I wanted to share two children's books that we have come to love recently. There are not too many books that I enjoy reading over and over (and over) again to my children, but these have been around for a while and are definitely in the category of excellent books for children.

Wild About Books by Judy Sierra is about a librarian who accidently drives her Book Mobile into the zoo. "In a flash, every beast in the zoo was stampeding to learn all about this new something called reading." Molly, the librarian, finds books to suit each animal's tastes and needs, then teaches them the proper way to handle books. The love of reading leads the animals to write their own books and eventually build their own "Zoobrary." So,

Tiddler by Julia Donaldson is another favorite. While Julia has written many wonderful children's books including The Gruffalo, I thoroughly enjoyed this story about a little fish who likes to tell tall tales. Tiddler is always late to school, and he always has an elaborate story as an excuse. One day, however, he runs into real trouble and finds himself far from home. He's lost and afraid until he hears a familiar story. By following it back from one sea creature to another, he is able to re-trace his way home again. This book is an excellent read-aloud with its lilting rhythm and the opportunity to use many different voices in the text.

What have been your favorite children's picture books?

Louv starts off the book by showing what kind of world our children are being born into. My grandparents' generation was very much in contact with farms and natural life. My parents' generation may have been removed from that one step, but they still would have family or friends in the rural settings. Even my generation might still retain an element of that contact. The vast majority of the children today, however, are growing up in very urban environments, having far less contact with nature than anyone before them. Due to highly regulated housing communities, fear of litigation, concerns over crime and lack of access, more and more children are growing up indoors. Fort-building has been replaced by TV; exploration by Wii. As one 4th-grade child being surveyed explained, "I like to play indoors better 'cause' that's where all the electrical outlets are." It is yet to be fully revealed what the outcomes of these changes will mean, but it coincides with an increase in children with obesity, ADHD, depression, diabetes, and on and on.

Not only are our children further removed from nature, the very definition of nature is less and less clear in this age of technology. Animals have been cloned; research is being done on how to change nature's colors (i.e. tree leaves changing when toxins are in the air; butterfly wings in the pattern of brand logos, etc). On top of the morphing of nature, "fake" nature replaces the real thing: Rainforest Cafes, videos of nature, synthetic rocks...

We innately know that nature is necessary for our health and well-being, but it is only recently that more and more studies are being done on how nature might effect us on all levels of existence from creativity to self-image, from mental health to spirituality. It is a difficult topic to test with clear controls as nature and our response to it is very subjective, but results have shown that exposure to nature improves quality of life, and it is becoming clearer just how extensive the reverse is also true: lack of nature decreases quality of life.

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Louv took time to explain how our fears of letting our children loose in nature are generally misinformed. Nearly all cases of child abduction occur within the child's family. As far as health and safety, children are typically good at recognizing the limits of their abilities and with training, they can also learn the potential dangers in nature (poisonous vegetation, sounds of wasps, etc...)

Much of the end of the book deals with what is currently taking place in the US and Western Europe to return society to nature, whether in curriculums, clubs, legislation, land management, "green" living, etc... He gives suggestions for how parents and concerned adults can be involved in both small and large ways towards preserving what little "wild" is left, creating new natural habitats, and giving our children a chance to experience life outside of four walls.

Again, Louv's book is packed with information that I couldn't even briefly touch. This is a great book to read as we go from winter to spring to get us ready to embrace the great outdoors with the return of warmer days. I've been inspired to be intentional about taking my children outside and into nature.

The book deals more with slightly older boys as opposed to my toddler, so I will be referring back to it in the future, but it does help even now as I try to train and shape a male child. Rick Johnson explains some inherent traits of men as well as offering advice on how we as women can interact with and help our sons in ways they can understand. I appreciated the author's candidness as he talked about certain difficult areas that will have to be faced and addressed when raising sons. One of his major points is that a boy can only learn how to be a MAN from other men - therefore it is vital that we surround our sons with men of godly influence and character.

Certainly it is a great responsibility - a God-given responsibility - and above all he acknowledges that without God's help we can do nothing.

I know that although I don't see the fruits now, I am teaching my child by my example - especially with my attitudes when faced with life's difficulties.  I hope I learn this lesson young so that I can give my children many joy-filled years of sacrifice.  I have seen, too, how my discouragement and discontent can drag down my husband, whereas when I am joyful (though tired or disheveled or running late on dinner), a sense of harmony reigns in our house.  Truly we need God's strength to serve others as we learn to "lay down our lives" as He did for us.

After leaving the "Big Organic" farms, Pollan next lives and works five days on a family-run, fully-sustainable farm in Virginia called Polyface Farm. If you read no other part of this book, I think you would gain much from reading about this farm. It appealed to a deep part of me as a natural and beautiful way that man is supposed to subdue and rule the earth without destroying it in the process. You can check out Polyface Farms at their website, or for those of my family who are lucky enough to live close to them - you can even show up at the farm just to look around and see how things are done. They firmly believe that integrity of product relies on being fully transparent to their customers.

We can all see that "organic" has become a huge trend around the world with almost every grocery item offered in organic form. Seeing what a mass market and lucrative business selling organic can be, Pollan questions whether the word "organic" has stayed true to it's original ideal or is it just a lie to get more profit. To answer these questions, Pollan visits both large, corporate organic farms as well as the smaller "sustainable" family farms. Today I will share his finds about the first group.

While we would like to think that all our organic foods come from small, family-run farms, the truth is that most organic in grocery markets come from large corporations. Their marketing strategy is key in instilling peaceful, healthy images of bounding sheep and waving grasses. Organic sells a story with their food in name ("Earthbound"), from their picturesque packaging and descriptive labels ("free-range", "grass-fed", "fair-trade"). But what do these words all actually mean in practice? Is "organic" better?

Pollan finds these questions hard to answer since there are many different philosophies and practices within the organic world. However, he takes time to explain the development of organic farming from the alternative, hippie lifestyle of the '70s to the trendy, mass market phenomenon that it has become. A few years ago, the government finally set a standard that organic foods are to hold to, but this standard includes a level of permissible synthetics and additives. Some farmers feel like it is a farce and there is a desire to find a new word to describe their philosophy of organic farming - "beyond organic", "sustainable", etc.

In the big farms (which are often just a part of conventional mega-farms), things are run pretty much the same way non-organic farms are except the input is different. Vegetables and fruit have natural fertilizers, animals are fed organic foods. If you look closely, you might be disturbed at how much these operations mirror their conventional counterparts.  For example, we might read that chickens or their eggs are "free-range", but what that means legally is they are required to have "access to outdoors". Most of them are living in warehouses with a door that is locked until their last 2 weeks of life. Then farmers cross their fingers and hope the chickens won't venture forth and pick up diseases before they are ready to be killed. Organic milk often comes from feedlot cows fed an organic diet - not our image of freely-grazing Jerseys.

Pollan spent some time observing what it takes to get organic salad vegetables on our table. While it may be an "organic" process, it is certainly not a natural one. Soil is tilled repeatedly to kill weeds (and releasing it of many important nutrients), fertilizer is shipped in to compensate, and crop rotation is minimal. Huge amounts of energy are spent after harvesting to clean the vegetables, keep them at the right temperatures and ship them to our local grocery markets. Organic? Perhaps. Natural or sustainable, it is not.

Like his McDonald's test, Pollan ends this segment by cooking a homemade meal of roasted chicken and vegetables, a spring salad mix, steamed asparagus and organic ice cream topped with blue berries. He contemplated what the same meal would be like using conventional ingredients and concluded with these questions: Was it healthier? Probably, from lack of pesticides and chemicals; however, it might not necessarily be more nutritious depending on the freshness of the ingredients and the quality of the soil they were grown in. Did it taste better? Maybe, but again, that depends on freshness and the distance the food travelled. Typically organic vegetables do taste better because they take longer to grow, building thicker cell walls. Definitely the chicken was tastier compared to it's non-organic counterpart. Was it better for the environment? Farmers? Public health? Taxpayers? All, yes. Was a better in terms of fossil fuel usage? Definitely not!

Pollan ends by saying that you can't help seeing that "Industrial Organic" is a contradiction. While what they do is better than conventional farming, it is not possible to run things on such large scales, covering such vast distances and hold true to the philosophy of "organic" as people imagine it to be. 

Originally, I had divided this section up into five parts: Corn, Cow, Complex Foods, Consumers and Cheeseburgers & Chicken Nuggets. Today I will focus on the first two sections. Here we go....

Corn

Pollan starts off by taking us to a farm in Iowa which a couple generations ago was a self-sufficient community consisting of a variety of animals, vegetables and fruit, existing on the energy of the sun and working together to create a harmonious balance. Now the animals have been sent off to live their short lives in factories while the diversity of plants have given way to make room for rows upon rows of densely-growing, hybrid corn. Why? There is a lot of technical information to answer this question, but largely because of government policies both set up to help as well as to exploit the farmers, and lobbied by mega-food corporations.

This new corn, is actually not the sweet corn that we know, but a hybrid corn generated to grown densely, year-after-year, to feed the meat we eat and fill the foods we love. This corn drains the soil of nutrients, particularly nitrogen - which plants, and therefore humans, cannot live without. Formerly, corn would only be grown on a field 2 out of 5 years, rotated with legumes which replenish the soil. (Soil can only be replenished with nitrogen by two natural means: through a process involving the bacteria on the roots of legumes and when lightening strikes causing a chemical reaction with the nitrogen in the air allowing it to rain into the soil.) Thanks to modern technology derived from World War I's poisonous gas inventions, we now have synthesized nitrogen in generous amounts to spread over fields and feed the ravenous corn. Farmers use copious amounts of this fertilizer "just in case". It runs off into streams, rivers and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico, spreading large amounts of pollution along the way.

I haven't even touched the information about how the corn farmers are all in debt and surviving by government subsidies despite massive corn output year after year.

So what happens to all this corn after it is harvested? It heads out all over the US and overseas, but the majority of it is sent to feedlots to fatten up animals for the slaughter.


One interesting note that Pollan pointed out is the amount of petroleum it takes to get a cow through this fast-track process. Thirty-five gallons of oil for one cow! The production and transportation of our food goods alone uses almost one-fifth of our total petroleum consumption.

I'll stop here and let you digest all that information. Stay tuned for Part 1b where we will find this corn showing up at our dinner tables in all sorts of disguises.