Publisher’s Blog Archive

Will Big Food work in the natural market?

Pizza and friesAmerica has been on a long binge. We’ve consumed vast quantities of the fruits of mass production. We’ve grown up with the siren song of more, more and more for less.  But now we find ourselves in an economically troubled world where cheap food has taken its toll on our health, the environment is in trouble, and we depend on a continuous stream of globally sourced stuff produced by people at the very bottom of the economic food chain.

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Factory mass-market conformity is dead

Back in 1964 (my apologies if you weren’t born then) Bob Dylan sang about changing times. In one of his most famous songs the singer-poet wrote, “The order is rapidly fadin’, and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.”

No question that the sixties shook things up (yes, I was there), but it turns out that it took industrialized America until the end of the millenium to witness real status quo-altering change.

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Austin Real Food Rally Kick Off

Organic Connections publisher, Ken Whitman, at the Austin Rally for Real Food October 2, 2011Organic Connections publisher, Ken Whitman, was the lead-off speaker at the Austin Rally for Real Food on October 2nd. Here's Ken holding up an ear of unlabeled corn, making the point: "How is the public to know what's in it? They should have the choice as to whether they and their children want to be part of the largest biological human experiment in the history of this planet."

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Steve Jobs — In Memorium

We believe that it’s appropriate to join the many who have acknowledged the contribution Steve Jobs has made to our lives.

The impact that Steve Jobs and Apple have had on my creative and business life has been profound but it’s in our ability to reach out to each other that the tools which he designed become world changing. Certainly he did not invent the Internet and couldn’t have achieved what he did without countless others, but he simplified the process and made these new tools into art themselves.

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Do we really have to subsidize junk food?

by Ken Whitman, Publisher (Cross posted from NewHope360.com)

Are subsidies making our food choices absurd?Why is it that some of our societal problems persist or even get worse, despite various high-profile programs aimed at handling them?

Money is the all-purpose tool of government. Surely the answer lies therein. 

When it's feeding time in Washington, there are a lot of mouths lined up at the trough. Everyone wants a piece of the pie. Elected representatives want to keep their constituents happy, and that means cash in one form or another. Party platforms require cash in order to fulfill their visions and promises. Special interests employ dedicated teams of lawyers and lobbyists to secure their part of the federal fodder. Daily life in D.C. is pretty much a giant tug-of-war attempting to channel some of Uncle Sam’s greenbacks in one direction or another.

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Land of the free and home of the brave

Standing up to GMO business as usualSometimes it takes bravery to maintain your freedom. But in everyday life freedom doesn’t seem to be much of an issue. We have a lot of advantages as Americans, and life’s routines seldom bring challenges significant enough to require that type of courage.

Unfortunately, while most of us are occupied one way or another with the pursuit of happiness, economic and political forces are stoking the moneymaking machinery of our society without regard for our welfare.

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You don’t have to be Einstein

EinsteinAlbert Einstein was credited as defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sometimes it takes quite a while to fully understand the results of our actions. Things we’ve done or items we’ve consumed repeatedly that were considered good or benign may reveal themselves as damaging in the longer term.

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Time to Upgrade Our Mental Software

Human Thinking 2.0Human Thinking 1.0 (Western Edition) was overall a pretty nifty mental operating system. Testament to this is the fact that we’re still here after all these years. But of course there are bugs that we can’t continue to ignore. We seem to inevitably end up periodically in armed conflict and have made rather a mess of our economy, our environment and our health.

The biggest problem with the system is that, while we are all interconnected in a myriad of ways, Human Thinking 1.0 is not a networked system. It functions on the basis of what’s good for me or us and largely ignores the resultant effects created in other areas.

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The detoxification of America

You’ve probably heard the term toxic asset from media covering the financial crisis. Here’s a quick refresher for those not fluent in economic-speak. An asset is anything that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic worth. Something toxic is harmful, injurious, poisonous or even deadly. A toxic asset is an asset whose value has fallen significantly and for which there is no longer a functioning market. The asset can’t be sold at a price satisfactory to the holder. If, for example, you bought a car and later it turned out to have a manufacturing defect that rendered it dangerous to drive, your car would have become a toxic asset, sellable only for parts.

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Who’s doing what to whom and why

If you’re proactive about living a healthy life and desire the same for your family, friends and others, today’s America forces you into the role of an activist. Now, I’m a child of the sixties, so this comes fairly naturally to me. But when you have to fight over not getting poisoned or sick or genetically modified by the food you eat, and the government giving free rein to chemical, biotech and food companies to conduct human biological experiments on us for profit, you’ve got to wonder what the hell is going on? (pardon my “French”).

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Why do we have to fight for sustainability?

Good people are making positive changes in the world today. It seems that many of humanity’s best and brightest have understood that we have been heading down a dangerous path. They observed the warning signs in our environment, in our food supply, in our health and the health of our children. They are rising to the occasion and, by their own efforts, helping alter our course from certain destruction to laying the foundation for a sustainable planet and sustainable living.

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The Problem behind Childhood Obesity

Childhood Obesity Awareness Month Blog Carnival

This article was written for inclusion in the blog carnival hosted by Littlestomaks to promote awareness of childhood obesity as part of the National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. Please read to the end of this article to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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According to government figures, childhood obesity rates in America have tripled over the past three decades. Today, nearly one in three American children is overweight or obese. One-third of all children born in 2000 or later will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives; many others will face chronic obesity-related health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and asthma.

To emphasize this untenable situation, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that people who were obese as children are more likely to die from disease before the age of 55.

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The positive power of non-conformity

One of the great things about America is that we have the freedom, as individuals, to come up with ideas and act on them. We don’t need to apply for a license to proffer a better way of doing things or launch an enterprise that, even in some small way, would make people’s lives better.

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The capacity to redesign our lives

I invite you to consider that, with the exception of severe weather and natural disasters, the troubles in our world are man-made. But most of us are good people and very few of us actually set out to do bad things—in fact, quite the opposite. So how do we, as the most intelligent inhabitants of this planet, end up moving from one potential disaster to another as chronicled in the subject we call history?

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Organic Connections Wins Summit Creative Award

Organic Connections was announced as a winner of the Summit Creative Award in the magazine category for 2010.

Over the last sixteen years, the competition has established itself as one of the premier arbiters of creative excellence. Summit is known for its rigorous evaluative criteria and top international judges from firms including J. Walter Thompson USA, Inc.; McCann Relationship Marketing; Wieden + Kennedy; Hal Riney and Partners; Grey Advertising; TBWA/Chiat/Day; Young and Rubicam; Leo Burnett; Ogilvy; and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Organic Connections publisher Ken Whitman commented, “We are very pleased to receive this recognition for the creative work that we put into our magazine. It is a labor of love. Our objective in both the writing and design of the publication is to achieve a high quality of communication. We thank the judges for their consideration and validation of our efforts.”

Organic Connections also received the Apex Award for Publication Excellence in 2008.

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The exploitation of our future

The word exploitation means “use (of a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way.” Much to our collective shame, we have permitted our children to be exploited as a market niche. Under the advertised benefits of convenience and lower cost, this experiment in free-market capitalism has resulted in the enrichment of mega food corporations and a disaster for our future generation.

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Are we getting what we pay for?

Americans love cheap food. We spend less of our incomes  on food now than ever before. In 1949, we allotted 22 percent of our incomes to food. In 2009, that figure dropped to only 10 percent (about half of what the Japanese and French spend). Seems good until you correlate another set of statistics. Back in 1959, only 4 percent of children were overweight. Today that figure has climbed to 19 percent. In 1979, 28 percent of adults were overweight. Now it’s a shocking 64 percent.

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Are we heading into the future or the past?

When it comes to the direction our lives in this society are going to take, future or past may be the question.

The past, with roots extending back to the Industrial Revolution, is represented by a paradigm (a model, approach or underlying assumption) in which man and technology subjugate nature. Natural resources are used up and mountains of waste disposed of without regard to consequences, while assembly-line principles of “efficiency” are applied to food production, human health, and life in its many forms.

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Have We Learned by Our Mistakes?

Cell culture

The philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It certainly seems that we have a very short memory in America. We are constantly searching for “wonder” materials. Wall Street gets excited by them, our government throws open regulatory doors to give them free reign, and corporations can’t wait to be first to market something new. Of course this is good business for PR firms and ad agencies and it gives journalists something to write about.

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Putting your money where your mouth is

America’s love affair with cheap food has landed us in ninth place on the obesity scale out of 194 countries ranked by the World Health Organization. According to the New York Times, two-thirds of the US population is overweight.

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Growing Up in a Chemical World

Chemicals on our livesWe live in a world filled with chemicals. In fact, we’ve created a society in which there are roughly 80,000 industrial chemicals all around us. A figure this large deserves a moment to just pause and think about.

The unvarnished truth is that all of these chemicals haven’t been studied for safety. We don’t know what happens when they combine. We don’t know what happens when they get into our food or in our environment or on our skin.

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A broader view of health

HealthcareIn any meaningful discussion of health we should first define our terms. Health, says the dictionary, is “the state of being free from illness or injury; a person’s mental or physical condition.”

We should also look at a word that not only is getting a lot of current attention but is the focus of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. That word of course is healthcare. This, says our dictionary, is “the maintenance and improvement of physical and mental health, esp. through the provision of medical services.”

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The good, the bad and the unsustainable

To quote Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” This seems quite applicable to the present state of affairs in our fair country. We are living in an age of both wisdom and foolishness.

I suggest that at the root of this dichotomy lies bad, or simply unworkable, technology. How do you know a technology is bad? By its observable results—not by its promises or “scientific” justifications. Good technologies lead us toward the best of times. Bad ones give us newspaper headlines and top stories on the 6 o’clock news.

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Celebrate diversity or mandate uniformity?

Life isn’t always neat. Just ask any parents with young children. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nature doesn’t come in just one size or one color. Neither do people. English poet William Cowper once said, “Variety’s the very spice of life.” Do we want to revel in nature’s bounty or see Earth become one giant clean room?

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Whose country is it anyway?

I recently returned from a trip to our nation’s capital to do some lobbying on behalf of the natural products industry. It was a wake-up call for me, as I haven’t been all that interested in politics.

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