No Hay In Milltown.

In Milltown (now an ironic name), a farmer/friend tells my wife and I that too many of her local colleagues have turned to planting corn because it’s a cash crop subsidized by government and big corporations. In a contrarian move, she decided to grow a lot of hay, and is now selling it at top dollar to neighbors with livestock. Many local farmers are now worried about affordable food supply for their animals over the winter.

Furthermore, says Kim Henneman, DVM, FAAVA, Park City, UT (with a touch of satire), “Let’s not also forget to look at how all these monocrops are doing in this horrible drought now happening in the US. I have seen a few news reports that the few farmers who are not growing the Monsanto GMs [genetically modified] are finding their corn crops doing a bit better than their neighbors with the GM crops. And with so much of the American food supply controlled by these conglomerate corporations insisting we use their corn or soy, it’s going to be interesting to see where prices DON’T go up.”

Henneman continues, “Our European friends were right to hold out against these foods and we’ll be turning to them and wonderfully clean and ethical China for food if we keep up like this.”

Another sad comment on rural degradation: We left the farm and proceeded to mainstreet to eat a late dinner at Milltown’s only open restaurant. I asked the waitress if I could substitute my potato chips with a vegetable. Her earnest, unconsidered reply? “We don’t have a vegetable on the menu tonight.”

Nothing green struck our table for the entire meal. The iceberg lettuce was actually white. It seems that green is out this season. Is it perhaps in acknowledgement of the drought?

Most painfully, ALL ten customers that walked in or out of the place over the hour, were 50 to 150 pounds overweight (no hyperbole)–including, cruelly, ALL the kids.

Obesity has become a moral crisis, not just a health concern or even an epidemic. Bluntly, it feels like epic genocide to me. A whole class of people, an entire third or more of our nation, decimated by a systematized, socialized, choreographed and government financed meme that will haunt every minute of their lives–physically, psychically, professionally––until they die an expensive death.

Meanwhile, the 2012 London Olympics sizzle in the background on TV, with the “state-of-the-art” women’s US gymnastic team pulling super-hero moves, obliterating the competition––in physical (if not steroidal), gravity defying poetry––pausing only for commercials packed with impossibly slender eye-candy types. The dissonance of this is unbearable, deafening without being audible in the least. The TV volume is off. How incideous.

So I ordered the sour kraut, it was more affordable than a side of hay.