What’s happened to the farmland?
We re-routed our trip a bit so we could stay an extra day in KC. Last night we stayed in Nashville, Illinois in a small hotel, with a comfortable beds, surrounded by nice, country people. I’m getting a sense of how hard life is here in the middle of this country. It seemed hard in Nevada and Utah and Wyoming with all their rocks and dust and mountains, but here in farm country people seem to be barely holding on–holding on to the dream of farming.
It is obvious that some LARGE corporation controls what is planted, grown and harvested. The fields seem to have been fallow for a while. They still have the broken corn stalks from last Fall. I wondered why there were no tell tale signs of cold weather crops like spinach and kale and beets. Then I remembered: Monsanto. Kind of a sad thing since this part of the country was built on old fashioned farming.
Another thing that has struck me is that “home cooking” is not what it used to be. There are lots of these kinds of restaurants but the food seems like it just came out of a can. I haven’t found a salad that wasn’t filled with mostly white iceberg lettuce and hard little “cherry” tomatoes. I feel like I need to hunt for a natural foods store to get something organic. What have we done to our source of sustenance? Will we ever find our way back to the natural ways of producing food?
It’s a lot to think about as we carry on down the road through fields of nothing, waiting for their GMO seeds to be planted.
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on the road to simplicity 