There are a thousand reasons to Occupy.  Some are purely economic.  Others center on human rights and social justice.  Then there are the reasons that focus on the quality of life we are able to live in a world of over-industrialization.  Capitalizing on the basic human need for survival, corporations have driven our most fundamental necessities and basic creature comforts into the toilet in the name of profit.  Everything from blankets to body wash, beef to bottled water have entered the new market format in some hardly recognizable, bastardized version of its former self, spreading disease, widening the income gap, and “brand-washing” the human mind.  None of these realities leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as industrial food.

If you know me personally, you know how seriously I take food.  My small household (which includes me, my husband – reformed from a Coco-Puff childhood, and my 2-year-old who rejects cookies but will clear a table of fruit and hummus in seconds flat) emphasizes food and eating not as a part of life but as a way of life.  We have dedicated every inch of soil in our itty-bitty yard to our garden and line our driveway with potted veggies.  What we can’t grow for ourselves, we walk to our farmers’ market for.  We order eggs, meats, and dairy items from those farmers all winter.  Even our bread comes from a local orchard and bakery that procures local, sustainable flours.  And, when basic geography stands between us and food, we investigate the origin and company history of every item we buy before it goes on the grocery list.  We understand that eating real food, “slow food,” non-industrial food is essential to our life and wellness, but eating sustainably raised food is also critical to the health and vitality of our economy, our nation, and our planet.

This week, one of our favorite farms, run by an Amish family in Lancaster County, closed for business.  The loss of this farm is tremendous to my family and the countless others it served.  The farmer and his family proudly and meticulously raised meat, eggs, and dairy items from their beautiful and relatively small acreage.  The animals were treated with dignity and respect.  They were given room to roam, kept outside (weather permitting), and were never given “feed.”  Instead, they foraged or grazed upon the green hillsides that sloped gently toward a collection of impeccable buildings used for housing, milking, slaughtering, and so forth.  The family even hosted picnics for their buyers and gave them tours of the property, promoting a connection between suburbia and its food source, between farmer and consumer.  It was an amazing place run by amazing people.

The farm did not close for financial reasons, health code infractions, or even safety concerns.  It closed because the farmer could no longer withstand the political pressures levied against it by agencies that are attempting to squeeze the life (and money) out of the slow-food movement.  After a two-year FDA investigation of a Maryland buyers’ collective that was obtaining raw milk from over state lines (from 20 miles away to be exact), the farmer was named as being one of many who supplied the collective with the milk which – in the great state of Maryland – is considered contraband.  No need to reread that.  I did indeed say that raw milk is contraband in Maryland.

Keeping in mind that the law is the law, even if the law is completely ridiculous, it still does not strike me as an offense that should cost a man his farm – or the taxpayers a two-year investigation culminating in armed raids.  What is so dangerous about unpasteurized milk that requires it being seized by government officials and the home of a farmer, his wife, and their seven children should be raided by men with black boots and semi-automatic weapons?

It isn’t the milk, at all actually.  Milk, as with almost everything edible, can safely be consumed raw if eaten in a timely enough fashion.  Many cultures eat raw meats, organs, and other animal products.  If fact, older hunting traditions in many parts of the world still call for the heart of an animal to be cut out and eaten while the animal is still warm.  The hunters eat it, love it, and live to tell.  Despite incontrovertible evidence that raw milk is safe for human consumption if kept correctly, our government attempts to limit access of this item, among others, to the public market, and it doesn’t take much digging to understand why.

Slow-food (sustainably grown, locally sourced, unprocessed food) is a growing movement in America.  Our years of blind consumption are catching up to us, made evident by the sharp rise in disease, obesity, and physical/mental disorders in both children and adults.  Simultaneously, the rising cost of healthcare pinches our pockets, forcing us to seek out cheaper food sources, and sending us deeper into the cyclical problem.  Driven by an instinctual self-preservation, an increasing number of people are beginning to look at and speak out about the garbage dump that has become of the American dinner table.

With only a handful of corporations controlling the vast majority of food production in the U.S., easily discernible patterns of abuse and mishandling begin to emerge.  Like recipes for disaster, corporations have invented an infinite number of ways to make food play on our bodies’ weaknesses, fueling our inherent biological craving for fat and satiating every urge ten times over.

They have managed to make food inexpensive to produce by bulking it up with highly processed and extremely cheap ingredients like the “meals,” “syrups,” and “oils” of corn and soy, crops that can be farmed on massive scales by an increasingly industrialized agricultural system.  Conversely, because they control such large portions of the market, they are able to sell this despicably cheap food at incredibly low prices, “helping” families who are struggling to make ends meet.  Heck, if you stay loyal to scanning the mid-week, mailbox junk pile, you can probably even clip yourself a coupon.  But what are we really getting in return for our $1.99?

Sick; and we are getting sicker by the generation.  We are trading our physical health and the health of our planet for brand loyalty and disconnection for the fragile system that feeds us.  While Americans toss their carts full of colorful boxes containing mostly things they can’t identify or even pronounce, the small farms and food systems that have supported humans for millennia are rotting.

Meanwhile, political appointees sworn to uphold a fair, healthy, and honest food system are being selected from the insider’s network of pigs and criminals that we are also suddenly all too aware of.  In fact, the man currently heading the FDA’s food policy department (writing the laws that “protect” American consumers from unsafe foods and food handling) is Michael R. Taylor, formerly one of Monsanto’s most successful lobbyists.  With agendas that aim not to protect the food supply but to exploit it, we tack our grocery list to the laundry list of corporate corrupted, politically manipulated systems spinning wildly out of control.

As a result of these corrupt food systems, farmers find themselves in the crosshairs, but not for distributing contaminated products, poisoning consumers with gross mishandling, polluting or exploiting natural resources near their farms, or even manipulating food products to the point of unhealthy for consumption (all things the industrial food systems does regularly).  They find themselves coming under fire for supporting simple, timeless ideologies about freedom and food going hand-in-hand, for rejecting participation in a food system that is ultimately unhealthy and destructive to all things earthly, and for promoting the idea that food can come from outside the market system.

Though my Amish friend may have chosen, no doubt for the safety of his family, to take himself out of the line of fire, there are thousands of farmers willing to stand and fight.  They fire up their tractors, day in and day out, in willful dissent of the developing status quo.  They sow the seeds of change, of resistance, of tomorrow, and occasionally even of broccoli.  Every time you walk into a grocery store, looking at mountainous heaps of colorful and grotesquely oversized fruits and veggies and examining beef that comes from a place you have never even thought about, remember these warriors in overalls.  They are plowing for your health, your economy, your future, and the future of our planet.

It is high time to Occupy more than our streets.  We need to Occupy our fields as well.  Now, go hug a farmer.