A lot of my grey matter has been boiling over the issue of 'our food supply' lately. It's not a pretty picture, but some bright spots. The good news right away is that the two salmon smolt killing dams on the Rogue River are out and king salmon are spawning where their reservoirs once were. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to leave office and stop sucking out all the water from the salmon streams in California and sending it to farms and developers in the south of the state.

What got me started was a numbness that began creeping over my skin, starting with matching spots on my big toes, and ending with my scalp going numb. Turns out it's peripheral neuropathy and 20 million people have it. It started getting worse while doing shipyard work in Alaska last winter for a couple of months anchored out off the map in a forlorn bay with howling winds and who knows what kind of a wind chill factor. But when I got back to sunny Central Point the numbness had spread.

My doctor said I was intolerant of wheat and caffeine, two substances we consumed a lot of on the ship. We made our own bread and who doesn't drink copious quantities of coffee in Alaska. And that's only because a steady IV drip of Espresso is just too hard to manage up there, especially on a ship rocking and rolling. Well, I got off the gluten and coffee and the worst of the numbness has gone away. But my research has led to further worries that might make gluten intolerance look like a mosquito bite compared to a grizzly attack.

For starters, when you Google search this stuff, you find lots of articles on Genetically Modified Organisms, aka, GM crops. Recently, there has been a push by the Obama administration to allow the import of GM salmon. Since I'm such a salmon guy, this one really caught my attention, and I read the articles. Very scary when combined with the evidence already there of liver damage and worse from eating GM crops: soy, corn, sugar beets, some squash, etc. There goes my corn chips too.

Let me start over. Turns out 'gluten' in wheat isn't the problem so much as the lectin in the gluten. It attaches to the sugar molecules in the stomach lining, such as mannose, and disables it. Your food in turn just sits there and rots. And lectin is in the night shade family of plants as well: tomatoes, potatoes, etc. We've already heard how dangerous some members of this family are, like in deadly poison. You really have to peel the onion, so to speak, to see all that is going on with the whole toxic food thing.

I just don't get why anybody thinks it's all right to mess with the food supply on purpose, except it's corporate greed gone to seed. And of course, now these food corporations can donate any amount of money they want to influence Congress. They only had to snap their fingers and the FDA was willing to not require labeling of GM salmon as such. After all they didn't have to do it with corn and soy products. But food from animal sources is different, just way out there in front of public opinion and probably always will be.

It's shenanigans like this that give outfits like the California Department of Environmental Quality the encouragement, and 'license' to follow suit. Like the recent case where they ignored four Nobel Laureate scientists and the State's own experts and approved a known neurotoxin to be sprayed on the State's strawberry crop. This stuff is used to purposely cause cancer in rats in experiments. Of course it will cause cancer in bugs too, if they didn't die off first. They don't have any information on it killing people, so I guess it all right?

Just like the GM salmon, the company did a couple of tests that were hardly statistically significant, and on top of that, they maintain "people ought to do fine with it." What if it's like the drug that women took that caused so many birth defects. It's already known that GM corn causes still-born births in animals. Heck, you throw down GM corn to pigs and they won't touch it. Neither will squirrels, rats, cows, etc. They fatten cows up on GM corn only for a month, because after that too many of them start to die.

You can Google all this yourself, and you should. Don't take my word for it. This kind of information just doesn't jump out of the funny pages of the local newspaper. I did see in the Ag papers that GM grass of some sort got out of a test plot in Eastern Oregon and spread quite a ways via bird droppings. Aggies, as I remember the students being called who frequented the agriculture Hall at Oregon State when I went there, take exception to GM weeds going virial. Apparently it's a real revelation to them about the side effects of GM crops they produce. It's not like OSU or Monsanto are going to divulge the dark side of the movement to make more money from highly industrialized food production. Eat Local!!!

The chefs of America are hip to the problem and have 'grown local produce and meat' as one of their top concerns for the coming year. The use of sustainable and wild local seafood is a top priority as well. But, what does the National Fisheries Institute or Monsanto care for the chefs? If they can dominate the supply then the chefs have no choice. Right? I don't think so. As Americans wake up to these dastardly deeds, and worry about being a statistic instead of a grandparent. I think you'll see more food co-ops and restaurants start up that carry the good stuff. Nobody wants to die early if it's just a matter of where you park to do your shopping. Ashland Food Co-op proved that.

So, hope that Jerry Brown of California rescinds their renegade DEQ's order to allow the poisoning of 80% of all the strawberries sold in this country. And hope that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife doesn't find some other way to kill salmon smolts just so they can count fish easier. Yeah, it gets real easy to count fish when there are only one or two coming back to spawn. Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing. Thomas Jefferson said if it were a choice between having government or a free press, he'd choose freedom of the press. Someone should tell that to Nancy Pelosi too, by the way.

In any event, don't eat the corn chips. Maybe not even corn bread. And get tested for intolerance to gluten. I know that my knees feel like they have greased ball bearings in the mornings now, as opposed to my previous hobbling around first thing. They say glucosamine is good for joints. Turns out it attaches to lectin in the stomach so the lectin can't attach to the sugars on the stomach wall. That in turn greatly reduces the pollution in the blood stream from bad digestion which was causing inflammation in the joints.

I know I can't eat pizza without having dire consequences; something about the gene pool being altered after the Great Plague in Europe in the middle ages. I've never tried taking glucosamine for dessert after pizza. The ball bearings and the reduced numbness and headaches is all I need to back off wheat though. Lots of good alternatives to cook with anyway. You can make flour out of a fence post if you have half a mind to.

Seriously, my new flour formula for baking stuff is two cups each of sweet white rice flour and brown rice flour, one cup each of almond meal and tapioca starch. An Alaska correspondent swears by his sourdough pancakes, in fact practically lives off them. I'd have to research some more on how the culture affects the lectin content of the little wheat flour he does use in his mix of flours.

And on the positive side of local fish production, there were 54 king salmon spawning pairs spotted in the Rogue River where the Savage Rapids Dam reservoir was two years ago. And there were 28 spawning pairs counted in the new Rogue River channel above where the Gold Rey dam was just this summer. Meaning that shortly a guy might not have to go ten years without catching a king on the upper Rogue like I read in the Medford Mail Tribune.

Eating local has it's challenges for sure. You can grow your own pretty well, except there aren't any community gardens, especially not to the extent they have them just outside of town in Europe. And it's hard to get your wife to eat bear meat, especially if she grew up in that sea of concrete they call Los Angeles. It makes life interesting, not a challenge at all. And it certainly is fun poking the likes of Monsanto and Pacific Seafoods.