Before we leave Chiang Mai tomorrow morning for some very exciting discussions, we decided to take a day to see the area. We asked a guide to show us the local area and decided that we would go to a local village which is designated as a cultural area where members of several hill tribes live and farm in their traditional ways. Although there were women sitting on the porches of their homes (some with thatched roofs and some with teak-like leaves for roofing materials) tending babies or weaving traditional cloth, and women tending gardens, the only man we saw was an elderly man fletching an arrow. Everyone was dressed in traditional clothing which was, for someone like me who loves indigenous textiles, a spectacular delight: colorful, beautifully detailed and meticulously decorated. Here and there were signs that the modern world was not very far away: a couple of motorcycle helmets slung under a house on stilts, a plastic bucket holding balls of yarn being woven on a strap loom in a technique a thousand years old, plastic hose sprinkling a field, and everywhere the ubiquitous flip flops and plastic bags. These homes did not have electricity and therefore, had no TVs or other modern communication systems.
But these women told us, through our interpreter, that they never left their village homes, that they did not want to go to town and that they felt safe, protected and happy in their compound. And they looked safe, protected and happy. Their rice was growing in fields fed with mountain water through bamboo pipes. Their chickens and chicks wandered freely in the open and their babies seemed healthy and were robust, friendly and beautiful.
As I wandered through their village, I thought about Codex. I thought about the responsibility that you and I have to protect them (and us) from the mandated under nutrition and contamination of their food that Codex could bring them. I thought about the bright and well fed babies and the difference that food laced with pesticides and genetically modified DNA would bring to their bright eyes and clear lungs. I thought about what allergies and breast cancer and autoimmune disease would mean to them. This simple day in the country was another reminder why we do what we do — and why you support us: health rests in clean food. Health freedom rests in natural choices to get healthy and/or stay that way.
For all of us. Thai, Nigerian, Indian, Peruvian, American. We are all built around food. And our health depends up it. Since we have electricity, the internet and a Western knowledge-base of great sophistication (which includes information about Codex), how could we fail to act to protect ourselves and our brothers and sisters spread around the world? Of course not!
It was a good reminder for me of how vital this work is. I’m glad we took the opportunity!
