Or rather, in nice bright red font, the letters F. R. E. E. magically appeared next to each succulent dish? Wouldn't that be amazing?
Now this isn't one of those "pay-it-forward" types of places where you end up actually paying for the "next guy's" meal or a "donate what you can if you can" joint.
The meal is really, free, no catches, no tricks or schemes, no gimmicks- there isn't even a cash register or credit card machine to process your payment even if you wanted to pay.
Ok, let's use a different example since you're still not getting it...
You walk into the local organic grocery store, and guess what, all the produce and seafood are free! You take your shopping cart, get a little of this, some of that, eeeW, nice, Tilapia!
Your total adds up to zero dollars and 0 cents, and what's this? Again no cash registers.
"WHAT KIND OF (BEEEEP BEEEP) STORE IS THIS??? THIS IS SOME COMMIE, SOCIALIST THING WHERE THEY'RE TRYING TO GET RID OF CAPITALISM!!!" you may think, and you'd be exactly right!
Check this out... the dollar will dip and dive. the cost of food (and everything else) will rise, as it always has.
This is the essence and very nature of capitalism.
But free is set and absolute... it's always free. it's always $0.00. And 0 is always 0, it can't go up or down. And capitalists hate that!
Just a few years ago, the price of a loaf of bread was a little over $2.00, now it's almost $3.00 and yet the average household income has stayed the same and even dropped in the last 10 years.
Food is a critical ingredient to our very survival. We NEED it to live! so how then can anyone, with a grain of consciousness, monetize and capitalize on it? What, just because they were doing it before we were born?
What's next water? strike that, already done. Air? Sunlight?
Why isn't the right to eat, see and breathe, protected by our constitution?
So we can start a religion. Awesome! Bear arms and shoot trespassers. Check. Even the right to a free education and the freedom to speech, but not the necessities to sustain life?
But there's other costs involved right? But there's other costs involved in educating our children also, and yet you don't pay for their middle school, right?
And of course, who could ever forget our incredible ability to raise massive amounts of profit.
According to the USDA, the average profit markup to actual cost on store bought produce is 75%. For restaurants it's twice that! In the medical field, it's over a thousand times that.
Well, what if I told you that currently I am, and can and will!!! continue to, produce and distribute food to everyone, for absolutely free? No markup, no cost, no expenses, no paying it forward, (which is great, don't get me wrong) just...... simply...........free.
Free food? What? Impossible right?
How could someone, ever be able to take something that is already absolutely free....... IT'S ALREADY FREE, PEOPLE........ and available to us all, all around us, in nature, harvest and process it (which both takes money) and distribute it, all while keeping the free element?
Well, somehow, the government, through a program called SNAP, funded by, yup, the good old USDA, gives out free food via food stamps every day.
Non-profit organizations do the same thing through food banks.
Church soup kitchens, shelters, food pantries, the list goes on. All completely free food at no charge to the recipients.
This is magic right? what happened to the costs, the expenses, the enormous amounts of profit?
You see, in these "free food" examples, the food really isn't truly free. Cleverly, it's made to seem free by simply shifting the burden of costs to another party.... US! the people, the tax payers, the donors, the church members. So ya, definitely not free.
But even if it were free, is that good enough?
Today we want it chemical free, hormone free and gmo free as well. it needs to be local, organic, healthy, farmers market quality and grown, harvested and distributed in an ecologically and environmentally friendly way, without a carbon footprint.
Not processed by minimum wage employees without benefits, or foreign under minimum wage employees without running water, or Asian slave labor employees without hope, so that bigbox stores can sell it cheaper than their competition!
Is that too much to ask? am I really pushing what's permitted here?
We're talking about nothing short of a revolution in the world food system.
Making healthy food available to everyone, changes how we, our families, our children and future generations eat for the better. don't they deserve it?
So the questions then becomes... How do we actually, really truly produce and provide not only free, but healthy, organic food without the use of smog belching smokestacks and diesel guzzling, carbon fuming, environmentally unfriendly, 2 ton tractors?
Well, this is where our story actually starts...
Newly married couple, each only 25 years old, both engineers with very lucrative careers, typical dreams, aspirations and only one thing on their minds.... money! Decide that they're sick of corporate America, consumerism, capitalism, the government and the hassle and bustle of society. So they cash in all their investments, sell two waterfront homes in two different countries, all the vehicles, jet skis and other toys, burn the cell phones, TVs and computers and leave society completely.
No news, no TV, no internet,
16 months later, the economy crashed, Obama was elected, we went to war, again, and we never even knew about it.
Sounds great right? Here's the catch. Now we had to provide everything for ourselves. No easy task, mind you. So we built our own home with our own hands for free, raised livestock, harnessed free electricity from the sun and wind, and "attempted" to grow our own food.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone can just throw down a few seeds, do a rain dance, and grow food anywhere you want, as I (a child of the hippie movement) had been led to believe. In reality, when water makes contact with dry desert, 110⁰ dirt, there's a violent thermal reaction that occurs that instantly turns the water into steam. No, traditional farming techniques weren't an option.
So I did what any extremely intelligent and very good looking young engineer would do... I turned to the marijuana growers for help! Hydroponics has actually been around since ancient times, but the 60's space race and thoughts of long term space travel is typically credited for today's high yield, low water methods.
Nitrogen rich fish waste water is pumped up and fed to plant roots in a closed loop system. With the help of bacteria, the plants extract the nitrites and nitrates, oxygenate and clean the water and let gravity do the rest.
So, in 2004, I set out to build my first system. It was a simple aeroponics setup made from a couple Rubbermaid bins and although I'm sure the levels were way off, it actually produced fruits and veggies very well, very quickly. We located the system underground where it's 20+⁰ cooler, using ultraviolet LEDs to encourage flower, foliage and fruit growth.
The results were incredible... We were experiencing faster growth and larger and increased fruit and vegetable production. In fact, we were getting about 3-5x more food than two adults could even hope to consume.
So, what does the brightest person with the best smile on the planet do when he's producing WAY to much food to consume? Scale up!
So I built a solar powered, climate controlled, 4800cuft building, housing 700 fruit and vegetable plants in 7 hydroponic bays, fed by a 1000 gallon fish tank, housing 100 tilapia, 20 appaloosa catfish, 25 fresh water lobsters, shrimp, mussels..... the whole 9 yards.
Since you're not limited to a 1 dimensional plane with hydroponics as you are with farming you grow multiple times more food in a fraction of the space.
We're currently seeing 2X the production rate, 2X the size of produce, 2X the nutrient and sugar contents and 4X the quantity, (from the indoor, year-round growing cycle) with 99% less effort, 99% less cost, 99% less water and 99% less loss when compared to current annual industrial food production yield reports in the same growing zone, without the heartache of bugs, pests, cold spells, heat spells, droughts, fertilizing, pesticides or watering. Not to mention the protein aspect of growing fresh water aquatics. Incredible. Just incredible results.
And what does the best dressed, most... yada yada yada yadda... do when he's growing enough food to feed a small community? Why, Scale up of course!
My next thoughts went to hydroponically grown fruit and nut trees, why not right? And I wondered why hasn't anyone attempted such a thing. And still, again, we witnessed the same results... Exponential production of produce in a fraction of the space with basically 0 loss and no effort.
In fact, now this is insane, check this out... Tree grown fruit turned out to be even more lucrative and rewarding! Even with preserving the extras, this amounted to about 75-100 times more food than we could ever eat in a year, creating a snowball effect that rolled over into each following year. And without a capable means of giving away our free food, we had to stop production, it was literally just piling up.
So what does the.... best, greatest, most, ya, you get the idea by now? We're going to scale up!
We'll be building a ... 60,000 sqft natural/passive climate controlled warehouse, which will provide fruits, vegetables, herbs, nuts, fish, shrimp, lobster, crab, oyster, mussels, escargot, as well as honey (we keep bees for pollinating the crops.) And to resolve the piling up problem, a free to eat restaurant and grocery store on-site.
So after we invested all of our money on this endeavor, we decided we'd give YOU the opportunity to get in on this from day one. How nice of us right?
Seriously though, come on, we can make this a reality. I know we can!!!
But we REALLY need your help. will you help?
I know what you're going to say next. And yes, it's crazy... we need money, in order to create a system that doesn't utilize money in any way, shape or form, so that we can provide the same (or better) products & services as the current antiquated system that controls everything through... now get this.... money. Isn't that ironic?
YOU're making the change! Please contribute today.
Thank you
