Health Food Race To The Bottom

Is it just me or is there a race to the bottom in the “Heatlh Food Industry”. I shop at a locally owned store that used to carry my favorite brand- Eden Foods. (Full disclosure- I worked at their retail store many years ago) I liked that they went out into the country and got farmers to farm organically. They had standards, still do.

My locally owned store seems to be participating in the large retailer race to the bottom, a kind of wallmartisizaion of health food stores. It would be easy to put the blame on Whole Foods or the economic melt down. I am going, blamewise, with what the young man who works at the local coffee shop said, “Everybody is getting into health foods.” I guess if you don’t have any interest in history or many kinds of quality, and if you have never experienced real fooda, have so much money, less seems like more. The world is on its head, health food people used to pay more for quality.

I found Eden’s wine vinegar (Michigan grown grapes, mother, or starter included in the bottle) replaced by Flieshman’s brand (unrich as grocery store brands, no starter, made in Calif. with organic grapes 6% acidity as opposed to 5% as is legally mandated for vinegar) at my local store.

I used to call this place a health food store. Now I am not so sure. It sources grains and beans from China; Chinese growers can undercut our growers. Few dried beans are being grown in Michigan since the bottom fell out of the Organic market.

Rich, nutritous, home grown products are as hard to come by as they were in the health-food-store-hey-day 70’s.

Librarian's Daughter

Librarian’s Daughter

Old Ben Franklin is turning over in his grave on hearing that Amazon and Microsoft are suing Google for finding ways to digitize our collective culture, distribute out of copyright material for free. Never mind that Google has been scanning for a long time. Never mind that there are many devices and companies set up to co-operate with google and spread said collective culture. Google is visible, there are many others working to digitize our legacy and they ought to be allowed to do so.

There is, for instance, Gutenberg press, you can download out of copyright books straight to your device- Computer, hand held device or if you have a lot of money and buy Amazon’s line, Kindle- more about that later. Open source materials, software, books have been flying, flying, under the radar for some time.

Amazon and Microsoft suddenly realize nobody is making money off of our cultural heritage, send press releases to the media and file a lawsuit. I am not against people making a living and feeding their children and all that, but I do feel that out-of-copyright books are a commons and belong to all of us.

The business model of Gutenberg press is similar to Wikipedia, and public radio. It runs on donations from users. Another publisher of books online is Book Glutton, it has a feature for chatting with other readers inside the books. You can follow Book Glutton’s reading habits on Twitter. There is more than one romance publisher, you can often download romance books for free. Feed books has free content, public domain books, original books, news. You can self-publish online, bypass paper publishing, with Smashwords, free or paid. There are also paid booksellers: BooksonBoard eBookshop, Fictionwise Book store, O’Reilly Ebooks for tech professionals. The field is bursting.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (the organization) has a system for copywright (Find the whole story at Creative Commons. Note:If you see the symbol CC, only on TV does it mean closed caption). See Creative Commons (yes, they have a web sight) for details. The CC copyright ranges from free distribution to monetized offerings, and allows the publisher latitude in selecting copyrights. If the creator wants as many as possible to see their work, say academics, who definitely have a point of view and wish many people to see their work, they would choose open distribution. If an author wants remuneration for their work, they can choose paid distribution. The old copyright system that served us well for many years must now be updated. It seems to me that Microsoft and Amazon are self serving in trying to litigate. They very well know that much work has been done toward making the system fair for all of us, but choose to make money off an outdated system while they can, rather than use their considerable influence to upgrade, in effect, stone walling the future.

When you go to a web sight and have to interpret unshapely letters and type them in, you are helping download books. Downloading-software can be mistaken, humans are helping proofread. You are also proving you are human, and not a bot trying to fill mailboxes with spam. It is a big job to digitize written knowledge, nice to know we all are helping with the work. We humans know a lot of things, language can be useful and subtle. Doing multiple jobs at once: priceless.

About Kindle: It costs too much and the pages go to black before replenishing. It fades in sunlight, making it a good indicator for too many UV rays and when sunscreen ought to be applied, but an undependable beach reader, or so I have read. (Newyorker.com Aug 24) Amazon can recall books, the reader is connected to the source. Connectivity can be both good and bad, what will Amazon do? Amazon doesn’t have a stellar reputation. Kindle is pricy. On the plus side, Kindle has a book sized screen and can store a lot of books, it doesn’t weigh much, while it doesn’t work well on a beach, would work well in an airport, say.

Libraries were meant for everyone, they are organized so people can participate in culture building. This is a fine, democratic idea that can enrich our lives. The world wide web has and can have similar principles in the future. For a few corporations to dominate the web and use the law to bend the use of it for profit is very evil indeed. And we all know google’s moto: “don’t be evil”. Google has copied mostly out of copyright books. It’s people are efficient; they will scan now, find out the copyright later. Scan away google, but give copyright where copyright is due.