Category Archives: Food

Big Ag and its destruction called ‘conventional’ farming to hide the truth

farming for profitConventional farming is Big Ag’s planned destruction of human and natural food systems. It includes GMOs, patented seeds, silent forests, animals that are tortured for years before being slaughtered, one more India farmer that will commit suicide 30 minutes from now and many other very scary things. Conventional seems like such an innocent word: conjures up thoughts of conventional wisdom, societal conventions which are the underpinning of civilization … but this word, like our food system, has been corrupted by Big Money and their lapdogs, the major media portals, to confound and confuse us, and to obfuscate the truth. L.E.A.F. explains:

Conventional farming systems share many characteristics: rapid technological innovation; large capital investments in order to apply production and management technology; large-scale farms; single crops/row crops grown continuously over many seasons; uniform high-yield hybrid crops; extensive use of pesticides, fertilizers, and external energy inputs; high labor efficiency; and dependency on agribusiness. In the case of livestock, most production comes from confined, concentrated systems.

Philosophical underpinnings of industrial agriculture include assumptions that “a) nature is a competitor to be overcome; b) progress requires unending evolution of larger farms and depopulation of farm communities; c) progress is measured primarily by increased material consumption; d) efficiency is measured by looking at the bottom line; and e) science is an unbiased enterprise driven by natural forces to produce social good.” [Karl N. Stauber et al., “The Promise of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Planting the Future: Developing an Agriculture that Sustains Land and Community, Elizabeth Ann R. Bird, Gordon L. Bultena, and John C. Gardner, editors (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995)

When it’s good food you crave to feed to your families, look to traditional or family farming – and organics. Although take care with organics, as in recent years that industry has been steadily encroached upon by Big Ag too.

GMOs are a fraud the US and Africa must resist believing in, using

GMOd tomatoesNational Geographic writer Simon Worrall has nothing good to say about GMOs and plenty of cautions about following what has become conventional wisdom in the agri-business food industry. BTW, when did we start to refer to frankenscience by the term ‘conventional‘?

Monsanto was driven out of England after widespread protests against seed trials. Why are the Europeans so much more critical of GMOs?

Because Europeans have been better informed of the facts. The media in Europe, up to a few years ago, reported this scientific controversy fairly. People knew many well-credentialed scientists did not agree with the claim that these foods were safe. Adverse research showing harm to lab animals got publicized. As a result, European citizens made it clear they didn’t want these foods. Here, the media has not reported the controversy fairly. They’ve almost always presented the pro-GMO side. As a result, the American public has been systematically deceived…

Only if there were not risks that might impact health in ways we don’t yet know. As I said, when it comes to food safety, benefits should not be considered in offsetting risks. Everybody has to eat food and changes to food should not entail new risks, no matter what the purported benefits. Several studies by the UN and World Bank also concluded that genetic engineering is not needed to meet the world’s food needs. One of the directors of these studies was asked, “What role do you see for GMOs in the future of food?” He said, “Actually none. They aren’t needed. They haven’t been boosting yields. Small scale, agro-ecological methods are what’s needed in the Third World.”

Worrall believes in small holding farming, especially in Africa which is just beginning to experience the destruction of GMOs:

What would you say to an African farmer who wants to use GMOs to feed his starving child today rather than worry about an imaginary threat tomorrow?

First I would say: Read what the UN and World Bank-sponsored reports have said. You don’t need GMOs … there are solutions that do not rely on GMOs, which have been proven to work in Africa. So I would say: Get with the sound science, spend less money, and solve your food problem in a way that will create healthy soil, a healthy family and a healthy Africa.

Wow. Sen Menendez IS NOT opposed to GMO food!

EWG GE labeling won't cost moreI’m normally a Bob Menendez fan but WOW, today I’m so disappointed. The Senator wrote to tell me that he doesn’t believe that states should have the right to label GMOs. And he doesn’t believe in GMO labeling at the federal level either. In fact, Sen Menendez made it clear that he does not oppose the genetically engineered modifications of our foods.

The single reason states have started trying to pass their own GMO labeling laws is that the federal government won’t pass laws to allow United States citizens and residents to know what’s in our food. Vermont is the first state to require GMO labeling of all foods.

Here’s the letter Sen. Menendez sent me:

Dear Ms. Wei:

Thank you for contacting me to express your support for the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act. Your opinion is very important to me, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to you on this critical issue.

As you may know, the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act would amend the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to deem any food destined for human consumption as misbranded if it has been genetically engineered or contains genetically engineered ingredients, unless such information is clearly disclosed. The bill labels food as genetically engineered if it is an organism that is the product of intentional genetic engineering or contains any ingredients that are intentionally genetically engineered. This legislation has been introduced before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which I am not a member of. However, should the bill be presented for a vote before the full United States Senate, I will be sure to keep your views in mind.

As the Garden State, New Jersey has a proud reputation as a leader in many agricultural fields, and I am committed to preserving this legacy. While farmers have naturally modified crops to improve growth and yields for centuries, recent advances in genetic engineering have raised questions about the safety of some of these food products. I believe we must be prudent when approving genetically modified food but I also recognize that unnecessarily labeling inherently safe products, could actually risk confusing and misleading consumers. It is vitally important that we fully understand the impact of these practices on our food supply and our health while harnessing the advantages of modern science and innovation.

Currently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the implementation of food labeling set forth by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Foods that must be labeled include most prepared foods, such as breads, cereals, canned and frozen foods, snacks, desserts, and drinks. Foods that do not have to be labeled are called “conventional foods,” which include raw produce such as fruits, vegetables and fish. I continue to believe these standards should be regulated on the national level by objective scientific experts in the FDA rather than through a patchwork of state regulations that could have the unintended consequence of confusing consumers. Please know that I will continue to look for ways to ensure that Americans have access to appropriate and accurate nutritional information, without misleading consumers or imposing overly onerous requirements on food producers.

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of further assistance. You may also visit my website (http://menendez.senate.gov) to learn more about how I am standing up for New Jersey families in the United States Senate.

Learn more about why you should care and find out how the Non-GMO Project can help you get there.

User friendly food-date labeling system can cut waste

eat or freeze by use by dateTwilight Greenaway writes in Civil Eats about the food waste being caused by a broken US food labeling system that is inconsistent and misunderstood. She examines solutions proposed in The Dating Game, a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. NRDC has already been “getting the word out about food waste” and “confusing expiration dates” for years now.

No matter how many times we’re reminded that 40 percent of the food we produce in the U.S. goes to waste, it still manages to be a pretty shocking number…

According to Dana Gunders, NRDC’s resident food waste expert, the date labeling system in the U.S. is “not a system at all.” Instead, she says: “It’s like the Wild West. Laws vary across states and, for most labels on a vast majority of products, the manufacturers choose whether to have a date at all, which kind to apply, what they interpret that label to mean, and how to determine when to set that date.”

The result? People are throwing away food on those dates because they believe it’s no longer safe to eat — up to 90 percent of us. And, conversely, we might be eating unsafe food because we’re placing more trust in those dates than we should.

Ask Trader Joe’s CEO for clarification on GMO policy

Trader Joe's and its big food vendors
Trader Joe’s says it doesn’t carry any GMO products but that can’t actually be true as a lot of its products list sugar as an ingredient. Over half of US sugar is beet sugar which is heavily GMOed. If you want natural sugar, you should look for cane sugar specifically.

Furthermore, it seems like a major Trader Joe’s vendor is ConAgra, which is one of the big companies fighting against GMO labeling laws and spending mega-bucks to do so.

I like Patrick‘s idea (commenter on GMO Awareness):

I suggest folks contact ALISON MOCHIZUKI, Director of Public Relations at TJ’s, and request a response.

If you’ve got an idea too, let’s hear it.

One business’ trash can be somebody’s dinner

Rob Greenfield dives in the name of ending hunger – dumpster dives! 40% of US food goes uneaten so Rob travels around the country collecting food which he brings to parks and puts on display to show how much good food ends up being a waste problem instead of a hunger solution. After the media he invites have the chance to inspect his bounty, Rob gives it away:

“After leaving it out on display for a little while, if people want to take it home and eat it, they can.”

dumpster diver shares his bounty

Rob finds perfectly good fruits, vegetables – both whole and prepackaged/cut up, canned foods, blocks of cheese, pizzas, bags full of bread and bagels. He’s eaten from 3-500 dumpsters and has never gotten sick from the food he’s found in them.

Rob’s goal is to connect the many people who are food insecure – who lack regular access to food – with the stream of food items that are discarded by restaurants and grocery stores even though there is nothing wrong with them .. except for being past a sell by date, which Rob says, “means nothing.” In the future Rob imagines, no good food will ever end up in a dumpster.

According to non-profit Feeding America, “In 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children.”

What! 250 non-organic ingredients in organic foods??

Corporatization of organics
I believed in organic until last week, when my childhood friend Charlie Peller challenged me about organic labeling and I decided to do some research. Charlie cautioned, “You need to be careful when you read the labeling everything labeled organic is not necessarily organic and because you pay $3 or $4 more for a bottle also does not make it organic,” and it turns out he’s completely right.

Organic isn’t what I thought it was; most organic labels are owned by BIG FOOD; and the number of non-organic ingredients has risen from 77 to 250 in the past 13 years. The New York Times looked into the reach of corporations into organic foods in 2012. Here are some excerpts from that article:

Michael J. Potter (of Eden Foods) is one of the last little big men left in organic food…

Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the nation’s organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore.

All of which riles Mr. Potter, 62. Which is why he took off in late May from here for Albuquerque, where the cardinals of the $30-billion-a-year organic food industry were meeting to decide which ingredients that didn’t exactly sound fresh from the farm should be blessed as allowed ingredients in “organic” products. Ingredients like carrageenan, a seaweed-derived thickener with a somewhat controversial health record. Or synthetic inositol, which is manufactured using chemical processes.

Mr. Potter was allowed to voice his objections to carrageenan for three minutes before the group, the National Organic Standards Board.

“Someone said, ‘Thank you,’ ” Mr. Potter recalls.

And that was that.

Two days later, the board voted 10 to 5 to keep carrageenan on the growing list of nonorganic ingredients that can be used in products with the coveted “certified organic” label. To organic purists like Mr. Potter, it was just another sign that Big Food has co-opted — or perhaps corrupted — the organic food business.

…Between the time the Agriculture Department came up with its proposed regulations for the organic industry in 1997 and the time those rules became law in 2002, myriad small, independent organic companies — businesses like Cascadian Farm — were snapped up by corporate titans. Heinz and Hain together bought 19 organic brands.

Eden is one of the last remaining independent organic companies of any size, together with the Clif Bar & Company, Amy’s Kitchen, Lundberg Family Farms and a handful of others.

“In some ways, organic is a victim of its own success,” says Philip H. Howard, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, who has documented the remarkable consolidation of the organic industry. Organic food accounts for just 4 percent of all foods sold, but the industry is growing fast. “Big corporations see the trends and the opportunity to make money and profit,” he says.

BIG FOOD has also assumed a powerful role in setting the standards for organic foods. Major corporations have come to dominate the board that sets these standards.

As corporate membership on the board has increased, so, too, has the number of nonorganic materials approved for organic foods on what is called the National List. At first, the list was largely made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread. Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 77 in 2002.

… “After DHA (docosahexaenoic acid algae oil) got onto the list, we decided to go back and look at all of the ingredients on the list,” Mr. Kastel says. The average consumer has no idea that “all these additives are going into the organic products they’re buying.”

By 1996, he realized that the National Organic Program was heading in a direction he did not like. He said as much at a National Organic Standards Board meeting in Indianapolis that year, earning the permanent opprobrium of the broader organic industry. “They think I’m liberal, immature, a radical,” Mr. Potter says. “But I’m not the one debating whether organics should use genetically modified additives or nanotechnology, which is what I’d call radical.”

What we can do about the secretive incursions into the world’s healthy food stream by Big Ag and Big Food is: fight tooth and nail against the TPP which will give corporations an amazing amount of control over our lives, economies and politics … not allow Big Money to take over and eliminate our internet freedoms … and support truly healthy food by buying from local farmers and growing our own.

I’d love to hear the ideas you have for fighting back too.

At TedX, Congwoman Pingree talks as a sustainable organic farmer

Cong Chellie Pingree on Twitter
Congresswoman Chellie Pingree is the type of modern Democrat we need to keep in Washington, representing the American People’s interests at the federal level. Like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Cong. Pingree is a thoughtful, well educated, hard working and egalitarian woman with a quirky (but fun) sense of humor. She too believes that the American people can triumph over corporate greed and interests and works very hard to make sure this becomes reality.

One of the businesses Cong. Pingree owns is an organic chicken processing operation. She says she never fails to remind her colleagues that she’s an “expert chicken eviscerater.” Pingree jokes, “that’s a useful skill to have in Congress.”

In this TEDX Talk, Pingree talks about her history as a Maine Farmer and her ongoing work reforming national food policy and the federal Farm Bill. She challenges us to support the production of sustainably grown organic food in any ways we can, and charges us with helping to protect the butterflies and bees we need to help our food get naturally pollinated and thrive.

Hat tip to Theresa Lam for the find!

“Food Chains” film: tomato laborers can escape slavery for 1¢/pound

food chains film
Food Justice documentary “Food Chains” directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker arrives in theatres today Nov 21 2014. The New York Times review says:

“Food Chains” .. presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery .. Required to pick a minimum of 480 pounds of fruit per hour (hands moving so quickly that you would swear the film has been sped up), the workers average around $42 for a nine-hour shift.

“We live like animals in cramped housing,” one man says, as Mr. Rawal shows us jam-packed trailers and ragtag encampments. The ability to improve these conditions lies not with the farmers, we are told, but with the fast-food industry, restaurants and supermarkets whose contracts with buyers set the economics of the supply chain. But when a coalition of tomato pickers in Immokalee, Fla., began agitating for companies to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes, the state’s largest supermarket chain, Publix, refused to blink.

The Fair Food Program behind the film, asks that Big Box retailers pay 1¢ more per pound for tomatoes and not buy from farms with human rights violations. An example of human rights abuse? Big Ag raining toxic pesticides down on workers while they work in open fields, completely exposed.

Or some of the horrors happening to half a million child ag laborers .. under the age of 18 whom are United States citizens being made to work full length days and also attend school. According to testimonials, some of these kids are treated worse than their undocumented parents (if that’s possible).

What’s all this ag labor abuse in aid of? So Big Box retailers can serve up tasteless, over-refrigerated and over-transported monoculture tomatoes and America can eat strawberries for $1 a pint.

100K person study links milk drinking to early death

A Swedish study of 100,000 pasteurized milk drinkers shows a strong correlation between 1-2 glasses per day milk consumption and early death, plus osteoporosis leading to bone breaks. The results from eating cheese and fermented milk products like yogurt are different, and do not produce these unfortunate results.
Pouring milk in the glass on the background of nature.
Natasha Longo in a RiseEarth article reviews the study and breaks down the science of how pasteurization transforms healthy, raw (unheated) milk into a compound that leeches calcium out of bones and injects our bodies with toxins we can’t handle. More damningly, Natasha talks about why Big Dairy uses pasteurization.

(People) think (milk’s) safe due to pasteurization. However, heat destroys a great number of bacteria in milk and thus conceals the evidence of dirt, pus and dirty dairy practices. It’s cheaper to produce dirty milk and kill the bacteria by heat, that to maintain a clean dairy and keep cows healthy. To combat the increase in pathogens milk goes through ‘clarification’, ‘filtering’, ‘bactofugation’ and two ‘deariation’ treatments. Each of these treatments uses heat ranging from 100-175 degrees Fahrenheit. Dairies count on many heat treatments to mask their inferior sanitary conditions: milk filled with pus, manure and debris. Consumer Reports found 44% of 125 pasteurized milk samples contained as many as 2200 organisms per cubic centimeter (fecal bacteria, coliforms)

Pasteurization also destroys vitamin C, and damages water soluble B vitamins diminishing the nutrient value of milk. Calcium and other minerals are made unavailable by pasteurization.