For a time traveller from 2036, what’s scariest in the year 2000? — the “food”

Halloween is a big deal in North America. So to honour the occasion, we’ve got Zombie legislation rising from the grave (see post below), and now, food that scares even time travelers from the future! Hope I’m not “weirding out” too many readers with these Halloween specials.

Michael Schmidt was part of a small wave of European biodynamic farmers who came over in the early 1980s to set up farms in Ontario. Other notables from that era include Wilhelm Pfenning and Lawrence Andres. One of the first of that wave of biodynamic farmers to come to Ontario from Germany in the 80s, Berhard Hack, had the perception that what we needed to do in this country was to “empty the cities and fill the countryside”.

From John Titor’s reports — if they can be believed — it sounds like Bernhard Hack’s idea eventually becomes reality. John’s version of the future is much more agricultural; he reports that in his “future” a much higher proportion of the populace is directly involved in work on the land.

John Titor claims to have been a visitor from that future — from the year 2036. Naturally the people in the time he was visiting had a lot of questions. Read the whole thing here. And now a sampling from his answers:

Zombie legislation: ghost of Bill C-51 rises again to join “the undead”

Note: This is not about raw milk. But it is about health freedom — deciding for yourself what to eat.

On October 30th, 2008, the Globe and Mail published a story by Martin Mittelstaedt titled “Ottawa to revive supplement safety bill”. On the plus side, it’s good the Globe is giving us at least this early warning. My perception was that, last time, the Globe’s coverage of the huge citizen uprising over Bill C-51 was somewhere between minimal and non-existent. Even this story downplays the extent of citizen outrage the last “attempt on the health of Canadians” generated last spring. In case you missed it, Bill C-51 would have outlawed a wide range of natural supplements and reclassified them as pharmaceuticals that you’d need a doctor’s prescription for. Draconian penalties were decreed for even giving your neighbour a beneficial herb.  Here are some excerpts from the comments the recent Globe story generated:

Raw milk trial an abuse of process — Michael Schmidt’s letter to the editor of the Owen Sound Sun Times

Michael Schmidt’s local newspaper, The Owen Sound Sun Times, has quite rightly given a lot of attention to his recent court experiences and has followed up with a couple of less than supportive editorials, which we have noted and commented on here and here. Now Michael Schmidt himself takes up his pen to set the record straight on the fallacy underlying the whole contempt of court proceeding, which was initiated by York Region and recently heard in Newmarket. Here’s what Mr. Schmidt has to say:

“In his way Phil McNichol added a valuable point to the current debate about raw milk. Certainly his view was much more constructive than the editorial a week ago where I almost got the feeling The Sun Times was slamming me because MPP Bill Murdoch has been instrumental in trying to start a constructive dialogue about raw milk in parliament. I also would like to thank The Sun Times for Grant Robertson’s article regarding regulating the raw milk market. That was constructive, thank you.