The Year in Food and Agriculture

Forget the hungry; farm workers; urban 

agriculture; Terminators; SB1070...

 

Seattle, WA. Progressive media outlets have been busy providing an end of the year retrospective on the most notable events and issues that carried the headlines in 2010. Many news services and blogs in the food and agriculture-related areas ranked the Food Safety Modernization Act and the Child Nutrition Act at the top of their lists.

AlterNet, for instance, gave its highest ranking for 2010 to the impact of the BP gusher on the safety of seafood coming from the Gulf of Mexico. As members of a nation largely defined (and constrained) as consumers, people reading progressive sources like AlterNet thus have expressed the greatest concern for a story on the safety of the seafood they have been consuming.

Playing up the ‘democratizing’ influence of the Web, most of the alternative source and agglomeration sites ranked the top news items based on their popularity among readers. AlterNet, for instance, gave its highest ranking for 2010 to the impact of the BP gusher on the safety of seafood coming from the Gulf of Mexico. As members of a nation largely defined (and constrained) as consumers, people reading progressive sources like AlterNet thus have expressed the greatest concern for a story on the safety of the seafood they have been consuming.

What is left out of this accounting is another side of the story: the growing hunger and impoverishment of seafood industry and other workers displaced by what was arguably the most significant and unjust environmental catastrophe of the year. Even when we get the news story right, our reasons for doing so are often morally shallow and driven by mere self-interest and a narrow time horizon. Witness the media’s inattention to continued unresolved issues of environmental racism running the course from Hurricane Katrina to the BP gusher.

Other high ranking stories included reports on continued widespread problems with food-borne illnesses; a federal court’s decision banning Monsanto’s genetically-engineered beets from the Willamette Valley in Oregon; the growing obesity epidemic; and, among the cognoscenti and concerned ranchers, the new “Access to Pasture” rule for organic beef certification that requires a specified minimum number of days per year that organic cattle must spend on pasture to qualify as organic.

There are quite a few newsworthy items that did not make the top lists. One issue that has been widely overlooked is the continued growth in the number of persons suffering hunger and malnutrition during the extended collapse of the global economy that started in September 2008. Also missing from the lists is what I consider the biggest environmental and food justice story of 2010: the impact of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law, SB1070, and similar reactionary measures across the country on the workplace conditions and quality of life facing our nation’s farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Further, few sites ranked what is happening in urban agriculture as a top news story, despite the fact that hundreds of new community gardens were created in 2010 in cities from coast to coast and border to border. Here then is my take on the top news stories and events on environmental and food justice that did not make the end-of-year lists in most places.

Hunger Increasing

In November (2010), the USDA issued an update on 'food insecurity' in the United States. The report failed to garner the attention of the media or public, perhaps because this was seen as one of the top stories of 2009 and the media might consider this ‘so yesteryear.’ The current report, however, bears even more bad news: The number of people seeking food assistance continues to increase and is directly attributable to the effects of the Derivatives Depression, and shows a constant pattern of growing hunger since 2001. The expectations for 2010 are worse: measured in dollars, we can expect that the USDA will spend more than $100 billion on food assistance in 2010. These numbers suggest that the 50 million ‘food insecure’ persons reportedly in the U.S. in 2009 increased by at least another 2-3 million individuals in 2010 (see figure below).

Untold is the fact that this chart shows a constant pattern of growing hunger since 2001. USDA spending on food assistance has doubled since 2001. This means many of the neoliberal policies producing these effects date back to the second Clinton administration. A lesson for progressives about the limits of our two-party electoral politics?

Also absent from the 2010 top news lists is the fact that the great majority of the 'newly hungry' are children living with 'working poor' families. Also: Hunger remains more prevalent among the very people who harvest our crops, farm workers.

En el valle, grasshoppers eat better than farm workers.

Farm workers and waged slavery

One notable exception to progressive blindness to issues of food justice and sovereignty is the praise recently given to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) by Katrina vanden Heuvel in the pages of The Nation. Writing in this perennial progressive magazine, vanden Heuvel notes this as one of the great accomplishments of 2010:

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) enjoyed a remarkable 2010, successfully obtaining penny per pound pay raises and code of conduct agreements for farmworkers from the three largest food service companies and the growers who had blocked checks buyers cut directly to the workers so that millions of dollars languished in escrow. These agreements stand to increase workers’ annual earnings from about $10,000 to as much as $17,000. The State Department also recognized Laura Germino, CIW’s antislavery campaign coordinator, as an “anti-Trafficking Hero” for her work helping the US Department of Justice prosecute seven slavery operations in Florida over the last fifteen years, resulting in the liberation of over 1,000 farmworkers.

This modest increase of annual earnings is still far from being a ‘living wage’  as the Coalition itself notes. All we can celebrate here is the inching upward by the penny of the rates of wage slavery? The Florida farm slavery operations that the Justice Department cracked down on, with the heroic help of the CIW, is a noteworthy event that was largely overlooked by most media. But the $17,000 in annual earnings is still far too close to wage-slave levels.

The time is way past due to end wage slavery, hunger, and the structured inequalities that produce these effects. The top story for 2011 ought to be a mass mobilization demanding that we reverse the discriminatory tax burden imposed by neoliberal design. We must shift the expropriation of wealth from workers and instead return this common wealth to the multitude. The class war was declared a long time ago and it has beaten down the multitude over the past three decades, driving millions into hunger and starvation. It is time to reverse course, and we should make that the top food sovereignty story of 2011.

More urban community gardens

Still, we must not wait for some magical victory in the so-called class war. Instead, a top story for 2010 is that we are making our freedom and autonomy here and now, with a more positive and hopeful narrative. In this spirit, witness the continued growth of urban agriculture in the form of new community gardens, urban farms, guerrilla gardens, home kitchen gardens (huertos familiares), CSAs, and farmers’ markets.

The flourishing of urban agriculture is being led not by progressive West Coast urban strongholds but by old-yet-not-forgotten ‘Rust Belt’ cities. According to the Camden [New Jersey] Community Garden Club, for example, in 2010 the neighborhoods of this economically ravaged East Coast urban center, with a population that is 80 percent persons of color, created 31 new community gardens.

The news is similar across the country. There are a reported 7 new community gardens in Albuquerque; 11 in Dallas; 15 in Houston; 10 in Portland; 5 in Chicago; 6 in San Antonio; and even 2 or 3 in Laredo, Texas (my hometown). There are thousands of new P-Patches in most of the larger cities and the number of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects involving low-income persons of color in inner city communities has also increased, led along the way by the inspiring tale of the revival and resilience of the South Central Farmers Feeding Families.

Urban centers and rural communities across the country are seeing the rise of notable ‘food for the hood’ and ‘farm-to-table’ projects. Native American communities are developing community gardens at a frantic pace while Latina/os continue to play a central role in urban agriculture across the country, which is not surprising since there are millions of unemployed Mexican farmers living and working in the U.S. today as a result of changes unleashed by neoliberal agriculture and trade policies that displaced them from ancient ejidos and comunas.

In Detroit, there are at least 30 new community gardens, and many more guerrilla gardens in vacant lots, spread across an urban core that is gradually shifting from gray to green in color tone. The Motor City is becoming the Urban Farm City. Elected officials are even proposing the establishment of several urban farms, and city planners (working with community grassroots organizations) have identified more than 5000 acres of land suitable for urban agriculture. Urban agriculture and open space are at the heart of the new emerging ‘master plan’ for a city that has lost nearly half its population over the past three decades as a consequence of globalization-induced deindustrialization. This is why Detroit is perhaps easily considered ‘Ground Zero’ in the struggle for urban food sovereignty. The USDA has increased funding to support urban agriculture and I expect this to become a top 2011 story in the debates shaping the 2012 Farm Bill.

Terminator redux

I have previously reported in this blog on the revival of Terminator technology under Monsanto's new pledge that their ownership of this technology is intended to keep it from being misused. So, we are told to feel secure that Monsanto will now 'Save the Planet' from what is essentially a biological equivalent of Chernobyl.

The advent of genetic use restriction technology (GURT) must be dutifully monitored because it represents an enduring threat to all seed savers and plant breeders. Readers will recall that Terminator technology makes seeds sterile. The only imaginable use of this technology is to protect transgenic seed patent owners. But GURT is being re-branded and re-packaged by Monsanto as a method to contain gene flow between GEO and nonGEO plants.

Monsanto's statements allege that it is only trying to protect small and organic farmers from genetic contamination, by, um, using other genetically-engineered organisms. The promise is really to keep large-scale monoculture growers tethered to the transgenics treadmill while attaining 'plausible deniability' in the event of litigation by organic farmers for damages arising from transgenic drift.

In 2011, we will see a growing demand for state and local laws protecting traditional farmers, seed savers, and plant breeders. There will be more calls for local county-level bans or moratoriums on the cultivation of transgenic crops in areas where heirloom land race varieties are known to exist. I am certain 2011 will reveal new scientific findings and legal and policy developments affecting the future deployment of this truly dangerous and unnecessary technology.

Food sovereignty and the state of exception

Perhaps the biggest environmental and food justice news of 2010 was the largely untold story of the impact of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law, SB1070. This measure, and similar ones being proposed and adopted by a growing number of municipalities and states across the country, has already proven itself detrimental to the food security, health, and wellbeing of our nation’s farm workers.

An unstated aim of such laws is to further marginalize undocumented farm workers by making it more difficult to find work, get organized, and gain fair treatment. Given the current environment of record-breaking deportations, there is an upward trend in the number of farm workers who are getting deported before being paid for their work. Will the Obama Administration at least have the decency to repatriate unpaid wages — and not just the unwanted Mexicans — of the Derivatives Depression?

Anti-immigrant laws are diminishing the already slavish conditions that food system workers face across all sectors, from the factory farm fields and feedlots to the slaughter houses, packing plants, and canneries, and from the distribution warehouses to the grocery stores, restaurants, and fast food chains.  These laws demonize food system workers as threatening ‘Others.’  False allegations of disruptive effects on the American economy, employment, crime, safety, and culture become the pretext for disqualifying entire categories of persons from exercising their human rights. Denied status as full persons, farm workers are truly reduced to the ‘bare life.’ Breaking the grip of global commodity chains is thus interwoven with the defense of the rights of farm and food system workers. Simply put, there is no food sovereignty without autonomous farmers and farm workers.

The coming year will bring heightened struggles against the state of exception. The suspension of the constitutional rule of law that seeks to exclude from political life all that is the experience, skill, knowledge and desires of the undocumented multitude, will be met by the widening mobilization of indigenous and mestizo peoples. In this manner, perhaps the top story of 2011 will emerge the day we are courageous enough to declare: “We are all undocumented … y la comida no require papeles.”

Food Justice in the City

Garden Pedagogy, Part 1

Pancho McFarland

Teaching local youth appropriate methods for harvesting turnip greens (tops) and other crops is something I will long cherish from this past season's work at the Roseland Community Peace Garden. 

Chicago, IL. The intergenerational urban garden is a vital hub of teaching and learning.  Through hands-on interaction with human and other life, young and old persons develop knowledge across a number of content areas like horticulture, community organizing and development, and deep ecology. They pass on and receive traditional knowledge of gardening, foodways, and the broader culture and norms of life. Participants communicate with one another in a community setting, controlled by community members, and largely unencumbered by dominant institutions. 

My experiences during the 2010 growing season in Chicago were ripe with learning.  In a number of gardens in Chicago I was taught by people of all generations and I shared what I know with people from all generations in a mutual exchange of knowledge and information.

Picking turnip greens as a pedagogical moment

“Come over here and pick these turnip greens.  No, not like that.  Come here, Antonio.  Like this.  Get down, like this.  All the way down to the ground.  And snap it off. Right there, where the stem meets the tuber.” 

Control of one’s food is an essential aspect of a culture's resilience and survival in an era of deep social and ecological disturbances.  

Teaching local youth appropriate methods for harvesting turnip greens (tops) and other crops is something I will long cherish from this past season's work at the Roseland Community Peace Garden.  This passing on of traditional knowledge concerning gardening is important if a community or an ethnic group is to achieve food sovereignty.  Control of one’s food is an essential aspect of a culture's resilience and survival in an era of deep social and ecological disturbances. 

In essence, if a culture is to exist it must be able to make autonomous decisions about its production, distribution and consumption of food. The people comprising the cultural community must have requisite knowledge of horticulture, hunting and foraging, food preparation and canning, recipes, and the cuisine methods and techniques of previous generations.  Otherwise, communities of subordinate ethnic groups and colonized people forfeit their independence and become or remain food colonized.  The loss of food sovereignty and autonomy is a key cause of hunger, malnutrition, and related maladies in many working-class urban areas.

The ubiquity of fast-food and pre-packaged industrial agriculture food in many urban communities of color in Chicago and other large cities tears at the fabric of Black and Latin@ foodways.  Horticultural, food and seed saving, food preparation and household economic knowledge are lost in an urban food desert marked by the (dis)array of fried and processed, sugar-laden, fat-saturated, and preservative-tainted industrial foods. 

The pace of life in the city and the effects of poverty and food policy all contribute to the loss of knowledge and therefore the social and political resilience and sovereignty of Blacks and Latin@ communities. By tilling, planting, watering and harvesting, Antonio and two dozen other boys and girls at Peace Garden began learning how to provide for themselves in an ecologically and culturally appropriate manner without reliance on the capitalist market or governmental handouts.  They were learning and at the same time practicing community autonomy. 

“Tell your Mom what three things a plant needs to survive and bear fruit.”

“Water…the Sun,…. and food from the soil.”

DeShaun, of the night watering crew in the Roseland Garden, had been watering the crops with a hose and harvesting and eating broccoli for most of the summer when his Mom came to the garden to bring him home.  His Mom was impressed by her son’s knowledge of gardening.   His almost daily walks down the block to the community garden provided him an opportunity to interact with elders in his community and learn how and why to care for the garden. 

Through the spreading of love, good intentions and important community survival knowledge, youngsters like DeShaun and Antonio have the opportunity to appreciate and care for the life of their community as well as individual human and non-human life.

Biking to the garden: pedagogy on wheels

My sons and I spent much of the Summer and early Fall biking to our community garden.  Biking through our neighborhood taught us about alternative energy, health, community problems, urban policy, ecology and community empowerment.  The three of us learned so much from these learning moments, which are the focus of this blog series, that I must now refer to this as “pedagogy on wheels.” 

The ten-minute bike ride showed us how neighborhoods are spatially arranged including the way in which institutions such as schools, the police, and liquor stores circumscribe neighborhood life.

The underground economy determines a lot of the patterns of community life around our garden. Many aspects of life are affected by the competition between illegal and barely legal activity. On the one hand, we have the typical drug dealing, gang violence, and prostitution. On the other hand, we have the banality of the market in the form of poor quality retail and food outlets and the presence of the state especially through minimal social services and the ever-expanding police force. These forces hold community members hostage.  There are few spaces we can transform into places that provide opportunities to learn and practice community autonomy and empowerment. 

The bike ride demonstrates governmental neglect.  While the police seem to have an bottomless budget for containment and surveillance of the community, fewer public resources are invested toward efforts at community-building and the maintenance of tradition and culture.  Nor do public resources, in the form of governmental programs and institutions, monitor public health in light of how food choices are too often constrained by a lack of access to healthy food. Governmental neglect means taking structural violence for granted.

From the vantage point of our bike seats, we see things differently than from a car.  We experience, literally, every bump on the road.  We see firsthand the effects of urban policy and corporate greed.  After seeing evidence of the devastation wrought in poor neighborhoods we discuss what we see.  We read about the concept of food deserts and issues related to ecology, poverty, and race.  The core ideas of an alternative curriculum develops through an organic process of direct lived experience, dialogue, and participatory and collaborative research. 

This deep pedagogy is a wholistic undertaking and an approach akin to Freire’s generative pedagogy whereby the situation and participants determine the content and nature of the course.  This approach also incorporates a biocentric perspective, deep ecology, critical race analysis, and anticolonial and antiauthoritarian positions.

It is deep in that it tries to get at fundamental questions and solve keystone problems at the same time that the teaching and learning is democratic and the act of learning challenges hierarchical organizational models.  Each participant is student-teacher and teacher-student.  Each person holds responsibility for the entire group’s learning.  We are learning through discussion, reading, and research about anti-hierarchical modes of community organization, the forms of the exchange of knowledge through a horizontal anti-authoritarian organization.

These and many more experiences shaped an incredibly diverse and organic learning experience at the Roseland Community Peace Garden.  In subsequent posts I will go into details of the pedagogy outlined here and describe different examples of transformative learning including how adults from the nearby university participated in the community learning at the garden.

Foodscapes 1 - Traveling food

Homemade chorizo, dried chapulines, & suitcases full of mole

Shoreline, WA.  The winter holiday season is always an opportunity for us to visit and strengthen familial bonds without the distractions of college classes and the grinding routine of academic work. Over the past few weeks, we have seized the opportunity to share daily family meals with our adult children in the household during the holiday break. There has been a daily ritual of shopping and much to do preparing las comidas, the heart of our precious time together.

We travel the world through shared meals but these are always the result of at least two pairs of hands working together and many more ears listening in on an endless stream-of-consciousness tour through our family's histories, food ways, quirks, and specialties.

The hearth and kitchen is the soul of our cultura. So, all of us have been intense in our cooking rhythms since before Thanksgiving. This Christmas season has been special because of a surprise visit by our eldest, Elisa, from her current station in Quito, Ecuador. 

Elaine and I have been preparing homemade chorizo based on a recipe handed down by my beloved suegro, the late William C. Hastings. We use Ampita's meat grinder to prepare the pork shoulder roast before immersing it for four days in vinegar and secret spice mix. The fifty year-old cast-iron grinder is an heirloom gift we have diligently taken to heart and steady practical use. That old tool connects this family across generations of lively kitchen duty.

Like other tejanos en el Norte, we try to eat as much as possible like we would eat in our hometown kitchens in Laredo, Texas. Homemade machaca (dried or smoked meat) may be served mariachi style inside one of Elaine's flour tortillas, based on a fifth generation south Texas border recipe. We are corn tortilla eaters. The only time we eat flour tortillas is during special weekends or holiday events when serving overnight slow-cooked lengua (beef tongue), machacado con huevo, chorizo con huevo, or huevo ranchero dishes for breakfast. We survive through our traveling foods.

 
Other cultures have been part of the traveling foods we have shared this season: Wayo and Eliana were our home kitchen stars, especially when they prepared and presented sushi rolls and sashimi. The dinner was lovingly presented with 'live' assembly of the rolls and preparation of the homemade dipping sauces featuring wasabi-infused mayonnaise, tsume (sweet soy) and unagi (eel). The sushi rolls were daintily 'constructed' from fresh tuna, salmon, roe, crab, cucumbers, fried tempura toppings, sea weed, and sticky rice. Simple elegance. Shi'bui. Wayo's delicate fingers on the rolling mat reminded me of the same skill with which he ties his own fishing flies.

We have taken so many other culinary journeys, representing multigenerational inherited practices and recipes as well as new influences and ingredients acquired through our own travels or introduced to our area by travelers now residing in our midst. 

Elaine is our family's chief baker: Her multinational presentations have included flan, pumpkin-cream cheese roll, lemon meringue, Delicata squash, Sugar pumpkin, apple, and pecan pie; all these and more have graced our dinner table all season long. All her recipes are handed down from her mother and father. On pie duty, I do my part and bake the pumpkin or squash and then scoop the fruit into a bowl for Elaine to mix with her secret ingredients for the pie fillings.

I prepared our Thanksgiving center piece, an herb-lined turkey with buffalo meat and sausage stuffing. Elaine and I have for a long time presented a world menu of traveling foods:  Classic minimalist Spanish tortilla (eggs, potatoes, parsley, and Manchego); scallop fritata; fabada asturiana; broiled Alaska halibut on Peruvian purple mashed potatoes; Dungeness crab cakes; Moroccan lamb and artichoke tagine; a sublime fennel-leek-zucchini soup with simple olive crostini. 

Our kitchen is clearly our world travel hub. Yet, the ingredients typically are locally-sourced if we can consider the previously frozen Pacific halibut caught off-shore in Alaska as 'local.' I realize now that slow and deep food might not always be locally-sourced. A food miles question mark to be sure.

The traveling foods of the Mesoamerican Diaspora

We are not the only family eating 'traveling foods'. Indeed, I want to suggest that pretty much the whole world eats traveling food. Traveling food seems ubiquitous as a feature of daily life born of the interplay between localism and globalism, especially as handcrafted through the foodways and cuisines of immigrant communities.

Three days ago Elisa and I drove twenty miles in search of an authentic Mexican carneceria (butcher shop) I had heard about. We found the shop and the special beef we sought for a weekend grill featuring true fajita and bistek ranchero cuts. 

We lingered and explored the shop and found two surprise items. The first was a very fine perfectly balanced and tangy queso fresco from Yakima. Truly, the best we've ever had in the U.S. The second item, which I found stored dry and cool in the milk and cheese fridge, was chapulines in plastic bags. These are the storied dried crickets, and not grasshoppers as is sometimes mistakenly alleged, that are an indigenous 'snack food' in Oaxaca. 

Chapulines have long been fixtures of Oaxacan street cookery but they belong to a deep pre-Contact Native cuisine that has in this case traveled very far with Mixteca families that have settled in the Puget Sound bioregion over the past twenty years.

The chapulines can be stir-fried, drained, and eaten straight out of a bowl, perhaps with a twist of lime or a sprinkle of hot sauce. They can be grilled on the comal with a splash of spicy homemade mole. Other eaters may prefer their chapulines al fresco with a chile-lime-garlic-onion-tomato garnish on the side. The iterations of this 'snack food' are vast.

Food travelers in the antipodes of globalism

Speaking of mole, a colleague in Vancouver, the anthropologist Sara V. Komarinsky, shares similar accounts of traveling food. She writes of 'suitcases full of mole' in Alaska. Her work presents narratives of how the people of the Mesoamerican Diaspora are making place through their traveling foods. In Alaska, suitcases full of Oaxacan mole represent a new form of the multitude 'globalizing' localism. Foods and food practices are at the center of this everyday lived experience. Traveling foods are what people use to create cultural satellite offshoots of home origin villages left behind. Out of place, but definitely not out of mind.

Some 3 to 5 million Mesoamerican peoples are part of this traveling food show that has brought native peoples to live, work, play, pray, eat, and build new Diaspora communities across North America. Homemade chorizo in Seatlle; chapulines in Renton; mole poblano in Anchorage - all these are markers of the global drift of the local.

Food travels with people. Immigrants, especially those displaced or forced off their ancient ancestral ejidos and comunas, seem especially keen to hold unto their cuisine and when possible the plants and animals that make heritage foodways possible. 

Yet, not all 'travelers' are displaced Mesoamericans. The haute cuisine chefs of Mexico City, Cancun, Oaxaca City, or New York, Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago are already busy concocting hybrid chapuline dishes involving crickets glazed with another native Mesoamerican delicacy - home made xocoatl (chocolate). It turns out this is already a street dish in Oaxaca City, sans transgressive bourgeois appropriation and its appurtenances.

We have two poles in the diffusion of traveling foods: There are the survival foods like our homemade chorizo that sustains part of our family's heritage no matter where we live. This is the same reason there are chapulines in Seattle: Mixtec 'immigrants' displaced from their homes brought these as part of their cultural heritage and foodways. And then we have the appropriation of traveling foods that are exploited as 'high' cuisine peddled by gourmet restauranteurs. Traveling food is therefore imbricated as much with the survival of 'the poor,' the itinerant, and the displaced as it is with the fetishistic consumption lifestyles of elite gourmands. 

Unraveling these threads remains a serious challenge to the slow food movement in a world so flush with mobile human beings and their traveling foods. In the meantime, I will comfort myself by sprinkling some of the delicious aji lojano chile sauce, that Elisa brought with her from Ecuador, over my scrambled eggs and chorizo.

Invitation to followers and visitors

RE: WHITE HOUSE FORUM ON ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE 

Dear colleagues:

I have been invited to participate in an upcoming White House Forum on Environmental Justice to be held on 15 December 2010.  This will be a meeting with Cabinet level officials.

Obviously, this is a huge responsibility and an opportunity that should include the widest level of input and participation by the environmental justice community. I humbly seek your views and input on what you think I should bring to the table next week.

There is no need to grandstand about the ethics of leadership.  Everyone here knows that I stand with and work in commitment with communities seeking to rebuild the solidarity economy while attaining ecological democracy and practicing place-based self-governance. 

I am genuinely interested in seeking your advice on the challenges, priorities, and principles that we should emphasize as we initiate a new dialogue on environmental justice with the Obama Administration.

PLEASE POST YOUR COMMENTS BELOW.