US Constitution Silent on Food Rights

Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 9 March 2023...

Hey Y'all!!

Happy Thursday from Air2Ground Farms! It's a cloudy, rainy, cool morning. The animals are all good today with Nothing Significant to Report (NSTR). We have 25-30 ducks, I can't remember exactly how many. Yesterday, about a dozen of them decided they would go on a walk-about to indulge on the green grass that is popping up everywhere but in their yard because they pluck it as soon as it sprouts. We decided to just let them wander for the day and by evening, they were ready to get back to their pools. It was still a bit of an undertaking to "herd 'em an' wrangle 'em into the corral, pardner." The sheep and beef cows are wandering more away from their hay to pick at the green grass. As I mentioned, we are going to allow and even encourage this slow transition to their diet. We spent the majority of the day, even until after bedtime, working on YouTube videos. We were able to get 3 videos mostly edited to the place that we are happy with them. We may add a scene to one or two of them with Shelley and I just talking about why we are doing whatever is in the video. We feel the transition happening away from just "here's what we are doing" to more of a discussion of "here's why we are doing what we are doing." We are dialing in our focus for the YouTube adventure and are starting to accept that we will focus on inspiring, which by its nature requires more of a discussion of why we are doing something. If the focus was just entertainment, a simple look at what we do would suffice. So, we may add a scene or two, or we may just post these and then add more discussion to future videos. We'll see. It's forecast to rain throughout the day today and we are going to take the opportunity to make a trip to Springfield. The top pic is Shelley with the hogs this morning so you can get a look at how big they are getting. The bottom pic is Stella to show you that she is starting to get her Jersey markings on her face.

Yesterday I left you with the thought of "What about my constitutional rights to food?" Interestingly, if you do a bit of research into food rights, you will find that the United States of America is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have any. That's right. Venezuela, Ukraine, Uganda, SriLanka, (you get the point) all have rights to food enshrined in their constitutions. Not the United States. In 2021, Maine added verbiage into their State Constitution declaring "all individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being." That's it for rights to food for the citizens of the United States. In 2017, the US Mission to International Organizations explained it this way: "Domestically, the United States pursues policies that promote access to food, and it is our objective to achieve a world where everyone has adequate access to food, but we do not treat the right to food as an enforceable obligation." Why is something that is so important left out of our Constitution? How did we get here with our current laws restricting food freedoms? The first question. It would take more research for me to say definitively, but I believe it is because our Founding Fathers considered it such a basic human right to feed yourself whatever you choose, that it wasn't worth wasting the ink. They obviously thought long and hard about what to include, to the point that in the Declaration of Independence, they even altered John Locke's original assertion that all humans have fundamental natural rights to "Life, Liberty, and Property." The land-owner Founders didn't believe that everyone had the right to "Property" and thus changed it to "Pursuit of happiness." So, we know they were thinking of what basic human rights we all should be guaranteed, but like air and water, food is so basic it didn't need to be mentioned. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights, were added 15 years after the nation was formed and are still silent regarding food. 27 total amendments, most recently in 1992, and nothing about food. So how did we get here with the current laws? Well, back in 1906, in an effort to regulate meat going from one state to another, the Federal Meat Inspection Act was passed. Like I asserted yesterday, this wasn't about health and safety since the Act is silent about meat that stays within a state, it's about regulating commerce. And there we are still today with laws that regulate commerce, not guarantee safety.

Local Farm Report for 8 March 2023:

Harvest:

30 Chicken eggs

14 Duck eggs

0 Goose eggs

6 Gallons of milk

Sales:

2 Gallons of milk

Cheers! Psycho & Shelley