What can we do about it? Eat paleo and support local farmers for pastured meat, organic vegetables and fruit and cut down on buying food that comes from large agro-companies.....

The paleo diet automatically cuts out most things like grains, sugar and dairy which are all based on produce that can and has been patented, what is left is meat, fat, nuts, fruit and veg - all foodstuffs that can be found (hopefully) growing and being raised locally and hopefully no one has yet patented. Aren't we the lucky ones!

One of the reasons I drank raw milk for years was because it had to come straight from the cow, there could be no multinational corporation controlling its production, no thousand miles across continents for it to travel and minimal processing (like GMOs - which are already in our food chain; we cannot completely escape its effects). I had to go to the dairy with a glass bottle and have it filled directly from a milking cow. So, it was a kind of protest and a move back to grass-roots campaigning on a very small scale by me - but considering now there are over 1500 raw milk vending machines on the streets of Italy alone, this kind of small-scale action can have a massive cumulative effect over time.

I like to eat for my health but I also try to eat for the 'safe-keeping' of local, backyard small-scale farmers who struggle under enormous pressure from the likes of Monsanto and supermarket giants. I like to buy meat from farmers who care about their livestock and can tell me personally how they were raised, something we can never know for sure about any of the 'faceless' food we eat nowadays, no matter what is written on the packet to entice/dupe us into buying it.

Many people think this kind of local, grass-roots buying is 'idyllic', 'impossible', 'too expensive', 'not relevant for paleos' or 'not important enough to consider'. Well consider this: It is our absolute right as human beings to be able to have a choice about what we put in our mouths. If small-scale producers vanish to the likes of Monsanto, we will no longer have that choice and that really is scary.

The consumer has power, especially when they are (local) paleo consumers......

I'll get off my soap box now....phew.....