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Vote for the Dinner Party: 2012 Will be The Year that the Food Movement Finally Enters Politics

Hello dearest readers of my humble blog. I have so much to say. These past couple of weeks have been filled with hopeful excitement and an array of creative, cultural and political activities that I can't wait to share with all when I get the chance. While I get to it, I'll take some time to share one of my pursuits because it is time sensitive, requires the immediate action of voters in California, and it's very important.

Aside my work, class, and creative side projects, I've also been volunteering for a political effort call The Right to Know which is of top-notch importance in the United States, but that increasingly indirectly has also affected — and will continue to affect if nothing is done about it — the rest of the world. My professor and mentor Michael Pollan wrote the article I'll share bellow for the Times that gives a general explanation of the Food Movement and why the labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms California's Proposition 37 proposes is so important and simply the first step towards something much bigger than labeling — to re-modeling an unhealthy corrupt industrial food system to a healthier and more sustainable one. If you are in California, please register to vote before the deadline on Monday, if you haven't done that already, and please VOTE YES on Proposition 37! It's so important. The big corporations that use GMOs in their products without letting us know have gotten filthy rich by way of this deceit to us their consumers, and now are spending millions to defeat this proposition.  While I finish my own manuscript about the subject, go to the Right to Know website, watch this video, and/or read the article following if you want more information...

Vote for the Dinner Party: Is this the year that the food movement finally enters politics?
by Michael Pollan

One of the more interesting things we will learn on Nov. 6 is whether or not there is a “food movement” in America worthy of the name — that is, an organized force in our politics capable of demanding change in the food system. People like me throw the term around loosely, partly because we sense the gathering of such a force, and partly (to be honest) to help wish it into being by sheer dint of repetition. Clearly there is growing sentiment in favor of reforming American agriculture and interest in questions about where our food comes from and how it was produced. And certainly we can see an alternative food economy rising around us: local and organic agriculture is growing far faster than the food market as a whole. But a market and a sentiment are not quite the same thing as a political movement — something capable of frightening politicians and propelling its concerns onto the national agenda.

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that — to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too. Now, there is much that’s wrong with California’s notorious initiative process: it is an awkward, usually sloppy way to make law. Yet for better or worse, it has served as a last- or first-ditch way for issues that politicians aren’t yet ready to touch — whether the tax rebellion of the 1970s (Prop 13) or medical marijuana in the 1990s (Prop 215) — to win a hearing and a vote and then go on to change the political conversation across the country. Read More >>

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