth system. Plants grown aeroponically require far less water and fertilizer, don't need pesticide, are much less prone to disease, and grow up to three times faster than plants grown in soil, NASA said.

The developing root systems grow in an enclosed, air-based environment that is regularly misted with a fine, nutrient-rich spray.  A grower clips the leaves of plants grown in the openings of an aeroponic chamber.

Aeroponic growing systems provide clean, efficient, and rapid food production. Crops can be planted and harvested in the system year round without interruption, and without contamination from soil, pesticides, and residue. Since the growing environment is clean and sterile, it greatly reduces the chances of spreading plant disease and infection commonly found in soil and other growing media.

Aeroponics systems can reduce water usage by 98 percent, fertilizer usage by 60 percent, and pesticide usage by 100 percent, all while maximizing crop yields. Plants grown in the aeroponic systems have also been shown to uptake more minerals and vitamins, making the plants healthier and potentially more nutritious.

                                          

Taiwan Chicfarm (www.chicfarm.net)has successfully applied this technique and transformed it into an aeroponics home garden. With technology like this, jumping over the moon or eating pure clean, no pesticide vegetables won't be reserved for fairy tales.

The aeroponics system was tested at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the plants were checked for safety. Still, half the crew's harvest will be sent back to Earth for more testing. And to be even safer, the astronauts will clean the lettuce with citric acid-based, food-safe sanitizing wipes before eating it.

The crew seems excited about the lettuce. Astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren took to Twitter to share images of their crop. Kelly and Lindgren are the only two NASA astronauts on the space station now. The other crew members are Russians Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko, Oleg Kononenko and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui. Maybe Kelly and Lindgren will save them enough lettuce for at least a side salad.

INDOOR FARMING HAS MAKE MILLIONS

                                                     

In a windowless warehouse just outside of Chicago, where today’s forecast is for below-freezing temperatures, Green Sense Farms grows leafy greens and herbs all year around. They sell their bounty—protected from insects, disease and brutal winters—to grocers like Whole Foods and some local restaurants. Green Sense grows their soil-free produce (they use coconut husk instead) in indoor growing towers. Beneath 30 foot ceilings, rows and rows of produce are stacked and CO2 levels, water, lighting, and humidity are precisely controlled.

"At capacity, we’re producing about three to four million pounds a year," said Robert Colangelo, the president and founder of Green Sense Farms. With their current footprint—30,000 square feet—Green Sense can grow fresh produce that can be distributed within 100 miles to 20 million people.

Their success is another sign that the vertical urban farming movement is beginning to scale. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT’s Media Lab is developing an open source version, known as City Farm. In Japan, just 60 miles from where the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, inside of a former silicon chip manufacturing facility, Fujitsu grows 3000 heads of lettuce a day that sell for three times the price of other lettuce.

Growers say they want to grow nutritious food in a new, sustainable way, and supplement field farms and greenhouses. They believe the technique can revolutionize farming in crowded urban metropolises, during cold winters, and in impoverished parts of the world. And, the growers add, their produce is already in demand because it’s local, available year around, and frankly, pristine.

"In the field—there’s pests, there’s animals, there’s fungus, and there’s weather—the sun may shine, it may not," said Colangelo. "We see this as the future of farming."

                                           

MIT MEDIA LAB-THE FINALISTS OF THE 2014 INNOVATION BY DESIGN AWARDS: SPACES

CityFarm lets you grow pounds of produce in a month in what's essentially a glorified closet. Open-source software calibrates light levels, humidity, temperature, and pH to create an easily replicable, soil-free urban farm.

At the moment, he is working with universities and governments in Dubai, Accra, Guadalajara, and Detroit to develop vertical growing laboratories launching starting this January. In exchange for providing them with his technology, he hopes that each group will share their "recipes" for serving locals."We can optimize for different things," he said. "Like power use or water use—this is about harnessing the power of computing for food. Agriculture is thousands of years old but it’s only in recent times that we’ve been able to quantify a lot of the things around production."

And City Farm, Harper said, is trying to be the Linux of the vertical urban farm world. "We’re creating an OS that is open to the world," he said. "That will allow us to scale up faster."

But is there anything unhealthy or worrisome about growing crops in a sterile atmosphere, completely protected from natural elements, devoid of all sunlight, and in some cases, soil? "You would think, if it doesn’t have sunlight, it can’t possibly be nutritious, but the reality [is that] plants only harvest 10% of the sun’s rays, which we can recreate in the lab," Harpers said. "There is absolutely no nutritional difference between plants grown in sunlight and under an LED."

Others are more skeptical of the health issues and the costs. "I worry about the energy cost of inputs—light, water, nutrients," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of Food Politics and What to Eat. "I also worry about the nutrients in soil that aren’t reproduced in artificial systems. And then, there’s the taste issue. Soil influences taste."

Still, Nestle said that this sort of farming may have a place in the urban world. "If you live in a city and don’t have access to soil, I suppose this is an alternative that could be considered," she said. "The concern is there," said Gus van der Feltz, the global director of city farming for multinational lighting and tech company Philips. "If you don't use sun or soil what do you lose? Providing the right kind of environment and nutrients to the plant is important and we are working on that."

(Phillips has been actively working for more than seven years to develop LED lights that are suitable and cost effective for vertical urban farming. Green Sense, along with a number of other vertical farmers, are already successfully using their lighting products.)

As far as the energy trade-offs go, Colangelo of Green Sense says it’s difficult to make comparisons between vertical farming and conventional farming. "I would say honestly that no one has done a good cost analysis on this," he said.

One major cost for vertical farms is lighting. LED lights were a significant upfront cost for Green Sense, Colangelo admitted. But while expensive, they are also easy to maintain and provide good long-term value, he said.

And there are clear limitations to vertical farming. For instance, It isn’t practical to grow plants that require more space, like tomatoes or grains, in a stacked system. It’s not a universal solution for hunger, but increased access to greens can help public health: Dark leafy greens (as opposed to the corn and potatoes that Americans favor) are known to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. A little competition between open-source supporters and big business might help us get there.

                                   

Pesticides make men's sperm lower counts

                                                

Men who ate fruits and vegetables with higher levels of pesticide residues — such as strawberries, spinach, and peppers — had lower sperm counts and lower percentages of normal sperm than those who ate produce with lower residue levels, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It is the first study to look at the connection between exposure to pesticide residues from fruits and vegetables and semen quality.

“To our knowledge, this is the first report to link consumption of pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables, a primary exposure route for most people, to an adverse reproductive health outcome in humans,” said Jorge Chavarro, assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology and the study’s senior author.

The researchers used data from 155 men enrolled in the Environment and Reproductive Health (EARTH) study, an ongoing National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded study at a fertility center in Boston. Data included 338 semen samples provided between 2007 and 2012 and validated survey information about participants’ diets. The researchers classified fruits and vegetables according to whether they contained high amounts of pesticide residues (such as peppers, spinach, strawberries, apples, and pears) or low-to-moderate amounts (such as peas, beans, grapefruit, and onions), based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program. They then adjusted for factors such as smoking and body mass index — both known to affect sperm quality — and looked for connections between the men’s intake of produce with pesticide residue and the quality of their sperm.

                                

The results showed that men who ate greater amounts of fruits and vegetables with higher levels of pesticide residue — more than 1.5 servings per day — had 49 percent lower sperm count and 32 percent lower percentage of normal sperm than men who ate the least (less than 0.5 serving per day). They also had a lower sperm counts, lower ejaculate volumes, and lower percentages of normal sperm.

The men who ate the most fruits and vegetables with low-to-moderate levels of pesticide residue had higher percentages of normal sperm than those who ate less fruits and vegetables with low-to-moderate levels.

“These findings should not discourage the consumption of fruit and vegetables in general,” said Chavarro. “In fact, we found that consuming more fruits and vegetables with low pesticide residues was beneficial. This suggests that implementing strategies specifically targeted at avoiding pesticide residues, such as consuming organically grown produce or avoiding produce known to have large amounts of residues, may be the way to go.”

                       

New US Patents Could End The Use Of Pesticides

                                                 

                                                         SMART Pesticides

Paul Stamets, the world’s leading mycologist, filed a patent in 2001 that was intentionally given little attention. In the words of pesticide industry executives, this patent represents “The most disruptive technology that we have ever witnessed.” The biopesticides described in the patent reveals a near permanent, safe solution for over 200,000 species of insects, and it all comes from a mushroom. After what is called “sporulation” of a select entomopathogenic fungi (fungi that kill insects), the area becomes unsuitable for whatever insect(s) the fungi are coded for. Additionally, extracts of the entomopathogenic fungi can steer insects in different directions.

This is literally a complete paradigm shift away from the entire idea of pesticides. Instead of aiming to kill all problematic insects, a farmer could simply disperse a solution of pre-sporulation fungi among his or her crops. The insects would then simply live their lives around the crops, paying no attention to them. This simple idea flies in the face of the current, poorly thought out practice of spraying ever-increasing amounts of pesticides on resistant bugs.                   
Going further, this biopesticide would also eliminate the need for round-up ready GMO seeds and BT seeds that grow the pesticides in the crop and which needlessly endanger us, the consumer, in the process. Perhaps the most enticing element of this biopesticide fungi is that it’s essentially free. According to the patent, it can be “cultivated on agricultural waste.” We are looking at a 100% safe, natural technology that literally can end all GMO and pesticide manufacturers overnight with a new class of  SMART Pesticides.

“The matrix of pre-sporulating fungi can optionally be dried, freeze-dried, cooled and/or pelletized and packaged and reactivated for use as an effective insect attractant and/or biopesticide.” – Paul Stamets Patent for Mycoattractants and Mycopesticides.

                         

Even if we stop pesticide spraying now, scores of new research is confirming that our environment, food, soil, and bodies already carry traces of the chemicals. If the chemicals are so bad for us, there would be signs by now, right? These is a common rebuttal from pesticide companies and individuals who don’t care to do their research. Well, there just happens to be a patent to help with those issues as well. The US patent filed in 2003, once again from Paul Stamets, describes the utilization of a fungal delivery system for the purpose of “ecological rehabilitation and restoration, preservation and improvement of habitats, bioremediation of toxic wastes and polluted sites, filtration of agricultural, mine and urban runoff, improvement of agricultural yields and control of biological organisms.”

In addition, many people out there are currently providing solutions to remove/detox any potential pesticidechemicals from the human body. Strategies like community gardens, urban forests, and the resurgence of permaculture are springing up rapidly to pave the way towards a steadily growing number of pesticide-free dinner tables and families.

                                

On a larger scale, GMO food and pesticides are merely symptoms of an opposing consciousness that is rapidly changing. Put another way, these symptoms are the unwanted gifts from out of control corporations that, by definition, have no empathy towards the needs, health, or life of The People. As Neil Young mentioned in hisStarbucks Boycott, pesticide companies like Monsanto are, for the most part, not public-facing companies. As we are witnessing now with GMO brands, a boycott can severely damage their bottom line (lifeblood) but will not eliminate their business model. Due to the fact that they spend untold millions lobbying (purchasing) our politicians and regularly operate revolving doors between public and private positions, only a paradigm shift will eliminate the entire industry. At that moment, which is approaching, pesticide manufacturers can decide if they would like to cease being the problem and assist in the solution.

The good news is that whatever decision they choose won’t matter. A shift in consciousness around pesticide and GMO use eliminates their influence and knocks them off their fictitious monetary pedestals they believe to be sitting on.

The companies that profit from making these pesticides have made it clear they won’t stop, and our petitions to the EPA and FDA are mostly ignored due to revolving door leadership between pesticide makers and government regulators. Is there an answer? Yes Smart Pesticide there is!

Free Urban Food Will Fight Corporations Like Monsanto

                                     

Growing Our Own Food In Future to fight Monsanto

Agriculture Dr. Richard Alan Miller has described what he sees as proof of a shift in consciousness that is occurring in his recent work on the outskirts of Mexico City as well as in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Groups of children, varying in age, are learning to grow vegetables and salad greens on their own terms. Taking a page from Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf educational philosophy, the children become both the teachers and the students. They learn at their own pace while Dr. Miller and others are there to oversee and provide only minimal, gentle guidance. According to Dr. Miller, while observing the youth interacting with nature he states, “Many of the children had inherent, natural skill that was better than most master gardeners.” The food grown by the children was then used in nearby cities to feed hungry adults.“We are witnessing an educational shift with a new paradigm shift in agricultural reform in which small groups of children grow food for larger groups of adults” said Dr. Miller.

                                   

The answer for many of society’s problems can be found by walking in the opposite direction of the current push for further centralization being sold in many aspects of our life. Indeed, it is because of the centralization of the food system that we are now vulnerable to supply chain disruptions that can come from a variety of sources, instantly crippling unprepared communities.

In addition, a centralized food supply allows large corporations to monopolize the food sources while diminishing our rights and lessening the quality. As this has happened, answers began appearing like the seven acre Beacon Hill site in Seattle which made headlines in 2009 with plans for the first free open Food Forest within city limits. Simultaneously, the commonsense concept gained momentum through many cities across America.

This movement can be seen in the first crop of documentaries chronicling the rise of urban farming and community food forests. America is witnessing many communities develop local foodsheds in small cities and large metropolises alike. A foodshed encompass the land where the agricultural products are grown or raised, the route the food travels, the markets it is sold at, and finally the individuals who eat it. This is true community empowerment on multiple levels.

With these local movements beginning to establish powerful roots, we are now seeing a supercharged quickening of them with the use of alternative agriculture practices such as permaculture, biodynamic practices, aeroponics pyramids, vertical and roof top gardens for space limitations, drip irrigation and structured water systems for water conservation, and microbial, phyto, and bioremediation for accelerated soil building. The combination is propelling humanity forward and rebuilding the connection we have lost towards the relationship with our food and each other.

                                               

Summed up in one word; contributionism. A straightforward concept set around building community, following one’s passions, and removal from the monetary/corporate system. The open sourced, free food movements happening in every community on large and small scales are testaments to the permeation of this idea and its unstoppable growth. The fact remains that corporations have little power to do anything in the wake of decentralized, community volunteerism around a free food movement.

In America there are over 46,000,000 people on The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) –AKA food stamps. This is proof the old paradigm didn’t work and is over. As individuals and communities learn and empower themselves through decentralized, free food urban gardens, it is an absolute certainty that this number will decrease.