When is Food Actually Food?

photo courtesy of Evgeni Dinev (freedigitalphotos.net)

When is food, food, and when is it not food? 

New Moons are generally markers for new beginnings, a time to plant seeds and make new starts.  But what about a New Moon in Virgo (such as we will have on September 8th), where the ruler of Virgo, Mercury, is Retrograde?  In Virgo.  And what about the fact that at the time of the New Moon, 2 planets, Venus and Jupiter, are just about, but not quite, changing signs?  It feels like a beginning, that is not quite a beginning, because in order to make that new start, some things that are broken, unhealthy, or simply not working the way they should, have to be fixed first.   

In recent news we learned (some poor people first hand) about a huge outbreak of salmonella from eggs produced in apparently (appallingly) filthy conditions.  Virgo rules foods and foodstuffs, it rules the harvest, it also rules health and cleanliness.  Reports released the end of August by the US FDA show numerous possible sources of contamination at the targeted “farms” including rodent, bug and wild bird infestation, uncontained manure (lovely), and holes in the walls that allowed the alleged infesters to come in.  It’s enough to turn Virgo’s stomach in utter horror at the mere thought....

Then I spontaneously picked up a book that my daughter had given me, entitled “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.  I could barely get through the first few chapters without having nightmares about inedible corn, fake tofu and artificially fattened cows, and the corporations that orchestrate this colorful tableau.  Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the world, and ADM, manage how corn is grown, how much is grown, what grows it, and how much it costs.  They provide the pesticide and fertilizer, operate most of the grain elevators, broker and ship most of the exports, perform the milling, feed the livestock and slaughter the corn-fattened animals; distill the ethanol made from the corn; and manufacture the high-fructose corn syrup and all the myriad of other things derived from field corn.  Corn is in 1/4 of all the items in the supermarket.  It is everywhere and in everything.  It is omnipresent.  And most of the corn grown is inedible.

Then I went to Facebook to escape reality and someone had posted a “link” about “GMO” foods escaping their laboratory mutated fields for some wild herbal cohabitation, thereby mixing their mutant seed with normal, non-carcinogenic, real-food foods.  The title of the article is subtly called “8 foods that could be disastrous for your health”.  I naturally had to download the brochure on GMO foods and how to avoid them.  When you hear that Canola oil and Soybeans are not safe any more, where can you turn? 

All this just begs the question, “When is food actually food, and when is it not food, or just pretending to be food?”  Or, “When is food actually nutritious, and when is it poison in disguise?”

Perhaps what we really need to do, this New Moon, is explore what it is that we are ingesting, assimilating into our systems, and allowing to poison our environments and ourselves, before we can take full stock of what it truly means to have a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy planet.  Ahhh.... Virgo, alchemists of the harvest and the midwives of the fields, we need your healing guidance now more than ever. 

The goal of life is in living in agreement with Nature. ~Zeno