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The Food Shortage Solution in Your Own Backyard

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Ellen Brown from Web of Debt

While the global food systems we depend on come under increasing strain, there’s a solution to the growing crisis that most Americans can find in their own backyards–or front lawns.

A confluence of crises—lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war—have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do? 

Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance, pointed out in a recent interview with Del Bigtree that in the United States there are 40 million acres of lawn. Lawns are the most destructive monoculture on the planet, absorbing more resources and pesticides than any other crop, without providing any yield. If we were to turn 30% of that lawn into permaculture-based food gardens, says Gale, we could be food self-sufficient without relying on imports or chemicals. 

Permaculture is a gardening technique that “uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.”

Russian families have shown the possibilities, using permaculture methods on simple cottage gardens or allotments called dachas. As Dr. Leon Sharashkin, a Russian translator and editor with a PhD in forestry from the University of Missouri, explains:

Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.

The Dacha Model

Dachas are small wooden houses on a small plot of land, typically just 600 meters (656 yards) in size. In Soviet Russia, they were allocated free of charge on the theory that the land belonged to the people. They were given to many public servants; and families not given a dacha could get access to a plot of land in an allotment association, where they could grow vegetables, visit regularly to tend their kitchen gardens and gather crops. 

Dachas were originally used mainly as country vacation getaways. But in the 1990s, they evolved from a place of rest into a major means of survival. That was when the Russian economy suffered from what journalist Anne Williamson called in congressional testimony the “rape of Russia.” The economy was destroyed and then plundered by financial oligarchs, who swooped in to buy assets at fire sale prices. 

Stripped of other resources, Russian families turned to their dachas to grow food. Dr. Sharaskin observed that the share of food gardening in national agriculture increased from 32% in 1990 to over 50% by 2000. In 2004, food gardens accounted for 51% of the total agricultural output of the Russian Federation – greater than the contribution of the whole electric power generation industry; greater than all of the forestry, wood-processing and pulp and paper industries; and significantly greater than the coal, natural gas and oil refining industries taken together.  

Dachas are now a codified right of Russian citizens. In 2003, the government signed the Private Garden Plot Act into law, granting citizens free plots of land ranging from 1 to 3 hectares each. (A hectare is about 2.5 acres.) Dr. Sharaskin opined in 2009 that “with 35 million families (70% of Russia’s population) … producing more than 40% of Russia’s agricultural output, this is in all likelihood the most extensive microscale food production practice in any industrially developed nation.” 

In a 2014 article titled “Dacha Gardens—Russia’s Amazing Model for Urban Agriculture”, Sara Pool wrote that Russia obtains “over 50% agricultural products from family garden plots. The backyard gardening model uses around 3% arable land, and accounts for roughly 92% of all Russian potatoes, 87% of all fruit, 77% vegetables, and 59% all Russian meat according to the Russian Federal State Statistic Service.”

Our Beautiful but Toxic and Wasteful Green Lawns

Rather than dachas, we in the West have pristine green lawns, which not only produce no food but involve chemical and mechanical maintenance that is a major contributor to water and air pollution. Lawns are the single largest irrigated crop in the U.S., covering nearly 32 million acres. This is a problem particularly in the western U.S. states, which are currently suffering from reduced food production due to drought. Data compiled by Urban Plantations from the EPA, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Alliance for Water Efficiency suggests that gardens use 66% less water than lawns. In the U.S., fruits and vegetables are grown  on only about 10 million acres. In theory, then, if the space occupied by American lawns were converted to food gardens, the country could produce four times as many fruits and vegetables as it does now. 

A study from NASA scientists in collaboration with researchers in the Mountain West estimated that American lawns cover an area that is about the size of Texas and is three times larger than that used for any other irrigated crop in the United States.  The study was not, however, about the growth of lawns but about their impact on the environment and water resources. It found that “maintaining a well-manicured lawn uses up to 900 liters of water per person per day and reduces [carbon] sequestration effectiveness by up to 35 percent by adding emissions from fertilization and the operation of mowing equipment.” To combat water and pollution problems, some cities have advocated abandoning the great green lawn in favor of vegetable gardens, local native plants, meadows or just letting the grass die. But well-manicured lawns are an established U.S. cultural tradition; and some municipalities have banned front-yard gardens as not meeting neighborhood standards of aesthetics.  Some homeowners, however, have fought back. Florida ended up passing a law in July 2019 that prohibits towns from banning edible gardens for aesthetic reasons; and in California, a bill was passed in 2014 that allows yard use for “personal agriculture” (defined as “use of land where an individual cultivates edible plant crops for personal use or donation”). As noted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: 

“The Legislature recognized that lawn care is resource intensive, with lawns being the largest irrigated crop in the United States offering no nutritional gain. Finding that 30% to 60% of residential water is used for watering lawns, the Legislature believes these resources could be allocated to more productive activities, including growing food, thus increasing access to healthy options for low-income individuals.”

Despite how large they loom in the American imagination, immaculate green lawns maintained by pesticides, herbicides and electric lawnmowers are a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the United States. In the 1930s, chemicals were not recommended. Weeds were controlled either by pulling them by hand or by keeping chickens. Chemical use became popular only after World War II, and it has grown significantly since. According to the EPA, close to 80 million U.S. households spray 90 million pounds of pesticides and herbicides on their lawns each year. A 1999 study by the United States Geological Survey found that 99% of urban water streams contain pesticides, which pollute our drinking water and create serious health risks for wildlife, pets, and humans. Among other disorders, these chemicals are correlated with an increased risk of cancers, nervous system disorders, and a seven-fold increased risk of childhood leukemia. 

That’s just the pollution in our water supply. Other problems with our lawn fetish are air and noise pollution generated by gas-powered lawn and garden equipment. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that this equipment is responsible for 5% of U.S. air pollution. Americans use about 800 million gallons of gas per year just mowing their lawns.

The Food Shortage Solution in Your Own Backyard

by Ellen Brown

Posted on June 9, 2022

While the global food systems we depend on come under increasing strain, there’s a solution to the growing crisis that most Americans can find in their own backyards–or front lawns.

A confluence of crises—lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war—have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do? 

Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance, pointed out in a recent interview with Del Bigtree that in the United States there are 40 million acres of lawn. Lawns are the most destructive monoculture on the planet, absorbing more resources and pesticides than any other crop, without providing any yield. If we were to turn 30% of that lawn into permaculture-based food gardens, says Gale, we could be food self-sufficient without relying on imports or chemicals. 

Permaculture is a gardening technique that “uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.”

Russian families have shown the possibilities, using permaculture methods on simple cottage gardens or allotments called dachas. As Dr. Leon Sharashkin, a Russian translator and editor with a PhD in forestry from the University of Missouri, explains:

Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world – and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat. Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year – so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens – and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry.

The Dacha Model

Dachas are small wooden houses on a small plot of land, typically just 600 meters (656 yards) in size. In Soviet Russia, they were allocated free of charge on the theory that the land belonged to the people. They were given to many public servants; and families not given a dacha could get access to a plot of land in an allotment association, where they could grow vegetables, visit regularly to tend their kitchen gardens and gather crops. 

Dachas were originally used mainly as country vacation getaways. But in the 1990s, they evolved from a place of rest into a major means of survival. That was when the Russian economy suffered from what journalist Anne Williamson called in congressional testimony the “rape of Russia.” The economy was destroyed and then plundered by financial oligarchs, who swooped in to buy assets at fire sale prices. 

Stripped of other resources, Russian families turned to their dachas to grow food. Dr. Sharaskin observed that the share of food gardening in national agriculture increased from 32% in 1990 to over 50% by 2000. In 2004, food gardens accounted for 51% of the total agricultural output of the Russian Federation – greater than the contribution of the whole electric power generation industry; greater than all of the forestry, wood-processing and pulp and paper industries; and significantly greater than the coal, natural gas and oil refining industries taken together.  

Dachas are now a codified right of Russian citizens. In 2003, the government signed the Private Garden Plot Act into law, granting citizens free plots of land ranging from 1 to 3 hectares each. (A hectare is about 2.5 acres.) Dr. Sharaskin opined in 2009 that “with 35 million families (70% of Russia’s population) … producing more than 40% of Russia’s agricultural output, this is in all likelihood the most extensive microscale food production practice in any industrially developed nation.” 

In a 2014 article titled “Dacha Gardens—Russia’s Amazing Model for Urban Agriculture”, Sara Pool wrote that Russia obtains “over 50% agricultural products from family garden plots. The backyard gardening model uses around 3% arable land, and accounts for roughly 92% of all Russian potatoes, 87% of all fruit, 77% vegetables, and 59% all Russian meat according to the Russian Federal State Statistic Service.”

Our Beautiful but Toxic and Wasteful Green Lawns

Rather than dachas, we in the West have pristine green lawns, which not only produce no food but involve chemical and mechanical maintenance that is a major contributor to water and air pollution. Lawns are the single largest irrigated crop in the U.S., covering nearly 32 million acres. This is a problem particularly in the western U.S. states, which are currently suffering from reduced food production due to drought. Data compiled by Urban Plantations from the EPA, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Alliance for Water Efficiency suggests that gardens use 66% less water than lawns. In the U.S., fruits and vegetables are grown  on only about 10 million acres. In theory, then, if the space occupied by American lawns were converted to food gardens, the country could produce four times as many fruits and vegetables as it does now. 

A study from NASA scientists in collaboration with researchers in the Mountain West estimated that American lawns cover an area that is about the size of Texas and is three times larger than that used for any other irrigated crop in the United States.  The study was not, however, about the growth of lawns but about their impact on the environment and water resources. It found that “maintaining a well-manicured lawn uses up to 900 liters of water per person per day and reduces [carbon] sequestration effectiveness by up to 35 percent by adding emissions from fertilization and the operation of mowing equipment.” To combat water and pollution problems, some cities have advocated abandoning the great green lawn in favor of vegetable gardens, local native plants, meadows or just letting the grass die. But well-manicured lawns are an established U.S. cultural tradition; and some municipalities have banned front-yard gardens as not meeting neighborhood standards of aesthetics.  Some homeowners, however, have fought back. Florida ended up passing a law in July 2019 that prohibits towns from banning edible gardens for aesthetic reasons; and in California, a bill was passed in 2014 that allows yard use for “personal agriculture” (defined as “use of land where an individual cultivates edible plant crops for personal use or donation”). As noted in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: 

“The Legislature recognized that lawn care is resource intensive, with lawns being the largest irrigated crop in the United States offering no nutritional gain. Finding that 30% to 60% of residential water is used for watering lawns, the Legislature believes these resources could be allocated to more productive activities, including growing food, thus increasing access to healthy options for low-income individuals.”

Despite how large they loom in the American imagination, immaculate green lawns maintained by pesticides, herbicides and electric lawnmowers are a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the United States. In the 1930s, chemicals were not recommended. Weeds were controlled either by pulling them by hand or by keeping chickens. Chemical use became popular only after World War II, and it has grown significantly since. According to the EPA, close to 80 million U.S. households spray 90 million pounds of pesticides and herbicides on their lawns each year. A 1999 study by the United States Geological Survey found that 99% of urban water streams contain pesticides, which pollute our drinking water and create serious health risks for wildlife, pets, and humans. Among other disorders, these chemicals are correlated with an increased risk of cancers, nervous system disorders, and a seven-fold increased risk of childhood leukemia. 

That’s just the pollution in our water supply. Other problems with our lawn fetish are air and noise pollution generated by gas-powered lawn and garden equipment. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that this equipment is responsible for 5% of U.S. air pollution. Americans use about 800 million gallons of gas per year just mowing their lawns.

Yet even people who recognize the downsides of lawnmowers and chemicals continue to use them, under pressure to keep up appearances for the sake of the neighborhood. That cultural bias could change, however, in the face of serious food shortages. And while yards left to dirt and weeds may be unsightly, well-maintained permaculture gardens are aesthetically appealing without the use of chemicals or mowing. Here are a couple of examples, the first of a dacha and the second of a Pennsylvania community garden:

[Stephen Scott / Small Farmers’ Journal]

[Neighborhood Gardens Trust]

Homegrown Food: Organic, Non-GMO, and No Fossil Fuels Required

Local garden farming does not need chemical fertilizers or gas-guzzling machinery to thrive, as the Russian dacha farmers demonstrated.  Dr. Sharashkin wrote in his 2008 doctoral thesis:

[T]he Soviet government had the policy of allowing dacha gardening only on marginal, unproductive, or overexploited lands that could not be used in state-run agriculture. And it is on exactly these lands that gardeners have consistently been producing large crops of vegetables and fruits ever since private gardens were re-authorized in 1941.… [M]ost of the gardeners grow their produce without chemical fertilizers.

When the practice [of industrial chemical use] subsided in the 1990s as the output of collective farming dwindled and was replaced by household production, significant abatement of environmental pollution with agrochemicals (especially that of watersheds) was observed. [Emphasis added.]

Most of Russia’s garden produce is grown not only without agrochemicals but without genetically modified seeds, which were banned in Russia in 2016. As Mitchel Cohen reports in Covert Action Magazine, some GMO use has crept back in, but a bill for a full ban on the cultivation of genetically modified crops is currently making its way through the Duma (the ruling Russian assembly).

Growing your own food conserves petroleum resources not only because it requires no tractors or other machinery but because it needn’t be hauled over long distances in trucks, trains or ships. Food travels 1,500 miles on average before it gets to your dinner table, and nutrients are lost in the process. Families who cannot afford the healthy but pricey organic food in the supermarket can grow their own.

Prof. Sharaskin noted that gardens also have psychological benefits. He cited studies showing that personal interaction with plants can reduce stress, fear and fatigue, and can lower blood pressure and muscle tension. Gardening also reconnects us with our neighbors and the earth. Sharaskin quotes Leo Tolstoy:

“One of the first and universally acknowledged preconditions for happiness is living in close contact with nature, i.e., living under the open sky, in the light of the sun, in the fresh air; interacting with the earth, plants, and animals.”

From Crisis to Opportunity

Today, people in the West are undergoing something similar to the “rape of Russia” at the hands of financial oligarchs. Oligarchical giants like BlackRock and Blackstone come to mind, along with “the Davos crowd” – that exclusive cartel of international bankers, big businessmen, media, and politicians meeting annually at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. 

WEF founder Klaus Schwab has declared the current confluence of crises to be “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” It is also a rare but narrow opportunity for us, the disenfranchised, to reclaim our plundered assets and the power to issue our own money, upgrading the economy in the service of the people and reimagining food systems and our own patches of land, however small. 

For food sustainability, we can take a lesson from the successful Russian dachas by forming our own family and community food gardens. Russia has also seen the burgeoning growth of eco-villages – subsistence communities made up of multiple family cottages, typically including community areas with a school, clinic, theater, and festival grounds. Forming self-sufficient communities and “going local” is a popular movement in the West today as well. 

A corollary is the independent cryptocurrency movement. We can combine these two movements to fund our local food gardens with food-backed community currencies or cryptocurrencies. Crypto “coins” bought now would act like forward contracts, serving as an advance against future productivity, redeemable at harvest time in agricultural produce. That subject will be explored in a follow-up article, coming shortly. 

_______________________

This article was first posted on ScheerPost. Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. 

Off the Top of My Head

If the Planet Goes Down, It Will Be Irrelevant Whether a Woman Has the Right to Choose or Not

by John Lawrence

Democrats will fail at codifying Roe vs Wade, but Republicans will succeed in codifying anti-abortion rights if a Republican President is elected in 2024. But that's the least important thing that will happen. If Republicans take over the House and Senate in 2022, and a Republican President is elected in 2024, forget the US and the world doing anything about climate change. It will be full steam ahead for fossil fuels, and full steam ahead for the death of the planet. We don't have that much time any more to prevent irreversible change due to global warming. All the deadlines here have past or soon will be past. The relevant headline is Greenhouse Gases Must Begin to Fall by 2025, Says U.N. Climate Report. We are continually being bombarded with political and cultural trivia when the giant in the room is climate change. The prevailing attitude is we'll get around to that eventually, but eventually is almost here, folks. If not much is happening before 2025, we might as well forget it and spend our few remaining years enjoying the human past times of war and trivial pursuits. Eos reported:

"The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report on climate mitigation since the Paris Agreement was released today. This is likely the IPCC’s last word before the window of opportunity to stop warming at 1.5°C disappears, after which scientists said life-threatening climate consequences and feedbacks will intensify.

"Led by hundreds of scientists convened by the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, the summary of the report was approved by 195 governments after 16 days of discussions and one 40-hour marathon session that stretched into Sunday night.

"The report gives the world a failing grade. International policies implemented by the end of 2020 will miss the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming well below 2°C. Current trends suggest that by 2100, the world will warm 3.2°C compared to preindustrial average temperature, with a spread of 2.2°C to 3.5°C possible.

"“Reaching 3.2°C will be nightmarish,” said Andrea Simonelli, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University who was not involved in the report. “The threshold for habitable is already being pushed to the limit in many places.”"

Despite these dire warnings the human species is still on a binge of colossal pettiness. This means that wars and in particular resource wars will become more severe and common. Already the whole world is in a food crisis due to drought and lack of water for crop irrigation. War also plays a part. Russia and Ukraine together supply more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, and coming disruptions could fuel higher food prices and social unrest. When people start fighting over food, wars will take on proportions that will make the war in Ukraine seem like a minor aberration. Russia and Ukraine together export more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, feeding billions of people in the form of bread, pasta and packaged foods. The countries are also key suppliers of barley, sunflower seed oil and corn, among other products. Food prices have already risen globally as a result of pandemic-related shipping disruptions, rising costs for farmers and adverse weather, and wheat is no exception. Between April 2020 and December 2021, the price of wheat increased 80 percent, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. That was on a par with rising costs for corn and higher than increases for soybeans or coffee.

Now we're talking some serious stuff, not just the future of NATO. The brunt of the food crisis just like the brunt of climate change in general will be felt most by the poorer nations. As a consequence, whatever immigration crisis that is being felt today will be magnified 1000 times at least as starving people seek to come across borders not only in the US but all over the world where prosperous nations border on poverty stricken ones. So crises based on real world problems, rather than on national borders between Russia and Ukraine, will become more severe. Already in California, the water supply for crop irrigation is likely to be turned off by 2025 as Lake Mead and Lake Powell go dry. California supplies about a quarter of the US' fruits and vegetables so the American diet is shortly to be seriously affected and not just by supply chain issues. Recently, a fire in Laguna Niguel destroyed 20 multi-million dollar homes on a day that was not particularly windy or hot. One 10,000 square foot mansion recently was on the market for almost $10 million.

They say that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Now the human species is fiddling while the whole damn planet is about to go up in smoke. Oh well, it was a nice planet while it lasted. Scientists assure us that there are trillions of other habitable planets out there, but they're so far away.

Off the Top of My Head

Beyond Meat and Cow Farts

by John Lawrence, February 24, 2021

About 19% of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted into the atmosphere each year comes from agriculture. There are roughly a billion cattle in the world raised for both meat and dairy. The 2 billion tons of GHGs they burp and fart account for 4 percent of global emissions each year. Also pig poop accounts for half of all poop related emissions with cows making up the other half. Industrial cow and pig farms create ponds full of poop which then sometimes break through to streams and rivers. In an article, "A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms", we find the following:

"Fifty yards from Miller’s family graveyard is a massive open-air cesspool storing the pigs’ waste – a stagnant pool containing their feces, urine, blood and other bodily fluids – often referred to as a “lagoon”, one of about 3,300 lagoons across the state. When the cesspool reaches its capacity, its contents are liquefied and sprayed into a field across the street from Miller’s house via a large, sprinkler-like apparatus. The sprayer releases a mist of waste on to the field, which, according to court documents, is about 200ft from Miller’s home at its closest rotation."

In addition to the environmental, health and stench problems, pig shit lagoons are contributing major amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere. “Air pollutants from the routine operation of confinement houses, cesspools, and waste sprayers affect nearby neighborhoods where they cause disruption of activities of daily living, stress, anxiety, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory conditions, reduced lung function, and acute blood pressure elevation,” Wing and fellow UNC researcher Jill Johnston wrote in a 2014 study. They also found that the state’s industrial hog operations disproportionately affect African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. That pattern, they concluded, “is generally recognized as environmental racism”.

The Guardian article continued: "North Carolina’s pork production industry has shifted dramatically since the mid-80s. Today’s industrial farms, often called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, raise pigs and other livestock in confinement until they are ready for slaughter. The hogs generally live in cramped quarters; Michelle B Nowlin, supervising attorney of Duke’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, estimates they typically get seven or eight square feet of space each." Chickens and cattle suffer the same fate of having to spend their meager existence in CAFOs.

As more people world wide become middle class, they want to eat more meat. This is not only a problem for the animals who suffer the most, but it is a problem for the GHGs that animal agriculture causes that contribute to global warming. But the nutritional aspects of eating animals are equally inefficient. A pig eats 3 times as many calories as we get when we eat it. Cows require six calories of feed for every calorie of beef that we eat. In China and other developing countries meat eating is becoming much more popular because of a growing and more affluent middle class.

There are several alternatives already on the market: plant based hamburgers called Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers. These burgers are a pretty good approximation of the real thing, but there are even more products being developed that don't only mimic the taste of meat. They actually are meat except they are created without having to pass calories through a cow and then slaughtering the cow. They use the same metabolic processes that a cow does to deposit meat on its bones. This meat though is created in a lab and is already on the market in Singapore according to The Guardian:

"Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time. The development has been hailed as a landmark moment across the meat industry.

"The “chicken bites”, produced by the US company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock, the company said.

"Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork, with a view to slashing the impact of industrial livestock production on the climate and nature crises, as well as providing cleaner, drug-free and cruelty-free meat. Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild."

If the world's consumption of meat can be converted to lab grown meat that looks, taste, and feels like the real thing, then we can eliminate the whole process of passing calories through a cow or pig or chicken first and still get the same end result. That alone will save about 10 billion tons of GHGs per year.

'Hunger Like They've Never Seen It Before': US Food Banks Struggle as 1 in 6 Families With Children Don't Have Enough to Eat

Published on Friday, November 27, 2020

by Common Dreams

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," said one Texas food bank director. 

by Brett Wilkins, staff writer

 

74 Comments

People queue on November 21, 2020 at a food distribution site at Lake-Sumter State College in Clermont, Florida sponsored by the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. (Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Light Rocket/Getty Images)

One in six U.S. families with children don't have enough to eat this holiday season, a national emergency exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the unemployment crisis it has generated. Over the past several days, remarkable reporting in the Washington Post and National Geographic, among other outlets, has explored this alarming trend. 

"It's been hard to survive. Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work."
—Randy Young, Houston 

According to Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the U.S., more than 50 million people will experience food insecurity by the end of the year. Among U.S. children, the figure rises to one in four. The group, which runs a network of some 200 food banks across the nation, says it distributed over half a billion meals last month alone, a 52% increase from an average pre-pandemic month. 

The latest U.S. Census Bureau pandemic survey, published earlier this month, found that fewer than half of U.S. households with children were "very confident" they could afford to provide enough food for their families in the next month. 

As is so often the case when it comes to matters of economic inequality, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the hunger crisis. Among the 25 U.S. counties experiencing the worst food insecurity, only four have majority white populations, all of them in rural Kentucky. Census Bureau data reveals that fully 27% of Black and 23% of Latinx households with children reported not having enough to eat over the past week—compared with just 12% of white families. 

"This is a story about racial and ethnic disparities—both food insecurity and the story of coronavirus," Emily Engelhard, managing director of Feeding America's research unit, told National Geographic. "The populations and geographies that started in the most disadvantageous state of food insecurity are the ones that are getting hit the hardest" during the pandemic. 

"People are seeing hunger like they've never seen it before," Trisha Cunningham, president of the North Texas Food Bank—where cars lined up for miles and people slept in their vehicles waiting for Thanksgiving food boxes—told National Geographic. On November 14, its busiest day on record, North Texas Food Bank provided groceries—including 7,000 whole turkeys—to more than 25,000 people.

In northeastern Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank planned to distribute 12,000 meals, a 5,000-meal increase from a year ago. 

"We're now seeing families who had an emergency fund but it's gone and they're at the end of their rope," Kristin Warzocha, president of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, told the Guardian. "We're going to be doing this for a really long time, and that's frankly terrifying given the impact hunger has on physical health, learning and development for children, and parents' stress."

In Texas' second-largest city, the San Antonio Food Bank distributes eight semi-trucks full of food every day, but still was forced to resort to rationing due to soaring need. 

"Covid-19 has taken so much, people's jobs, their loved ones, and now we're just trying to stop it from taking Thanksgiving," San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper told CNBC. "Pre-pandemic we were feeding around 60,000 people a week, and now we're seeing around 120,000... and most of those are new to the food bank. They've never had to ask for help before." 

 

Indeed, among the thousands of cars that lined up starting in the pre-dawn hours for free Thanksgiving meals at Houston's NRG Stadium last weekend, there were more than a few luxury makes. 

"I was just telling my mom, 'You look at people pulling up in Mercedes and stuff, come on,'" Randy Young, a recently laid-off cook at the stadium who was waiting in line with his elderly mother, told the Post. "If a person driving a Mercedes is in need of food, you know it's bad."

"It's been hard to survive," Young said. "Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work." 

Loudoun County, Virginia is per capita the wealthiest county in the nation, with a median household income of just under $140,000. Yet the Post reports Loudoun Hunger Relief recently handed out meals to 887 households in one recent week, a 300% increase from pre-pandemic activity.  

"We are continuing to see people who have never used our services before," Jennifer Montgomery, Loudoun Hunger Relief's executive director, told the Post. 

In the nation's largest city, Food Bank for NYC president Leslie Gordon told France 24 that "even before the pandemic, there were 1.5 million residents here across the five boroughs who didn't always know where their next meal was coming from or what it would be, and that's escalated considerably to nearly two million of our neighbors." 

"Across the country demand has not let up, and food banks do everything they can to make sure families have food on the table for Thanksgiving," Zuani Villareal, a spokesperson for Feeding America told the Guardian. "There's no end in sight, but we can't be the only solution." 

Celia Call, CEO of Feeding Texas, stressed to the Post that "without sustained aid at the federal level, we'll be hard-pressed to keep up" with demand. "We're just bracing for the worst," she added. 

Several progressive lawmakers tweeted the Post article over the past two days. One of them, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), said that "Congress has the power to address this crisis," and asked, "Why aren't we doing it?" 

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Off the Top of My Head

Farming: Past, Present and Future

by John Lawrence, May 5, 2020

There are a lot of people in the world who still wake up each morning and worry about where they will get the food for today. They are subsistence farmers or, if they live in cities, they are subsistence eaters. Unfortunately, the pandemic has made the situation even worse. Besides that midwest farmers are suffering because their export market to China has been ruined by Trump's trade war. Throughout American history monocultural farmers have gone bankrupt due to market conditions. They have to borrow heavily to plant their crops, and, if interest rates go up or market conditions are unfavorable when the crop is harvested, they might not be able to repay their bank loans. Farmers like my Grandfather were in a lot better shape because they were basically self-sufficient. They grew their own food, and kept just enough animals whose slaughter fulfilled their own needs. My Grandfather had a small dairy farm which he worked himself. He didn't have a lot of fuel or equipment expense. He used a team of horses for which he grew their own food. He grew the hay for his dairy cows. He didn't have to borrow money for fuel, equipment and seeds every year like the midwestern monocultural farmers.

So he could sell his milk for whatever price the market was paying. He and his family were self-sufficient. My Grandmother made their clothes. They had a garden. She canned foods for the winter months. Very little was store bought. So they weathered the Great Depression with no problem because they had a self-sufficient farm. Today farmers markets are providing a more important service in the age of pandemic. Local farmers are providing fresh food that the industrialized agricultural food chain has not been able to provide. They have filled a niche. Industrialized agriculture relies on antibiotics for animals and pesticides and herbicides for crops. My Grandfather's farm was organic because every pre-World War II farm was organic by definition. Today the industrialized farm inputs like Monsanto's GMO seeds and weedkiller Roundup make farmers dependent on banks which are all too willing to foreclose on their property if they cannot make their loan payments. Not only was my Grandfather's farm organic, he didn't have any debts. He did not have to borrow money every spring from the banks, and then pay back on his loans every fall. He did not have any GMO crops for which he had to buy seeds every year from Monsanto and then buy the Roundup to spray them with.

I'm thinking the local farmers' markets are teaching us a lesson in this pandemic era. They can supply food that does not have to have a long supply chain to get it to the stores. It doesn't have to be trucked for miles. It does not have to be sprayed with cancer causing chemicals. It doesn't have to be cultivated and harvested with fuel intensive, greenhouse gas producing tractors. It is not as susceptible to food borne disease such as e coli, salmonella and listeria which come mainly from industrialized farms. Maybe local farming should be encouraged. People want healthy organic foods, foods devoid of GMOs. Local supply chains are more reliable and safer than industrialized food chains. I think that the agricultural industry should become more like my Grandfather's farm, more local, more organic. Farmers' markets are showing us the way.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

Off the Top of My Head

Animal Agriculture Industry Rivals Fossil Fuel Industry as one of the Largest Causes of Climate Catastrophe

by John Lawrence, January 31, 2020

In Chris Hedges brilliant accompanying article he says, "One of the easiest and most significant ways an individual can directly reduce his or her environmental impact on the planet is to eat a diet free of animal products." Another is to eat organic as much as possible. Not only will it be better for the planet, it will be better for you personally. The industrial food industry has been a problem for almost as long as the fossil fuel industry. The first oil well was discovered in 1859. After the Civil War, the meat packing industry was started, made possible by the railroads which could distribute meat to the rapidly growing urban areas. Armour and Swift meats were concentrated in Chicago's Union Stockyards in 1865. So the industrialization of food and the industrialization of oil started the same time about 150 years ago. That's when the human race started pumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere resulting in the global warming and environmental crisis we face today. Henry Ford got his idea for the assmbly line for automobiles from the assembly line production of meat products pioneered by Armour and Swift.

From the beginning meat packing and the other industrialized food products were laden with impurities. A chemist, Harvey Wiley, showed that honey and maple syrup were nothing more than corn syrup modified with a few chemicals. Foods including meat were preserved with formaldehyde. Borax was added to milk to hide the fact that it was sour. The meat packing industry was so unsanitary that people were getting sick eating industrialized food products. Prior to the Civil War most food was produced on local farms and not shipped miles in railroad cars to urban centers. Hence it was organic by definition since chemical weed killers and pesticides had not been invented yet. As food became more industrialized, Monsanto got into the act and industrialized farms started spraying foods with chemicals. In 1906 Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle" brought the attention of the general public to the deplorable conditions in the meat packing industry.

Eventually, thanks to Harvey Wiley and Upton Sinclar mostly, the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was enacted. Of course the titans of industry were very much against it. It was government interference in free enterprise. It was socialism. But finally they were required to list ingredients on the label. Today we still are dealing with the situation of adulterated food, food contaminated with preservatives, animal feedlots that are unsanitary, food contaminated with e coli and other pathogens. Monsanto's glyphosate, a known carcinogen, is sprayed liberally on crops. Food additives, both to preserve them and make them look and taste better, are still arrows in the quiver of the food industry. The fast food industry consumes huge quantities of beef products. The general public is ignorant of proper nutrition much less the difference between the health benefits of organic versus nonorganic foods.

The general public is also ignorant of the fact that industrialized animal products are not only contributing to global warming, but also to the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics due to the fact that animals are fed antibiotics to make them grow faster so they can be slaughtered quicker thus contributing to greater profits.

The question is will Americans and other advanced societies cut out their consumption of meat, encourage the recreation of organic family farms, lead healthier lifestyles and reduce consumption of products dependent on fossil fuels in order to save the planet from runaway global warming? If they did, they would be healthier and the planet would definitely be healthier. Otherwise, we will long for the days of preindustrialized America and all the "progress" that has taken place since then will just be seen as a mess of pottage, a Biblical reference, by the way. A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable (Wikipedia). Technological progress has by and large been a mess of pottage if it means that in return for 150 years of industrialized toys and goodies, we will have destroyed the earth for future generations.

Off the Top of My Head

Climate Change is Threatening the World's Food Supply

by John Lawrence, August 17, 2019

A new United Nations report details how climate change is making it more difficult for people to be able to feed themselves especially in poorer parts of the world. As diets tend towards more beef, beef cows are replacing land previously used for growing crops. Raising beef uses ten times more resources than poultry, dairy, eggs or pork. Besides that cows belch and fart methane. According to a New York Times article: "Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars."

Fortunately, there are now some alternatives to the beef cow which deliver the same meaty product sans cow - Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Some smart people have figured out how to create a burger which tastes like a hamburger without running a lot of fodder through a cow. Both are plant based products which look, taste and feel like the real thing. If these products become widespread, the beef cow could be eliminated from the planet, and this would reduce carbon emissions. It would also free up many acres of land on which crops could be raised that would more efficiently feed people.

Both burgers are vegan, halal and kosher. It's unclear at this time whether or not the ingredients are organic and non-GMO. Soy is one of the main agricultural products that is genetically modified so that it can be sprayed with glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup). cnet reports: "The Impossible Burger contains mostly organic ingredients, while the Beyond Burger doesn't. The Beyond Burger is strictly non-GMO, whereas Impossible Foods recently faced backlash about using genetically modified ingredients that contain the pesticide glyphosate." Well then, how can it be mostly organic, and how can the Beyond Burger that's non-GMO not be?

The New York Times article continues: "Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes." Already people are migrating all over the world as they face food shortages and eventual starvation.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.

The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.

And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

Citizens of planet earth take notice. Unless you change the ways you're conducting business, planet earth is not going to be able to sustain you. Consumer oriented lifestyles must be replaced by lifestyles that are more sustainable. Plant based alternatives to beef are a step in the right direction. More birth control would be another to reduce the population. Conversion to renewable energy on a large scale would be the third. Airplanes and the military are large greenhouse gas emitters. All these steps and more must be undertaken if humanity is to survive on planet earth. Humanity is under threat of extinction from just 120 years of industrialization and fossil fuel development. It is time to change course or the earth will cease to be habitable. Whoever thought that the automobile and the airplane were good things?

Off the Top of My Head

Jury Award - $80 million: Monsanto's Roundup Caused Man's Cancer

by John Lawrence

A federal jury has awarded Edwin Hardeman $80 million after it concluded that Monsanto's Roundup caused his cancer. Monsanto which has been acquired by Germany's Bayer, is currently defending itself from thousands of similar lawsuits. Mr. Hardeman used Roundup to control weeds and poison oak on his property for 26 years. In 2015, he learned that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The next year, after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer declared glyphosate, the major ingredient of Roundup, a probable carcinogen, Mr. Hardeman sued Monsanto. In a similar case decided last year, a California jury found that Monsanto had failed to warn a school groundskeeper of the cancer risks posed by Roundup. The jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages, but a judge later reduced that payment to about $80 million.

Many agricultural crops such as corn and soy beans which end up in the American food supply are sprayed with Roundup. These crops have been genetically modified so that they are resistant to Roundup itself so that the Roundup only kills weeds around them. However, the crops themselves when harvested contain Roundup so Americans are literally eating Roundup.

MIT reported:

Roundup Ready crops are crops genetically modified to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup. Roundup is the brand-name of a herbicide produced by Monsanto. Its active ingredient glyphosate was patented in the 1970s. Roundup is widely used by both people in their backyards and farmers in their fields. Roundup Ready plants are resistant to Roundup, so farmers that plant these seeds must use Roundup to keep other weeds from growing in their fields.

The first Roundup Ready crops were developed in 1996, with the introduction of genetically modified soybeans that are resistant to Roundup. These crops were developed to help farmers control weeds. Because the new crops are resistant to Roundup, the herbicide can be used in the fields to eliminate unwanted foliage. Current Roundup Ready crops include soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, cotton, and sorghum, with wheat under development.

Roundup Ready crop seeds have notoriously been referred to as "terminator seeds." This is because the crops produced from Roundup Ready seeds are sterile. Each year, farmers must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto. This means that farmers cannot reuse their best seed.

Roundup is sprayed in parks all over New York City and probably in other major cities as well, and then people sunbathe on the grass. Mother Jones reported:

Monsanto’s Roundup brand alone was applied by the city nearly 500 times last year—about a dozen bathtubs’ worth in undiluted form, according to DOH’s annual pesticide figures—mostly via the Roundup Ultra formulation, a more concentrated version of the original. The Parks Department, responsible for most of the city’s Roundup use, declined to answer my request for a description of where it uses Roundup and how much, though did confirm its use in iconic locations like Central, Prospect, and Riverside parks. Roundup applications are done “at various locations throughout the city system under careful supervision and in very limited quantities,” was the extent of Parks’ disclosure on the subject.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly found traces of glyphosate in a number of common foods, according to agency emails obtained by The Guardian.

US government scientists have detected a weed killer linked to cancer in an array of commonly consumed foods, emails obtained through a freedom of information request show.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been testing food samples for residues of glyphosate, the active ingredient in hundreds of widely used herbicide products, for two years, but has not yet released any official results.

But the internal documents obtained by the Guardian show the FDA has had trouble finding any food that does not carry traces of the pesticide.

“I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal and corn meal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them,” FDA chemist Richard Thompson wrote to colleagues in an email last year regarding glyphosate. Thompson, who is based in an FDA regional laboratory in Arkansas, wrote that broccoli was the only food he had “on hand” that he found to be glyphosate-free.

Glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Roundup is ubiquitous in the food supply. Roundup has been linked to different types of cancers as well as numerous other ailments including Alzheimer's and autism. EcoWatch reports:

Eager to sell more of its flagship herbicide, Monsanto also encouraged farmers to use Roundup as a dessicant, to dry out all of their crops so they could harvest them faster. So Roundup is now routinely sprayed directly on a host of non-GMO crops, including wheat, barley, oats, canola, flax, peas, lentils, soybeans, dry beans and sugar cane.

Between 1996 - 2011, the widespread use of Roundup Ready GMO crops increased herbicide use in the U.S. by 527 million pounds—even though Monsanto claimed its GMO crops would reduce pesticide and herbicide use.

Monsanto has falsified data on Roundup's safety, and marketed it to parks departments and consumers as “environmentally friendly" and “biodegradable, to encourage its use it on roadsides, playgrounds, golf courses, schoolyards, lawns and home gardens. A French court ruled those marketing claims amounted to false advertising.

Ironically, Germany and 13 other countries have outlawed the use of glyphosate even though Germany's Bayer owns Monsanto, the producer of glyphosate. Best to eat organic as much as possible to minimize the presence of glyphosate in your and your family's bodies. The US Food and Drug Administration is more on the side of Monsanto and other major corporations than it is on the side of American consumers. Europe uses the precautionary principle which says it is better not to use a product until it's proven safe. The US is just the opposite. Anything is legal until proven unsafe. Buyer beware.

 

Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment

Published on Tuesday, December 04, 2018 by Common Dreams

 

Our food system is linked to an economic system that is fundamentally biased against what’s good for people and the planet.

by Helena Norberg-Hodge

 

7 Comments

Recent and inspiring testaments to human ingenuity and goodwill have two things in common: They involve smaller-scale farms adapted to local conditions, and they depend more on human attention and care than on energy and technology. In other words, they are the opposite of industrial monocultures — huge farms that grow just one crop. (Image: Sustainable Food Trust)

If you’re seeking some good news during these troubled times, look at the ecologically sound ways of producing food that have percolated up from the grassroots in recent years. Small farmers, environmentalists, academic researchers and food and farming activists have given us agroecology, holistic resource management, permaculture, regenerative agriculture and other methods that can alleviate or perhaps even eliminate the global food system’s worst impacts: biodiversity loss, energy depletion, toxic pollution, food insecurity and massive carbon emissions.

"The food system is inextricably linked to an economic system that, for decades, has been fundamentally biased against the kinds of changes we need."

 

These inspiring testaments to human ingenuity and goodwill have two things in common: They involve smaller-scale farms adapted to local conditions, and they depend more on human attention and care than on energy and technology. In other words, they are the opposite of industrial monocultures — huge farms that grow just one crop.

But to significantly reduce the many negative impacts of the food system, these small-scale initiatives need to spread all over the world. Unfortunately, this has not happened, because the transformation of farming requires shifting not just how food is produced, but also how it is marketed and distributed. The food system is inextricably linked to an economic system that, for decades, has been fundamentally biased against the kinds of changes we need.

Put simply, economic policies almost everywhere have systematically promoted ever-larger scale and monocultural production. Those policies include:

• Massive subsidies for globally traded commodities. Most farm subsidies in the US, for example, go to just five commodities — corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice — that are the centerpieces of global food trade. At the same time, government programs — like the US Market Access Program — provide hundreds of millions of dollars to expand international markets for agriculture products.

• Direct and hidden subsidies for global transport infrastructures and fossil fuels. The IMF estimates these subsidies and ignored environmental costs at $5.3 trillion per year — the equivalent of $10 million every minute.

• ‘Free trade’ policies that open up food markets in virtually every country to global agribusinesses. The 1994 NAFTA agreement, for example, forced Mexico’s small corn producers to compete with heavily-subsidized large-scale farms in the US; the recent re-negotiation of NAFTA will do the same to Canadian dairy farmers.

• Health and safety regulations. Most of these have been made necessary by large-scale production and distribution — but they make it impossible for smaller-scale producers and marketers to compete and survive. In France, for example, the number of small producers of cheese has shrunk by 90% thanks in large measure to EU food safety laws.

These policies provide a huge competitive advantage to large monocultural producers and corporate processors and marketers, which is why industrially produced food that has been shipped from the other side of the world is often less expensive than food from the farm next door.

The environmental costs of this bias are huge. Monocultures rely heavily on chemical inputs — fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides — which pollute the immediate environment, put wildlife at risk and — through nutrient runoff — create “dead zones” in waters hundreds or thousands of miles away. Monocultures are also heavily dependent on fossil fuels to run large-scale equipment and to transport raw and processed foods across the world, making them a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, scientists estimate the greenhouse gas toll of the global food system at one-third of total emissions.

There are social and economic costs as well. In the industrialized world, smaller producers can’t survive, their land amalgamated into the holdings of ever larger farms — in the process decimating rural and small town economies and threatening public health. In the Global South, the same forces pull people off the land by the hundreds of millions, leading to poverty, rapidly swelling urban slums and waves of economic refugees. In both North and South, uprooted small farmers easily spiral into unemployment, poverty, resentment and anger.

There are also risks to food security. With global economic policies homogenizing the world’s food supply, the 7,000 species of plants used as food crops in the past have been reduced to 150 commercially important crops, with rice, wheat and maize accounting for 60 percent of the global food supply. Varieties within those few crops have been chosen for their responsiveness to chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation water — and for their ability to withstand long-distance transport. A similar calculus is applied to livestock and poultry breeds, which are skewed toward those that can grow rapidly with inputs of grain and antibiotics in confined animal feeding operations. The loss of diversity even extends to the size and shape of food products: harvesting machinery, transport systems and supermarket chains all require standardization. The end result is that more than half of the world’s food varieties have been lost over the past century; in countries like the US, the loss is more than 90 percent. The global food system rests on a dangerously narrow base: without the genetic variety that can supply resilience, the food system is vulnerable to catastrophic losses from disease and the disruptions of a changing climate.

One Man Could End World Hunger, but He Won’t

by Lee Camp, from truthdig, October 3, 2018

Billions and billions: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is doing his part to widen the income gap. (Composite image from Megapixel, Cliff Owen / AP)

I do not want to talk about Jeff Bezos.

But in order to not talk about Jeff Bezos, I have to talk about Jeff Bezos.

We all know the Lex Luthor-looking head of Amazon is the richest human in the world.

He’s achieved a net worth of more than $150 billion by selling everything that has ever existed … with free shipping. (It turns out the only thing stopping the human race from giving all our money to one man was that pesky $4.99 shipping fee.)

But let me stop right here. Even the way we talk about economics is influenced by a capitalist culture that tells us amassing money is the answer to everything. Did you notice I said Bezos “achieved” a net worth of $150 billion, and that seems like a normal way to phrase it? However, would you say, “Jeffrey Dahmer achieved eating the hearts of 10 different people?” No, that would sound odd to you. Yet having $150 billion is nearly as sociopathic, and still we use terminology as if it’s GREAT!

But, like I said, this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about clean water.

Clean water is one of the most important things to anyone and everyone (second only to nacho cheese). Yet millions around the world don’t have clean water or struggle to get it. A report by the U.N. “estimated that 300 million people on the continent [of Africa], more than a third of the population, have no fixed supply [of clean water].” And 2.5 billion worldwide lack proper sanitation. The CDC says 2,200 children die a day from diarrheal diseases—mostly from unclean water.

Millions of people in total die each year from a lack of clean water. So how much would it cost to change that? It would cost $10 billion a year to bring pure water to the entire world.

Jeff Bezos himself could provide the world with clean water for the next 15 years.

He could save millions upon millions of lives. But instead of doing that, he will continue to enrich himself by delivering sex toys in a box with a smiley on it.

But this is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about world hunger. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty while the U.N. in 2015 estimated it would cost $30 billion a year to end world hunger. Imagine—not a soul hungry! And big shock—when people aren’t hungry, there’s less crime, less hatred, better decision-making, and so forth. Hunger correlates with all kinds of shitty stuff, which means we all benefit when there’s no hunger. Think about it; you probably have coworkers who miss lunch and start spraying hate crimes around the office. Then you have to say, “Leslie, I think if you just had a taco, you would stop using the C-word so much.” Now imagine Leslie on a global scale.

Jeff Bezos himself could end world hunger for five straight years. If he teamed up with the Koch brothers, they could do it for eight to 10 years.

But Bezos wouldn’t do that. Instead, he’ll just make billions convincing people to put Amazon Echo spy systems into their own homes.

This column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about Flint, Mich.

You remember how upset we were about Flint’s water? It was poisoned with lead. It was destroying lives of people who were already poor to begin with. Then the authorities came to the conclusion it would cost $216 million to fix, and everyone was aghast. That’s an insane amount of money. How could ANY city afford that?!

Jeff Bezos could pay to repair Flint’s water supply 694 times over.

He could pay for it 690 times over and still have 864 million dollars left to pay for a cast of people to dance around him dressed like wood sprites and sprinkle glitter on his shining bald head for the rest of his fucking life. (So don’t say he wouldn’t be happy.)

But this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about homelessness.

There are 554,000 homeless people in the U.S., one of the richest countries in the world. What would it cost to give each of these struggling people his or her own apartment? Recent numbers show the cheapest apartments to rent in America are in Wichita, Kan. (because why would ya? … unless you were heavily invested in grasshoppers). In Wichita an apartment costs $632 per month. (In San Francisco that’s the cost of the monthly utility bill for a dog house.) So $632 per month amounts to $7,584 per year. Therefore, the total cost to give every American houseless person an apartment in Wichita would be $4.2 billion.

Jeff Bezos could give every homeless person their own apartment for the next 36 YEARS.

This is one man we’re talking about! But Jeff Bezos would never do that. He’d rather push a bag of 3,000 live ladybugs on someone actually searching Amazon for “Lady Bugs” the Rodney Dangerfield film (which was apparently intended as a children’s movie, but now seems like a guidebook for how to become a #MeToo predator).

But this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about education.

When people go to college without coming out stuck under immense debt, it often changes their whole lives. They can get better jobs, eat healthier, provide for their family. “According to the American Association of Community Colleges,” this source says, “the average yearly cost of tuition and fees for community college students in the U.S. is $3,347. …” It usually takes two years to graduate from community college, so the cost for two years is $6,694.

Jeff Bezos could pay for the entire community college education of 22.4 million students.

That’s more than the entire number of college students enrolled this year across our country. Of course you’d have to pay for your own beer bongs, posters of John Belushi in the “college” sweater, macaroni stuck to the floor and pregnancy tests. (But I know a guy who can get you a homemade pregnancy test for 35 cents. It’s made out of alkaline batteries and sawdust, but it’ll spot a freakin’ baby a mile away.)

However, this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about the system that created Bezos.

If you removed Bezos from Amazon tomorrow and vacuumed all his money away, he would be replaced by another sick hoarder of egregious wealth. This is because we have a deathly ill economic system. Think about it this way—the goals of our economy (and any economy), according to Zeitgeist Movement founder Peter Joseph, and I agree, should be:

• Pursuit of abundance (all people’s basic needs are met)

• Sustainability (can the system keep going forever)

• Liberation of humanity from hard and dangerous labor (nobody doing jobs they hate)

• Adaptation to emerging technologies and variables

Makes sense—we should seek a sustainable system where nobody is dying or miserable. Here’s the problem—unfettered capitalism doesn’t even claim to be ATTEMPTING any of that. Our economy’s mission statement is basically to “… preserve inefficiency for the sake of monetary circulation, economic growth and power preservation.”

Profit over all else. It doesn’t matter how many people die or work at an Amazon warehouse for pennies. Does. Not. Matter. So it’s not that capitalism is failing in this new Gilded Age. Rather, capitalism is succeeding at what it was meant to do: amass all the money in a tiny number of hands and exploit everyone else.

That’s what this column is about.

—

If you think this column is important, please share it. This column is based on a segment performed and written by Lee Camp for his TV show “Redacted Tonight.” Also, check out Lee’s free weekly podcast, “Common Censored.”

Off the Top of My Head

Kellogg's Honey Smacks Are Smacking of Salmonella

by John Lawrence, August 24, 2018

Oh no! One of the trusted American brands contains salmonella. Who would have thunk it.

NPR reported:

Kellogg's issued a voluntary recall of the brand's Honey Smacks cereal Wednesday. The cereal has been linked to a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Mbandaka, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

So far the outbreak has spanned 31 states with 73 cases of infection. There have been 24 reported hospitalizations and zero deaths.

New York, California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among the states to report cases of the Salmonella Mbandaka strain, with New York reporting the highest most at 7.

Both the CDC and Kellogg's are advising consumers and retailers to throw out 15.3 oz. and 23.0 oz. boxes of the Kellogg's Honey Smacks cereal. Affected products have a 'best if used by' date on the top of the box between June 14, 2018 and June 14, 2019.

Illnesses in connection with the cereal started appearing in early March, according to the CDC.

Salmonella bacteria are the main cause of infection that leads to an illness called salmonellosis. Symptoms of the illness include diarrhea, vomiting, fever and abdominal cramps, and appear within 12 and 72 hours of consumption of salmonella bacteria. Drinking water and fluids is recommended, according to the FDA.

The Mbandaka strain? Is Africa getting even with the western world? This is what happens when a centralized food processing system generates products which are then delivered all over the world. Any outbreaks in other countries? Even if it weren't for the salmonella, Honey Smacks are crap anyway. The food supply is contaminated. Best to grow your own food or locally grown and processed food. Even organic food is no guarantee against salmonella and other contaminants although your chances of not contracting a disease are probably better.

Off the Top of My Head

Oh Nooo! Salmonella in Kellogg's Honey Smacks!

by John Lawrence, July 14, 2018

Parents are being warned not to feed their Lil' Darlins Kellogg's Honey Smacks. Such an innocent childhood treat could make them sick. It has been linked to 100 outbreaks of salmonella poisoning in 33 states. "Do not eat this cereal," the Center for disease Control and Prevention warned people. Of course this Center is part of the bloated bureaucracy the Trump administration would like to get rid of. Caveat Emptor is their motto, and the more boxes of Kellogg's Honey Smacks the Kellogg's Corporation can sell, salmonellla or not, the better. Hey this agency may go the way of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Republicans are trying to get rid of. It stinks of the Obama era and Elizabeth Warren, you know Pocahontas? Trump wants her to take a 23 and Me genetic test to prove she really is an Indian.

But I digress. Back to Honey Smacks and salmonella. It's no mystery how food products are contaminated with salmonella and e coli. They are usually found in factory produced food or Frankenfood. Food is produced nowadays on an industrial basis. There are two food tiers: organic which is more expensive and usually consumed by the upper classes and those who care about their family's health, and industrial factory food, which is cheaper, for everybody else. Industrial food is loaded with pesticide and herbicide residues as well as preservatives, artificial colorings and flavors. It is mass produced for the market which is either ignorant of food quality or is so pro-American that they just accept it as a way of life along with gas guzzling cars and NASCAR. Damn the environment. Give 'em guns and car races and they'll be happy. Frankenfood is almost always found at restaurants, especially fast food restaurants, unless they make a point of telling you their food is organic.

NPR News reports:

According to the Food and Drug Administration, people infected with salmonella can experience diarrhea, abdominal cramps and fever. The illness usually resolves itself within a week if people are properly hydrated.

Salmonella bacteria live in intestinal tracts and are usually transmitted through contaminated food or water or contact with animals.

The CDC estimates that approximately 1.2 million illnesses and 450 deaths are caused by salmonella every year. This year alone has seen announcements of smaller salmonella outbreaks linked to pre-cut melon, eggs, dried and frozen coconut, raw sprouts, prepared chicken salad, and the plant kratom, as well as backyard chickens and pet guinea pigs.

Factory produced food is the culprit. President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act, a sweeping overhaul of the country’s food safety system. But Congress has only provided the agencies involved with half the funding it needs to take off — leaving its progress at a standstill. So in Trump World anything Obama did is contaminated just like the food supply. Let's get rid of consumer safety and health concerns. They interfere with corporate profits.

Animals are fed antibiotics to make them fatten sooner. Diseases like salmonella evolve into antibiotic resistant strains that get into the food supply. Farming practices at factory farms are all about mass production and cutting corners to make maximum profits. To be safe buy your food from a small organic farm instead of from the large corporate manufacturers of food products. Your family will be healthier. Although organic foods are not immune from food borne disease, it is less likely to occur when good farming practices are implemented. Fast food joints are the worst when it comes to disease. Just think of Chipotle and Jack in the Box. Those corporations would rather that you forget about their association with food borne disease. They had to rev up their cheery advertising budget to make people forget.

 

New Study Raises Alarm About Exposure to Glyphosate Pesticides at Levels the EPA Claims Are "Safe"

Published on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 by Common Dreams

"These early warnings must be further investigated," said one researcher, espeically "given the planet-wide use of the glyphosate-based herbicides."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

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Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

A new study on glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup—one of the world's most widely used weedkillers—is fueling persistent concerns about the pesticide's impact on sexual development, genotoxicity, and intestinal bacteria, even when exposure is limited to a level currently considered "safe" by U.S. regulators.

"What your average consumer needs to know is that there's absolutely no scientific evidence backing up the EPA's claims of 'safe levels.'"
—Katherine Paul, Organic Consumers Association/span>

While the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO), and California have classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, U.S. and European regulators have continued to authorize farmers to use it, and Republicans in Congress have even threatened to cut off funding to the WHO over the issue.

Researchers at the Ramazzini Institute in Italy collaborated with experts from the U.S. and Europe to conduct the new crowdfunded pilot study, which will be detailed in three peer-reviewed papers set to be published in the journal Environmental Health later this month. They exposed rats to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) in drinking water at the "safe" level set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over a three-month period, "starting from prenatal life until 13 weeks after weaning."

"The results show that GBHs—even at doses deemed safe and over a relatively short exposure time (which in human-equivalent terms correspond from embryo life to 18 years of age)—are able to alter certain important biological parameters, markers chiefly relating to sexual development, genotoxicity, and alteration of the intestinal microbiome...especially in females," according to the study's website.

Daniele Mandrioli, associate director of the institute's cancer research center, explained to the Guardian that this "shouldn't be happening," and noted that in humans, "disruption of the microbiome has been associated with a number of negative health outcomes, such as obsesity, diabetes, and immunological problems."

Philip J. Landrigan, a member of the study's research team and a professor at New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, expressed worries that glyphosate may pose a long-term cancer risk "that might affect a huge number of people, given the planet-wide use of the glyphosate-based herbicides."

Acknowledging that "by its very nature and purpose, the pilot study does not resolve the uncertainties puzzling the various agencies," Landrigan concluded that "these early warnings must be further investigated in a comprehensive long-term study."

Consumer advocates in the U.S. also responded with calls for further studies, pointing out that "there have been no long-term, peer-reviewed studies of the potential health impact of glyphosate exposure at levels lower than the EPA's guidelines."

"This new pilot study confirms what many responsible scientists have been saying all along: There is no such thing as 'safe' levels when it comes to glyphosate, especially when it comes to children," remarked Ronnie Cummins, international director of the U.S.-based Organic Consumers Association (OCA), which supports the testing food products—including Ben & Jerry's ice cream—for levels of glyphosate.

"What your average consumer needs to know is that there's absolutely no scientific evidence backing up the EPA's claims of 'safe levels,'" OCA U.S. director Katherine Paul told Common Dreams. "So when Ben & Jerry's says it doesn't matter that there's glyphosate in their ice cream—because the levels are beneath EPA guidelines—that's total bunk."

Meanwhile, Monsanto—which has tried to influence scientific health reports about Roundup—maintains that "there is no link between glyphosate and cancer," and accused the Ramazzini Institute of being "an activist organization with an agenda." The institute has supported the study of cancer for more than two decades and, according to its website, its top priorities are conducting scientific research, performing early diagnosis, and spreading information about "environmental toxic and carcinogenic risks."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Off the Top of My Head

Glyphosate in Organic Wine and German Beer

by John Lawrence, April 3, 2018

Moms Across America recently tested wines and beers for Monsanto's Roundup (glyphosate) and found that there were substantial quantities in all kinds of wines from Napa Valley, even organic wines. They even found it in German beer which prides itself on its purity! Glyphosate is a carcinogen. Rather than spend millions trying to figure out a cure for cancer, why not simply get at the causes of cancer, one of which undoubtedly is Monsanto's glyphosate which is ubiquitous in crops even crops that had not been directly sprayed with the stuff.

The highest conventional wine test result for glyphosate was 28 times higher than the glyphosate levels found in the organic and biodynamic wines. Biodynamic wines are wines made employing biodynamic methods both to grow the fruit and during the post-harvest processing. Biodynamic wine production uses organic farming methods (e.g. employing compost as fertilizer and avoiding most pesticides) while also employing soil supplements prepared according to Rudolf Steiner's formulas, following a planting calendar that depends upon astronomical configurations, and treating the earth as "a living and receptive organism."

This is from the Moms Across America website:

Because Roundup/glyphosate is not permitted on organic or biodynamic vineyards, the results are unexpected and can only be explained by the drift of chemical sprays from neighboring vineyards. This could mean legal ramifications for the contamination and devaluation of another company’s product.

Zen Honeycutt, Director of Moms Across America, states “We have recently learned that the detection of glyphosate is an indicator of the presence of many other co-formulants in glyphosate-based herbicides which, combined, are 1000 times more toxic than glyphosate alone. French scientist Gilles-Éric Seralini and his team have also discovered that these co-formulants are also endocrine hormone disruptors, which can lead to breast cancer, miscarriages, birth defects and many other health issues. There should be zero glyphosate and related chemicals in our wine, food or personal products.”

Consumers may wonder how Roundup/glyphosate is getting into their wine. Roundup/glyphosate is sprayed every year in conventional vineyards. A 1-2 ft strip is sprayed on either side of the grape vines which are planted in rows, to kill weeds when the vines are dormant in late winter or early spring. According to plant pathologist, Don Huber from Purdue University, the vine stems are inevitably sprayed in this process and the Roundup is likely absorbed through the roots and bark of the vines from where it is translocated into the leaves and grapes.

All the wines tested were from the Napa Valley, Sonoma and Mendocino County areas. According to the CA Dept of Health, breast cancer rates in the Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties is 10 to 20 percent higher than the national average. 700 lawsuits are currently pending against Monsanto for the connection between non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Roundup.

Currently the FDA does not require end product testing or labeling for pesticides. Therefore the public is unable to know the type or amount of any pesticides that are present in the wines.

Moms Across America and other groups call for the protection of organic and biodynamic brands, farm workers and consumers by requesting that all food producers STOP spraying toxic chemicals on their crops.

In the Trump era fat chance anything will be done to curb the growing presence of herbicide Roundup in our diet. Cancer rates will probably continue to rise. Moms Across America probably does not have the lobbying presence in Washington that Monsanto has. Germans, however, will be outraged at this report.

Farming for a Small Planet

Published on Friday, January 12, 2018 by Common Dreams

How we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce.

by Frances Moore Lappé

 

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"Most startlingly, emissions from food and agriculture are growing so fast that, if they continue to increase at the current rate, they alone could use up the safe budget for all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050." (Photo: TompkinsConservation.org)

People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.

Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic agriculture, or more broadly “agroecology”—is actually the only way to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, healthful food. Inefficiency and ecological destruction are built into the industrial model. But, beyond that, our ability to meet the world’s needs is only partially determined by what quantities are produced in fields, pastures, and waterways. Wider societal rules and norms ultimately shape whether any given quantity of food produced is actually used to meet humanity’s needs. In many ways, how we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce. Solving our multiple food crises thus requires a systems approach in which citizens around the world remake our understanding and practice of democracy.

Today, the world produces—mostly from low-input, smallholder farms—more than enough food: 2,900 calories per person per day. Per capita food availability has continued to expand despite ongoing population growth. This ample supply of food, moreover, comprises only what is left over after about half of all grain is either fed to livestock or used for industrial purposes, such as agrofuels.[1]

Despite this abundance, 800 million people worldwide suffer from long-term caloric deficiencies. One in four children under five is deemed stunted—a condition, often bringing lifelong health challenges, that results from poor nutrition and an inability to absorb nutrients. Two billion people are deficient in at least one nutrient essential for health, with iron deficiency alone implicated in one in five maternal deaths.[2]

The total supply of food alone actually says little about whether the world’s people are able to meet their nutritional needs. We need to ask why the industrial model leaves so many behind, and then determine what questions we should be asking to lead us toward solutions to the global food crisis.

Vast, Hidden Inefficiencies

The industrial model of agriculture—defined here by its capital intensity and dependence on purchased inputs of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides—creates multiple unappreciated sources of inefficiency. Economic forces are a major contributor here: the industrial model operates within what are commonly called “free market economies,” in which enterprise is driven by one central goal, namely, securing the highest immediate return to existing wealth. This leads inevitably to a greater concentration of wealth and, in turn, to greater concentration of the capacity to control market demand within the food system.

Off the Top of My Head

No More Homeless Menus at McDonald's

by John Lawrence

McDonald's use to have a Dollar menu where you could get several items for a dollar or two. No more. The cheapest sandwich you can get now will cost more than $5.00. They've upgraded their menus so that now they're electronic and change among rotating pictures and information. I guess there were too many homeless people hanging around and they wanted to get rid of them by uping their prices and going upscale.

Somebody posted on reddit:

I remember when McChickens & McDoubles were in the $1.30 ish-$1.60+ range, price slowly increasing as time goes on. I went tonite and now they are priced $1.99 each or $2 basically, WTF. why the big price jump? This is in Southern California. It has to deal with the rising minimum wage that goes up every new year? For the new year SoCal is at $10.50 minimum wage in my region. In a few years, some states will have it up to $15 minimum wage gradually as time goes on.

Also he told me they have a un-advertised deal 2 McDoubles for $2.50. I took that instead. How much higher are prices going? geez. We lost the dollar menu. Within no time, sounds like we'll lose the value menu too?

The Dollar menus was always positioned as a loss leader. It wasn't meant for somebody who never ordered off the regular menu, but it was great for the homeless. You couldn't get cheaper food. Not that it was that nutritious, but it filled the belly. $5.00 for a Sausage McMuffin is just a little too much for the homeless budget. Where are they going to get cheap food now?

Huffington Post reported:

McDonald’s popular $1 McDouble cheeseburger, which has lured customers to the Golden Arches since 2008, is getting hard to sustain as rising beef prices threaten the company’s profit margin.

The world’s biggest restaurant chain launched a competing $1 Grilled Onion Cheddar Burger in December. It also made the new sandwich - with one beef patty rather than the McDouble’s two - a star of current television commercials, a status it shares with the McDouble.

The dilemma for McDonald’s Corp restaurant operators is that the McDouble has the highest ingredient costs on the Dollar Menu, making it a bad financial proposition unless customers add high-margin sides such as french fries or soda.

“If the McDouble is all the customer buys, you lose money,” said Richard Adams, a former franchisee who now advises the chain’s restaurant operators. “Depending on what happens to beef prices, McDonald’s management should be open to taking the McDouble off the Dollar Menu.”

The decision would be a significant one. McDonald’s gets 10 to 15 percent of its sales from the Dollar Menu and experts say the McDouble is one of the most popular items on it.

I guess McDonald's wants to appeal to a more upscale clientele now. There were probably too many shopping carts parked outside McDonald's, and they had to clean the bathrooms more often. Too much loitering.Strike another blow to living on the street.

They sure were busy Christmas day. Many people were eating their Christmas dinner at McDonald's. They're even offering lattes now. A small McCafe goes for $2.00. You can't beat that. So they are competing with Starbucks? WTF!

How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

From the New York Times:

By ANDREW JACOBS and MATT RICHTEL

Photographs by WILLIAM DANIELS for The New York Times

SEPT. 16, 2017

 

 Mrs. da Silva and other vendors like her make regular deliveries for Nestlé to a quarter of a million households in Brazil.

FORTALEZA, Brazil — Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

Celene da Silva, 29, is one of thousands of door-to-door vendors for Nestlé, helping the world’s largest packaged food conglomerate expand its reach into a quarter-million households in Brazil’s farthest-flung corners.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

“What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive,” said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

Mrs. da Silva, who herself weighs more than 200 pounds, recently discovered that she had high blood pressure, a condition she acknowledges is probably tied to her weakness for fried chicken and the Coca-Cola she drinks with every meal, breakfast included.

Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.

A New York Times examination of corporate records, epidemiological studies and government reports — as well as interviews with scores of nutritionists and health experts around the world — reveals a sea change in the way food is produced, distributed and advertised across much of the globe. The shift, many public health experts say, is contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago.

The new reality is captured by a single, stark fact: Across the world, more people are now obese than underweight. At the same time, scientists say, the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in which a growing number of people are both overweight and undernourished.

How the Food and Drug Companies Ensure that We Get Sick and They Make Money

Published on Monday, July 24, 2017 by Common Dreams

 

by Paul Buchheit

 

43 Comments

"It seemed all the large health organizations were encouraging people to eat the very foods linked to the diseases they're supposed to be fighting against."  (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Another reason for single-payer health care: The documentary What the Health shows how the lives and health of human beings are considered insignificant, and in many ways threatened, by the pursuit of profits in the meat and dairy and drug industries. 

The corporate disdain revealed by this film is nearly beyond belief. And our 'trusted' watchdog agencies, both non-profit and government, are beholden to the biggest companies, accepting money in return for their silence about the dangers of animal and pharmaceutical products. 

Some of the contentions in the documentary have been disputed, most notably the implication that sugar is not a major factor in diabetes, and that dairy is. Indeed there may be flaws in the documentary. But it clearly reveals the damaging behavior of the businesses and organizations that are contributing to human suffering. 

Despicable: Corporate Profits at the Expense of Our Health 

According to the documentary (and other sources), the World Health Organization and other major health groups have labeled both processed and red meats as carcinogenic. Yet powerful lobbying efforts have kept America near the top of the world in meat consumption. The drug and chemical industries do their part by providing pesticide-filled GMO corn and soy, fed mostly to dairy cows, and with most of their antibiotic products going to fatten up the animals most of us eat. 

Hypocritical: Our Watchdog Non-Profits on the Payroll of Big Ag 

At the time of the documentary, beef and/or dairy menu items were promoted on the websites of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the American Cancer Society (ACS), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, prompting the narrator to say, "It seemed all the large health organizations were encouraging people to eat the very foods linked to the diseases they're supposed to be fighting against." 

It all started to make sense when some of the health organization funders were discovered: Kraft Foods, Oscar Mayer, Tyson Chicken, Dannon and Yoplait Yogurts, Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, Subway, Domino's, and the beef and dairy industries themselves. Not a single one of the four health organizations was willing to be interviewed. 

It gets worse. ACS, AHA, and ADA are accepting millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies that are making BILLIONS of dollars from the diseases the health organizations are supposedly trying to combat. That includes Pfizer, Merck, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, and others. These Big Pharma firms HAVE A VESTED INTEREST IN OUR SICKNESS. A Time report explains the diabolical 'cascading' of drugs through our lives: "If you become addicted to painkillers, there are pills to help you stop taking the pills, by reducing the symptoms of withdrawal. And if you take too many pills, there's a pill for that too."

How Heart Healthy Advocates Got It All Wrong

by John Lawrence

Based on an article from National Geographic

Eating Margarine Instead of Butter Sent People to Premature Graves

credit: Amazon

At one time margarine was considered the "heart healthy" alternative to butter. But as Paul A. Offit, M. D. writes in Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, "By urging people to eat margerine instead of butter, said a Harvard doctor, 'we were often sending them to their graves prematurely.'" Offit goes into a lengthy analysis and history of fat and what fats were considered healthy, what were not and how recent studies have reversed what had been the conventional wisdom. The author takes on scientists’ mistaken belief that margarine, with its partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats, was better for you than butter which contains animal fats. It was quite the opposite, writes Offit, and the process for converting unsaturated fats to trans fats “has probably caused more disease and death than any other man-made chemical reaction in history.” So much for science especially when commercial interests get involved. Remember when doctors recommended smoking?

In 1901 a German scientist, Wilhelm Normann, was the first person to hydrogenate liquid vegetable oils. This meant that he was able through a chemical process to convert them from liquids to semi solids and trans fats were born. Normann was granted a patent for his process and soon millions of pounds of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were being produced every year. In the U.S. William Proctor of Proctor and Gamble was able to convert liquid cottonseed oil to a solid. They named the product "Crisco" for crystallized cottonseed oil. Crisco turned out to be superior to every other cooking oil or shortening ever invented for the following reasons:

1) Trans fats have a much longer shelf life than products containing animal fats.

2) Trans fats burn at extremely high temperatures so they don't cause so much smoke in the cooking process.

3) Trans fats have a neutral flavor so they don't change the flavors of foods.

4) Trans fats look like butter so they can easily replace it.

5) Trans fats are extraordinarily cheap.

So trans fats like Crisco allowed bakers to make cakes fluffier, cookies crumblier, crackers crisper, pies flakier, chicken crunchier and croissants more delicate.

Proctor and Gamble had a gold mine on their hands. Crisco would replace lard or schmaltz, as the Germans called it, and animal fats were soon verboten, relegated to to the unenlightened past. Crisco was marketed with slogans like "It's all vegetable! It's digestible!" and "An Absolutely New Product, a Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America." Science had done it again - shown modern women how to cook in a much healthier, more productive way than their grandmothers. And what's more, it was Kosher!

Proctor and Gamble had a gold mine on their hands.

In the 1940s animal fats like butter accounted for two thirds of all fat consumption in the U.S. By the 1960s trans fats with the increasing use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils accounted for two thirds of U.S. fat consumption and animal fats were out for knowledgeable modern cooks. Also the fast food industry was delighted and started its quest to colonize American taste buds. Because partially hydrogenated vegetable oils had a long shelf life, french fries, fried chicken and numerous other products could be transported without costly preservation. In 1958 Congress passed the Food Additives Amendment which was intended to protect Americans against harmful food additives. Unfortunately, trans fats got grandfathered in.

GMOs Don't Result in Greater Crop Yields

by John Lawrence

They Just Increase Amount of Poison We're Exposed To

The controversy over genetically modified crops has focused on whether or not they were safe to eat. We have to ask ourselves what was the purpose for genetically modifying them in the first place. That was so they could be sprayed with Monsanto's Roundup and they wouldn't die. Only the weeds would die. But this leaves the crops, mainly corn and soybeans, with a nice coating of poison. It won't kill them, but it might kill you.

The next promise of the chemical corporations was that the use of GMO sprayed with weed killers would lead to a significant increase in crop yields, but that hasn't happened either. The promise was that GMOs would "feed the world". Monsanto and others pointed to the fact that the world's population was increasing so we needed a far more abundant food supply, and the only way to get there was by means of GMOs liberally sprayed with RoundUp, the main ingredient of which is glyphosate.

Twenty years ago the US and Canada embraced the use of GMOs while Europe rejected them. Now it's possible to compare results in the two regions to see if the use of GMOs actually produced higher crop yields. It didn't according to a recent study. The net result is that Americans have been exposed to significant doses of cancer causing chemicals in return for basically nothing. Europeans on the other hand have been eating better and safer including more organics in their diets as a matter of course, de rigueur!

The New York Times reported:

"An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany."

The US has fallen behind France in decreasing the use of pesticides on crops like corn, soybeans and cotton. So you're eating food products liberally sprayed with poisons, and in addition you're wearing clothes which were sprayed with poisons. Is it any wonder that there is more cancer? In France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.

By the way, do you know what chemicals are in your clothes? The San Diego Union says on November 2, 2016: "What's in your jeans? A rogue's gallery of unpronounceable chemicals whose effects on humans are suspect. Perfluorochemicals, phthalates, and azo dyes are among the substances that are widespread in making clothes." Is it any wonder that cancer is so common? The article goes on to say that some American companies are taking a more European approach where more than 1000 chemicals are banned. In the US only fewer than 50 are.

Would You Like a Helping of Agent Orange With Your Breakfast?

The use of insecticides in US crops has decreased slightly because they can be "programmed in" to the GMOs. However, the use of herbicides has increased since the only way to get rid of weeds is to spray the whole kit and caboodle. And this hasn't really worked either since genetically adapted super weeds have taken over. Rather than get involved in an arms race with nature, it would make more sense to use natural methods of weed control and forget the spraying. But the US has to have a technological solution for everything. How else to employ all those chemists? After all they developed Agent Orange for use in the defoliation of Vietnam. Now with a slight modification they are using the same product to spray GMO crops in order to get rid of the weeds.

According to the New York Times:

Profound differences over genetic engineering have split Americans and Europeans for decades. Although American protesters as far back as 1987 pulled up prototype potato plants, European anger at the idea of fooling with nature has been far more sustained. In the last few years, the March Against Monsanto has drawn thousands of protesters in cities like Paris and Basel, Switzerland, and opposition to G.M. foods is a foundation of the Green political movement. Still, Europeans eat those foods when they buy imports from the United States and elsewhere.

Fears about the harmful effects of eating G.M. foods have proved to be largely without scientific basis. The potential harm from pesticides, however, has drawn researchers’ attention. Pesticides are toxic by design — weaponized versions, like sarin, were developed in Nazi Germany — and have been linked to developmental delays and cancer.

The companies that make the genetically modified seeds also make the poisons to spray them with. Now Monsanto, the largest seed manufacturer is in talks to merge with Syngenta, the Swiss pesticide giant. If they merge, their combined market capitalization would be around $100 billion.

Corporate Profits More Important Than Human Health

Dr. Martin Qaim a researcher at a German University said recently, “Currently available G.M. crops would not lead to major yield gains in Europe.” And regarding herbicide-resistant crops in general: “I don’t consider this to be the miracle type of technology that we couldn’t live without."

There is something to be said for the GMO products that reduce the need for pesticides. These products actually reduce the amount of poison that a consumer is exposed to. However, the use of herbicides increases the amount of poison a consumer is exposed to, and the use of such products has only been increasing in recent years. The goal of herbicide resistant seeds has been to sell more product, more RoundUp, more glyphosate.

As the use of RoundUp increases, weeds are becoming more resistant. This requires using more herbicides and different herbicides in order to get them under control. Growing resistance to Roundup is also reviving old, nasty chemicals. One is 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous Vietnam War defoliant. Its potential risks have sounded the alarms for scientists and advocacy groups.

Despite the promised yield advantages from GMOs, data shows that there are none. For rapeseed which is used in the production of canola oil, Western Europe maintained a lead over Canada in yields. For corn, the trend lines between the two barely deviate. And sugar beets have shown stronger yield growth recently in Western Europe than the United States, despite the dominance of genetically modified varieties over the last decade in the US. Jack Heinemann, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand said that Western Europe, “hasn’t been penalized in any way for not making genetic engineering one of its biotechnology choices.”

Meanwhile the chemical corporations keep up their marketing efforts primarily directed at farmers who they say will be able to produce more with less effort by the use of their products. Monsanto has said that the corn seed of 2025 will have 14 traits and allow farmers to spray five different kinds of herbicide.

Organic GMOs?

Recent developments have suggested that there could be such a thing as organic GMOs. That is the purpose of the GMO would be  greater crop yields, but these crops would not be sprayed with herbicides or pesticides just like organic crops are not. There may be some possibilities along these lines. We'll wait and see.

Mischa Popoff, a former USDA organic inspector, wrote to me recently:

Not only will GMO Golden Rice alleviate the suffering of millions, it could also – in point-of-fact – be grown organically! So I joined with 11 scientists and wrote an article last year in The Daily Caller about producing the world’s first organic-GMO crop. I then wrote a brief follow-up immediately after Mr. Trump won the presidency.

Would you please help get the word out about this? GMO Golden Rice has been given to the world, free of charge, by its inventor, Dr. Ingo Potrykus. All that stands in its way is the lack of political will.

However, as previously noted pesticides, unlike herbicides, can be engineered into the GMO seeds. Are these GMOs really harmless as opposed to GMOs which don't have pesticides engineered in to the very seeds? Maybe not. More study is required before this kind of GMO could be considered organic. Show me a GMO whose only goal is to increase crop yields without being engineered for herbicides or pesticides, and I'll show you a GMO that could possibly be considered organic.

Government Agency Puts Out a Hit on Vegan Mayonnaise Manufacturer

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

You Can't Make This Stuff Up, Folks!

The American Egg Board, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, put out a hit on an eggless mayonnaise start-up which had come up with a product called Just Mayo which contains no eggs. Perceiving this as a threat to the egg industry and the thousands of chickens it represents, Egg Board members exchanged emails asking, "Can we pool our money and put a hit on him?" This was in reference to the founder of the eggless mayonnaise company, Josh Tetrick. They also suggested that "old buddies from Brooklyn pay him a visit." Evidently, the $7 billion egg industry saw the vegan start-up as a threat to its profits, and was determined to stop it in its tracks at all costs. The Board's president, Joanne Ivy, sent an email to her organization's public relations consultants at Edelman. "It would be a good idea if Edelman looked at this product as a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business," she wrote.

Ivy approved of an offer from Anthony Zolezzi, a "consultant" (yeah, sure), who bragged during a strategy session that he could "make one phone call" and get Whole Foods to pull Just Mayo from its shelves. "If it is that easy, I will contact Anthony and remind him to make that call if it isn't too steep" in cost, Ivy wrote to Chad Gregory, president and chief executive of United Egg Producers, a board-affiliated cooperative of egg producers.

The investigators from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service concluded, however, that Zolezzi was never under contract with the Egg Board even though he offered to put out a contract on the vegan mayonnaise. The investigators went on to say that Zolezzi's offer, if acted upon, "would have significantly exceeded the provisions of the Egg Research and Consumer Information Act" that established the board and its duties. You think? Ivy also instructed staff to erase all emails having to do with Beyond Eggs, the original company name, after reading them. Due to staff's apparent non-erasures, investigators retrieved the deleted emails, and all without Putin's hackers' help!

A Federal Investigation Concluded Russian Hackers Not to Blame

A federal investigation was sparked by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher and his Washington attorney. It makes you wonder what other nefarious undertakings and goings on are being pursued by shady government agencies. At least they can't blame this one on Putin. It wasn't Russian hackers who were attacking the Just Mayo headquarters. The American Egg Board spent at least $59,500 attacking the vegan mayonnaise company including hiring a top tier Chicago public relations firm to plant "USDA approved" pro-egg messaging with bloggers the firm considered influential.

The American Egg Board under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture also took out pop-up ads promoting eggs on the internet. These ads which usually included the Board's "Incredible Edible Egg" logo would outrank other ads promoting Just Mayo according to hackers who were familiar with manipulating the internet ad protocol algorithms. So just when a Just Mayo ad should have approached the eyeballs of an internet user, up would pop the Incredible Edible Egg. Just Mayo would have been punked! Even if internet users conducted a search for "Beyond Eggs" the original name of Tetrick's company, they would get treated to an Incredible Edible Egg ad instead. This is really dirty pool. It's one thing to out compete your competition. It's quite another to use Mafia tactics to pound your competitor into the ground even if it means that thousands of chickens' lives are at stake.

Edelman charged the American Egg Board $33,000 for "research and coordination with 5-10 influential bloggers in food and health/nutrition space, drafting key messaging and coordinating posts" according to Board documents. Ivy has since resigned over this fiasco, and, as far as I know, Just Mayo is still on Whole Foods' shelves. In the end the documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act and Tetrick sent them out to journalists. Ironically, the net effect was for Hampton Roads, the new name for Tetrick's company, to receive excellent publicity just the opposite of what the American Egg Board was trying to achieve on behalf of egg producers and their chickens. "The egg board is supposed to promote eggs. It's not supposed to take down competitors," said Michele Simon, a frequent critic of the food industry who runs a consulting business called Eat, Drink, Politics.

Tetrick Had Altruistic Goals for Just Mayo

Having grown up in poverty, Tetrick spent several years working in Africa, then moved back to the U.S. hoping to find a way to “use capitalism for good.” He decided that a plant based mayonnaise which is cheaper to produce and more earth friendly was the way to go and would save many chickens the misery they have to go through being raised in captivity and confined to cages.

 “If one looks at the food system with clear eyes and says, ‘Alright, what’s going on?’ we would say that it uses too much energy, it uses too much water, it uses too much land,” he told WBUR this fall. “And one of the things is the use of chicken eggs.” Eggs, he argued, are bad for the environment, bad for human health, bad for animal welfare and bad for global hunger so why not replace them with something cheaper, more sustainable and just as good if not better? Makes sense, capeesh? Tetrick's goal was to use the capitalist system to come up with a more sustainable, earth friendly and cheaper product.

Just Mayo is cheaper than regular mayonnaise. It cost $3.48 at Walmart to Hellmann’s $5.25. And the egg industry has struggled with bad press over salmonella cases and mistreatment of chickens inside battery cages at egg production facilities.

This is from the Washington Post:

In 2011 Tetrick set up a lab in a start-up heavy industrial neighborhood of San Francisco, hired a bunch of chemists, and put them to work coming up with a plant-based substitute for eggs that is both indistinguishable from and less expensive than the real thing. Their solution was a powder made from Canadian yellow peas, which mimics egg yolks’ emulsifying abilities, minus the cholesterol and chicken coops. Egg substitutes would form the foundation of Hampton Creek’s business — the company now sells egg-less “Just Cookies” and “Just Cookie Dough” in addition to four varieties of vegan mayo.

Tetrick doesn’t try to broadcast that fact, though. The original Just Mayo label featured the name in big letters and a large image of an egg with a pea shoot growing in it. “Egg-free” was featured in relatively small font alongside the product’s other health-food bonafides (soy-free, gluten-free, cholesterol-free, kosher) and “vegan” was nowhere to be seen.

“We don’t market our product to tree-hugging liberals in San Francisco,” Tetrick told The Post in 2014. “… We built the company to try to really penetrate the places where better-for-you food hasn’t gone before.”

The word Just in Just Mayo doesn't mean only or exactly but derives from the word justice. Tetrick is on a moral crusade, one that entails a veiled threat to the chicken industry. Eggs, it's hard to believe, may go by the wayside. Tetrick believes that his Just Mayo may "fundamentally change the world." No wonder the red blooded Americans behind the American Egg Board saw this as a threat to the American way of life.

In October 2014, Unilever, which manufactures Hellmann’s Mayonnaise (America’s No. 1 condiment), sued Hampton Foods for false advertising and unfair competition citing that the government's definition of mayonnaise (yes, the government has a definition for mayonnaise) included the fact that it must contain eggs. It was decided, however, that Hampton Creek could keep the Just Mayo name for its product as long as the label contained the correct wording for its ingredients. The lawsuit brought Just Mayo even more publicity and helped to establish it as a profitable and premium product.

Monsanto Polluted San Diego with PCBs and GMOs

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

PCBs Pervade San Diego Bay

A San Diego group of attorneys is suing Monsanto to get millions of dollars for remediation projects to clean up San Diego Bay. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) have been linked to cancer, neurological damage, thyroid problems and reproductive complications. Monsanto is all about the profits even when it has knowledge that what it's selling is poison. Cases have been filed in Federal Court in San Jose, Oakland and Spokane in addition to San Diego. Dozens more cities across America may soon follow suit.

Municipalities have been forced to shell out millions to clean up rivers, creeks and bays. It has been established that fishing in such places and consuming those fish is dangerous to human health. PCBs have shown up in breast milk and sea lions among other places. They are ubiquitous in our environment.

Monsanto marketed the PCBs under the trade name Aroclor. The chemicals accumulate in fish that are devoured by humans with the result that almost everybody who eats fish has a certain amount of PCBs in their system. PCBs were used in electrical equipment, highway paint, caulk and many other products. Monsanto's position is that, if their product was improperly disposed of, it was not their fault. Under California's public nuisance laws, however, a company may be held responsible if it knowingly marketed a product even though it knew it was hazardous.

Monsanto officials knew as early as 1969 that Aroclor was dangerous, but decided to keep manufacturing and marketing it anyway in order to increase profits. Their official discussions went so far as to say that Aroclor was likely a "global contaminant." Monsanto employees had thrown fish into a heavily contaminated creek and discovered that they started bleeding and losing their skin in about 10 seconds.

The Oakland city attorney said that the chemical giant "chose profits over people, and American cities and citizens are still suffering the consequences."

Robert Reich Nails Monsanto's Modus Operandi

In an excellent book, Saving Capitalism (For the Many, Not the Few), Robert Reich has a great section on Monsanto. I, therefore, give over the rest of this article to a quotation from this book:

Monsanto, the giant biotech corporation, owns the key genetic traits in more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States and 8o percent of the corn. Its monopoly grew out of a carefully crafted strategy. It patented its own genetically modified seeds, along with an herbicide that would kill weeds but not soy and corn grown from its seeds.

The herbicide and herbicide-resistant seeds initially saved farmers time and money. But the purchase came with a catch that would haunt them in the future: The soy and corn that grow from those seeds don't produce seeds of their own. So every planting season, farmers have to buy new seeds. In addition, if the farmers have any seeds left over, they must agree not to save and replant them in the future. In other words, once hooked, farmers have little choice but to become permanent purchasers of Monsanto seed. To ensure its dominance, Monsanto has prohibited seed dealers from stocking its competitors' seeds and has bought up most of the small remaining seed companies.

Not surprisingly, in less than fifteen years, most of America's commodity crop farmers have become dependent on Monsanto. The result has been higher prices far beyond the cost-of-living rise. Since 2001, Monsanto has more than doubled the price of corn and soybean seeds. The average cost of planting one acre of soybeans increased 325 percent between 1994 and 2011, and the price of corn seed rose 259 percent. Another result has been a radical decline in the genetic diversity of the seeds we depend on. This increases the risk that disease or climate change might wipe out entire crops for years, if not forever. A third consequence has been the ubiquity of genetically modified traits in our food chain. At every stage, Monsanto's growing economic power has enhanced its political power to shift the rules to its advantage, thereby adding to its economic power.

The Fight to Label GMOs

Beginning with the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, and extending through a series of court cases, Monsanto has gained increased protection of its intellectual property in genetically engineered seeds. It has successfully fought off numerous attempts in Congress and in several states to require labeling of genetically engineered foods or to protect biodiversity. It has used its political muscle in Washington to fight moves in other nations to ban genetically engineered seed. To enforce and ensure dominance, the company has employed a phalanx of lawyers. They've sued other companies for patent infringement and sued farmers who want to save seed for replanting. Monsanto's lawyers have also prevented independent scientists from studying its seeds, arguing that such inquiries infringe the company's patents.

You might think Monsanto's overwhelming market power would make it a target of antitrust enforcement. Think again. In 2012, it succeeded in putting an end to a two-year investigation by the antitrust division of the Justice Department into Monsanto's dominance of the seed industry. Monsanto has the distinction of spending more on lobbying—nearly $7 million in 2013 alone—than any other big agribusiness. And Monsanto's former (and future) employees frequently inhabit top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department, they staff congressional committees that deal with agriculture policy, and they become advisors to congressional leaders and at the White House. Two Monsanto lobbyists are former congressman Vic Fazio and former senator Blanche Lincoln. Even Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was at one time an attorney for Monsanto. Monsanto, like any new monopoly, has strategically used its economic power to gain political power and used its political power to entrench its market power.

It's useful to view the strategy of the new monopolists as integrating economic and political dominance. They acquire key patents and then spend vast sums protecting them and charging others with patent infringement. In addition, they use mandatory licensing agreements to require potential competitors to use whole lines of their products and prevent customers from using competing products, thereby creating de facto industry standards. Favorable court rulings, advantageous laws, and administrative decisions to forgo antitrust lawsuits or bring them against competitors extend these de facto standards to entire sectors of the economy. [end quote]

And so, dear reader, we live in a world in which large corporations feel free to pollute and despoil the environment including the food we eat because they have not only market dominance but because they have political dominance as well. The revolving door between government and corporations swings ever so easily, the hinges are well lubricated. Congresspersons and their staff have easy access to lucrative jobs once they have established their contacts on the inside. They just have to lobby their old friends on behalf of Monsanto and other large corporations giving them a free license to pollute and purvey dangerous products. The hallmark of these products is not that they will kill you immediately like the poor fish that Monsanto employees threw into a PCB polluted river, but that the symptoms will show up as cancer and other related diseases years later when Monsanto can no longer be linked to those outcomes.

More Bad News for Monsanto

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups announced December 4th, 2015 that they will put Monsanto on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.

Vandana Shiva, physicist, author, activist and founder of Navdanya, and member of the RI Steering Committee said: “Monsanto has pushed GMOs in order to collect royalties from poor farmers, trapping them in unpayable debt, and pushing them to suicide. Monsanto promotes an agro-industrial model that contributes at least 50 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Monsanto is also largely responsible for the depletion of soil and water resources, species extinction and declining biodiversity, and the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide.”

Andre Leu, president of IFOAM and a member of the RI Steering Committee, said: “Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products, and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, and by manipulating the press and media. Monsanto’s history reads like a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.”

Get set for an epic battle between a corporation that is destroying the planet and those who are pushing back against this monstrous corporate behemoth.

The Fight Against GMOs and Toxic Food

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

While Other Countries Ban GMOs, US Congress Endorses Them

Scotland has banned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) within its country. "Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment—and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status," said rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead. Here in the US the fight is just for the right to know that a food product should be labeled as GMO, and that's not going so well.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1599, the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015. This is BS, of course, since the bill's real purpose is to preempt the rights of state and local governments to pass laws requiring the mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to overturn GMO labeling laws already in place in several states, and to prevent the passage of any federal mandatory GMO labeling law in the future. So there is no free speech insofar as knowing what's in something we are eating is concerned. The law's attempt is to suppress truth in labeling.

GMOs were developed primarily to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup so that Roundup could be sprayed directly on crops and only the weeds would die. So whether or not GMO corn and soybeans are good or bad for you, the presence of poison sprayed on them can't be too good for human consumers when they eat such crops. Especially crops such as grapes and apples which have very thin skins and are vulnerable to soaking up the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on them.

The GMO process starts with the seeds only available from Monsanto which grow into the Roundup resistant corn and soybeans which must be purchased on an annual basis from Monsanto. Farmers who save seeds from the current crop are subject to lawsuits by Monsanto which claims the GMO seeds as their intellectual private property.

Food activist Vandana Shiva has been delivering a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.

Ever increasing amounts of Monsanto's poison are being sprayed on crops that American consumers are eating as super weeds have adapted to the stuff and are growing bigger than ever requiring more and more Roundup to kill them. The only rational solution is to go back to natural organic ways of dealing with weeds and pests as Monsanto's GMO crops are not sustainable. The only rationale for using Monsanto's GMO seeds and herbicides is that the farmers can get a larger crop yield per acre and thus make more money. But quality rather than quantity is what savvy American consumers are demanding more and more. So the market for organic food is growing. Organic food is non-GMO food that hasn't been sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. With regard to animals they haven't been fed GMO corn or soy and haven't been given antibiotics or hormones.

San Diego Loves Roundup

San Diego is spraying Monsanto's Roundup (generic name - glyphosate) all over its freeways, public lands and waterways exposing San Diegans to this poison whenever they are driving or boating. In a letter to the editor of the San Diego Union, Susan Trump of North Part said this:

San Diego is liberally using Roundup, glyphosate, on public lands and waterways.

Entire countries such as France, Sri Lanka, Brazil and South Africa are banning the substance. We are past the age of ignorance. We understand the consequences and it is generally known that Roundup is not safe for humans, plants, insects or animals, yet its use continues to the extent that it is now in the food supply.

San Diego has just sued Monsanto for similar reasons. This must stop.

This month a French court confirmed Monsanto was guilty of chemical poisoning. Also in September 2015, Latvia and Greece Kicked Monsanto Out and Opted to Ban GM Crops!

San Diego Dr Robert J Rowen says:

What does your grocery shelf and San Diego’s bay water have in common? Monsanto and its poisons!

...

According to the French agency, glyphosate is used in more than 750 different herbicide products and its use has been detected in the air during spraying, in water and in food. Experts said there was "limited evidence" in humans that the herbicide can cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma and there is convincing evidence that glyphosate can also cause other forms of cancer in rats and mice. IARC's panel said glyphosate has been found in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, showing the chemical has been absorbed by the body.

Monsanto, which produces the glyphosate-containing herbicide, Roundup, strongly disagreed with the decision. "All labeled uses of glyphosate are safe for human health," said Phil Miller, a Monsanto spokesman, in a statement. (Did you know that this horrible stuff is routinely found in toxic screening on umbilical cord blood in our babies?)

And what did our own EPA say about this compound? “The EPA's 2012 assessment of glyphosate concluded that it met the statutory safety standards and that the chemical could "continue to be used without unreasonable risks to people or the environment."

About 180 million pounds per year are dumped on your food. It’s a systemic poison for plants, meaning the entire plant takes it up. More is deliberately dumped on “Roundup Ready” soy, etc. They are literally drenched and drowning in the toxic soup. Monsanto engineered crops to be resistant to a chemical it can more readily sell. It’s a win-win for the most evil company on the planet. Make and sell seeds of crops resistant to a poison it sells. And buy the government so that you will not be able to be informed if what you buy is GMO, and where possible get these bought off cronies to spoon-feed the public that your wares are safe. Now an ignorant public will be forced to buy and ingest your Frankenfoods and all the cancer causing poisons that have been sprayed on them. What a tremendous and diabolical scheme.

In a major victory for  activists, it was announced last week that the California Environmental Protection Agency is planning to label Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide as a cancer-causing chemical.

Nathan Donley, staff scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco said that this is a major victory in the fight against dangerous pesticides.

“California’s taking an important step toward protecting people and wildlife from this toxic pesticide. It’s nearly impossible for people to limit exposure to this toxin because it is just so widespread. That’s why we need much tighter controls on its use,” Donley said.

“More than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are used each year in the United States, and the science is clear that it’s a threat to public health and countless wildlife species. It’s long past time to start reining in the out-of-control use of glyphosate in the United States,” he added.

Shop Organic for the Sake of Your Family's Health

So shopping organic and buying from local farmers makes more sense if you want to protect your family's health. GMO crops won't kill you immediately. Glyphosate won't kill you immediately. That's safe to say. But cancer rates are going skyward for all segments of the population as toxic chemicals permeate our diets and our lifestyles. There is no proven link between GMOs and cancer, but common sense dictates that unnatural chemicals as part of our diet aren't good for us regardless of the lower prices for such foods. It's better to pay a little more and protect your family's health. Like cigarettes, GMOs sprayed with glyphosate won't kill you immediately, but cancer will eventually get you. Monsanto's role is to deny the link between the two as long as they possibly can.

To be sure GMOs allow for more food production per acre if you want to call it food. It's actually Frankenfood. But the demographics of the growth of human population are indeed scary:

The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. By the end of the century, the world may well have to accommodate ten billion inhabitants—roughly the equivalent of adding two new Indias. Sustaining that many people will require farmers to grow more food in the next seventy-five years than has been produced in all of human history. For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater.

But we shouldn't panic and conclude that GMOs are the only way to go. There are natural methods to produce more food. One way is to reduce the production of beef and encourage a more vegetarian diet. Beef cows consume tremendous amounts of grains in order to produce one pound of meat. If humans consumed the grains directly, more could be fed and more water would be available for human consumption rather than the vast quantities required for animal production.

In addition beef cows are fed tremendous amounts of hormones and antibiotics in order to fatten them up and grow to maturity faster. Whatever animal protein humans consume should be organic for the same reasons that vegetables need to be non-GMO and organic if one's family's health means more than the slightly increased dietary costs. Money can be saved by not eating out which costs about five times as much as the same meal prepared at home, and what's more most restaurants are serving GMO and non-organic foods. Most restaurants are serving GMO foods and animals who have consumed them unless stated otherwise. Their whole trip is to make foods taste good without regard to whether or not those foods are good for you. So you pay through the nose and get a dose of poison to boot.

If you need more reasons to avoid GMO foods, here's a few:

1. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GMO) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and that the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

2. Between 1996 and 2008, US farmers sprayed an extra 383 million pounds of herbicide on GMOs. Overuse of Roundup results in "superweeds," resistant to the herbicide. This is causing farmers to use even more toxic herbicides every year. Not only does this create environmental harm, GM foods contain higher residues of toxic herbicides. Roundup, for example, is linked with sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer.

3. Most of the health and environmental risks of GMOs are ignored by governments' superficial regulations and safety assessments. The reason for this tragedy is largely political. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, doesn't require a single safety study, does not mandate labeling of GMOs, and allows companies to put their GM foods onto the market without even notifying the agency.

Their justification was the claim that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different. But this was a lie. Secret agency memos made public by a lawsuit show that the overwhelming consensus even among the FDA's own scientists was that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. They urged long-term safety studies. But the White House had instructed the FDA to promote biotechnology, and the agency official in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, later their vice president. He's now the US Food Safety Czar.

Will the US be the Last to Ban Monsanto's GMOs?

Many other countries are not falling for Monsanto's corporate nonsense and are labeling or outright banning GMOs. As I wrote previously:

Russia is considering legislation to criminalize GMO foods describing GMO food producers as terrorists. France, the largest agricultural producer in Europe, is preparing to restore a GMO maize ban in their country. Twenty-six countries, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy and Mexico, have a total or partial ban on GMOs. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

Why does the US insist on doing the opposite by passing legislation that prevents states from banning or even labeling GMOs?

Even supposedly healthy restaurants like Subway are purveying meats from animals that have been factory farmed. This means they have been fed vast quantities of pesticide and herbicide sprayed corn and soy. They have been given huge amounts of antibiotics and hormones. Then they are made into sandwiches that people eat.

This is from an article by Reynard Loki, How Subway Sandwiches Are Fueling a Major Public Health Crisis:

Subway's slogan is, "Eat fresh." But while the company may have established itself as the "healthy" fast-food alternative, many people don't realize that as the world's largest fast food chain, it is also contributing to a serious public health crisis, animal cruelty and environmental damage due to the company's use of meat from factory farmed animals. These filthy and inhumane operations cause an incomprehensible amount of animal suffering, poison our air, land and water, and give rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that impact human health.

...

"Every year, more than two million people in the United States get infections that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die as a result," according to a 2013 report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In addition to the illness and deaths caused by resistant bacteria, the report found that C. difficile, a serious diarrheal infection usually associated with antibiotic use, causes at least 250,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths every year."

...

“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda of WHO. “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine. Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating.”

The antibiotics used to fatten animals are hastening the day when they won't be effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and humans will die from minor infections as they used to before antibiotics were invented. And this is all so that factory farmers can make a few more dollars by bringing animals to market in less time.

Unless Americans wise up to where their food is coming from particularly restaurant foods, they are putting themselves at risk for diseases for which there aren't proven links to toxic substances in the food supply. These toxicities are put there so the corporate food giants and corporate farmers can make more money than they would have if they had supplied food products which hadn't been sprayed with toxic substances or had toxic foods fed to animals which are then butchered and fed to humans. As long as the link between these practices and actual human disease remains hazy, these corporations will continue to get away with it much as the cigarette manufacturers got away with selling a product that it took years to prove that it was cancer causing.

Corporate Deserters Seek to Continue Doing Business in the US While Paying Taxes to Foreign Governments

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Corporations are relentless about setting up tax avoidance schemes and finding new and improved ways of getting out of paying taxes. One method is to set up a corporate subsidiary in the Cayman Islands which doesn't require any taxes to be paid. This works well for collecting royalties on patents because the patents can just be transferred to the subsidiary, and, voila, no taxes need be paid at all. Other companies which do a great deal of selling abroad have money piling up in foreign jurisdictions. US law requires them to pay taxes on this money when they bring it back into the US. So these companies like Microsoft, Apple and Qualcomm are always lobbying for a "tax holiday", which would allow them to bring this poor, lonely money home without paying taxes on it. Corporations are people, remember, and money is their Mother's Milk.

Other industries like fast food operations make most of their money in the US. They have been stumped until recently as to how to get out of paying taxes on it. But now they have discovered an ingenious new way. The latest wrinkle is called inversion. A US corporation merges with a corporation in a foreign country and then for tax purposes lets its headquarters be located there. Nothing changes as far as US operations are concerned. Executives continue living in the US and US operations continue as usual. The corporation pays taxes to the foreign government which has a lower tax rate while leaving the US high and dry. Such a scam is being perpetrated by Burger King which is merging with a Canadian corporation called Tim Hortons. Burger King will cut its tax obligations in the US, pay a reduced tax bill to Canada and continue in the US with business as usual. No physical change of headquarters is necessary. No executives need move to Canada. As an added bonus, money made in Canada doesn't require begging for a tax holiday. It moves freely here with no strings attached.

Congress could eliminate the tax loophole which makes this possible, but Congress is in the business of creating loopholes not eliminating them. They are all for expanding loopholes instead of contracting them. Actually, Congress is the "Loopholes R Us" guys. Expect even more not fewer loopholes in the future.

Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, blasted the deal. He said he was disappointed in Burger King's decision to renounce its US citizenship. They have effectively renounced their US citizenship for the purposes of paying taxes but not for the purposes of making profits. And Wall Street demands that they and all corporations maximize profits. Else they will be downrated and their stock might lose value. One of the chief ways they maximize profits is to minimize taxes. So Wall Street, who is their Big Daddy, cheers when corporations get out of paying taxes, and corporations dutifully listen to their Big Daddy and do what he says. Or else they'll be taken to the woodshed of lower stock values and sell orders. Investors will not be pleased.

Inversions let companies which earn money outside the US transfer money to the US without paying additional monies to the US. No need for a tax holiday. So don't be too surprised if Qualcomm or Apple decides to merge with a company in southeast Asia which would allow it to bring all the money, that has been sitting there waiting for a tax holiday, back to the US without further ado and with no additional taxes. So for money generated in the US, taxes are paid to the foreign government and for money generated outside the US that money gets to come home tax free. More and more companies are going to ditch Uncle Sam, and companies that are thought to be quintessentially American are going to be unAmerican when it comes to paying taxes. This means a greater tax burden on the middle class or perhaps it means that the Fed will just print more money. Inversions could cost the US $20 billion in lost tax revenues over the next decade.

In the last two decades more than 75 American companies have moved their official addresses abroad. The consulting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers moved its corporate address to Bermuda in 2002. Underwear manufacturer Fruit of the Loom moved its corporate address to the Cayman Islands in 1998. Sara Lee merged in 2012 with DE Master Blenders which has corporate headquarters in the Netherlands. Chiquita Bananas and medical device manufacturer Medtronic will both move their corporate headquarters to Ireland this year which brings up an interesting anomaly. Will the US government continue to pay millions in Medicare and Medicaid money to a corporation which in return pays taxes to a foreign government?

Bugger King says that Tim Hortons offers a real good business synergy since Tim Hortons is breakfast oriented while Bigger King specializes in lunch and dinner, but that's no reason why the corporate structure needs to be such that Buegher king is the subsidiary of Tim Horton. Bugger King is making itself subservient to Tim Horton to get out of paying US taxes pure and simple. The US loss is Canada's gain. Wow, Canada has free health care and what used to be US tax revenues. What's wrong with this picture?

The US stands alone among major nations in taxing on a residence basis instead of letting taxes be collected where the money is made. If your corporate headquarters are in the US, then you must pay corporate taxes on all the money you earn anywhere in the world to the US. Tim Hortons is resident in Canada so it pays taxes in whatever jurisdictions its money is earned. If they make money, for instance, in Britain, they pay taxes on that money to Britain not to Canada. So it's not just the fact that the US corporate tax rate is higher than Canada's. It's the fact that other modern industrialized nations pay taxes in whatever jurisdictions they operate in to those jurisdictions while US based companies pay taxes to the US wherever they make money anywhere in the world.

Burgher King is not the first corporation to pull this stunt. Walgreen's, the largest US drugstore chain, thought about it too. While pondering the move, Walgreens came under pressure from Democratic lawmakers and activists to remain headquartered in the United States. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, took a shot at Walgreens' folksy motto, writing, "Is 'the corner of happy and healthy' somewhere in the Swiss Alps?" Such a move might have cost U.S. taxpayers $4 billion over five years. There were calls for a national boycott. After announcing that it would not locate its corporate headquarters in Switzerland, Walgreen's stock went down. Shareholders were not amused that Walgreen's was giving money away by not locating there.

ThinkProgress reports:

At the same time, Walgreen is currently considering merging with European drugstore chain Alliance Boots and move to Switzerland as part of a plan to dodge up to $4 billion in U.S taxes. The company that gets almost a quarter of its $72 billion in revenue directly from the government through Medicare and Medicaid is trying to reap even more profits while leaving taxpayers holding the bag. 

Walgreen isn’t the only one. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, tried merging with the smaller U.K.-based AstraZeneca earlier this year and switch its address, where the tax rate is lower. It was estimated the move would save them at least $1 billion a year in tax obligations to the U.S. (the deal ultimately didn’t go through). Medtronic, a medical device company, plans to move its corporate address to Ireland, a tax haven, to avoid paying U.S. taxes on $14 billion. Chiquita, the banana distributor, is also heading to Ireland after acquiring Fyffes.  These tax dodges, as Fortune magazine calls them in this week’s issue, are “positively un-American.”

Huffington Post reported:

In May, Senate Democrats introduced the Stop Corporate Inversions Act of 2014, which recommends, among other things, forcing a large portion of a merged company's management and workforce to relocate to the new overseas location if the company wants to dodge U.S. taxes.

The bill "allows corporations to renounce their corporate citizenship only if they truly give up control of their company to a foreign corporation and truly move their operations overseas," Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who backed the bill, said last month.

Congress has the power to solve this problem. They merely need to change the rules so that the level of foreign partnership changes from the current 20% to 50% which would effectively make the corporation a foreign owned entity. But since our American method of governance is by corporate lobbyists, Congress will do the right thing only if it benefits corporations and right now that would be the status quo which allows corporations to do most of their business in and extract most of their propfits from the US while paying taxes to a foreign government.

President Obama and other Democrats have proposed that any corporation moving its headquarters abroad to avoid paying taxes should not receive any government contracts. "They're technically renouncing their U.S. citizenship," Obama said of the companies. "They're declaring they are based someplace else even though most of their operations are here. You know, some people are calling these companies corporate deserters." But Democrats do not control Congress so anything they want to do is moot. The American way of governance is ineffectual and dysfunctional as long as corporate interests supersede the interests of citizens and taxpayers. That is why a parliamentary democracy would better serve the US citizenry. In that form of government the winning party can get its agenda accomplished with far less interference from other parties.

The Reason Europe Bans American Apples

by Christina Sarich

Natural Society       / News Analysis

 

Published: Wednesday 18 June 2014

 

Apples treated with diphenylamine (DPA), a substance which keeps them from turning brown for months at a time when they are kept in storage, is now a sore spot for importers of American apples.

 

                                    

It’s sad when one of the biggest ‘super powers’ can’t even export a quintessentially American food to another country because it is too toxic to eat. But apples treated with diphenylamine (DPA), a substance which keeps them from turning brown for months at a time when they are kept in storage, is now a sore spot for importers of American apples.

DPA isn’t harmful all by itself, but it breaks down into carcinogogenic elements. It’s been used since 1962, but was banned in the European Union in 2012 since producers couldn’t answer inquiries about its safety. European food safety regulators wanted more information on it, but none could be summoned. The apple industry simply responded with one study “that detected three unknown chemicals on DPA-treated apples, but it could not determine if any of these chemicals, apparently formed when the DPA broke down, were nitrosamines.”

British scientists, John Barnes and Peter Magee, in 1956, reported that dimethylnitrosamine produced liver tumors in rats, and later went on to test other nitrosamines and N-nitroso compounds. They found that the compounds caused all kinds of problems, including liver cancer, lung cancer, and even botulism.

Caution: GMO, Non-Browning Arctic Apple Coming Soon“Nitrosamines occur commonly because their chemical precursors–amines and nitrosating agents–occur commonly, and the chemical reaction for nitrosamine formation is quite facile. Research on the prevention or reduction of nitrosamine formation has been productive, and most of the items shown in the table contain considerably lower amounts of nitrosamines than they did a few decades ago.”

No wonder European officials were concerned. In 2012, they slashed the allowable levels of DPA on apples to 0.1 parts per million, but now they don’t want those gleaming, spot-free apples normally seen on super market shelves in the States, at all. DPA residues were found on over 80 samples taken from US imports, with an average reading of 0.42 parts per million, well above their ‘allowable’ level.

Funny then, how the U.S. EPA Office of Pesticides tasked with reviewing all pesticides and chemicals on our agricultural produce told the EWG that they had no idea their was a ban on DPA. The EPA then had the nerve to tell the EWG that they had no intention of reviewing DPA safety standards, in light of European’s refusal to eat our poisoned fruit.

Reminds you of the Snow White fairy tale, doesn’t it. Here, little lady, eat the fruit. The Europeans said no thanks, and the rest of us would be better off getting our apples from a bunch of cutely named dwarves.

 

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                                        ABOUT Christina Sarich

Christina Sarich is a humanitarian and freelance writer helping you to Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. She also writes exclusive articles for NationofChange. Her blog is Yoga for the New World. Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing the Body And Mind Through the Art of Yoga.

Cheap Corn Permeates Every Facet of the American Diet

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Corn is the staple of the US agricultural system and food supply. It's in everything we eat unbeknownst to many Americans. Corn feeds steers that become steak and fast food hamburgers. Corn feeds chickens and pigs - even catfish, salmon and tilapia. Milk, cheese and yogurt that once came from cows that grazed on grass now come from Holsteins that spend their time tethered to milking machines while munching on corn. Processed foods contain even more corn than so-called "natural" foods. Take chicken nuggets, for example. Not only the chicken itself but the corn starch that holds it together, the corn flour in the batter, the corn oil in which its fried, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di- and triglycerides, the golden coloring, the citric acid that keeps it fresh - all these ingredients come from corn.

Any soft drink in the supermarket including Coke and Pepsi contains High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) so you can wash down your corn with some more corn. A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain corn. Corn's derivatives are used in all processed foods, derivatives such as corn oil, corn starch, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, ascorbic acid, ethel acetate, acetic acid and vanilla extract. When broken down, derivatives of corn get used as a food filler, texturizer, emulsifier, sweetener, preservative, adhesive and many other applications.  Government agricultural policies makes corn so cheap that food manufacturers earmark large budgets for research and development to invent infinite ways to push corn into more products. And corn is not only used as a food. It is used in gasoline production (ethanol), construction materials, adhesives, paper products, disposable diapers, trash bags, batteries and charcoal briquettes as well.

Why is corn so ubiquitous in the American diet? The main reason is that it's super cheap and this is mainly a result of government policy. For hundreds of miles in the midwest corn is the only crop grown. Farm after farm are devoted to this monoculture. America produces 300 million tons of number 2 corn each year. This isn't the kind of corn you eat when you eat corn on the cob. This is the kind that is primarily fed to beef cows, chickens and pigs.

It wasn't always so. Farms used to plant several crops and were home to multiple animals. No longer. Why this change from polyculture to monoculture? Credit Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill, the two mega corporations of US agribusiness. US government agricultural policies, lobbied for by these giant agricultural corporations, have resulted in corn being the cheapest agricultural commodity out there. Government subsidies, provided thanks to the taxpayers, push the price of corn way below the level that would have been set by the law of supply and demand.

Way back in the 1930s farmers were paid not to grow corn when supply exceeded demand thereby keeping supply and demand in balance and the price paid for a bushel of corn up. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a United States federal law of the New Deal era which reduced agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land. Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus and, therefore, effectively raise the value of crops. But during the Nixon administration farm policies were rejiggered to increase production and drive down prices.

The 1973 farm bill began replacing the New Deal policy of supporting prices through loans, government purchases and land idling with a system of direct payments to farmers. Farmers were encouraged to sell as much production as they could at any price, no matter how low, because the government (taxpayers) would make up the difference. Corn production skyrocketed much to the approval of large agribusiness corporations like ADM, Cargill and Monsanto which engineered GMO seeds that could be sprayed with their Roundup herbicide. But lower profit margins forced the smaller farmers into bankruptcy. Farmers were forced to maximize the number of bushels their farms could produce per acre. The only way to do this was to use GMO corn (bought from Monsanto), huge tractors and combines and huge quantities of pesticides (also bought from Monsanto).

It became economically expedient to concentrate animals in large feeding pens where they were fed a diet of corn. Corn is fed to beef cows although they evolved to eat grass. Feeding them corn actually makes them sick, and, in order to prevent this, they are fed a dose of hormones and antibiotics with their daily allotment of corn. Corn subsidies have been largely responsible for this change.

Author Michael Pollan's recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, suggests that corn subsidies in particular have led to the success of the feedlots or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that he and journalist Eric Schlosser have blamed for the emergence of e. coli as a major health concern. Subsidized corn is so inexpensive that beef companies find it profitable to build large facilities to feed corn to their cattle. Cows do not normally live in enclosed areas or consume corn, so these CAFOs generate large amounts of waste and require antibiotics and other drugs to keep the animals healthy.

From agribusiness' point of view, a cow is simply a vehicle for converting plant material to protein and the point is to get the cow to maximum weight in the shortest period of time. In other words the game is to minimize the time to slaughter for these animals. The same applies to chickens, turkeys and hogs. This maximizes profits. Corn does a better job of speeding up this process than does grass. Corn can be commodified and stored; grass can't. Cheap corn made beef and in particular fast food hamburgers cheap. Those cheap hamburgers are actually subsidized by American taxpayers with the subsidies paid to farmers.

As a reaction to the inhumane treatment of animals in CAFOs and the unhealthiness of chicken and beef provided by animals brought to maturity in these confining conditions where they literally tromp around in their own excrement day after day, the organic movement has taken hold. Cow excrement which used to be spread on fields by manure spreaders on small family farms and which provided healthy nutrients back to the soil is now so toxic due to the corn fed diet that it can't be used as fertilizer and is placed in lagoons where it languishes much like spent nuclear fuel. In both cases there is nothing that can be done with the toxic sludge except to store it in perpetuity. Only there have been burst dams and the resultant toxic sludge has oozed into streams and rivers.

Organic food has also caught the attention of big food producers whose lobbying has shaped the US organic food laws to their benefit. What is considered organic has been defined as loosely as possible. The result is that instead of what the consumer visualizes as a bucolic family farm with happy chickens scratching for worms has instead become big business with CAFOs similar to nonorganic food production. The only difference is that the chickens must be fed organic chicken feed ^i.e. there can be no chemical additives, hormones or antibiotics in the feed. In order to qualify as free range, the chickens must have the possibility of going outside on some grass. So the large feeding pens have a little door which the chickens can go out and romp around on a fifteen foot strip of grass but only for a short time before they are slaughtered. Most chickens acclimated to the large enclosed pens don't even bother, but they can be marketed as "free range chickens."

Big Organic food production is hardly the small family farm that most people envision. It turns out that there's organic and then there's ... organic. Large scale operations have invaded the organic industry. They operate much like non-organic food industries. In many cases they are one and the same. Take Horizon milk, for instance. I have been drinking Horizon organic milk for a couple of years. I was sort of amazed to see it pop up at Food 4 Less and even, recently, at Wal-Mart. I should have suspected that this was a really huge operation, but until I started researching this article, I didn't realize how huge. It turns out that Horizon is just another brand of Dean Foods:

Dean Foods is by far the largest U.S. dairy processor. According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Dean processes 40 percent of fluid milk consumed in the U.S., which it distributes in a dizzying array of brands. Its dominance extends to organic milk, too — Dean’s Horizon brand is the largest supplier of organic milk.

Like a lot of Big Organic food suppliers, Horizon is pushing the limits of the meaning of "organic." The Cornucopia Institute has a dispute going with Horizon over the illegal practice of bringing conventional heifers onto organic farms. These heifers are then converted to organic although they haven't been raised to organic standards up till then.

According to Cornucopia News:

Conventional replacement dairy calves, typically bought at auctions, likely receive antibiotics, toxic insecticides and parasiticides as well as conventional feed during their first year of life before being “converted” to organics—all practices strictly prohibited in organic production.

“Real organic farmers don’t buy replacement heifers,” said Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute.  “Real organic farmers sell [surplus] heifers.”

Demonstrably lower levels of stress, superior health and improved vitality of the cows separates authentic organic dairy farms from factory farms masquerading as organic, according to the farm policy research group.

“In the factory farm model, the animals are pushed for such high production that, just like in the conventional confinement model, after as few as 1 to 2 years, they are so sick, or they are not healthy enough to breed, that they are slaughtered,” Kastel clarified.  “Organic cows are generally so healthy, and live such long lives, that many of the baby calves born can be sold to other farmers, creating an alternative revenue stream for organic farmers.”

The fact that large scale organic farms use the same CAFOs as do the large scale conventional farms explains a lot why there is as much e. coli found in organic food as there is in non-organic food. In both cases animals are concentrated together and live out their days in their own excrement. Only difference is that "organic" cows and chickens are fed organic feed (supposedly) and no antibiotics or hormones. Because of living conditions, organic CAFOs will result in more sick animals even than conventional CAFOs which at least have the advantage of antibiotics.

Another issue with organic produce is that it is allowed into the country from foreign countries as long as it was produced according to organic standards. Of course there is little or no enforcement mechanism to ensure that organic vegetables and fruits from abroad adhere to the highest standards.

Many might think that the issue of food production has nothing to do with climate change, but they would be wrong. Grassing over the huge number of acres now devoted to corn in order to feed ruminants (cows) would in fact do a lot to offset fossil fuel emissions. If the 16 million acres now used to grow corn in the US were converted to pasture, 14 billion pounds of carbon would be removed from the atmosphere by the grasses and put into the soil as enrichment, the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road. Cows, and, therefore, humans, would be so much healthier. As much as one third of the greenhouse gasses that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to food production and transport. Locally grown would reduce the GHGs produced from transporting food all over the world.

In another article I will spell out the differences in more detail between the Big Organic food producers and the local small family operations of real organic farms which are not only organic according to the letter of the law but in the spirit of true organic farming as well.

Kroger Sued for Misleading Consumers About Simple Truth ‘Natural’ Chicken

Christina Sarich

Natural Society/ News Report

 

Published: Wednesday 9 April 2014

 

What this comes down to is false advertising on labels—a practice the FDA seems to allow left and right.

Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. (by revenue), realizes that consumers care about what they put on their tables, but the company is misleading the nation about some foods, making unacceptable false claims. One product the company is lying about is called Simple Truth Natural Chicken, claimed to be ‘cage-free’ and ‘raised in humane conditions.’ 

These claims have led to a recent lawsuit against Kroger.

These claims are extremely confusing and meant only to generate more income for the grocery store chain – not to treat animals or consumers, for that matter, fairly. What this comes down to is false advertising on labels – a practice the FDA seems to allow left and right.

Many consumers will pay extra for products that are better for their health. What’s more, there are many individuals searching for meat-providing which care for animals more equitably, instead of the hideous ways that they are known to be treated on factory farms. Kroger’s label implies that chicken grown for their grocery stores are treated better than birds grown in factory farms, but this simply isn’t the case.

First of all, chickens raised for meat in the US are grown in cages, although hens grown for their eggs, are. So the ‘cage-free’ portion of the label is already misleading. It’s a marketing ploy, at best. When a customer called to ask what ‘raised in a humane environment’ meant, she was simply told that, “they live on the floor of a barn in poultry house.”

According to PETA, that means a huge windowless shed is utilized to cram as many as 40,000 birds for harvesting their meat. Chickens normally grow well in groups of about 90. Otherwise, they become stressed from crowding and relentlessly peck at one another causing injury and death. The conditions of a ‘chicken house’ are anything but humane. Michael Specter, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, who also visited a chicken shed once wrote:

“I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe …. There must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.”

Simple Truth Chicken is produced by a company called Purdue, and they only follow minimal industry standards that basically necessitate inhumane treatment of these animals before they end up on your plate – but Kroger wants you to pay extra. They can end up with painful bone deformities being raised this way, as well as ruptured tendons, cardiovascular problems, and lameness.

They are selectively bred for being a ‘broiler’ or a chicken with lots of meat, and they spend most of their lives in chronic pain. Kroger is selling factory farmed chicken.

As I mentioned earlier, there is currently a lawsuit against Kroger for this misleading label, but a Kroger spokesperson simply states the label is ‘accurate.’ Consumers deserve to know how their chicken is really raised.

You can sign a petition to tell Kroger to stop lying about their Simple Truth chicken here. You can also simply boycott them, until they make amends to their customers and change their ways.

'Agent Orange Corn': Biotech Companies Are Waging a Chemical Arms Race on Our Food Supply

Food Revolution Network             /               By John Robbins          

Instead of protecting the American people from a poison, the USDA is acting as a salesman for Dow.

 

Photo Credit: © igor.stevanovic/ Shutterstock.com

              

January 16, 2014  |  

 

 

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The Obama administration announced last week that it expects to approve corn and soybeans that have been genetically engineered by Dow Chemical company to tolerate the toxic herbicide — 2,4-D. They are planning this approval despite the fact that use of this herbicide is associated with increased rates of deadly immune system cancers, Parkinson’s disease, endocrine disruption, birth defects, and many other serious kinds of illness and reproductive problems.

Weed ecologists are unanimous in warning that approval of these crops will lead to vast increases in the use of this poisonous chemical. Researchers at Penn State say that in soybeans alone, planting of crops resistant to 2,4-D would increase the amount of 2,4-D sprayed on American fields to 100 million pounds per year — four times the current level. The researchers predict a cascade of negative environmental impacts, and add that the increasing use of the herbicide would actually worsen the epidemic of superweeds it is intended to address, by causing weeds to become resistant to multiple herbicides.

A coalition of 144 farming, fishery, environmental and public health groups have asked the USDA not to approve the 2,4-D resistant crops. Citing studies that predict dire consequences to both human and environmental health, they add the concern among farmers that 2,4-D would drift onto their property and kill their crops, causing serious economic damage in rural communities.

But you have a chance to prevent this from happening. We have now entered a 45 day period during which the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is inviting public comments.

The biotech industry continually reassures public officials and the public that genetically engineered foods reduce the amount of pesticides applied to our crops. Is this claim scientifically valid? Or is it just a myth propagated for PR purposes?

A recent study, conducted at Washington State University, provides a conclusive answer. The study was authored by agronomist Charles Benbrook, a former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences. Using official US Department of Agriculture data, he and his team of researchers looked at the effect on pesticide use of the first 13 years (from 1996 to 2008) of GM crop cultivation in the United States.

Their conclusion?

“Genetically engineered crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the U.S. over the first 13 years of commercial use of GE crops.”

Total Herbicide Volume Applied…

There may be controversy over whether GMO foods are safe for human consumption. But there is virtually no controversy over the fact that herbicides, like all pesticides, are dangerous. The enormous increase in herbicide use that has occurred as a direct result of the planting of genetically engineered crops has not only poisoned the air, the water, the soil, and farm workers. It has also been directly responsible for the development of the super-weeds that now plague 50% of our agricultural acreage. The biotech industry’s answer to these super weeds — their new corn and soy seeds that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to 2,4-D — would only make our food production systems even more tightly tethered to the pesticide treadmill that has produced the problem in the first place.

Monsanto and Dow Chemical company refer to their new 2,4-D-resistant seeds as an “innovation that works for tomorrow.” They call it “the future of farming.” But these genetically engineered seeds would actually take American agriculture back more than a half-century.  2,4-D was introduced in the 1940s, and became notorious during the Vietnam war for its use as part of the chemical weapon known as “Agent Orange.” This is why the 2,4-D-resistant crops developed by Dow AgroSciences are frequently referred to as “Agent Orange crops.”

Agent Orange, the defoliant used as a weapon of war in Vietnam, is a mixture of equal parts 2,4-D and another related herbicide, 2,4,5-T. The aircrews charged with spraying Agent Orange used a sardonic motto – “Only you can prevent forests,” a shortening of the famous forest service warning to the general public – “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

But of course, Agent Orange was — and is — no joke. The Vietnamese government estimates that 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects, as a result of the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange in that country. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that even all these years later there are still a million people in the country disabled due to our use of Agent Orange.

The biotech industry says that referring to crops that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to 2,4-D as “Agent Orange crops” isn’t fair. They acknowledge that 2,4-D was one of Agent Orange’s primary ingredients. But where is the evidence, they ask, that 2,4-D, by itself, is dangerous?

There is in fact considerable evidence linking the weedkiller 2,4-D, by itself, to cancer, lowered sperm counts, birth defects, neurological damage and other serious health harms. Dozens of studies in humans have reported an association between exposure to 2,4-D and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells that can be fatal.

Convinced by such research, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and parts of Canada have banned 2,4-D. But instead of protecting the American people from this poison, the USDA is acting as a salesman for Dow. If we don’t stop this, we’ll soon be spraying massive quantities of 2,4-D on our fields and farms. That’s why it’s so important that you make your voice heard during this crucial 45 day window.

Monsanto, Dow, and the other corporations that stand to profit enormously from the use of these crops say that they are necessary to combat the epidemic of superweeds. But these superweeds have come into being precisely because of the overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide on crops that have been genetically engineered to be Roundup-resistant.

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GMO technology was designed to enable farmers to weed their fields by spraying them with Roundup, killing the weeds but not the genetically engineered Roundup Ready plants. But what has happened, as many scientists warned it would, is that weeds have increasingly become resistant to Roundup, which has led to farmers using more and more of Monsanto’s weedkiller. This skyrocketing increase in herbicide use has been a disaster to biological diversity in our fields, for instance nearly wiping out milkweed, thus causing a severe decline in Monarch butterfly populations.

Meanwhile, the number of weeds resistant to Roundup has grown to epidemic levels. Weeds that can no longer be controlled by Roundup now infest roughly half of farmers’ fields. The biotech industry says the solution is their next generation of genetically engineered crops that are resistant to 2,4-D and other herbicides. But many scientists are warning that we’ll only see the same sad thing again. The effect will be to generate still more intractable weeds resistant to multiple herbicides. And then we’ll need even more toxic pesticides to address the problem.

It’s a chemical arms race. Fortunately, you can do something about it.

Here’s how to make your voice heard:

1) Click on this link.

2) LET THEM KNOW HOW YOU FEEL.

3) Don’t buy meat from factory farms. The primary use of genetically engineered corn and soy are as livestock feed in factory farms.

John Robbins is the author of many international bestsellers, including Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, that have collectively sold more than 2 million copies and been translated into 27 languages. John has received the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award, Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award, and countless other accolades.

How Did Hepatitis Get into Organic Berries?

Published on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 by Center for Food Safety    

by  Michele Simon  

The latest example of how even health-conscious eaters are not immune from foodborne illness outbreaks came last week with a recall of organic frozen berries contaminated with Hepatitis A. The products were sold under the brand name of Townsend Farms at two large chains: Costco stores in the west and Harris Teeter stores.

The latest count from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention is 87 people infected in eight states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and (Photo:Fried Dough/Flickr)Washington. Of these, 36 have been hospitalized.

According to the CDC, Hepatitis A “usually occurs when an infected food handler prepares food without appropriate hand hygiene.” However, the source of this particular strain is still unclear, except that it probably did not originate in the U.S.

This outbreak raises several important questions about our food system.

Are Companies Duping Consumers with “Farm-washing”?

According to the fine print on the back label, shown on food safety attorney Bill Marler’s blog, the fruit came from around the world: Chile, Argentina and Turkey. The pomegranate seeds processed in Turkey appear to be the culprit.

But you couldn’t tell the international origins from the front of the packaging labeled “Organic Antioxidant Blend,” with the bucolic image of Townsend Farms and its warm and fuzzy tag line: “Since 1906, Field to Farm to Family.”

It seems at least one victim of the outbreak was fooled by the imagery. According to CBS News, Geoff Soza of California ate “a healthy breakfast of thawed frozen berries and Greek yogurt every morning” but while “celebrating his 30th wedding anniversary in Yellowstone National Park,” the 64-year-old wound up in the hospital instead. At one point, things looked so serious that the words “liver transplant” were uttered by a doctor.

Soza seemed shocked to learn his favorite berries were not from the Oregon farm depicted on the packaging. According to the story:

Healthy and health-conscious, the Sozas always inspect their foods and select organic produce. They were surprised to learn that some of the fruit from Townsend Farms of Fairview, OR, was from outside the U.S. But the packaging convinced the Sozas the fruit was all-American because it bears the slogans “Grower. Processor. Distributor.” and “Field to Farm to Family, since 1906.”

Soza’s wife put it plainly: “It was our distinct impression that these are raised under U.S. standards, especially organic food standards.”

I asked Mark Kastel, co-founder of The Cornucopia Institute, if he thought the Townsend label was confusing as to the product’s origins.

“Yes, it’s deliberately deceptive, to make you think you’re buying local fruit from the farm up the road,” Kastel said. “There are many examples of this. Often companies with the word ‘farm’ in their name don’t even do any growing themselves, they just contract with farms, sometimes from all over the world. Or they just buy from brokers in the farms or an anonymous source.”

How does this connect to food safety risks? While small, local farms are not immune, the difference is in the magnitude of the impact: with a small farm, any adverse impacts are only felt locally, but with globalization, the potential hazards are spread far and wide, and to a much larger population.

Also, about the antioxidant claim on the package, registered dietitian Andy Bellatti says, “All whole, plant-based foods contain antioxidants. So, any combination of fruit can be ‘an antioxidant blend’ and what matters most is diversity of antioxidants, not just from berries.”

Can We Trust Organic Labels on Imported Foods?

Among the most frequent questions I get regarding organic is “what about imported food; can we trust the standards in other countries?” The Townsend berries sport the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic seal, indicating that even though the mix contains imported fruit, it still conforms to the high U.S. based organic standards.

As Food Safety News explains, imported foods are evaluated by organic certifying agencies approved by the USDA:

Townsend Farms products are certified as organic by both Oregon Tilth, a private third party certifier, and the Washington State Department of Agriculture. But how is it that berries grown in Turkey, Chile and Mexico can get packaged in Oregon and certified as organic by the standards of the U.S. Department of Agriculture?

The short answer to that question lies in the fact that firms worldwide have the ability to certify farms according to the standards set forth by the USDA. As long as a proper authority can verify a farm operates according to organic standards once a year, that farm can become USDA-certified organic whether it’s outside Indianapolis or Istanbul.

OK, but can we trust these foreign certifiers? Some watchdog groups such as Center for Food Safety and Cornucopia Institute have greater confidence in U.S. farms and U.S. organic certification than from imports. These groups and many others have grave reservations about particular countries with an increasing presence in the U.S., particularly China and India.

How Many Sick People Will it Take to Get Feds to Act?

Most importantly, this serious outbreak underscores once again, how the stalled food safety regulations, as mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act (enacted in 2011), are adversely impacting public health.

The law, which numerous groups pushed hard for, mandates significant upticks in foreign inspections by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), although how those increases will be funded remains a serious question. Additional import safeguards include giving the FDA authority to require certification for food coming from certain countries as a condition of admission to the U.S.

But the required regulations for how these preventive measures would be implemented have been overdue for more than a year now. In April, a federal court agreed with the Center for Food Safety’s lawsuit that the FDA has failed to adhere to statutory deadlines for final regulations.

The judge ordered the FDA to work with Center for Food Safety to submit a new timeline for the rules, which the court would then require FDA to follow. George Kimbrell, senior attorney with Center for Food Safety, says this process is currently underway, which is the good news:

Congress required the FDA to dramatically improve import safety. The firm, timely deadlines for new import regulations underscored how overdue and urgently-needed the improvements are. The court should soon set new deadlines for the regulations, and the FDA will finally do the job Congress required of it and protect the American public from continued outbreaks.

The bad news is that while the FDA continues to drag its feet, Americans continue to get sick. Whether it’s Hepatitis A in imported berries, listeria in imported cheese or salmonella in imported papayas, our regulators have a lot more work to do to safeguard the food supply. Let’s hope it won’t take more illnesses to get them to take action.

© Center for Food Safety 2013

      

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer specializing in food industry marketing and lobbying tactics and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and How to Fight Back. She is also on the advisory board for Corporate Accountability International’s Value [the] Meal campaign and lives across the bay from San Francisco in Oakland. You can follow her blog and find her on Twitter.

Barrio Logan No Longer a Food Desert: Gets New Supermarket

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

The new Northgate Gonzalez supermarket opened on December 12, 2012 bringing fresh foods and groceries to an area long neglected by mainline supermarket chains - Barrio Logan. It is located at the corner of Cesar Chavez Parkway and Main Street. Prior to opening, this ethnic Latino neighborhood had the usual complement of fast food restaurants offered to poor ethnic neighborhoods such as McDonald's and Church's and Popeye's fried chicken chains. In a food desert there is little in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables, but thanks to the Mercado Redevelopment Project, Barrio Logan has been considerably spruced up and is a food desert no more! In 2010 The San Diego City Council approved plans to transform two city blocks of vacant land in Barrio Logan into the Mercado Project which also featured 92 affordable housing units.

Carlos Castañeda, who grew up in Barrio Logan, said it was about time the neighborhood had a source of fresh produce and reasonably-priced groceries.

“The city just totally neglected us for decades, Castañeda said.

"So the fact that we’re sitting in an area that had junkyards, had toxic waste sites, believe it or not, and now we’re sitting in a beautiful market that’s going to serve the very community that it’s surrounding, it is a very big deal.”

The San Diego City Council and Mayor Bob Filner proclaimed December 11, 2012 Northgate Gonzalez Mercado Day.

The Northgate Gonzalez supermarket chain was started by Miguel Gonzalez who migrated to the US with his late father, - also named Miguel - from Jalisco, Mexico in the late 60s. They both worked factory jobs until they were able to open their first supermarket in a Latino neighborhood in Anaheim in 1980. Miguel Jr sold his house and his father refinanced his to come up with the money to finance the first Northgate Gonzalez supermarket. Initially, they knew nothing about the supermarket business. After they managed to open, they had $240. left to actually run the business so they employed only family members at first. Luckily, they came from a large family. Miguel has 12 brothers and sisters.

Miguel Sr made the hot carnitas and chicharrones which went down well with their mainly Latino customer base. A couple of brothers ran the meat counter while the sisters worked the cash registers. Today the stores have bulk food sections like you find in health food stores. They have a large variety of ethnic Mexican foods like carnitas, ceviches, salsas and aguas frescas. Cumbia plays over the speaker system and television screens in the meat department show soccer games and Mexican talk shows.

Today the supermarket chain employs over 5000 people at 37 stores, most of them Latino, and including dozens of family members. The stores are located all over southern California from Anaheim to Los Angeles to Santa Ana to Long Beach. There are 3 stores in San Diego and 4 more in San Diego County including stores in Vista, Fallbrook, Chula Vista and Escondidio.

They have even branched out to financial services at Barrio Logan. Northgate Financial, now Prospera Gonzalez, will provide a complete suite of financial products to Northgate customers to satisfy their current and future financial needs and will guarantee the quality and delivery of these services with respect and an honest price. Payroll checks are cashed for free unlike the check cashing services normally found in the ghetto which charge exhorbitant rates.

While ethnic supermarket chains are growing, traditional supermarket chains are declining. For instance, in El Cajon recently a huge Ralphs on 2nd Street closed just as two Iraqui owned supermarkets located nearby opened. The so-called ethnic supermarket industry has seen its revenues grow around 2 percent annually during the past five years, while the supermarket industry as a whole has been losing money. There is a large Vietnamese supermarket, Thuan Phat, in Linda Vista and a Japanese supermarket, Mitsuwa, in Kearney Mesa. The signs at Thuan Phat are in Vietnamese and Spanish.

Even Michelle Obama in her perennnial attempts at promoting healthy foods spoke at a Northgate Gonzalez supermarket in Los Angeles last year. She was there in behalf of The California Endowment which sponsors the California FreshWorks Fund. Northgate Gonzalez was the first recipient of loans totaling $20 million from the FreshWorks Fund. Now they will be able to open more stores.

“We just think they're a phenomenal operator,” said Tina Castro, director of investing for The California Endowment. “Their stores are beautiful, they offer a tremendous selection of produce and they really care about their consumers and engage with the communities that they're based in,” Castro said.

From Fronteras:

"Northgate Gonzalez’s efforts to improve their customers' health include in-store cooking demonstrations and a line of foods identified for shoppers as healthy choices.

"Back in Barrio Logan, customers say they love the beautiful produce, huge selection of meats, prepared Mexican dishes and tortillas made in-store from scratch.

"A reviewer on Yelp called Northgate Gonzalez, 'Whole Foods Market for the working class Latinos.'

"One shopper said what he loves most is when he hits his local Northgate Gonzalez market on the weekend, it’s like being in Mexico."

In April of 2000, Miguel Jr and his brothers and sisters created the González Reynoso Family Foundation to give back to the community.

Their website states: 

"Our foundation is proud  to continue our support of our community and our heritage by focusing our efforts to help those in need."

 In 2011, they donated more than $100,000 to local schools and neighborhood sports teams. In addition, they also serve neighboring communities by maintaining sports facilities and by donating to families in need during the holiday season. They also support various orphanages and convalescent homes in Mexico.

Barrio Logan is the latest recipient and beneficiary of the González Reynoso Family's success. Latinos as well as all San Diegans can celebrate the fact that these good people have brought not only fresh meats, fruits and vegetables to Barrio Logan, but have done it as a family owned business not a corporate owned entity beholden to Wall Street.

 

 

Is Organic Food Really Organic?

by John Lawrence

In an article entitled "Canada's Organic Nightmare" put out by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, authors Mischa Popoff and Patrick Moore contend that many foods labeled as USDA organic may not actually be up to that standard because there is a lack of field testing in Canada, and, furthermore, free trade agreements allow the importation of such foods into the US. There are also "organic equivalency" agreements with other countries that allow imported organic food to be considered as equivalent to that grown in Canada. Popoff and Moore contend that organic crops and livestock are not tested in Canada before they are certified thus making certification essentially meaningless. Inspections consist of checking out the records at organic farms to see if the paperwork is in order, but the actual products are not tested making it more likely that the records could be falsified.

US standards for organic certification do call for field testing of crops and livestock to make sure that they do not exceed well-defined limits of pesticides and herbicides. On both sides of the border GMOs are prohibited in order to qualify for the organic label. While the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) goes to great lengths to make sure that regular supermarket non-organic food is safe and conforms to all labelling claims, pulling food from store shelves and inspecting it before it leaves the farm, organic foods are not so rigorously tested. Mischoff and Popoff claim that the lack of organic food field testing is the result of lobbying efforts by the global environmental movement, but perhaps corporate farmers wishing to enter the lucrative organic market are the real culprits here. They make the point that regular supermarket food should not be criticised as containing undesirable chemicals if organic foods have to rely, more or less, on farmers' vouching for the purity of their products.

I'm not so sure that this logic holds. If Canadian organic products (which have been found to contain herbicides and pesticides) cannot be completely trusted, it does not follow that people should trust supermarket foods not to cause harm. What should happen is that Canadians should demand rigorous field testing of their organic products just as they test other products in the food chain to ensure that Canadians (and citizens of other countries they export to) are getting certifiable organic products. The US should demand the same before they accept imported Canadian products and give them the USDA organic label.

According to the CFIA’s definition of organic foods, there is no mention of safety, purity, nutrition or sustainability criteria that are all readily and inexpensively verifiable through basic lab testing. Instead, "organic product" in Canada is legally defined as product “that has been certified as organic.” According to the CFIA's own regulations, organic food can only be decertified if it's pesticide level does not even meet the limits imposed for non-organic foods. The authors contend that Canada will become a backdoor for the importation of non-organic food under the organic label since large corporations realize that there is a lot of money to be made in this high end market, and there is even more money to be made if organic standards are allowed to be debauched.

Why does Canada allow such haphazard and potentially dangerous practices to continue? The authors claim that organic farmers want organic certification so they can claim their foods are organic and, therefore, charge more for their products without having the scientific scrutiny that would actually prove that their products truly meet organic standards. And there is money involved since the private CFIA certifiers are paid by the farmers themselves as they are in the US. So the farmers get what they want - lax standards - and the CFIA certifiers get what they want - a lucrative profession. There likely is collusion between the two entities amounting quite possibly to the level of fraud.

The organic industry in Canada is a $2 billion a year industry. It is sufficiently mature that it could support a better testing standard which would not be prohibitively expensive. The Canadian standard continues to put more emphasis on bureaucratic paperwork than on scientific analysis and this is the way the big players in the organic industry want it. They can reliably fill out the paperwork at little cost to themselves. Growing truly organic food products would not only be an inconvenience to them but might possibly detract from the bottom line. This is a problem not only in Canada but also in the US where big corporations entering the organic industry seek to lower organic standards in order to cut costs.

Under the same lax regulations Canada doles out the "certifiably organic" label to other countries for use on their imports into Canada. So Canadians are faced with the prospect of consuming foods that originated in other countries having the Canadian organic label and consuming them as if they were grown in Canada. This back door into Canada also permits these products to be reimported into the US as if they were Canadian certifiable organic products.

The Canadian Organic Trade Association shot back at Popoff's and Moore's study:

"This article covers a report that is an untruthful and indefensible indictment of Canada’s organic farmers and business people, who take great pride in providing consumers with a complete seed-to-fork system premised on integrity, traceability and transparency.

Canada’s organic food system must meet all food safety and regulatory requirements, including random testing for chemical residue. Testing is, and always has been, one of the many enforcement and inspection mechanisms available during surprise spot-checks or when an inspector determines that testing is merited. Organic farmers and processors undergo mandatory annual third-party audits and site inspections.

"The authors of the Frontier Centre report are well-established opponents of organic, vocal in their support of GMOs, who have produced a heavily biased document. We are shocked by the media attention this has received, which is obviously intended to generate controversy where none exists.

"Organic products have been proven through numerous peer-reviewed studies to contain significantly less pesticides and pesticide residues, in an environment already contaminated from years of toxic pollution. Organic farmers and businesses are working hard to reverse this trend and to create an alternative system to conventional agriculture. GMOs, artificial preservatives and colouring are not allowed in organic production."

However, they don't claim that regular field testing is required, but is at the discretion of the certifier. Their statement that organic products have proven to contain "significantly less pesticides" suggests that they still might not be up to organic standards, just that they have less pesticides than regular supermarket foods. They also suggest that, while they are doing the best they can, the environment has been "already contaminated from years of toxic pollution." However, this seems like more of an excuse or a rationale for not meeting organic standards. It's an organic farmer's and certifier's responsibilty to ensure that foods labeled organic in fact are up to organic standards not just that the farmer has tried hard to meet those standards. 

In addition to testing for the prescence of pesticides and herbicides organic products should be tested for the prescence of pathogens which would crop up if manure, for example, were to be improperly composted. This is not even on the organic industry's radar yet and explains why even some products labeled "organic" in the US have contained e coli and other pathogens and have caused health problems among consumers.

Suffice it to say that standards for organic foods are mind bogglingly lax, especially in Canada. Since Canada has a free trade agreement with the US for the importation of organic foods, these foods from Canada and imports into Canada from other countries can wind up on US store shelves labeled organic. While consumers pay a premium for organic foods, are they really getting what they pay for? God only knows. Standards need to be upgraded in both Canada and the US. The incentive for collusion between farmers and certifiers needs to be eliminated, and field testing needs to be rigorously enforced or, in the case of Canada, instituted.

GMO Cops: Biotech Giant Hires Former Cops to ‘Enforce Patents’

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Friday 30 November 2012 in Nation of Change

A new private force of former police officers which I have dubbed ‘GMO Cops‘ will now be hunting down any farmer who is replanting biotech giant DuPont’s GM seeds to save their failing genetically modified harvest. That’s right, they’re literally seeking farmers who replant Roundup Ready soybeans who are in violation of DuPont’s patent. And as the second largest seed company in the world (second only to Monsanto), DuPont is hiring dozens of former cops and sending them across the entire continent of North America to track down farmers who haven’t paid up.

GMO Cops or The GMO Mafia?

Another term to describe these individuals may also be the ‘GMO Mafia‘. Literally sent to ‘protect sales’ and essentially shake down struggling farmers who may actually be replanting DuPont’s ‘patented seeds’ without paying the company in licensing fees, the GMO Cop Mafia’s mission statement is to ensure that “illegal beans” do not get planted. After all, if a farmer were able to replant these beans, then it may slightly make up for the horrible yields produced from the crops. The same yields that have been a major factor — if not the factor — in over a quarter of a million farmer suicides.

Farmers who lost everything after signing on to deceptive deals with the likes of Monsanto and other biotech companies.

The GMO Cops Mafia news also comes literally just 24 hours after it was revealed that GM cotton crops fell by at least 40% according to mainstream government reports. Similar news has been making the headlines about GM corn, which is being absolutely ravaged by heavily ‘mutated’ rootworms that are resistant to the pesticide-producing capabilities of the GMO crops. Pesticide producing GMOs that ultimately end up in your stomach.

It should come as no surprise that DuPont also fell 5.6% this year in the stock market.

So perhaps DuPont has realized that they better start shaking down their clients now before their empire ultimately collapses along with Monsanto. And if it’s not resistant rootworms, horrendous failures to yield, or a disturbingly high rate of farmer suicide, its the numerous country-wide bans on GMOs that continue to be announced each month. From Russia to Peru (which passed a monumental 10 year ban), GM crops are effectively being phased out of the international food supply.

The bottom line, it seems, is that DuPont is out to get every last penny before the company faces serious resistance. As one research professor told Bloomberg:

 “Farmers are never going to get cheap access to these genetically engineered varieties… the biotech industry has trumped the legitimate economic interests of the farmer again.”

But regardless of the GMO Cop Mafia, DuPont will not be able to weather the mass opposition to GM crops that is continually mounting on a grassroots level. Like their cohort Monsanto, even all of the political brute force in the world cannot save the bastards.

Anthony is an accomplished investigative journalist whose articles have appeared on top news sites and have been read by millions worldwide. A health activist and researcher, Anthony’s goal is informing the public as to how they can use natural methods to revolutionize their health, as well as exploring the behind the scenes activity of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA.

Monsanto's Lies and the GMO Labeling Battle

Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

by John Robbins

You may have never heard of Henry I. Miller, but right now he is attempting to determine the future of food in this country.  And he has enormous financial backing.

Mr. Miller is the primary face and voice of the “No on Prop 37” campaign in California.  At this very moment, Monsanto and other pesticide companies are spending more than $1 million a day to convince California voters that it’s not in their best interest to know whether the food they eat is genetically engineered.  And Henry I. Miller is their guy.

If you live in California today, he’s hard to miss.  You see him in TV ads, hear him in radio spots, and his face is all over the expensive fliers that keep showing up uninvited in your mail box.  Initially, the ads presented Miller as a Stanford doctor.  But he isn’t.  He’s a research fellow at a conservative think tank (the Hoover Institute) that has offices on the Stanford campus.  When this deceptive tactic came to light, the ads were pulled and then redone.  But they still feature Miller trying to convince the public that Prop 37 “makes no sense,” and that it’s a “food-labeling scheme written by trial lawyers who hope for a windfall if it becomes law.”

Actually, Prop 37 makes all the sense in the world if you want to know what’s in the food you eat.  It was written by public health advocates, and provides no economic incentives for filing lawsuits.

Who, then, is Henry I. Miller, and why should we believe him when he tells us that genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe?

Does it matter that this same Henry Miller is an ardent proponent of DDT and other toxic pesticides? Does it matter that the “No on Prop 37” ads are primarily funded by pesticide companies, the very same companies that told us DDT and Agent Orange were safe?

I find it hard to avoid the impression that Henry Miller is a premier corporate flack.  He was a founding member of the Philip Morris backed front group that tried to discredit the links between tobacco products and cancer.  After the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, he argued that exposure to radiation from the disaster could actually provide health benefits.  He argues that drug companies, not the FDA, should be responsible for testing new drugs.  And he is a board member of the George C. Marshall Institute which, funded by oil and gas companies, is notorious for its denial of climate change.

Now he’s telling us that we should vote No on 37 because, he says, the labeling law contains exemptions included “for special interests.”  As if the corporations he fronts for weren’t the biggest “special interests” of all.  And by the way, the exemptions in Prop 37 conform to those found in GMO labeling laws in the 61 other nations around the world, including the European Union, that already require labeling for foods that are genetically engineered.

Miller and the No on 37 campaign say that labeling would increase family food bills by hundreds of dollars per year.  Interestingly, the study they cite to justify this claim was paid for by the No on 37 campaign itself.  It was the work of a Maine public relations firm, Northbridge Consulting, that has no economic expertise, but has worked on behalf of Coke and Pepsi against laws that would require the recycling of soda pop bottles.

Would the passing of Prop 37 actually raise the price consumers pay for food?  Henry Miller adamantly proclaims that it would.  But according to the only fully independent economic analysis of Prop 37, prepared by researchers at Emory University School of Law, “Consumers will likely see no increase in prices as a result of the relabeling” required by the bill. 

Somehow I keep getting the feeling that Henry Miller may not be the man you want to listen to when your health is at stake.  But Monsanto and its allies are seeing to it that this man’s face and beliefs are everywhere in California today.  One television viewer in San Francisco reported seeing ads featuring Miller no less than 12 times in a single day.

Other “No on 37” ads feature a physician, Ronald Kleinman, dressed of course in the obligatory white coat.  Though the ads don’t mention it, Dr. Kleinman’s ethical principles don’t seem to hamper him from being a highly paid voice for the interests of the junk food companies.  While working for Coca-Cola, he advocated for “the safety…of sugar, artificial colors and nonnutritive sweeteners in children’s diets.”

Not content with misrepresenting Stanford University (three times), the pesticide and junk food companies behind No on 37 have also:

1. Misled voters in the state voter guide by claiming falsely that the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, believes GMO foods are safe.
2. Illegally affixed the official US FDA seal to their campaign propaganda, and attributed a fabricated quote to the FDA, falsely implying that the FDA has taken a position against Prop 37.

Regrettably, this deluge of deception seems to be having an impact.  Although polls originally showed that more than 80% of the California public want genetically modified food to be labeled, more recent polls are showing a virtual dead heat on Prop 37, with the advertising deluge only increasing in intensity.

Some daily newspapers in California are contributing to this unhappy trend by coming out against Prop 37, with editorials that use entire paragraphs directly from the “No on 37” press releases.  Might this have anything to do with the fact that processed foods companies are the primary source of advertising revenue for newspapers today?  And that the lobby for the processed food companies, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, has called the defeat of Prop 37 its single highest priority for the year?

The famed food author Michael Pollan wrote recently that Proposition 37 is the litmus test for whether or not there is actually a food movement in this country.  Public health activist Stacy Malkan adds that it also may be the litmus test for whether there is democracy left in this country.

These are good points.  There is no food movement if Monsanto has its way with us.  And there is no democracy without an informed citizenry.

The question now is whether we are going to allow special interests to dictate what we are allowed to know about the food they sell us.

In this case, ignorance is not bliss.  It’s subservience to the agenda of Monsanto and the other pesticide companies.  Without labeling, we are eating in the dark, with potentially disastrous consequences.

What remains to be seen is whether Californians will, come November 6th, allow Monsanto and its allies to control what you are allowed to know about the food you eat.

Find out more and get involved here.

Sign a petition to Congress calling for labeling of genetically engineered foods here.

John Robbins is cofounder of the Food Revolution Network, which provides information and inspiration to help you heal your body and your world with food.  He is the author of many bestsellers, including The Food Revolution, No Happy Cows, and Diet For A New America.  He is also the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award, Green America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and many other accolades.

Pesticide Industry Backed Opponents of GMO Labeling Get Criminal in California

Published on Friday, October 19, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Zack Kaldveer

The $36 million No on 37 campaign, bankrolled by $20 million from the world's six largest pesticide companies, has been caught in yet another lie, this time possibly criminal.

These companies and their allies in the junk food industry know that their profit margins may suffer if consumers have a choice whether to purchase genetically engineered foods or not.  And that's why opponents are spending nearly a million dollars per day trying to make Prop 37 complicated. But really it's simple - we have the right to know what's in our food.

To date, the No on 37 campaign has been able to repeat one lie after another with near impunity. But has this pattern of deceit finally caught up to it?

Yesterday, the Yes on 37 campaign sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a criminal investigation of the No on 37 campaign for possible fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  

The No on 37 campaign affixed the FDA's seal to one of the campaign's mailers. Section 506 of the U.S. Criminal Code states: "Whoever...knowingly uses, affixes, or impresses any such fraudulently made, forged, counterfeited, mutilated, or altered seal or facsimile thereof to or upon any certificate, instrument, commission, document, or paper of any description...shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

The letter also provides evidence that the No on 37 campaign falsely attributed a direct quote to the FDA in the campaign mailer. Alongside the FDA seal, the mailer includes this text in quotes. "The US Food and Drug Administration says a labeling policy like Prop 37 would be 'inherently misleading." The quote is entirely fabricated. The FDA did not make this statement and does not take a position on Prop 37.

In addition, the three identified authors of the "Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Proposition 37" include a Dr. Henry I. Miller, who is identified solely as "Founding Director, Office of Biotechnology of the Food & Drug Administration." Dr. Miller in fact, does not currently work for the FDA in any capacity - as millions of California voters have been erroneously led to believe.

This is not the first blatant act of deception that the No on 37 campaign has been caught perpetrating on the citizens of California - particularly relating to their "top scientist" Dr. Henry Miller.

Consider Miller's growing "rap sheet":

• On Oct. 4 the No on 37 campaign was forced to pull its first ad off the air and re-shoot it after they were caught misrepresenting Miller as a doctor at Stanford University  when he is actually a researcher at the Hoover Institute on Stanford's campus, as the Los Angeles Times reported.
• Last week, the campaign was reprimanded by Stanford again for misrepresenting the university in a mailer that went out to millions of voters. And this week, the campaign was caught sending out yet another deceptive mailer involving the University.

In addition to allowing his university affiliation to be repeatedly overblown, Miller has a sordid history of parroting the talking points of some of the world's most notorious corporate bad actors: he's a founding member of a now defunct tobacco front group that tried to discredit the links between cigarettes and cancer, he's repeatedly called for the reintroduction of DDT - known to cause premature birth, fronted for an oil industry funded climate change denial group for Exxon, claimed that people exposed to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster "may have benefited from it", and attacked the US Food and Drug Administration's efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs safety while urging it to outsource more of its functions to private industries.

This is the man the No on 37 campaign has portrayed to voters as an arbiter of good science and promoted as an expert worthy of our trust. In reality, Miller is nothing more than a corporate shill that will say whatever his paymasters ask him to, be it Exxon, Phillip Morris, Monsanto, or DuPont.

Does the No on 37 campaign stand behind Miller's fringe views on tobacco, climate change, nuclear radiation and DDT?

But this pattern of deceit doesn't end with Miller:

• On Oct. 5, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the nation's largest professional association for nutritionists and dieticians, accused the No on 37 campaign of misrepresenting its position and misleading voters in the official California Voter's Guide that went to 11 million voters.
• And the anti-Proposition 37 ads that are now blanketing the state have been described as misleading by the San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps these latest revelations will prompt the mainstream press to begin focusing their attention on the No on 37 campaign's pattern of deceptions - including a potentially criminal act - rather than on easily discredited pesticide industry Prop 37 "red herrings" like common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus "big bureaucracy claims", and "cost increase hysteria".

So who should we trust?

Who should we trust when it comes to our right to know what's in the food we eat: Monsanto, DuPont, and Henry Miller or the millions of California consumers and leading consumer, health, women's, faith-based, labor and other groups; 61 countries that already require GMO labeling; and a growing stack of peer-reviewed research linking genetically engineered foods to health and environmental problems?

Who has our best interests at heart, the pesticide and junk food industry, or Prop 37 supporters like Consumers Union, California Nurses Association, California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, United Farm Workers, American Public Health Association, Consumers Union, Sierra Club, Whole Foods Market, California Council of Churches, Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Food Democracy Now!?

Zack Kaldveer is the assistant media director for the Yes on Prop 37 campaign.

Prop 37: Vote Yes for Labeling GMO Foods

by John Lawrence  from the San Diego Free Press

The French prime minister announced on September 15, 2012 that France would maintain a ban on Monsanto's MON810 maize, the only genetically modified organisim (GMO) currently allowed in Europe. Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider that France is the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

But that's not all. Following the ground-breaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

Also in March, 2011 the Mexican States of Tlaxcala and Michoacán each passed legislation banning the planting of genetically modified corn to protect natural plants from further GMO contamination.  Together, both states produce about a third of all of Mexico’s corn. GMO corn can cross-contaminate ancient strains of Mexican maize.

Meanwhile, the "No on 37" ads are proliferating. They are saying that Prop 37 is arbitrary because it doesn't call for labeling alcohol, restaurant food, meat or cheese. However it does call for labeling all fruits and vegetables which are GMO products. That's certainly a worthwhile start. Since all animal products in the grocery stores have eaten GMO corn, labeling animal products as GMO because they ate GMO corn when they were alive would result in blanket labeling of all meat products except those who were fed organic grass or corn, a minuscule quantity.

Also labeling GMO foods on restaurant menus would result in every item on the menu being labeled as GMO. This would be a little extreme to start, and would guarantee massive infusions of lobbying cash into the battle for GMO labeling by the other side. Alcoholic drinks contain GMOs, but again it would be impractical at the present time to require a bartender to inform you that the drink you just ordered contained GMOs. It is better just to consume organic products insofar as possible. Organic wine is already labeled as such. There are GMO grapes, but the larger issue is the fact that grapes are heavily sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, and grapes aren't grown from seed making GMO grapes a non-issue. 

Bourbon by definition must be made with 51% corn. Nearly every distillery uses GMO corn to make bourbon. However, at present there are two organic, non-GMO choices: Four Roses and Wild Turkey. However, even those whiskies are not committed to using non-GMO corn since there is little of it available these days. Jack Daniels is ending its commitment to using non-GMO corn. In 2000, a number of their consumers, particularly those in Europe, expressed a preference for non-GM ingredients, and  they opted for only 100% non-genetically modified corn. But now they are going to GMO corn because of availability issues. I guess they will lose the European market. Here is a marketing opportunity for someone!

It is not only concern about GMO corn that calls for caution.

Colin O’Neil, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, says he hasn’t seen any science pointing to genetic material passing through the distillation process. But, as he sees it, that’s not the only cause for concern.

“To assume that the only real risk is contamination of genetic material ignores the fact that these crops by and large either produce an insecticide (which has been shown not to break down in the human gut) or they are engineered to withstand exposure to herbicide.” And farmers are spraying an increasing amount of Roundup and other weed killers as a result of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” he points out.  

“I don’t know what types of pesticide residues are on the corn that goes through the distillation process,” O’Neil adds, “but residue in any form presents an increased exposure to consumers.”

So bourbon aficionados will have to take their chances or demand organic whiskey because Prop 37 will not protect them. Beer drinkers should import European beers now that GMO maize, which had been previously used in beer manufacturing, has been banned there.

Major U.S. companies have dropped genetically engineered foods in Europe, citing consumer fears. There is a survey which says that Kellogg, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, Heinz, and others comprise a growing list of companies going GMO-free - but not in the U.S. Some of these companies are behind the "No on Prop 37" campaign here in California. If enough people in the US demand GMO free foods and beverages as they have in Europe, they will have to provide them here as well.

Here are 8 reasons you want Prop 37 to pass, and why we're asking for your support.

1. GMOs have never been proven safe. The FDA conducts no independent testing of GMOs, but instead claims that they are "not substantially different" from non-GMO foods.

2. The biotech industry is not required to conduct long-term safety studies on GMOs, and it keeps researchers from conducting those tests by claiming the right to protect its patented seeds and technologies.

3. GMOs are everywhere. Today, most non-organic US corn, soy, cotton, and sugar beets - which are used in most of the sweeteners and additives used by food processors - are genetically engineered. So is the feed fed to the animals you eat. In fact, 75-85% of the processed food in your grocery store contains unlabeled GMOs.

4. The companies who want you to believe GMOs are safe are the same ones who lied to you about Agent Orange and DDT.

5. GMO crops are responsible for super weeds and super bugs, soil degradation, and a lack of diversity - which makes crops and humans more susceptible to disease.

6. The only folks who don't want you to know what's in your food are huge corporations like Monsanto, Dow AgriScience, BASF and food conglomerates like Pepsi and Coca-Cola - who along with other biotech, pesticide and processed food manufacturers have donated nearly $33 million to defeat Prop 37.

7. This is our best - and perhaps only - shot at labeling GMOs and ending Monsanto's monopoly of our food supply and destruction of our health and environment. Nineteen other states have tried - and failed - to get a GMO labeling law through the state legislative process. Prop 37 takes GMO labeling direct to the voters so Monsanto's lobbyists can't kill it.

8. If this law passes in California, food manufacturers have admitted that it may as well be a national law. They won't want to put "this product contains GMOs" on their labels, so they will reformulate their products. And if they reformulate for California, they may as well do it for all of their products.

Early voting on Prop 37 begins on October 9. By November 6, this historic initiative will have passed or failed.

Is the End of Monsanto Near? Prop 37 Succeeding as Nations Ban GMO Crops

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Saturday 29 September 2012 by Nation of Change

“After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.”

Is the end of Monsanto within reach? It has certainly been a rough couple of weeks for the mega corporation as the real dangers surrounding GMOs are being brought to the attention of consumers on a global scale like never before. It all started with the monumental French study finding a serious link between the consumption of Monsanto’s Roundup-drenched GMOs and massive tumors. Being called the ‘most thorough’ research ever published on the real health effects of GMOs, the study led to even larger victories.

After the study not only did France call for a potential worldwide ban on GMOs pending the results of their in-depth analysis, but Russia’s major consumer rights organization announced a ban on both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn.

Prop 37 Can Label Monsanto Out of Existence

And now, the Proposition to label all GMOs in the state of California is showing massive success. If Prop 37 passes, it won’t just affect California. It is very likely that other states will not just take note, but adopt similar legislation. Through this legal mechanism, we can essential label Monsanto out of existence.  This is possible when considering that the average consumer is actually opposed to GMOs and heavily in favor of proper labeling.

In a major Los Angeles Times poll, registered California voters in favor of labeling outnumber pro-GMO voters by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Altogether, a whopping 61% of those polled reported supporting the Prop 37 labeling initiative. Only 25% reported opposing it.

If GMO-containing products are properly labeled, the simple fact of the matter is that less people will buy them. As of right now, very few people are even aware of what they are putting in their mouth. In fact, if the public knew that they were consuming GMOs which were linked to massive tumors and organ failure, the overwhelming majority would abandon such products. Without labeling, however, they have no idea. The same can also be said for other ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and aspartame.

As Yes on 37 campaign manager Gary Ruskin explains:

“Monsanto, DuPont, and Coca-Cola do not want Californians to know what’s really in their food and drinks, because they fear consumers will turn away from their genetically engineered ingredients and pesticides that go with them.”

If they knew they were eating mercury in the HFCS and consuming an artificial sweetener with over 42 associated diseases, then major change would occur – change that includes forcing manufacturers to abandon these ingredients in order to stay profitable. And after all, Monsanto’s number one goal is profit. This is a company that has been caught running ‘slave-like’ working conditions in which ‘employees’ were forced to buy only from the company store and were not allowed to leave the area or their pay would be withheld.

If Monsanto’s profits were to plummet, their political reign would likely follow as well. Without an endless amount of cash to throw at crushing Prop 37, already contributing $4 million to fuel anti-labeling propaganda in California, the corporation’s massive grasp on the world of science (continually censoring studies and funding pro-GM research) and politics would virtually cease to exist.

It is essential that we ensure the passing of Prop 37 in a bid to generate the literal end of Monsanto. Once consumers actually know that they’re putting genetically modified creations into their body, real change will occur within the food supply.

Russia Bans Use and Import of Monsanto's GMO Corn Following Study

by Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Thursday 27 September 2012 in Nation of Change

“With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow.”

Following the ground- breaking French study that graphically linked the lifetime consumption of Monsanto’s GMO corn in rats to massive tumors and direct organ failure, Russia’s premiere consumers rights organization has suspended both the importation and use of Monsanto’s GMO corn within the nation’s borders.

The move may soon be echoed by other nations, who may soon be urged by France to ban Monsanto’s GMOs due to serious health concerns. France, who also recently upheld a key ban on growing GMOs, has been instrumental in alerting the world to the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto’s overall corruption. In the nation’s latest announcement, it was revealed that France’s Agriculture Minister was launching an investigation into the GMO study, ultimately calling for European authorities to ban Monsanto’s GMOs in order to protect citizens in the event that the study was found to be sound.

It seems that France has become somewhat of a consumer health watchdog in more than just one area, simultaneously tackling the issue of pesticide contamination as well. It was even announced that the French government was seeking to ban crop dusters in all areas possible, aiming to reduce the amount of obesity-linked pesticides within the food supply.

Monsanto Still Clinging to Old GMO Mantra

Meanwhile, Monsanto is continuing to stick to its tired statements regarding the ‘safety’ of its GMO crops and Roundup herbicide. Instead of discussing not only the French study finding that the company’s GMOs led to horrendous tumors that led to rats literally dragging them along the ground as they walked, they claim that the information ‘does not warrant’ any concern at all from European officials. Just as Monsanto (and the US government) ignored evidence linking Roundup to DNA damage and infertility, it appears they intend to do it once more and hope that it all goes away.

Unfortunately for Monsanto, it’s not going away this time.

With Russia now acting to secure food safety, many other nations will surely follow. While the United States may continue to ignore the issues surrounding GMOs and Monsanto’s blatant disregard for human health (they were caught running ‘slave-like’ working rings, after all), many foreign nations will not. Countries like Poland, Peru, and Hungary have already taken action in banning or removing Monsanto’s GMO crops. And even in the United States grassroots movements have spawned bills like Proposition 37 – the monumental bill in California that seeks to label GMOs.

First Long-term GE Food Study Results Are In And They’re Not Pretty

By Genna Reed

from Food & Water Watch, September 19, 2012

Because of restrictions in technology use agreements, researchers are often unable to get access to seeds for independent feeding trials to test the safety of genetically engineered (GE) food and animal feed. One of the few scientists that has succeeded in obtaining seed and doing longer term feeding studies on rats is Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team from the University of Caen’s Institute of Biology in France.

His new two-year feeding study was just published in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Past studies were cited in our GE Foods Overview report including a 2007 study, which found significant liver and kidney impairment of rats that were fed insect-resistant Bt corn, concluding that, “with the present data it cannot be concluded that GE corn MON863 is a safe product.” Another study published in 2009 found that glyphosate caused DNA damage to human cells even at lower exposure levels than those recommended by the herbicide’s manufacturer.

Séralini’s newest research is incredibly significant because it is the longest feeding trial performed on animals fed GE crops, involves 200 rats which is the highest number of rats examined in a GE diet study, measures more metabolic differences through blood and urine sampling during the rats’ lifespans and uses the total formulation of Roundup on the feed, as opposed to just the active ingredient of glyphosate.

Some of the shocking findings of this chronic rat feeding study include:

• Female rats fed Roundup ready GE corn developed mammary tumors caused by the disruptive effects of Roundup on the female reproductive hormone, estrogen.
• Both male and female rats fed GE feed had severe liver and kidney damage, and the damage was not necessarily dose dependent. The symptoms were similar for animals fed high and low diets of GE corn.
• 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely compared with 30 percent and 20 percent of the control group (rats fed a non-GE diet).
• In groups treated with trace Roundup levels in their water, 70 to 80 percent of the rats had 1.4-2.4 times more abnormalities in their pituitary glands than the controls. The pituitary gland is a vital hormone-producing part of the brain responsible or controlling signals for growth, metabolism, stress and fertility.
• The first detectable tumors occurred 4-7 months into the study, which shows the need for feeding studies longer than just 90 days!

The status quo for GE food safety testing is unacceptable. Biotech companies are only required to complete 90 day rat feeding trials to determine the relative safety of their GE crops, a period which only represents up to early adulthood. Without long-term studies on the health effects of GE crops, consumers are basically serving as guinea pigs. This lack of research must be acknowledged and turned into a priority for the USDA and FDA before any new GE crops are approved.

This latest study sheds a critical light on the inherent dangers of GE crops designed to withstand chemical pesticides and herbicides, like Roundup, and makes mandatory labeling even that more vital. Join Food & Water Watch’s LET ME DECIDE campaign and sign this petition to tell your state and federal elected officials to require labeling for all GE foods.

Who’s Deceiving Whom? Push to Label GMO Foods Frightens Big Ag Interests

Published on Friday, September 21, 2012 by Food & Water Watch Blog

by Anna Ghosh

Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Pepsi and Coke are scared. They’re afraid that California’s proposition 37 to make labeling of genetically engineered foods mandatory will end their unchecked, unquestioned power to hide GE ingredients in the majority processed foods without their customers’ knowledge. Which is why they’ve poured millions into an anti-Prop 37 propaganda campaign they’re calling “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme.” But who’s deceiving who?

These corporations have enjoyed the transgenic food version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that lax regulation has afforded them for more than two decades. During this time, GE ingredients have permeated the vast majority of our food supply with little independent, long-term scientific scrutiny (Finally this week, the first long-term peer-reviewed study on GE food was released and the results are frightening). Proposition 37 and several other statewide mandatory labeling initiatives in the works are about giving the power of information back to consumers and ending the tyranny that large corporations have had over our food supply.

But first, let’s dispel some of the top myths that the “Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme” front group has been busy spinning.

Myth #1: GE labeling will mean higher food costs.

TRUTH: Opponents of labeling claim that mandatory GE food labeling would increase food costs for the average family by $600 to $825 per year, but since the opponents are the ones doing the analysis, it’s not surprising that they’re grossly overestimated. On the contrary, an impartial consulting firm did a study in 2001 for the U.K. Food Standards Agency and found that GE labeling would increase a household’s annual food spending by only 0.01 to 0.17 percent — a very small figure ranging from an increase of $.33 to $5.58 in 2010 real U.S. dollars (inflation-adjusted) annually. Plus, food companies change their labels all the time (New and Improved! Heart Healthy!).

Myth #2: GE labeling means more bureaucracy and taxpayer costs.

TRUTH: The monitoring and enforcement required for mandatory labeling doesn’t have to be difficult as long as
all players participated in labeling along all steps of the food chain. Federal and state agencies could simply add GE labeling to existing food labeling requirements that they already assess during compliance inspections.

Myth #3: GE labeling would burden grocers and retailers with mountains of paperwork.

TRUTH: Changing food labeling to indicate the presence of a GE ingredient wouldn’t be any different for grocery stores than stocking a product that has changed its ingredients or added a nutritional-benefit claim to the package. For foods that the store handles (such as produce or some meat that is repackaged on site), retailers will have to be sure that GE and non-GE products are kept separately and labeled as such, just like they currently do with country-of-origin and pricing information.

Myth #4: It is not the responsibility of the states to create food-labeling requirements.

TRUTH: States often lead the way when the federal government is too slow, too gridlocked or too weak to take action. Long before the United States enacted a mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) policy, eight states required this labeling on their own. Renewable energy standards are a good example – California has been building its renewable energy program since 1998 and today leads the country in renewable energy use and is the standard other states strive to match. Hopefully California will also lead the country in establishing mandatory GE labeling when a majority of Californians vote for Prop 37 this November.

Myth #5: GE labeling conflicts with science.

TRUTH: This one couldn’t be further from the truth. The chronic effects of eating GE foods are still largely unknown. And without labeling of GE foods, we cannot associate any health problems with people who ate them — because we do not know who ate them. Since the FDA has no way to track adverse health effects in people consuming GE foods, and because there is no requirement that food containing GE ingredients be labeled, there is no effective way to gather data on health problems that may be happening. Science is all about knowledge, testing and discovery. GE labels will only increase everyone’s knowledge and institute a system whereby more testing and track-back is available to trace the possible health problems that could arise through ingesting certain GE ingredients.

MYTH #6: California’s Proposition 37 will result in frivolous lawsuits.

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, the lawsuits argument is a red herring. Food companies accurately label for calories, fat content and other information required by law; likewise they will abide by the requirements of Prop 37. According to an independent legal analysis by James Cooper, JD, PhD, of George Mason University School of Law, Proposition 37 is unlikely to result in frivolous lawsuits.

MYTH #7: Prop. 37 would prohibit processed foods from being marketed as “natural.” 

TRUTH: According to the California Right to Know Campaign, Proposition 37 applies only to genetically engineered foods, not other foods. Processed foods such as canned olives could still be marketed as “natural” as long as the food is not genetically engineered.

The fight to make GE labels the law is a battle of more information vs. less. These corporations are not spending millions for our benefit. They are spending millions to protect their profits and maintain the status quo of keeping it customers in the dark. To learn more, read Food & Water Watch’s latest fact sheet: How Much Will Labeling Genetically Engineered Foods Really Cost and join the campaign to make GE labels the law.

© 2012 Food & Water Watch

Anna Ghosh is a writer and activist for environmental causes and sustainable food. She is a co-founder of the Kitchen Table Talks discussion series and was on the Slow Food Nation communications advisory committee. She is currently the Western Region Communications Manager for the consumer advocacy non-profit Food & Water Watch.

France Maintains Key Ban on Monsanto's GMO Maize Crops

from Nation of Change, September 17, 2012

by Anthony Gucciardi

“Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace.”

In another massive victory against Monsanto and the spread of genetically modified crops, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayraul has announced that the nation will be maintaining a key ban on the only remaining GMO currently allowed in Europe. Known as Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, or MON810 maize, the original ban was brought forth back in March following the French court’s previous annulment on a November ban.

Thanks to activism by French citizens and serious political outcry, Monsanto is now effectively blocked from Europe’s gigantic marketplace. This is even more true when you consider that France is the largest agricultural producer in Europe. This move by such a large and influential nation will surely lead to similar legislation throughout the rest of the globe. 

This decision comes in the face of emormous pressure from Monsanto to 'soften' its stance on GMOs (see first link). Monsanto has significant pull within governments around the globe, with the United States in particular being the ‘launch pad’ for the biotechnology movement. We now know thanks to WikiLeaks  that United States ambassadors have actually threatened nations opposed to Monsanto’s GMO maize crops, going as far as to threaten them with ‘military-style trade wars’. When considering that this is but one leak, it is very concerning.

France has thwarted the political preasure and led the charge against Monsanto, even finding Monsanto guilty of ‘chemical poisoning’ earlier this year. According to the prime minister, the ruling was also part a wider plan to reduce the use of chemicals in farming.

Many countries have taken action against Monsanto and its many harmful creations. Peru has banned Monsanto’s GMOs for a total of 10 years, Hungary uprooted the company’s crops from its farmland, and even the agricultural giant California is seeking to label GMOs this November. From Agent Orange (known to kill 400,000 and cause 500,000 plus birth defects) to GMO maize, Monsanto’s time for experimentation may soon be up.

Stanford Scientists Shockingly Reckless on Health Risk And Organics

Published on Thursday, September 6, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Frances Moore Lappé

I first heard about a new Stanford "study" downplaying the value of organics when this blog headline cried out from my inbox: "Expensive organic food isn't healthier and no safer than produce grown with pesticides, finds biggest study of its kind."

What?

Does the actual study say this?

No, but authors of the study -- "Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review" -- surely are responsible for its misinterpretation and more. Their study actually reports that ¨Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria."

The authors' tentative wording -- "may reduce" -- belies their own data: The report's opening statement says the tested organic produce carried a 30 percent lower risk of exposure to pesticide residues. And, the report itself also says that "detectable pesticide residues were found in 7% of organic produce samples...and 38% of conventional produce samples." Isn't that's a greater than 80% exposure reduction?

In any case, the Stanford report's unorthodox measure "makes little practical or clinical sense," notes Charles Benbrook -- formerly Executive Director, Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences: What people "should be concerned about [is]... not just the number of [pesticide] residues they are exposed to" but the "health risk they face." Benbrook notes "a 94% reduction in health risk" from pesticides when eating organic foods.

Assessing pesticide-driven health risks weighs the toxicity of the particular pesticide. For example the widely-used pesticide atrazine, banned in Europe, is known to be "a risk factor in endocrine disruption in wildlife and reproductive cancers in laboratory rodents and humans."

"Very few studies" included by the Stanford researchers, notes Benbrook, "are designed or conducted in a way that could isolate the impact or contribution of a switch to organic food from the many other factors that influence a given individual's health." They "would be very expensive, and to date, none have been carried out in the U.S." [emphasis added].

In other words, simple prudence should have prevented these scientists from using "evidence" not designed to capture what they wanted to know.

Moreover, buried in the Stanford study is this all-critical fact: It includes no long-term studies of people consuming organic compared to chemically produced food: The studies included ranged from just two days to two years. Yet, it is well established that chemical exposure often takes decades to show up, for example, in cancer or neurological disorders.

Consider these studies not included: The New York Times notes three 2011 studies by scientists at Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan that studied pregnant women exposed to higher amounts of an organophosphate pesticide. Once their children reached elementary school they "had, on average, I.Q.'s several points lower than those of their peers."

Thus, it is reprehensible for the authors of this overview to even leave open to possible interpretation that their compilation of short-term studies can determine anything about the human-health impact of pesticides.

What also disturbs me is that neither in their journal article nor in media interviews do the Stanford authors suggest that concern about "safer and healthier" might extend beyond consumers to the people who grow our food. They have health concerns, too!

Many choose organic to decrease chemicals in food production because of the horrific consequences farm workers and farmers suffer from pesticide exposure. U.S. farming communities are shown to be afflicted with, for example, higher rates of: "leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft tissue sarcoma" -- in addition to skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate cancers," reports the National Cancer Institute. And, at a global level, "an estimated 3 million acute pesticide poisonings occur worldwide each year," reports the World Health Organization. Another health hazard of pesticides, not hinted at in the report, comes from water contamination by pesticides. They have made the water supply for 4.3 million Americans unsafe for drinking.

Finally, are organic foods more nutritious?

In their report, Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, and co-authors say only that "published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods." Yet, the most comprehensive meta-analysis comparing organic and non-organic, led by scientist Kirsten Brandt, a Scientist at the Human Nutrition Research Center at the UK's Newcastle University found organic fruits and vegetables, to have on "average 12% higher nutrient levels."

Bottom line for me? What we do know is that the rates of critical illnesses, many food-related --from allergies to Crohn's Disease -- are spiking and no one knows why. What we do know is that pesticide poisoning is real and lethal -- and not just for humans. In such a world is it not the height of irresponsibility to downplay the risks of exposure to known toxins?

Rachel Carson would be crying. Or, I hope, shouting until -- finally -- we all listen. "Simple precaution! Is that not commonsense?"

Frances Moore Lappé just released EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (Nation Books) on the fortieth anniversary of her Diet for a Small Planet.

Funding Sources of Anti-Organics Stanford Study Questioned in New Report

Published on Thursday, September 13, 2012 by Common Dreams

- Common Dreams staff

A study released last week by Stanford scientists, which claims organic foods are no more healthy than non-organic foods, was funded by corporate agriculture and biotechnology giants, according to a new report by the Cornucopia Institute.

Organic produce (Photo: Flickr/ penelope waits / Creative Commons License) "We were not one bit surprised to find that the agribusiness giant Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural business enterprise, and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which have deep ties to agricultural chemical and biotechnology corporations like Monsanto, have donated millions to Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, where some of the scientists who published this study are affiliates and fellows," said Charlotte Vallaeys, Food and Farm Policy Director at the Cornucopia Institute, a non-profit organic farm policy organization.

On September 3, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, released the research, garnishing widespread press coverage from corporate news outlets such as the New York Times, Associated Press, and CBS News. As the New York Times reported, the study "concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive."

However, as Cornucopia points out, a deeper examination of the actual research reveals "glaring errors, both in understanding the important and complex differences between organic and conventional foods and in the researchers’ flawed choice of research methods."

Environmental health advocates such as the Environmental Working Group and Mark Kastel of Cornucopia have been quick to point out the wealth of research ignored in the Stanford report, which reveals the obvious risks involved in producing and consuming non-organics; however, Stanford's spin was quickly and widely accepted by journalists without fact-checking and was rushed to the pages of major news outlets.

Now Cornucopia has revealed that the Stanford researchers have direct ties to big ag players, which stand to profit from an organics smear campaign.

"Make no mistake, the Stanford organics study is a fraud," says Mike Adams of Naturalnews.com and Anthony Gucciardi of Naturalsociety.org. "To say that conventional foods are safe is like saying that cigarettes are safe. Both can be propagandized with fraudulent science funded by corporate donations to universities, and we’re seeing the same scientist who helped Big Tobacco now helping Big Biotech in their attempt to defraud the public."

"There was just no way that truly independent scientists with the expertise required to adequately answer such an important question would ignore the vast and growing body of scientific literature pointing to serious health risks from eating foods produced with synthetic chemicals," says Vallaeys.

Additionally, the study did, in fact, concede a few positive attributes to organic foods, including the fact that organic produce has fewer pesticide residues; however, such facts were buried in the presentation of the research by the Stanford researchers and public relations staff and were not widely reported by major news sources.

The Global Food System Casino

Published on Friday, September 14, 2012 by The Asian Age

by Vandana Shiva

Food is our nourishment. It is the source of life. Growing food, processing, transforming and distributing it involves 70 per cent of humanity. Eating food involves all of us. Yet, it is not the culture or human rights that are shaping today’s dominant food economy. Rather speculation and profits are designing food production and distribution. Putting food on the global financial casino is a design for hunger.

After the US subprime crisis and the Wall Street crash, investors rushed to commodity markets, especially oil and agricultural commodities. While real production did not increase between 2005-2007, commodity speculation in food increased 160 per cent. Speculation pushed up prices and high prices pushed an additional 100 million to hunger. Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan are all playing on the global food casino.

A 2008 advertisement of Deutsche Bank stated, “Do you enjoy rising prices? Everybody talks about commodities — with the Agriculture Euro Fund you can benefit from the increase in the value of the seven most important agricultural commodities.”

When speculation drives up prices, the rich investors get richer and the poor starve. The financial deregulation that destabilised the world’s financial system is now destabilising the world food system. The price rise is not just a result of supply and demand. It is predominantly a result of speculation.

Between 2003 to 2008, commodity index speculation increased by 1,900 per cent from an estimated $13 billion to $260 billion. Thirty per cent of these index funds are invested in food commodities. As the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative states, “We live in a brave new world of 24-hour electronic trading, triggered by algorithms of composite price indices, fits of investor ‘lack of confidence’ and of unregulated ‘dark pools’ of more than $7 trillion in over the counter commodities derivatives trades.”

The world commodity trading has no relationship to food, to its diversity, to its growers or eaters, to the seasons, to sowing or harvesting. Food diversity is reduced to eight commodities and bundled into “composite price index”.

Seasons are replaced by 24-hour trading. Food production driven by sunshine and photosynthesis is displaced by “dark pools of investment”. The tragedy is that this unreal world is creating hunger for real people in the real world.

In The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with it — a cover story for Harper’s — Fredirick Kaufman says, “The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.”

And the entry of investors like Goldman Sachs, AIG Commodity Index, Bear Sterns, Oppenheiner and Pimco, Barclays allowed agribusiness to increase its profits. In the first quarter of 2008, Cargill attributed its 86 per cent jump in profits to commodity trading. ConAgra sold its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion.

Gambling on the price of wheat for profits took food away from 250 million people. Speculation had separated the price of food from the value of food. As Austin Da-mani, a wheat broker, told Fred Kaufman, “We’re trading wheat, but its wheat we’re never going to see. It’s a cerebral experience”.

Food is an ecological experience, a sensory experience, a biological experience. With speculation it has been removed from its own reality. Grain markets have been transformed, with futures trading by the grain giants in Chicago, Kansas City and Minneapolis combined with speculation by investors.

And as Mr Kaufman says, “Imaginary wheat bought anywhere affects real wheat bought everywhere.” So if we do not decommodify food more and more people will be denied food; as more and more money is poured into the global casino, the artificial processes of speculation are driving up prices of food and taking it beyond the reach of millions.

The rules of the World Trade Organisation, the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and the IMF and bilateral free trade agreements have forced the integration of local and national food economies into the global market. And now the global financial system is speculating on food commodities, influencing prices and the right to food of the poorest person in the remotest corner of the world.

The spike in the world food prices started to reappear in 2011. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, in January 2011, the food price index was up 3.4 per cent from December 2010. Cereal price index was three per cent above December, and at the highest level since July 2008, though still 11 per cent below its peak in April 2008.

In India, the prices of onion jumped from Rs. 11/kg in June 2010 to Rs. 75/kg in January 2011. While production of onion had gone up from 4.8 million tonnes in 2001-2002 to 12 million tonnes in 2009-2010, prices also went up, showing that in a speculation-driven market there is no correlation between production and prices. The price difference between wholesale and retail was 135 per cent.

Food that has been put on a global casino is serving speculative investors and agribusiness well, but it is not serving people. We need to get food off the global casino and back on people’s plates. Food democracy and food sovereignty can only be achieved by putting an end to financial speculation.

Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Programme, related the Egyptian revolution of 2010 to the rise of food prices. “In many protests, demonstrators have brandished loaves of bread or displayed banners expressing anger about the rising cost of food stables such as lentils. When it comes to food, the margins between stability and chaos are perilously thin. Volatility on the markets can translate quickly to volatility on the streets and we all should remain vigilant.”

The growing concern about speculating on food has forced some banks to stop investing in food commodities. Germany’s Commerzbank and Austria’s Volksbanken have both removed agricultural products from their index fund products. Deutsche Bank had earlier done the same. It is time that every government and every financial institution put people’s right to food above the hunger for profits.

© 2012 The Asian Age

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.

Prop 37: Labeling Genetically Modified Foods

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

I wrote a previous article in the San Diego Free Press about genetically modified (GMO) foods. One might ask, "What is the purpose of genetically modifying a food item." Is it to enhance the flavor? Is it to make it more nutritious? Well, no, not really. The sole purpose of modifying corn and soy products is to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides.  Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy seeds grow into plants that will not be killed when Roundup is sprayed on the soy field which kills every other thing in the field EXCEPT the Roundup Ready soy plant. This allows the corporate farmer to whip through the field with his $185,000. tractor and harvest the soy plants with hardly a need for costly manual labor. Consequently, when you buy a soy or corn product at the supermarket or fast food restaurant, you are getting GMO soy or corn which has been drenched in herbicide before it was harvested in order to cut the cost of growing and processing which weeds would entail. Did I mention that Roundup was good for killing pests too? This maximizes yields and profits.

 Proposition 37 asks the simple question, "Do voters want food products that have been genetically altered to be labeled as such?" If you vote yes, you want GMO products to be labeled. If you vote no, you don't want to know that the food products you're consuming contain genetically altered organisms. According to some estimates, 40 to 70 percent of food products sold in grocery stores in California contain genetically engineered ingredients. By definition foods labeled organic cannot contain any GMO products. Naturally, the organic food industry wants GMO products to be labeled so as to give consumers a clear choice between organic products and GMO products and, not incidentally, to increase their profits. On the other side are the chemical and processed food industries including Coca-Cola, General Mills, Nestle, PepsiCo, DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto, a leading producer of genetically engineered seeds which has donated $4.2 million to defeat Prop 37.

What's at stake here is whether or not American consumers will have the knowledge and ability to distinguish between products that contain potentially harmful ingredients or products which haven't been processed and grown with a cocktail of chemicals. And do we want the food industry dominated by corporate farmers whose main interest is in maximizing profits or do we want our food produced by smaller local farmers whos main interest is in producing quality products even though they may cost a little more? The main argument of the corporatists is that labeling GMO foods would add to the price, but what they really fear is that consumers would make a hasty exit from the supermarket doors when they see the GMO label on many of their favorite products and head for the nearest health food store.

However, Prop 37 doesn't even go far enough in my opinion. The labeling initiative largely covers processed foods that contain such ingredients, but there are exemptions for alcohol and restaurant meals. Milk, cheese and other dairy products made from cows that are injected with the bovine growth hormone or eat genetically engineered feed like alfalfa would be exempt. The GMO industry is insidious. An animal can eat a GMO product, but when you buy sirloin steak, it will not have to be labeled GMO. Likewise, Jack in the Box hamburgers as well as Ruths Criss filet mignon will not have to be labeled as GMO on the restaurant menus. While people eat out more often these days due to lack of time for food preparation, they still will not be aware of what is in their food even if Prop 37 passes. That's why every American should read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser to have their conscious raised about what they are putting in their bellies three times a day in most cases. While a direct link between eating chemicals in our food and cancer has not been established, it is likely that a build-up of Roundup, bovine growth hormone and god knows what else is not contributing to the long term health of our bodies.

Many other nations, including Japan, China and a host of European countries, already label genetically engineered food. But In the United States forget it. Nothing is labeled that might dissuade consumers. However, produce that is not cosmetically perfect is regularly tossed in the dumpster. A lot of organic growers and food companies, on the other hand, voluntarily label their products with a seal verifying that their foods do not contain genetically modified ingredients. But for some consumers and especially the poor the sole conern is price. But they can take heart. Monsanto's genetically modified sweet corn will soon be available at Walmart.

A major food fight is about to break out between consumers who want to eat healthy and corporate farmers and the chemical industry who want to maximize profits and keep the American food supply the way it is today - highly chemicalized and unnatural.

VOTE YES ON PROP 37 FOR A HEALTHIER AMERICAN FOOD SUPPLY. CONSUMERS SHOULD KNOW WHAT THEY'RE EATING.

Reference for this article: Proposition 37 in California: A high-stakes food fight  by Dana Hull, from the Silicon Valley Mercury News.com, 8/24/12

Are You Eating Genetically Modified Foods Laced With Pesticides?

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press, August 28, 2012

In a quest to eat a healthier diet, I made smoothies containing a couple scoops of a soy protein product I bought at Trader Joe's. I also started eating a lot of berries, high in anti-oxidants, which are supposed to be good for you. Then one day I woke up and realized that the soy I had be eating was actually genetically modified (GMO) soy created by the Monsanto Corporation for the sole purpose of being resistant to Monsanto's Roundup, a powerful herbicide which will kill every plant in a soybean field except genetically modified soy plants. So the soy I had been eating was not only GMO soy containing herbicide within its seeds, but it had been drenched in a powerful herbicide prior to having been harvested and brought to market.

Same thing for the berries. They are highly sprayed with pesticides and herbicides so that whatever healthful properties they may have possessed are completely compromised by the poisons being ingested. Grapes are the most highly sprayed product out there. Even drinking wine unless it's organic gives you a high dose of toxicity. Doctors may tell you that it is healthy to have a glass of wine with dinner, but unless it's organic wine, you'r getting a dose of pesticide and herbicide along with it. In 2010 411,828 pounds of Roundup were applied to wine grapes in California. A 2009 study found that even one glass of wine a day increased women's chances of getting cancer. It seems that the anti-oxidant cancer fighting effects of wine are counterbalanced by the pesticide and herbicide laced grapes that it is made from.

The Bush administration approved the use of methyl iodide on strawberries despite scientific evidence that it wasn't safe for human consumption. Unless you are buying organic strawberries you are getting a dose of it every time you eat them. Arnold Swarzenegger also approved its use in California in the final days of his administration despite the fact that 54 eminent scientists including six Nobel Laureates testified that methyl iodide is one of the most toxic chemicals on earth.This chemical is getting into California's food and water supplies and causing harm to agricultural communities surrounding the fields where it's being used, not to mention the workers who pick the strawberries. Governor Brown has said he will take a "fresh look" at the chemical, but so far your best protection is to eat organic berries be they strawberries, raspberries, blueberries or blackberries. Each year nearly 1 billion pounds of pesticides are sprayed on the fields and orchards of America. 

The latest development in the Monsanto Roundup nightmare is that, despite the best efforts of corporate America to have their soybean fields weed free so that they can be harvested with $185,000 tractors and little hired labor maximizing profits, weeds themselves have evolved to be "Roundup Ready". These super weeds cannot be extinguished with Roundup despite repeated sprayings. They are threatening to take over American fields. So now we're in an arms race between Monsanto which is developing even more potent herbicides to be sprayed on crops which the American people are destined to ingest and the super weeds which continue to evolve. Roundup Ready GMO crops now account for 90% of US soybeans and 70% of US corn. These food products are what you are buying at Ralphs, Vons, Safeway and other American super markets as well as what you are eating at most restaurants.

Dow Chemical Corporation has come up with a GMO corn variety called Enlist which has been specifically developed to not be killed by even more potent chemicals developed to kill the super weeds. And the chemical industry pressures farmers to use their products and drench their fields with pesticides rather than grow organically and use natural methods of weed control because there is no money in it for them if farmers abandon chemically based weed control. But it's not only super weeds that we need to be concerned about. Super bugs and insects have evolved that are resistant to Roundup Ready GMO corn!

According to a recent NPR report:

There can be little doubt that genetically engineered crops are the most dangerous aspect of modern agriculture. Not only are we seeing rapid emergence of super-weeds resistant to glyphosate, courtesy of Roundup Ready crops, we now also have evidence of emerging Bt-resistant insects. Add to that the emergence of a brand new organism capable of producing disease and infertility in both plants and animals, and a wide variety of evidence showing harm to human health, and the only reasonable expectation one can glean is that humanity as a whole is being seriously threatened by this foolhardy technology.

Instead of reducing the need for manual labor which the introduction of Roundup Ready crops promised, we are now seeing farmers hiring workers to manually go through fields hoeing out the giant pigweeds and ragweeds that Roundup is not able to kill. Add to this the bad news that global warming is killing off crops for lack of water and you have a real dilemma.

The way I used to feel about the American food supply was that for the most part it wouldn't kill you immediately. It might take 30 or 40 years until you collected enough chemical toxins in your liver or pancreas to instigate a siege of cancer. However, there is a growing body of evidence that it is becoming increasingly likely that you will be killed more or less immediately if you are unlucky enough to eat meat contaminated with e coli or salmonella. Each year 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from a foodborne disease. According to Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates, more than 125,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3,000 die each year from microbial pathogens including salmonella, e coli, and listeria. Estimates of the cost of foodborne illness in terms of health care and lost productivity exceed $75 billion a year. So while your chances of being killed or injured due to a car accident are greater (40,000 deaths and 3 million injured per year), your chances of getting sick from a foodborne disease (1 in 6) is even greater than your chances of being injured in a car crash (1 in 100). And incidences of Salmonella in particular are increasing year over year. In 2010 FoodNet detected 8,256 cases of salmonella poisoning, with 2,290 hospitalizations and 29 deaths.

In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser explains why foodborne disease is on the increase. Basically, it's because of the unsanitary conditions in which corporate farmers raise, slaughter and process animals for human consumption. Chickens are kept in such crowded quarters that workers have to go through every day and weed out the dead ones throwing them in the dumpster. They are hardly allowed to turn around while they are being fed a diet of antibiotics and hormones which will fatten them to the slaughter in the least number of days. Beef cows are slaughtered and processed by low wage workers, mainly illegal immigrants, unfamiliar with proper food handling procedures, who work on sped up assembly lines where numerous mistakes are made with regard to sanitation and the workers' own safety.

In the slaughtering and processing of cows, it is very important that fecal material does not contaminate the meat, but a USDA study found that 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. This is what is served in fast food hamburgers as well as the hamburger you buy at the supermarket. As Schlosser observes," [There is] a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat." If a cow's hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of manure can fall off it into the meat. The contents of a cow's digestive system can get onto the meat. Inexperienced "gutters" spill manure quite often. Workers forget to clean and disinfect their knives. A contaminated knife spreads germs to everything it touches. The overworked, often illiterate workers in the nation's slaughterhouses do not understand the importance of good hygeine. They drop meat on the floor and place it right back on the conveyor belt.

In 1993 San Diego based Jack in the Box was implicated in a breakout of hemolytic uremic syndrome. Kids in Seattle were being hospitalized at an alarming rate. The outbreak was traced to undercooked hamburgers at a local Jack in the Box restaurant which disclosed the prescence of e coli 0157:H7 in the hamburgers. More than 700 people in four states were sickened; more than 200, hospitalized and 4 died. Lauren Beth Rudolph ate a hamburger at a San Diego Jack in the Box. She was admitted to hospital on Christmas Eve in terrible pain. She died in her mother's arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old.

A government official compared the sanitary conditions in a modern feedlot to those in a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when people dumped their chamber pots out the window, raw sewage ran in the streets, and epidemics raged. Cattle packed in feedlots live in pools of manure, eat dirty food and drink dirty water. Feedlots have become efficient mechanisms for circulating e coli. Nevertheless, a Federal judge allowed Supreme Beef Processors to sell beef to schools for school lunches even after the plant was shut down for Salmonella contamination in 1999.

At present the nation's 200,000 fast food restaurants are not subject to any oversight from Federal health authorities. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. People who smoke crack know the inherent dangers; people who eat hamburgers usually don't. And most of the harm is done to children. The American culture of deregulation has done more to protect the meat packing industry than it has done to protect Americans who consume their products.

The American food supply both in terms of vegetables and meats has been compromised by herbicides, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and preservatives. The only way that you can protect yourself is to eat and drink organic products. Even there you have to believe that the label "organic" means what it says. With lack of oversight who knows how many cheaters there are who are claiming their products are organic when they really aren't. And the food industry is lobbying to downgrade what the meaning of organic is so they can label their products as organic including GMO products. In Europe GMO products have been outlawed for years although the food industry continues to chip away at this state of affairs and argue for their introduction

One wonders whether the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs due to pancreatic cancer had anything to do with his dietary habits. Jobs was a vegan so you might assume he ate large quantities of soy products and vegetables. Were his dietary choices organic? If not were the very products he and others consumed, while thinking that they were eating healthfully, actually contributing to their long term demise. It's something to think about. Health food is not alway healthy.

Top 10 Lies Told by Monsanto on GMO Labeling in California

by Michele Simon from the Huffington Post 8/22/12

The battle in California over Proposition 37, which would require labeling of foods containing GMOs, is really heating up. Millions of dollars are already being poured into the opposition campaign, with much of it going to former Big Tobacco shills.

Over at GMO HQ, Monsanto recently posted this missive called "Taking a Stand: Proposition 37, The California Labeling Proposal," in which the biotech giant explains why it is opposing the measure (to the tune of $4.2 million so far).

Even for a corporation not exactly known for its honesty and transparency, this brief webpage is riddled with deception and outright falsehoods about the initiative and its proponents. Here are the 10 most blatant examples:

1) The law "would require a warning label on food products."

No warning label would be required. Rather, the words "partially produced with genetic engineering" or "may be partially produced with genetic engineering" would be required on the back of the package -- similar to what is now required for ingredient or allergen labeling. For whole foods, like the sweet corn coming soon to a Walmart near you, a sign would be posted on the store shelf with the words "genetically engineered." The aim is simply to offer consumers additional information about the contents of the foods they purchase.

2) "The safety and benefits of these ingredients are well established."

Unfortunately, no long-term studies exist on either the safety or benefits of GMO ingredients, so Monsanto has no basis for making such a claim. Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not even require safety studies of genetically engineered foods. Meanwhile, some independent studies raise questions about links to allergies and other potential health risks.

3) "The American Medical Association just re-affirmed that there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods."

This statement, while true, is taken out of context and is misleading because the AMA also (for the first time) called for mandatory premarket safety studies of GMOs. As Consumers Union recently noted in its reaction to AMA's announcement, labeling and testing logically go together:

The AMA's stance on mandatory labeling isn't consistent with its support for mandatory pre-market safety assessments. If unexpected adverse health effects, such as an allergic reaction, happen as a result of GE, then labeling could perhaps be the only way to determine that the GE process was linked to the adverse health effect.

4) Food companies "have had the choice" to use GM ingredients.

Choice is a good thing; however, consumers have never had the choice. Prop 37 will give consumers a long-overdue choice about eating genetically engineered food.

5) "FDA says that such labeling would be inherently misleading to consumers."

Of course FDA refuses to require GMO labeling, thanks to Monsanto's arm-twisting that began more than 20 years ago. Food Democracy Now's Dave Murphy explained the FDA decision in May upon its 20-year anniversary, which came as a result of a broader deregulatory push by the first Bush administration:

Twenty years ago this week, then-Vice President Dan Quayle announced the FDA's policy on genetically engineered food as part of his "regulatory relief initiative." As Quayle explained in the 1992 press conference, the American biotechnology industry would reap huge profits "as long as we resist the spread of unnecessary regulations."

Dan Quayle's 1992 policy announcement is premised on the notion that genetically engineered crops are "substantially equivalent" to regular crops and thus do not need to be labeled or safety tested. The policy was crafted by Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto lawyer who was hired by the Bush FDA to fill the newly created position of deputy commissioner of policy.

Five years earlier, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush visited a Monsanto lab for a photo op with the developers of Roundup Ready crops. According to a video report of the meeting, when Monsanto executives worried about the approval process for their new crops, Bush laughed and told them, "Call me. We're in the dereg businesses. Maybe we can help."

 

Call they did. It's typical for corporations to get their policy agenda approved through back-channel lobbying and revolving door appointments and then point to the magical policy outcome as evidence of scientific decision-making.

6) "Consumers have broad food choices today, but could be denied these choices if Prop 37 prevails."

There is no basis in logic that consumers could be denied food choices. Indeed, Proposition 37 actually broadens the meaningful food choices available through greater transparency. Right now, people are eating in the dark.

7) "Interestingly, the main proponents of Proposition 37 are special interest groups and individuals opposed to food biotechnology who are not necessarily engaged in the production of our nation's food supply."

In fact, quite a large number of food producers, farmers and others very much "engaged in the production of our nation's food supply" support the campaign. (See the growing list of endorsements.) Speaking of "special interest groups" wouldn't that label apply to the likes of Monsanto and all the industrial food producers who oppose Proposition 37?

8) "Beneath their right to know slogan is a deceptive marketing campaign aimed at stigmatizing modern food production."

"Modern food production" -- is that Monsanto's latest euphemism for scientifically altering the genetic code of the food supply? In truth, nothing is hidden "beneath" the Right to Know campaign, that's all it's about. But because Monsanto has no good argument for why consumers don't have the right to know how their food is produced, it has to resort to distracting deceptions.

9) "[Proponents] opinions are in stark contrast with leading health associations."

Another look at the long list of Prop 37 endorsements reveal that Monsanto and friends are actually out of step with leading health associations, such as:

• American Public Health Association


• American Medical Students Association


• American Academy of Environmental Medicine


• Physicians for Social Responsibility, California chapters


• California Nurses Association

10) "The California proposal would serve the purposes of a few special interest groups at the expense of the majority of consumers."

 

Again, logic defies this talking point, especially since all polling indicates a "majority of consumers" want GMO food to be labeled. Indeed, the most recent California poll shows the proposition winning by a 3-to-1 margin. No wonder Monsanto has to resort to such nonsensical talking points.

Group Exposes Practice of Adding Synthetic Preservatives to 'Organic' Baby Formula

Published on Thursday, August 9, 2012 by Common Dreams

Cornucopia Institute files legal complaint against manufacturers

- Common Dreams staff

A non-profit consumer advocacy and research organization has filed a formal legal complaint with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) against several infant formula manufacturers it says are adding synthetic preservatives to certified organic infant formula.

Group says this is just latest example of manufacturers betraying the "organic" requirements for instant baby formula. The Organic Foods Production Act, passed by Congress in 1990, explicitly bans synthetic preservatives in organic food., but the Wisonsin-based Cornucopia Institute claims that a variety of producers have added more than a dozen unapproved synthetic ingredients to organic infant formula over the past five years.

“This is another blatant violation of the federal law governing organics by multi-billion dollar corporations that apparently think they can get away with anything,” says Charlotte Vallaeys, Director of Farm and Food Policy at The Cornucopia Institute.

The preservatives are beta carotene and ascorbyl palmitate, synthetics that are added to infant formula to prevent the oxidation and rancidity of ingredients such as the controversial patented supplements DHA and ARA, manufactured by Martek Biosciences Corporation (Royal DSM) and marketed as Life'sDHA®.

When formula with Life'sDHA® first came on the market, the FDA received numerous adverse reaction reports from parents and healthcare providers who noted serious gastrointestinal symptoms in babies who had previously tolerated formula without the Martek DHA and ARA oils.

“This is not the first time that the pharmaceutical companies and agribusinesses, that manufacture infant formula, have quietly added to organic formula the same synthetic ingredients that they use in their conventional versions without first seeking the legally required approval for use in organics,” says Vallaeys.

In its complaint, Cornucopia also asked the USDA to investigate the formula manufacturers’ organic certifying agent, Quality Assurance International (QAI). QAI is one of the largest organic certifying agents, and has come under fire in the past for certifying organic livestock operations that failed to meet the organic standards for animal welfare and outdoor access. QAI has also allowed its clients to add a number of other allegedly illegal synthetic ingredients to organic food and livestock feed.

“Consumers should be able to trust that the organic label represents foods that are free from unnecessary synthetic ingredients, and they rely on third-party certification by USDA-accredited certifying agents,” said co-director of the institute Mark Kastel.

Cornucopianamed the following brands of organic infant formula in its complaint to the USDA: Earth’s Best, Similac Organic, Vermont Organics, Bright Beginnings and Parent’s Choice (sold by Walmart).

Similac Organic is produced by Abbott Laboratories, a $30 billion pharmaceutical corporation. The other brands are produced by PBM Nutritionals, owned by Perrigo, a $2 billion dollar pharmaceutical corporation.

The only commercially available baby formula available in US stores that does not contain these synthetic preservatives is Baby’s Only Organic, manufactured by Nature’s One. Baby’s Only Organic is certified organic by OneCert.

*  *  *

Cornucopia's baby formula Buyer's Guide is available here.

The institute's comprehensive report on the subject, Replacing Mother—Imitating Human Breast Milk in the Laboratory (pdf), is also available for download on the Cornucopia website.

#  #  #

Open Letter to the Organic Community: The California Ballot Initiative to Label GMOs

Published on Thursday, August 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Ronnie Cummins

After 45 years of hard work and grassroots struggle, the organic community has built up a $30-billion organic food and farming industry and community. This consumer and small farmer-driven movement, under steady attack by biotech and Big Food lobbyists, with little or no help from the federal government, has managed to create a healthy and sustainable alternative to America’s disastrous, chemical and energy-intensive system of industrial agriculture. Consumer demand is behind strong organic sales. Conscious of the health hazards of genetic engineering and chemical agriculture, and the mortal threat of global warming and climate change, millions of Americans are demanding food and other products that are certified organic.

It’s a hopeful sign that, in spite of economic recession, organic foods now make up 4.2% of all grocery store sales. However given the magnitude of the country’s public health, environmental, and climate crisis, 10% annual growth in the organic sector is simply not enough to reach the proverbial “tipping point” before our current crisis metastasizes into what can only be described as a catastrophe.

 

In the food sector, we cannot continue to hand over 90% of our consumer dollars to out-of-control, biotech, chemical-intensive, energy-intensive, greenhouse gas polluting corporations  and "profit at any cost" retail chains. The growth of the Organic Alternative is literally a matter of survival. After two decades of biotech bullying and force-feeding unlabeled and hazardous genetically engineered foods to animals and humans, it's time to move beyond defensive measures - such as petitioning the FDA - and go on the offensive.  With organic farming, climate stability, and public health under the gun of the gene engineers and their partners in crime, it's time to do more than complain. With over 1/3 of U.S. cropland already contaminated with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), with mounting scientific evidence that GMOs cause cancer, birth defects, and serious food allergies,  and with new biotech mutants like alfalfa, lawn grass, ethanol-ready corn, 2,4 D-resistant crops, and genetically engineered trees and animals being fast-tracked for approval by the government, with absolutely no pre-market safety-testing required, time is running out.

 

The burning question for us all then becomes how - and how quickly - can we move healthy, organic products from a 4.2% market niche, to the dominant force in American food and farming?

The first step is to change our labeling laws. Nearly 80% of non-organic processed foods, including so-called “natural” foods, contain genetically engineered bacteria, viruses, antibiotic-resistant genes, and foreign DNA. Yet none of these foods are labeled. No wonder only 30% of Americans realize they’re probably eating GMOs on a regular basis. Health-minded and environmentally conscious consumers actually buy more products marketed or labeled as “natural” ($50 billion a year) than they do organic ($30 billion), either because they don’t understand the difference between organic and “natural”, and/or because so-called “natural” foods are typically cheaper than certified organic. For instance, two-thirds of the foods sold in Whole Foods Market or Trader Joe’s are not organic, but rather “natural.” Polls indicate that consumers are confused about the qualitative difference between organic and natural products, with a near-majority believing that “natural” means “almost organic.”

 

It’s time to put an end to this massive fraud, and take back our right to know what’s in our food. Since the federal government and the White House seem to listen more to Monsanto and Big Ag than the 90% of Americans who support mandatory labeling of GMOs, OCA and allied activists have decided to bypass Washington politicians and take matters into our own hands.

 

What is likely the most important food fight in a generation is unfolding in California. The grassroots-powered Nov. 6 California Ballot Initiative (Proposition 37) to require labels on genetically engineered foods and to ban the routine industry practice of marketing GMO-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural” is approaching a decisive moment. The outcome of this ballot initiative will determine whether GMO foods are labeled, not only in California but across the entire United States and Canada as well. It’s time for all of us who care about an organic and sustainable future to close ranks and support the Nov. 6 California Ballot Initiative (Proposition 37). Over 650 organizations, organic companies and retail stores have already endorsed the campaign. But we need thousands more.

 

We need volunteers to help out -  in California and nationwide. Please sign up here if you are willing to approach the managers of the retail stores, CSA, restaurants, or farmers market where you regularly buy your organic food and ask them to join the more than 100 retail stores that have already publicly endorsed Prop 37. Once your neighborhood health food store or co-op has endorsed the campaign, you can get them further involved in distributing campaign information and raising money. CA and our allies in this campaign to pass Prop 37 have raised almost $4 million dollars so far, but Monsanto, the Grocery Manufacturers, and the Farm Bureau will spend $20-40 million to defeat Prop 37. Thank you  to the 15,000 people who have already made donations to OCA or the OCF for this campaign, but we need to raise even more.

 

Restoring consumers' right to know, banning the industry practice of marketing GMO-tainted foods as “natural,” and starting to drive genetically engineered foods off supermarket shelves will not solve all of the life and death issues that are currently staring us in the face: the climate crisis, endless wars, economic depression, corporate control over government, and the health crisis. But cutting Monsanto and the biotechnocrats down to size and restoring consumer choice are good first steps toward sustainability and a healthy food and farming system. Just as important, in political terms, by defeating the Biotech Bullies and indentured politicians, we can begin to restore the tattered self-confidence of the American body politic. A resounding victory by the organic community in the California Prop 37 campaign will prove to ourselves and the currently demoralized body politic that we can indeed take back control over the institutions and public policies that determine our daily lives. Now is the time to move forward. Support Prop 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Foods Act. This is the food fight of our lives. Please join and support us in this historic struggle.

Ronnie Cummins is a veteran activist, author, and organizer. He is the International Director of the Organic Consumers Association and its Mexico affiliate, Via Organica. http://www.organicconsumers.org; http://www.viaorganica.org