Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Fair Trade and MMS









Recently I was able to help out by taking some photos of items from our Village Store at the farm. The store is managed by farm intern and our neighbor, Peter from Canada and his wife Kristine. We thought it would be cool to feature some of the items from the Village Store on the website with a picture and background information on the item. The pictures were taken in the farm environment where the Village Store is located. I have posted a few of the pictures above.

The farm wants to offer fair trade items as a way of offering socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable alternatives to customers. Fair trade costs more, but considering individuals are being paid living wages, their children are being educated, their health concerns are being respected and their environment is being managed sustainably, we can consume in ways that bring justice an peace to the world. This is a great topic to explore more and as I learn more and more about this I realize that I do not want to support companies and practices that harm other people.

In addition to being passionate about fair trade and educating people about it, Peter from Canada is also passionate about something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" or "MMS" for short. MMS comes in a bottle that looks like it was purchased from the 99 cent store and a label that could have been printed on some guy's home computer printer. Peter acknowledges the sketchiness of the packaging, but says that MMS has been known to cure such things as zits, warts and cancer. (Although we tried it on a random giant zit that Chris had last night and, unfortunately, we saw no results). But, Peter is running an experiment right now on some ailing farm plants. Half of the plants are being sprayed with MMS and the other half are not. So far, 4 plants on the MMS side have died and 16 have died on the non-MMS side. Also, we have a young goat who has had a resistant parasite causing diarreah that can be deadly to goats. MMS was administered a few days ago and we have seen noticable improvement and the poop has normalized. So, mixed results for the Miracle Mineral Supplement. As far as I know, there is still no instant cure for the occasional zit.

1 comment:

laura said...

those are cool pictures amanda! you really took advantage of our setting