Sweet Relish and "No Right To Eat or Produce Food"

Yesterday, I teased the very last of the cucumbers (just a few) from the high tunnel to make a batch of sweet relish.  I love homemade relish.  As I cook it, it's one of those foods whose smell makes my mouth water.  The flavor of homemade relish is like the difference between a store-bought tomato and a home-grown tomato.  You can't describe how it's different, but the flavor is so much more ... there.  Yum!

I love growing my own food.  I love that the food I'm feeding my family is more nutritionally dense then what I would buy at the store.  And the food I grow is, I feel, safer than what I buy at the store.  

But my right to eat and produce food seems to be under attack.

In Wisconsin, during a raw milk trial (the sale of raw milk has been targeted in sting operations leading to court cases) a judge said that, "Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume foods of their choice."  Walter at Sugar Mountain Farm, writes about it here.

In a previous post, Walter writes about the attack on small American farmers seen in the movie Farmageddon: The Unseen War On American Family Farms.  

I have to wonder if someday I'll be on a back alley selling my freshly grown - in dirt - carrots like they're  contraband?

To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

 ~Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural."

- Thomas Jefferson