Corporate Kneebiters
Industry Disavows Smart Choices Campaign
Published October 30, 2009 @ 12:57PM PT
The Smart Choices campaign is heaving its dying breaths. The writing has been on the wall since last week when the campaign that had decided to label some unhealthy processed food as wise eating decisions called a temporary halt in the face of FDA scrutiny. I wrote "I think this is one 'postponement' that might well end up lasting forever," and now that looks all the more likely that will be true.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is planning his own investigation of the campaign, announced yesterday that all eight of the industry giants involved in the campaign have decided to stop using the Smart Choices logo on their packaging. Smart Choices officials suspended the program during the investigations but left it up to companies whether to keep using the logo on their packaging.
Raise your hand if you think there's any chance that these companies will ever again slap this hot-potato of a logo on their boxes. Thanks to alert citizens like those here at change.org, who demanded accountability on this issue, the public stink has become even less appealing to these corporations than the nasty smell of their own false advertising.
Image courtesy of √oхέƒx™ via flickr
Boycott Whole Foods
Published August 19, 2009 @ 12:40PM PT
I've been looking the other way for a long time each time I go to Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. I mean, I already know that they profit off of creating an image of sustainability- mixing organic produce with conventional. I know that the CEO John Mackey is a libertarian who opposes labor unions (none of the Whole Foods are union), and in general opposes most the ideals I fight for in my life. But, Whole Foods make my shopping pretty easy and made it easy for me to check my values at the door.
But, no more.
It is one thing to disagree with a CEO like John Mackey. Fine. We all have different politics. But, its another thing when he is taking his money and influence to fight against everything I believe in. And, right now we are a critical tipping point on health care, and the need for a public health care option.
John Mackey decided to tke the politics of the teabaggers and make them acceptable for the Wall Street crowd last week in the Wall Street Journal.. He started by throwing out the "socialism" charge at President Obama and then goes onto to argue for Health Savings Accounts, deregulation, and getting rid of insurance companies from being able to discriminate against medical conditions. Oh, and he throws in as well, people are fat so that is why we have a health care problem ( solution- shop at Whole Foods, duh!).
Mackey argues against the public option with: "While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system"And that is where he lost me, and my whole paycheck. We need a strong public option. We need to be able to have a system that can compete with the massive insurance industry. Our small businesses, including small scare organic farmers, need real health insurance reform.
I am for a sustainable food system and I believe a important key is looking to make sure all the players up the chain are supported. Which means- we need to make sure workers are paid well ( ahem- EFCA), that farmers and employees on farms can buy health insurance ( ahem- public option), and that the companies we buy from support our values for real, not just market our values back to us.
So, I am taking my money to the farmers markets, UFCW organized grocery stores, and smaller natural food stores. I hope you follow suit.
If you're on facebook, you can join the Boycott Whole Foods group here.
[Update: Natasha here, minor URL edit and corrections made, sorry to bump in.]
The Meat Market's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Published August 04, 2009 @ 08:38PM PT
Dear The Meat Industry,
When you complain on one hand that your business will be hurt by country of origin labeling laws, and on the other that it's unfair to criticize the US meat industry because of greenhouse gas emissions from meat production in other countries, it makes you sound like you need Ritalin.
In other news, cows need to eat grass, bozos.
Kissy the face,
n
(Photo credit: laenulfean on Flickr.)
U.S. Farmers Love Biotech...Apparently
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Farmers in the United States are continuing to plant genetically engineered crops at unprecedented levels according to a report released recently by the USDA's Economic Research Service.
The report found that the adoption (the percentage of farmers planting a certain kind of crop) of GE soybeans reached 91 percent; the adoption of GE cotton reached 88 percent; and the adoption of all biotech corn climbed to 85 percent in 2009.
Farmers are doing this despite claims that growing biotech crops in the U.S. has done little to increase yields. According to the Failure to Yield (pdf) report (previously cited on this blog) conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientist's Doug Gurian-Sherman:
...genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.
So why are U.S. farmers continuing to plant biotech crops?
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over
Published July 09, 2009 @ 07:43AM PT
This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.
But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.
Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.
First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.
Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':
... In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?
Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods. ...
Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.
What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.
Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.
Mike Taylor for Food Safety Coordinator
Published July 02, 2009 @ 09:59PM PT
Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.
Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.
As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.
So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.
This guy is heading up a food safety working group.
I'm just swimming in the changeiness.
