Finally some positive news.

[seven of nine]

Originally Posted by rickers

What would be nice would be an indoors, 7 days a week, all season farmers market, where veggies, meat, fish and chicken can be sold. Kind of like a Pikes Place market without the waterfront. A Bazaar Del Montana of sorts.

Here comes a salmon .

[jimj]

Originally Posted by seven of nine

Here comes a salmon .

Maybe flying Macs? I'd love to see them try and throw those 25lb lunkers.

[grizzfan]

Rambush says:

What I would like to see is local beef on the shelfs and at Restraunts. Most meat is imported in from someplace else.

The challenge here is that there are very few slaughter houses except in centrally located cities. It would be difficult to sustain workers in a town of less than a couple hundred thousand people and your beef would have to cost more to make one economically feasible. It's called "economy of scale". I'm not sure there is a commercially run slaughter house left in Montana that does anything other than occasional custom butchering. I used to work in one in Livingston 50 years ago. Some ranchers butcher a beef every once in a while but as an aside to their ranching business.

Hey guys and gals, this is a nice thing to do in the summer in Montana. Even Hippy-Mr&Ms-Sustainable-Missoula has the farmers market only in the summer couple days a week. Much of the produce is grown by a very industrious Hmong community. I'm not sure, if you don't have people like these, who's going to do all this planting and growing for other than their own use. And we get Hutterite chickens, vegetables and turkeys in our local stores. It will take more effort than thinking this is so very cool. I'm quite happy my lettuce comes from California and my blueberries from Chile!! They're cheaper and I'm living longer everyday!

As an aside, the Missola City Council recently spent a month or more debating on whether to allow people to keep chickens in their yards. The liberal, no makeup, sack dress, staight hair community pitched a fit in favor of this allowance. The council approved the issue and after about 3 months had issued only 6 licences!! Several months later I don't know what the numbers are today, but imagine it hasn't grown much. You see, people can get all stirred up over a "good idea" and don't follow through even in a liberal mecca like Missoula.

[Kristynwy]

Originally Posted by grizzfan

Kristynwy,

Many of the diseases you list could not be diagnosed in the early part of the twentieth century and, because people didn't live as long, they did not develop them.

The fact remains that we are living longer. Look at Social Security, for instance. When FDR came up with the scheme in 1932 practically no one lived to 65 to collect it and the system was flush. Now with longer lives brought about by better nutrition, pharmasuticals and medical advances, SS is suffering, near bankrupt. (The money situation is exaserbated by the fact that Congress and the President have been raiding SS for about 35 years.)

The fact is, as the world famous Surgeon General from the Clinton era, Joyclyn Elders, said: "Sooner or later something is going to kill ya." The long one lives the more chance one has of developing a dreaded malady, one of those you mention.

Your theory doesn't explain the high incidence of disease in children, as well as young adults.
What about the epidemic of obese children, children who are now coming down with heart disease and diabetes????
Cancers in children have exploded, cancers and brain tumors have exploded in the young and middle aged adult population compared to what the rates were several years ago as well; due to the increased amount of chemicals in modern day products as well as processed food.
100 years ago Autism in children was an extremely rare disease, now it is 1 in 250, or a figure similar to that?

If that were honestly the case that people weren't living long enough to be diagnosed with those diseases then the statistics above wouldn't be happening as we speak.

I don't want to hijack the thread, so I will get to my point, I think it is wonderful to grow as much of our own food as we can as well as buy locally from farmers, because the taste and the quality is so much better for us health wise. I think that would not only prolong our lives but improve the quality of our lives while we are on this earth. Some people manage to stay alive despite having heart disease, diabetes ect. because they are given medical chance after chance until their bodies can no longer cope with the disease. Some of this can't be helped by genetics, however our bodies are like an engine what we fuel it with will determine how long and the quality of how we function.

[TypicalCalifornian]

To further hijack the thread consider

1. Not terribly long ago cancer was such a stigma death certificates seldom mentioned it. Some other disease, say pneumonia, was listed as the cause of death. The stats are mostly invalid for a variety of reasons.

2. Autism affects 1 in 150 chicldren born today using "their" statistics. A contrarian point of view it's the same as it's ever been only diagnosed more often. When I was a kid they might have been described as slow, difficult, crazy, or just have behavior problems. Same with all these ADD, ADHD diagnosis.

3. Diabetes and obesity in children? Again a few generations ago it was safe, or felt safe for kids to play on their own for hours and days unattended. There were no fat children by todays standards (go look at a year book from WW2 or even the 1960's).You've now created a society where parents fear their children being abducted, molested, etc. because the society no longer feels justified in describing people who misbehave as what they are. So we've allowed and protected all sort of creeps at the expense of our feelings of safety.

100 years ago life expectancy was 47 years. It's approx. 77 now. My parents and grandparents were worn out and dead at far younger age than I am. A large "problem' facing our society is the number of people expected to live beyond 100 and with relative good health.

My point? This is a great time and place to live if you practice moderation and are a careful consumer of modern medicine. The second drug you take is to offset the negative affects of the first drug. Do anything necessary to avoid taking that first drug (lose weight, change diet, etc.)

[jimj]

Originally Posted by TypicalCalifornian

To further hijack the thread consider

1. Not terribly long ago cancer was such a stigma death certificates seldom mentioned it. Some other disease, say pneumonia, was listed as the cause of death. The stats are mostly invalid for a variety of reasons.

2. Autism affects 1 in 150 chicldren born today using "their" statistics. A contrarian point of view it's the same as it's ever been only diagnosed more often. When I was a kid they might have been described as slow, difficult, crazy, or just have behavior problems. Same with all these ADD, ADHD diagnosis.

3. Diabetes and obesity in children? Again a few generations ago it was safe, or felt safe for kids to play on their own for hours and days unattended. There were no fat children by todays standards (go look at a year book from WW2 or even the 1960's).You've now created a society where parents fear their children being abducted, molested, etc. because the society no longer feels justified in describing people who misbehave as what they are. So we've allowed and protected all sort of creeps at the expense of our feelings of safety.

100 years ago life expectancy was 47 years. It's approx. 77 now. My parents and grandparents were worn out and dead at far younger age than I am. A large "problem' facing our society is the number of people expected to live beyond 100 and with relative good health.

My point? This is a great time and place to live if you practice moderation and are a careful consumer of modern medicine. The second drug you take is to offset the negative affects of the first drug. Do anything necessary to avoid taking that first drug (lose weight, change diet, etc.)

Agreed!
I do beleive that not only have we gotten better at "fixing" things we've gotten even better than that at finding things wrong or that explain why people are how they are.

[rangerider]

Originally Posted by grizzfan

Come on guys, let's get real!! As a old guy from Livingston where the story originated, I can tell you that this works great in August but doesn't in January when it's -40F!!

Farmers markets are fun, if not expensive, ways to enjoy fresh produce in the Summer. But Montana's pitifully short growing season garentees it can't last.

Vegetables in the winter were the ones my mom canned or what stayed a while in the root celler. Remember those?

I do remember those, still do it, in fact, root cellar and all. With a little doing, however, you can rig a greenhouse on the end of a (especially) passive solar home and grow stuff all year. It does take a little extra doing in the winter, but I have friends outside of Wilsall who built a home close to twenty years ago that works just fine tucked into a hillside, and they have fresh veggies year 'round. I have had a house planned for a long time that I hope to build one day, and I'm pirating part of his design because it works really well and is plumb cheap to live in.

To service a population would take a major undoing of the type of growing/processing/shipping/storing we have become used to. You're absolutely right that our growing season stinks here, but head east and you gain a month before going very far - that opens up the possibilities for more types of crops. With the right type of greenhouses the possibilities are considerable.

Originally Posted by grizzfan

Rambush says:

The challenge here is that there are very few slaughter houses except in centrally located cities. It would be difficult to sustain workers in a town of less than a couple hundred thousand people and your beef would have to cost more to make one economically feasible. It's called "economy of scale". I'm not sure there is a commercially run slaughter house left in Montana that does anything other than occasional custom butchering. I used to work in one in Livingston 50 years ago. Some ranchers butcher a beef every once in a while but as an aside to their ranching business.

There is a small grocery store/slaughter house about two miles from my house; they do a surprising amount of butchering business every week. Not too much wild game, but lots of beef and pork. We have had our meat cut there for years, and I have never been in there when there wasn't several carcasses hanging. The small unincorporated community next to our place has about 350 people. Other than that, lots of farms around and the neighboring towns anywhere from 10 to 20 or so miles away.

I'm still wondering if we aren't going to change our ideas about the economy of scale and at least partially return to more localized growing and storing. Especially with the cost of fuel and transportation in general.

I'm even wondering if someday we're going to bitterly regret covering some of the best farmland in this valley with sprawl and subdivisions...

[grizzfan]

Rangerider, the little grocerystore/slaughter house you mention is a type of 'custom butchering' I refered to. A more commercical setup, like the one I worked in in Livingston, supplied all the major stores, including Safeway, and Yellowstone National Park with meat. It was a big operation. Those have been consolidated to major cities in the mid-west.

Even with increased transportation costs, I don't see them being decentralized. The costs will have to be passed on. You have to find someone willing to do that kind of work. Today it's largely done by illegals!