The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise
by Don Lotter

The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity
by Don Lotter

7 Diseases That Big, Juicy Steaks Could Give You

By Sara Novak, Planet Green
Posted on November 5, 2009, Printed on November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143691/

More and more people are passing on meat for a wide variety of reasons. For starters, it reduces your impact on the planet. Some simply can't bare the despicable factory farming industry in this country. And the third weighing issue on the minds of the more than 2.8 percent of the U.S. population that considers themselves vegetarian, arehealth issues. And studies show that there are plenty of them.
Sicknesses Associated With Eating Meat

1. Prostate Cancer

According to a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology, researchers examined the dietary habits of 175,313 middle-aged men and followed them for nine years. They discovered that men who ate a diet heavy in red meat and processed meats were diagnosed with prostate cancer more often than men who ate little meat. "HCAs, a family of mutagenic compounds, are produced during the cooking process of many animal products, including chicken, beef, pork, and fish," the article said. And this is not reserved for a well done steak. The mutagens form when meat is cooked at a normal level and it is present in grilling, frying, or broiling. It appears to grow worse as the meat is cooked longer. In the end, the consumption of meat increased the risk of prostate cancer by 12 percent.

2. Heart Disease

More than 864,480 Americans died of heart disease in 2005, according to theAmerican Heart Association. And according to a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a teaching hospital for Harvard), heart disease is directly related to meat consumption. The study involved 617,119 men and women who were 50 to 71 years old at the start of the study. At the beginning of the study, patients filled out diet information surveys and 10 years later deaths from cardiovascular disease were noted.
Results of the Study:
"Compared to people in the lowest levels of red meat consumption (average 0.32 ounces per 1000 calories), men with the highest levels of red meat consumption (average 2.39 ounces per 1000 calories) experienced a 27 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
For women with the highest levels of red meat consumption (average 2.32 ounces per 1000 calories) the results were even more dramatic. They experienced a 50 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease."

3. Osteoporosis

A group of studies done at the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition Health and Environment, by nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell and his colleagues, links bone density with meat consumption. The less meat that you eat the less you'll experience a loss in bone density as you age. Osteoporosis is a reduction in bone density that occurs as we age and in turn causes bone fractures and breaks in older individuals. The disease impacts 25 million Americans, 80 percent of whom are women. According to Campbell, the study is a great explanation for why Americans, who include more calcium in their diets than Asian cultures, have five times the rate of osteoporosis compared with many Chinese and other Asians. Our much larger meat consumption rate is working against us.

4. Kidney Stones

Kidney stones are deposits that form in your kidneys in varying sizes. They are a common problem, but can be super painful. Kidney stones range in size from that of a grain of sand to the size of a marble or larger. According to Physicians Desktop Reference, foods that are high in protein, such as meat could, "encourage the formation of kidney stones."

5. Food-borne Illnesses

Food-borne illnesses have been swirling through the news all year long and it hasn't been pretty. The New York Times wrote that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, poultry is the number one source of food-borne illness. It doesn't matter how much antibiotics they pump into an abused chicken population because even still up to 60 percent of chickens sold at the supermarket are infected with live salmonella bacteria.

6. Pancreatic Cancer

High intake of dietary fats from red meat and dairy products is associated with a higher risk of pancreatic cancer, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
"[W]e observed positive associations between pancreatic cancer and intakes of total, saturated, and monounsaturated fat overall, particularly from red meat and dairy food sources," the authors write. "Altogether, these results suggest a role for animal fat in pancreatic carcinogenesis."

7. Type 2 Diabetes in Women

A study done on women by the American Diabetes Association, found that there was a positive relationship between meat consumption and instances of Type 2 Diabetes. The study documented 1,558 recorded cases of Type 2 diabetes. After adjusting for age, BMI, total energy intake, exercise, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking, and family history of diabetes, "our data indicates that higher consumption of total red meat, especially various processed meats, may increase risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in women."
Sara Novak is a writer specializing in food, travel, and nature for Planet Green and TreeHugger.

Published on Sunday, November 8, 2009 by the New York Times
Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies
by Nicholas D. Kristof
Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies - to the tune of six pounds per American per year . That's a lot of estrogen.
More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it - though not conclusively - to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.
Now it turns out it's in our food.
Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.
The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.
Should we be alarmed?
The chemical industry doesn't think so. Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council dismissed the testing, noting that Americans absorb quantities of BPA at levels that government regulators have found to be safe. Mr. Hentges also pointed to a new study indicating that BPA exposure did not cause abnormalities in the reproductive health of rats.
But more than 200 other studies have shown links between low doses of BPA and adverse health effects, according to the Breast Cancer Fund , which is trying to ban the chemical from food and beverage containers.
"The vast majority of independent scientists - those not working for industry - are concerned about early-life low-dose exposures to BPA," said Janet Gray, a Vassar College professor who is science adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund.
Published journal articles have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.
This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.
While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have "an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities." Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.
Scholars have noted some increasing reports of boys born with malformed genitals, girls who begin puberty at age 6 or 8 or even earlier, breast cancer in women and men alike, and declining sperm counts among men. The Endocrine Society, an association of endocrinologists, warned this year that these kinds of abnormalities may be a consequence of the rise of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and it specifically called on regulators to re-evaluate BPA.
Last year, Canada became the first country to conclude that BPA can be hazardous to humans, and Massachusetts issued a public health advisory in August warning against any exposure to BPA by pregnant or breast-feeding women or by children under the age of 2.
The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies - and has generally been asleep at the wheel - is studying the issue again . Bills are also pendingin Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers.
"When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong," said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. "Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?"
While the evidence isn't conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we're cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I'm drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I've come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals - they give me the willies.

Published on Saturday, October 31, 2009 by the Star Tribune (Minnesota)
Why Is the USDA Continuing Loans for New Factory Farms?
by Lenny Russo
I am a card carrying member of the Land Stewardship Project. For those of you who are unfamiliar with LSP, it is a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1982 whose stated purpose is to promote sustainable agriculture, develop sustainable communities and foster an ethic of farmland stewardship.
This morning, I received an email from them alerting me to the USDA's Farm Service Agency policy of continuing to provide loans to build new specialized hog and poultry facilities at a time when overproduction in these agricultural sectors is leading to depressed prices, contract cancellations, abusive contract terms and increased corporate consolidation of the hog and poultry industries. This policy is a reversal of a directive issued on January 8, 1999, that suspended all direct and guaranteed loan financing for the construction of such facilities. The reasoning behind the suspension was the concern that FSA loans of this type could exacerbate the crisis of oversupply and depressed prices that were already affecting the hog industry. Shortly after assuming office in 2001, the Bush Administration re-instituted the loans, and so far the Obama Administration has continued to support this policy.
LSP's position on this is clear and unequivocal. They believe that the USDA is siding with so called "mega-operations" at the expense of existing hog and poultry contract growers and independent hog farmers by issuing these loans. In short, they claim that these loans provide public financing for speculators whose strategy it is to expand in order to seize greater market share when prices are low while existing hog and poultry producers are being forced to reduce production in order to cut their losses in an effort to correct the market by bringing the supply more in line with current demand. They insist that these loans favor corporate-backed farming over small family farms. They further contend that this is bad public policy that puts taxpayers' money at risk. Why, they ask, are we increasing production at a time when overproduction is creating a crisis for America's farmers? It's a good question and one that begs to be answered.
I have previously made know my dissatisfaction with the choice of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the Obama Administration's Secretary of Agriculture. My objections to this appointment were not and continue not to be without basis. In 2002, then Governor Vilsack came out in support of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops and, in particular, genetically modified pharmaceutical corn. The previous year, Vilsack was named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization which is the largest lobbying organization for the biotechnology industry. He is also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership. A widely criticized economic development program created by Governor Vilsack called the Iowa Values Fund trumpeted Trans Ova, a firm that has pursued technological development in the cloning of dairy cows. In 2005, Governor Vilsack pressured Republican State Senator Sandy Greiner to sponsor a bill that took away local governmental rights to regulate where genetically modified crops could be grown and proposed the elimination of all GMO buffer zones as well as the elimination of all regulations on GMO seeds. During his tenure as Iowa Governor, it was not unusual for Vilsack to be shuttled about on a corporate jet provided by agribusiness giant Monsanto. As Agriculture Secretary, Vilsack continues to ardently support the production of bio-fuels which have been shown to use as much or more fossil energy to produce than they can generate while contributing to an increase in world food prices. Finally, the legacy Governor Vilsack left in his wake, a legacy that was put in motion many years earlier when as State Senator Vilsack he voted to take away local control of hog factory farms from local government agencies, is one that saw the greatest proliferation of confined hog feeding operations in the history of the State of Iowa.
To be fair to Secretary Vilsack, he has over the last year moderated some of his positions on these issues. For instance, he has publicly supported a reduction in the $17 to $25 billion annual subsidies that go to chemical, energy-intensive and genetically engineered crops that have continued to bolster factory farms and the junk food industry while wasting valuable nonrenewable resources and contributing to the destabilization of our climate. He has also softened his support for the controversial biopharmaceutical crops by calling for mandatory labeling and insisting on strict liability for companies whose GMO crops cause genetic pollution.
Even so, these changes in policy do not go nearly far enough in establishing a new paradigm for American agriculture. Our current petroleum based food system consumes 19% of our energy while generating 37% of our greenhouse gases. Instead of continuing to appropriate massive subsidies such as the aforementioned FSA loans that serve to perpetuate this system, would it not be better for all of us if the federal government moved to help farmers and ranchers transition to more energy efficient and carbon-sequestering practices while fostering localized and regionalized systems of sustainable agriculture.
During his campaign for change, Barack Obama promised us serious reform. Continuing to support the USDA's policy of Farm Service Agency loans to factory farms is not change that I, for one, can believe in. I encourage anyone who opposes this policy to contact Secretary Vilsack at 202-720-3631 and voice your opposition to government funded factory farming and make known your support for America's family farms.
© 2009 Star Tribune
Russo is currently the chef and proprietor of Heartland Contemporary Midwestern Restaurant & Wine Bar in St. Paul. Russo has more than 30 years experience in the food and beverage industry including executive chef, general manager, food and beverage director and corporate chef for several Twin Cities companies, among them being U.S. Restaurants, Aveda Corporation, W.A. Frost & Company, Faegre's, the Loring Cafe and the New French Cafe. Read more about Lenny Russo .

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by The Huffington Post
The High Human Cost of Unsafe Food
by Marion Nestle
I think we need a whole lot more public outrage about unsafe food. Maybe the recent front-page articles in the Washington Post and New York Times will do the trick.
Both tell tragic stories of women who developed hemolytic uremia syndrome in response to eating a food contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Both reveal the appalling physical and monetary cost of these illnesses. Recall: we also do not have an effective and affordable health care system.
To me, the most chilling part of the Times investigation had to do with the lack of testing for dangerous pathogens. No meat packing company wants to test. Why not? They know the animals coming into the plant are contaminated. They know that tests would come up positive. They know that if they find pathogens, they have to recall the meat.
It's obvious why meat is contaminated. The making of hamburger is enough to put anyone off, as the letters to today's Times attest. In my book, Safe Food, I discuss a study demonstrating that one pound of commercial hamburger could contain meat from more than 400 cattle. The Times' article takes such facts to a personal level. The 22-year-old woman who ate the tainted hamburger is paralyzed from the waist down and likely never to walk again.
Read these articles and you will understand that meat companies will not do what is needed to produce safe food unless they are forced to.
And it's not just hamburger that causes problems. Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has a new report out on the ten foods that cause the most cases of foodborne illness in America. Hamburger isn't even on the list. Instead, it's leafy greens, eggs, tuna, oysters, potatoes, cheese, ice cream, tomatoes, sprouts, and berries.
So how come Congress isn't forcing all food producers to produce safe food? Could it be because there isn't enough public outrage to counteract industry pressures and make Congress act?
Bill Marler, who represents both of the victims profiled in those articles, is begging Congress to put him out of business.
His message is clear: get busy and pass meaningful food safety legislation, right now, before it is too late.
I'm hoping these articles and the CSPI report will be seen by senatorial staff who will urge their bosses to support the House bill passed last spring.
Maybe we need hundreds of thousands of people to deluge Congress with appeals to act on food safety, now.
You would like to do this but don't know how? Easy. Find your own representatives online on the House site and your Senator just as easily . The e-mail addresses are right there waiting to be used.

Michael Pollan: People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That
By Michael Pollan, The Nation
Posted on September 10, 2009, Printed on September 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142502/
This article is adapted from Michael Pollan's introduction to Bringing It to the Table, a collection of Wendell Berry's writings out this fall from Counterpoint.
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the paper's agriculture reporter, said that "after being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House."
Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves -- the "food movement," as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- local and organic and pastured -- are thriving, farmers' markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture's census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to "sustainability" and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds -- but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for
Time
that "our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil"; he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the healthcare crisis.
Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well.
But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from that soil.
I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry's own since he first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry's thinking about agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard's master idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to reconceive "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject." No single quotation appears more often in Berry's writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible.
That same year, 1971, Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, which linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis, showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood without reference to the problem of agriculture.
Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought; and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves.
For what would we give today to have back the "environmental crisis" that Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type 2 diabetes became "epidemic"? (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to the early 1980s.)
But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat and solar panels), we went back to business -- and agribusiness -- as usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins of national politics and culture.
When I began writing about agriculture in the late '80s and '90s, I quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.
It was during this period that I began reading Berry's work closely -- avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild and didn't fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don't have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field at Walden, but he couldn't square his love of nature with the need to defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that "if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp." With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It's not at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at farming and gardening.
It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture. Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I had a legitimate quarrel with nature -- a lover's quarrel -- and showed me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He relocated wildness from the woods "out there" (beyond the fence) to a handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators but as full-fledged participants.
Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism, which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we're finally beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for getting it started with sentences like these:
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in...farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. -- "Conservationist and Agrarian," 2002
That we are all implicated in farming -- that, in Berry's now-famous formulation, "eating is an agricultural act" -- is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at the farmers' market, are deep in his debt.

Published on Thursday, September 10, 2009 by The New York Times
Big Food vs. Big Insurance
by Michael Pollan
To listen to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself - perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That's why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat "preventable chronic diseases." Not all of these diseases are linked to diet - there's smoking, for instance - but many, if not most, of them are.
We're spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers' market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He's even floated the idea of taxing soda.
But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America's fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side - like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.
That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There's lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.
The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There's more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.
As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it's much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.
But these rules may well be about to change - and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like "pre-existing conditions" and "underwriting" would vanish from the health insurance rulebook - and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.
The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.
When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system - everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches - will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn't really ever had before.
AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill - which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.
In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City's bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.
That's why it's easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.
Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a "foodshed" - a diversified, regional food economy - could be the key to improving the American diet.
All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health - which means going to work on the American way of eating.
But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that course.
For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it down.

Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_food_is_power_and_the_powerful_are_poisoning_us/

Posted on Sep 6, 2009

By Chris Hedges
Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.
The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates.
Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers. They have poisoned our soil with pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped nutrients and phosphorus into water systems, causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the onslaught of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, are declining in the Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out the tomato crop. The draconian Food Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our governing elite to corporations, means small farms will only continue to dwindle in number. Sites such as La Via Campesinado a good job of tracking these disturbing global trends.
“The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical,” activist Henry Harris of the Food Security Roundtabletold me. The group builds distribution systems between independent farmers and city residents.
“Food is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power,” he said. “The national food system is collapsing by degrees. More than 50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central Valley of California. What happens when gasoline becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the cropland? The monolithic system of food production is highly unstable. It has to be replaced very soon with small, diverse sources that provide greater food security.”
Cornell University recently did a study to determine whether New York state could feed itself. The research is described in two articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. If all agricultural land were in use, and food distribution were optimized to minimize the total distance that food travels, New York state could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of its food needs met from within its boundaries. This is not encouraging news to those who live in New York City. New York once relied on New Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead of having food shipped from across the country. But New Jersey farms have largely given way to soulless housing developments. Farming communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up and desolate, have been gutted by industrial farming.
The ties most Americans had to rural communities during the Great Depression kept many alive. A barter economy replaced the formal economy. Families could grow food or had relatives to feed them. But in a world where we do not know where our food comes from, or how to produce it, we have become vulnerable. And many will be forced, as food prices continue to rise, to shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced foods, already a staple of the nation’s poor. Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes and heart disease, is often the only food those in the inner city can buy because supermarkets and nutritious food are geographically and financially beyond reach. As the economy continues to deteriorate, the middle class will soon join them. 
“It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land,” Wendell Berry observed in “The Unsettling of America.”  “Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land’ because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”
Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his family has farmed for generations, argues that local farming is fundamental to sustaining communities. Industrial farming, he says, has estranged us from the land. It has rendered us powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left us complicit in the corporate destruction of the ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has been as devastating as its physical cost.
“The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat,” writes Berry. “They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely—consumptive machines—which is to say, the slaves of producers. What … model farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist enterprise—that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.”
The nascent effort by communities to reclaim local food production is the first step toward reclaiming lives severed and fragmented by corporate culture. It is more than a return to local food production. It is a return to community. It brings us back to the values that sustain community. It is a return to the recognition of the fragility, interconnectedness and sacredness of all living systems and our dependence on each other. It turns back to an ethic that can save us.
“[The commercial] revolution … , ” writes Berry, “did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
“The inevitable result of such an economy,” Berry adds, “is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime’s devotion. ‘Waste,’ in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans—the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested’ farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.’ Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump.”

Whole Foods CEO's Dumb, Hypocritical Conservative Talking Points

By Mark Harris, CounterPunch
Posted on September 7, 2009, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142365/

If the CEO of a grocery giant such as Kroger or Safeway had written a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing the “public option” in health care reform, it’s unlikely there would have been much of a backlash. Indeed, with right-wing America’s noisy revolt over health care reform in high gear, one more business journal op-ed on the topic probably would have not stirred much attention. 

Not so with the brewing grassroots protest against Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s recent Journal op-ed. Indeed, Mackey’s libertarian-flavored blast against the specter of “a massive new health-care entitlement” has touched a sensitive nerve with many health-conscious, reform-minded Americans. 

In short order, a Boycott Whole Foods Facebook group signed up over 30,000 supporters. There have been protests for single-payer health care outside Whole Foods stores in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Austin. Across the country newspaper columnists and bloggers have also weighed in on the controversy.

It’s not surprising really, considering Whole Foods eco-healthy image. It’s likely many of their customers take at face value the company’s identity as a leader in “socially responsible” business. Accordingly, they might also have assumed that a wealthy businessman whose success stems from promoting “natural foods” and “healthy living” would be on the side of progressive health care reform. 

Of course, they would be mistaken in that assumption. In fact, Mackey’s libertarian notions of reform are a disaster, guaranteed to lead the nation even further away from fixing what’s wrong with health care. Opposing any “public option” insurance plan, Mackey instead calls for such measures as the repeal of “government mandates” regulating what insurance companies must cover. “What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying,” declares the natural foods CEO.

In Mackey’s ideal libertarian world, deregulated insurance companies would supply products based only on the unfettered demand of health care “customers,” leading thus to happiness all around. Unfortunately, this tidy train of free-market logic cannot explain why insurance companies now routinely deny coverage to those with “pre-existing conditions.” It’s certainly not because consumers want it. Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that—supply and demand be damned—they just can? 

As a libertarian, Mackey would eventually like to see both government and business freed from all health insurance obligations. The responsibility for access to health insurance would become a strictly personal responsibility. But since Whole Foods has to compete in the here and now of today’s economy (i.e., keep out unions), the company offers a health plan based on high-deductible health savings accounts. In his op-ed, Mackey touts the Whole Foods plan as a model for American business. 

Typically, health savings accounts offer not only high deductibles, but also increased co-pays and more uncovered services. The Whole Foods plan includes a $2,500 deductible that must be met before coverage begins for employees who work more than 30 hours weekly. Mackey brags that the company pays 100 percent of insurance premiums and deposits up to $1,800 yearly in individual savings accounts that can be used toward out-of-pocket costs. 

Sound good? Actually, Mackey’s case for the company health plan only makes the argument for real health care reform even stronger. This is a company that employs a relatively young and transient work force, most of whom start at hourly wages more in the $8.00 to $13.00 per hour range. In other words, this is a workforce disinclined to use their benefits much, not only because they’re largely younger and healthier, but also because their modest pay serves to make employees think twice about any out-of-pocket medical expenses. 

This is all good if you’re a CEO looking to cut down on how much your company spends on health benefits. It’s also good if you believe, as Mackey does, that there’s a problem with people using health care frivolously, as if anyone ever seeks medical care just for the fun of it. Is there no irony in an exponent of “healthy living” promoting high-deductible health plans with their built-in bias against preventative medicine?

But the self-congratulatory hype that is Whole Foods trade in marketing only goes so far. According to a former Whole Foods executive, reports Judy Dugan on ConsumerWatchdog.org (Aug. 20, 2009), the company health plan is not nearly as delightful as Mackey contends. It contains “dozens and dozens of hidden system charges,” including a co-pay system based not on fixed rates, but a percentage of medical bills. For those “team members” unlucky enough to have major surgery, for example, the Whole Foods plan could potentially leave them still owing thousands in out-of-pocket dollars. 

There are other exclusions at work, such as the six months employment it takes before “team members” become eligible for the health plan. This is no small factor for a company whose annual turnover rate hovers around 20 percent or more, according to some reports. As for part-time employees, they’re mostly out of luck.

Such a critique could go on, but perhaps the larger point is this: While private health insurance plans vary in quality, there is no private insurance-based employer health plan anywhere that can adequately address the broad health care needs of the American public. The entire health care system needs an overhaul. That overhaul should begin with the declaration that affordable access to care belongs to everyone. Forget all the crank reform schemes dreamed up to justify continuing the private insurance system. Profit should not be part of the health care equation. Period. 

The Whole Foods backlash has caught some by surprise. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Any privileged purveyor of “conscious capitalism” happy to grow rich marketing natural foods and healthy living while lecturing the public that health care is not their right is only asking for trouble. The backlash against the natural foods giant also gains fire from the deep revulsion currently felt by many Americans toward the grotesque right-wing attacks on health care reform. 

Instead of offering an enlightened perspective on health care, however, Mackey gives us the pseudo-clever nonsense of Margaret Thatcher. "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money," Mackey quotes the former British prime minister to begin his Journal op-ed. Of course, by “other people’s money” what Thatcher or Mackey really mean is their money, the money of people of their economic status. 

Unfortunately, the problem with capitalism is that sometimes owners of large grocery chains grow rich on other people’s cheap labor. They then think this qualifies them to solve the problems of society. Predictably, they always seem to come up with solutions that favor their exclusive economic interests over the common good. 

Fortunately, you can only tell the people to eat their proverbial cake for so long. As John Mackey has learned, the guillotine of public opinion can cut a sharp line through all the hypocrisy.

Is Farming the New American Dream?

By Makenna Goodman, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on August 21, 2009, Printed on August 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142131/

In the post-Omnivore's Dilemma reality, where farmer Joel Salatin is known far outside his county, it doesn't take a genius to say it: farming has totally blown up.
What I mean is, alongside the cultural idolization of growing your own, there has been a notable increase in college graduates who opt to spend their first year out of college on a farm. These, mind you, tend to include (but are not limited to) folks who could otherwise get jobs in the film, art, banking, engineering, psychology, academic, etc. worlds--if they need a job at all. But more than just recent graduates; there is a growing number of young people opting out of school altogether, or on the flip side, actually up and leaving the corporate world after years to start farms, collectives, co-operatives, and even communes. There are kids quitting their high-level jobs in the city, moving to small-scale farms or homesteads in Vermont, and haying their butts off for no pay other than a roof and food (like my friend who worked at the #1 restaurant in NYC, and now picks squash blossoms in South Royalton, VT). And there are a number of flush youths who are cashing in their trust funds--in some cases--for cows. But why? Because unless you invest in a big-organic company that sells to WalMart, there's not much money in farming. It's a touch-and-go kind of life, incumbent on the weather, commitment, responsibility, and hard work. In this economic climate, especially--look at all the dairy farms going under--why is farming becoming a desirable life for young people who have the luxury of choice?
Some might say it's a passing trend, like flannel shirts in Williamsburg. Some might say it's because there's a dearth of "real" jobs, and farming is a good interim experience until the economy perks up. But perhaps it's something more profound: you know, a deeper desire to get back to the agrarian life. Or, a more emotional reaction--a re-establishment of home values, a switch in the long-term goals of the entitled, and a deepening need for connection to one's food, and work ethic. Perhaps we're looking at a new world of homesteading, manual labor, and life on the land. A life of farming, in other words.
But are these kids real farmers? Because alongside manual labor, some of them might also be writers. Or painters. Or teachers. Some of them might not even sell their food; they're just into living off the earth's bounty.
According to Gene Logsdon--to whom Wendell Berry refers as "the most experienced and best observer of agriculture we have"--the answer is yes, they're real farmers. If they're serious about it. If they love it. If they work hard. In his book Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream, he talks about this very issue:
It seems to me that, living at nature's pace on our little farm, I come closer to making my living from farming in a literal sense than "real" farmers. Carol and I raise most of our food including our meat, and some for other family members, keep a garden almost an acre in size, produce half of our home heating fuel from our own wood, derive most of our recreation and satisfaction from our farm, grow corn, oats, hay, and pasture, keep a cow and calf, two hogs, twenty ewes and their lambs, a flock of hens and broilers, and sell a few lambs and eggs. I'm sure I spend more time living on our farm than any industrial farmer in our county does. When they are not golfing in Florida or fishing in Canada, they spend a lot of time in the coffee shop or in my office telling me how farming is going down the drain....But urban people are also bringing agrarianism back to the cities. Developers build subdivisions that look and function like yesterday's villages or neighborhoods. Gardens and home businesses are planned into the landscape, as are nearby retail and service shops. Some communities even utter the almost forbidden words, "neighborhood schools" again. New neighborhood houses of worship in the ghettoes, small and humble and unassuming, return in the shadow of the abandoned cathedral-like churches. A surge of market gardening and farmers' markets recalls those years not so long ago when thousands of tiny truck farms, using horse manure for compost in their hotbeds and coldframes, supplied their cities with vegetables and fruits nearly year-round. The term "urban farming" turns out not to be an oxymoron. Chicago is even encouraging animal husbandry as part of its urban farming projects. In the heart of Cleveland, in the shadow of skyscrapers, horses plow garden plots. And with the returning agrarian spirit comes its wonderful offspring, agrarian ingenuity
[....]
I think I hear a faint rustle under the blacktop of shopping center parking lots, under the abandoned animal factories of yesterday and those yet to be abandoned tomorrow. Not only are the weeds pushing up through the cracking pavements, making way for the trees, but the irrepressible agrarian impulse is pushing through too. As long as humans are free to follow their hearts, there is hope.

Desperate Food Industry Tries to Tar Michael Pollan and Organic Produce

By Vanessa Barrington, EcoSalon
Posted on August 24, 2009, Printed on August 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142145/

What do you get when you cross a grassroots movement with a food industry fearful of losing its influence? Bogus studies, campaigns of misinformation and opinion pieces filled with myth and vitriol.
You may have noticed an uptick this year in news reporting that organic food isn’t really better for you, opinion pieces by conventional farmers saying that they are tired of being demonized by “agri-intellectuals”, and guilt-inducing ads by Monsanto in highbrow publications like the New Yorker touting the company’s ability to feed the world through technology.
Though all of this could be disturbing to those of us committed to sustainable agriculture and food that is fair to eaters, animals, workers and farmers, I’m choosing to see this as a good sign. I think it means we might be winning.
The turning point was when First Lady Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn only to receive a letter from The American CropLife Association telling her that they hoped she recognized the value of conventional agriculture in American life. The letter can be read here. Then, there were false allegations that the garden was contaminated with lead. In the face of all this, the first lady stuck with her commitment to keeping the garden organic.
Why is this happening now? For many years, organic food was a marginal market and the big players were content to let it either exist on the sidelines or hedge their bets and buyinto it themselves.
But due to the excellent work by many writers and activists like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Robert Kenner and others too numerous to mention, more of us are starting to pay attention to where our food comes from and how it is produced. This market is now a force for change. And individuals and companies that benefit from the status quo don’t want change.
Let’s take a closer look at the people and ideology behind some of the more recent high profile examples of the attacks against sustainable food.
The aforementioned study by London’s School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on the nutrient values of organic foods looked at various studies on the subject and compiled them to reach its conclusions. No new study was conducted. The meta review ignored some recent studies on nutrients, including one focused on antioxidants.
Not only that, the conductors of the survey only looked a narrow set of very specific nutrients. They did not consider factors of taste, environmental impact, or pesticide residues in the food – all factors that most consumers I know consider when buying organic foods.
Beyond the obvious limitations of the subject matter, it’s instructive to take a closer look at how the study was covered in the media, who conducted the study and who funded it.
So let’s pull back the curtain, shall we?
Media Coverage: Though the study looked at only 8 different nutrients and concluded there was no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically- and conventionally-produced foodstuffs, it went on to say that there were other reasons to buy organic food. Headline writers like tension so all the headlines were some variation on “organic foods not really better for you” or worse yet, “the organic foods hoax”.
What is the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine? The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is a respected college within the University of London, so all would seem to be on the up and up. But, this is the same school that published a hateful and not at all scientifically-rigorous study blaming fat people for global warming. I’d love to get into the problems with this study but that’s another post.
Who Funded the Study? The study was commissioned by the UK’s Food Standards Agency. The agency is an independent part of government set up by Parliament in response to food contamination issues and the resulting lack of consumer confidence.
The FSA is supposed to serve consumers, and it does in many cases, but like our very own USDA and FDA, the agency can be influenced by the food industry. Their slogan says it all: “safer food, better business”. And a quick look at the profiles of FSA staffers reveals more than a few food industry folk.
And then there’s Missouri farmer, Blake Hurst, in his article for The American Enterprise Institute. He attacks Pollan and other “agri-intellectuals” and city folk in general for making all kinds of assumptions about farmers and for presuming that they know the “messy, dirty” business of farming much better than farmers.
Throughout the piece Hurst erodes his credibility by making his own unfounded assumptions about his opponents, including the guy on the plane behind him, with whom he opens the story. He also says that he won’t change until the consumer forces his hand,ignoring the real lack of consumer power inherent in a food system that uses taxpayer dollars to subsidize the production of commodity crops that are then used to produce the unhealthy foods that fill the shelves of our grocery stores.
Foods (or food products) whose sheer volume and variety of brightly-colored packaging, flavors, colors and sizes are supposed to convince us of the abundance of our choices as consumers, when in fact all we’re really buying is agricultural surplus dressed up with chemicals, technology and marketing.
Then he brilliantly skewers his own argument by using a false urban (or rural?) legendabout a flock of turkeys so stupid they drowned themselves in a rainstorm to make his point that conventional farmers who pack the sentient beings we raise for food into crowded, filthy sheds are really protecting the animals from their own stupidity.
Oh, and by the way, what is this American Enterprise Institute that published Hurst’s article?
I’m glad you asked. The AEI is a neoconservative think tank devoted to free enterprise capitalism. According to Sourcewatch, AEI has funded studies that debunk climate change research, refutes studies showing the social costs of tobacco use, and has even worked to promote the Iraq war. The AEI staff listing includes Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich andRichard Perle.
As for Monsanto’s advertisements attempting to influence the very people who are most likely to read writers like Michael Pollan, don’t be fooled. We’ve done enough work here,here, and here that gets to the truth about Monsanto. And here’s an excellent piece from Grist detailing exactly why those specific ads are so bogus.
According to a recent survey, consumers are confused about and skeptical of green marketing claims, and misinformed about terms like natural and organic. That’s exactly how some would like it to be.
But there’s another side to this story: The status-quoers will eventually have to acknowledge that the system as it stands now will not serve anyone’s needs much longer, even theirs. As global warming accelerates and fuel costs rise, we need to figure out how to produce food differently. Maybe consumer power won’t ever be enough to force farmers like Blake Hurst to start to look at farming differently but the limiting characteristics of our unsustainable system will.
Until then, I won’t allow myself to be swayed by the propaganda of the resisters; I’ll put my money where the facts are – with the visionary, hopeful, innovative farmers who are doing things differently. Because, even though small-scale organic farming may not be the only answer, it can be part of a whole systemic change toward feeding ourselves without ruining the planet. And it tastes a lot better!

Published on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by The Huffington Post
Organic Agriculture Beats Biotech at Its Own Game
by Timothy LaSalle
Organic agriculture's recently recognized benefits for improving food security don't depend on a boost from genetically modified (GM) technology. While the chemically-based systems that GM requires could be cleaned up with organic techniques, there's no clear reason to degrade organic standards to accept the downsides that come with biotech-produced crops as they are currently managed. 
Recently, there have been renewed efforts to pressure organic agriculture to abandon one of its foundational principles and accept genetically modified crops. While there may be nothing inherently wrong with contemplating a theoretical overlap between biotech crop genetics and organic farming systems, there's not a compelling set of reasons to do so, either.
Alleging the principled barrier between the two is merely a quirky philosophical sticking point of "hard core resistance" within the organic community diverts attention from real questions as to the net value of this pairing.
Real question #1: Why bother?
To this point, biotech crops have not produced the yield advantages or biological resilience to multiple stressors. If we're looking for reliable, multi-benefit, future-oriented farming options in an input-limited world, biotech is not a player.
The question is rather: Why spend the time, money and scientific ingenuity manipulating a handful of genetic materials to end up with a specific new attribute when we should, and could, be rigorously advancing regionally adapted varieties and building up soils organically to achieve enduring nutrient content cycling and resistance to drought, flood and disease resistance.
This organic activity is sustainable in the long term, improves water-holding capacity in soil for all crops -- not just those that happen to have a gene with drought resistance, leaving the other crops at risk.
Real question #2: Who benefits?
Why have patented seeds good for a single planting when what most farmers in the world need are replicable, open-pollinated varieties that thrive in the particular mix of soil, degree days, weather and pest pressure where they are grown? The patented seed path is entirely under the control of a company and requires substantial chemical inputs to survive. The latter path, relying on finding the optimum fit with natural systems and fluctuation (thanks to climate change) over time, is controlled much more by sustainable farmers and the heroic seed companies dedicated to their service.
Real question #3: Is the stuff safe to eat? And who knows?
There is no data from independent, long-term studies on the human health impacts from eating GM crops. There's lots of research, but it's all tucked within the files of the companies that paid for it. The same companies prevent independent research on the efficacy and health impacts of their crop seeds. Many of the handful of intrepid researchers who do manage to carry out studies and dare to publish results showing problems with the GM approach face amazingly virulent reactions from the biotech community, and the institutional systems that depend on them for funding.
I think this quote from the editorial in the recent issue of Scientific American tells how little we really are allowed to know about GM crops:
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
Dr. Judith Carman of Australia is conducting one of the few long-term, independent animal feeding studies with GM materials. She says recent Australian and Italian studies finding reduced fertility and immune function, respectively, in mice are disturbing. Here she talks about extreme difficulty of doing meaningful research into this area. She is a PhD in medicine in the areas of metabolic regulation, nutritional biochemistry and cancer.
To us, it does not make biological sense that you can create brand-new proteins through genetic engineering in food and expect that our bodies will have the enzymes and capacity to break them down. These novel proteins are foreign to our immune systems because they have never before existed in nature.
Given how much we are not being allowed to know, our scientific, agricultural and food safety leaders need to take the reasonable step of following theprecautionary principle until we have the knowledge we need. Organic agriculture proponents are eager for more high-quality research on biological systems, because the promise for improving soils, sequestering carbon and feeding more people with healthier diets is so great all around the world.
Simply, this means that, facing irreversible potential harm, the onus for generating the proof of scientific consensus falls upon those seeking to take the action. With biotech crops and our long-term health and ecological well-being, that's a pretty big onus.
The organic community may eventually be open to biotech crops if long-term, independent studies would some day show there are no ecological or human health impacts. Because there is no research available to prove that yet, who needs them? Why risk it?
Copyright © 2009 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
Timothy J. LaSalle is CEO of the Rodale Institute, an internationally recognized leader in regenerative organic agricultural research, advocacy and education. LaSalle is the first CEO of the non-profit organization, located in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1947 by J.I. Rodale to explore the scientific foundation of organic agriculture.

Published on Thursday, August 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Boycott Whole Foods
by CommonDreams.org
by Russell Mokhiber
John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.
He’s a union buster.
He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.
He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.
And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods.
Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies.
“We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health,” Mackey wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.”
Yes it will, John Mackey.
Yes it will.
I do take that responsibility very seriously.
I try to eat well.
And exercise regularly.
I also take my responsibility as a citizen seriously.
After all, Mr. Mackey, we are all responsible for our own civic lives and our own civic health.
We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom and make wise civic and consumer choices that will protect our nation’s health.
Doing so will enrich our civic lives and help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.
That’s why, today, Single Payer Action is calling on all American citizens to boycott Whole Foods.
Why?
Because Mackey has launched a public campaign to defeat single payer national health insurance.
This despite the bottom line reality that single payer is the only way to both control health care costs and cover everyone.
As Dr. Marcia Angell says in today’s New York Times , “if you keep health care in the hands of for-profit companies, you can increase coverage by putting more money into the system, or control costs by decreasing coverage. But you cannot do both unless you change the basic structure of the system.”
Mackey leads his Wall Street Journal diatribe against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines – Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
And the problem with Mackey’s campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.
Mackey is responsible for these deaths as much as anyone.
And we are responsible for putting money into his Whole Food bank account so that he can continue his campaign without resistance.
I know that this boycott of Whole Foods will upset many liberal Democrats.
Where will they buy their organic wines?
And cheeses?
And tofu?
There are options.
Your local health food co-op.
Farmers’ markets.
Community supported agriculture.
Other corporate chains like Trader Joe’s.
So, please, join the Single Payer Action Boycott of Whole Foods.
Don’t cross the picket lines.
Don’t spend another penny at Whole Foods until John Mackey and his right wing friends are defeated.
And single payer is enacted.
Onward to single payer.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter .  He is also founder of singlepayeraction.org .

Published on Friday, July 31, 2009 by Civil Eats
Organic Versus Conventional Food: UK Report Flawed
by Paula Crossfield
A report issued Wedneday [PDF] by Dr. Alan Dangour of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the UK, claims that there is no substantial difference in nutritional content between organic and conventional food. The report was based on the review of fifty years worth of research papers on the subject. But reading it makes one wonder if influence caused a misreading of the findings, and in addition, if the agency has addressed the wrong questions entirely.
Even with very few studies comparing organic to conventional out there, evidence has proven that certain nutrients, such as Vitamin C and antioxidants, are on average higher in organic food. For example, a US study released in 2008 by The Organic Center focused on the nutrient quality of plant-based organic versus conventional foods, using matched pairs, “crops grown on nearby farms, on the same type of soil, with the same irrigation systems and harvest timing, and grown from the same plant variety.” According to their report,
“Across all the valid matched pairs and the 11 nutrients included in [The Organic Center] study, nutrient levels in organic food averaged 25% higher than in conventional food. Given that some of the most significant differences favoring organic foods were for key antioxidant nutrients that most Americans do not get enough of on most days, the team concluded that the consumption of organic fruits and vegetables, in particular, offered significant health benefits, roughly equivalent to an additional serving of a moderately nutrient dense fruit or vegetable on an average day.”
The Soil Association in the UK also pointed out yesterday that the FSA left out a more rigorous report commissioned by the European Union that found a range of “nutritionally desirable compounds” like antioxidants, vitamins, and glycosinolates were present in greater amounts in organic crops, while the amount of “nutritionally undesirable compounds” like mycotoxins, glycoalkaloids, cadmium and nickel were present in lower amounts by comparison in organic crops.
For research purposes the FSA report took into account studies beginning in 1958, from before we knew about the role certain nutrients played in our diet. In addition, studies show that nutrient content of our food overall has been going down over time. According to Michael Hansen of Consumer’s Union, “including older studies, with crop varieties that no longer are on the market, and which did have more nutrients, only serves to lessen the possibility of finding any significant differences between organic and conventional foods.”
The FSA study also ignored the 15 relevant studies that have come out since their February 2008 cut off date that could have changed the outcome of the report. In addition, the FSA analysis actually found that organic food contains more phosphorus, a beneficial nutrient, while conventional food on average contains more nitrogen, which scientists have linked to cancer. (Read more here ) Why wasn’t this information considered before issuing a substantial equivalence?
Aside from nutrients, contaminants are not considered in the FSA report. It has been proven that antibiotics are being taken up by plants via manure application on fields. The study did not address this or the unhealthy side effects of continued intake of pesticide residues, which accumulate in our bodies. There are a lack of studies on this subject, and investigators’ claimed that these questions were “beyond the scope” of this report, but that also might be due to a certain interest in keeping the scope small and thus the outcomes skewed.
The FSA is a branch of the government of the United Kingdom, but states on it’s website that it “works at ‘arm’s length’ from Government because it doesn’t report to a specific minister and is free to publish any advice it issues.” With no oversight, influence over the selected research could have been a factor in the outcomes. A look at the profiles of the head of FSA reveals former employees of agribusinesses like Arla Foods (now part of Europe’s largest dairy), Sarah Lee Corporation, and UK grocery giant Sainsbury’s. Therefore it is not hard to assume that the perspective leans towards what is best for agribusiness interests.
The FSA report was commissioned to determine whether or not the nearly 4 billion dollar organic industry in Great Britain could claim higher health benefits when selling its products. By rendering the playing field equal for conventional farmers, the government and the agricultural sector wouldn’t have to begin the difficult work of shifting the unwieldy agricultural system towards sustainability.
One of the biggest hurtles to reforming our food system in the United States is our unwillingness to acknowledge at the governmental level the superiority of sustainable agriculture. Leaving aside the nutrient question, organic agriculture helps improve the soil, protects farm workers from exposure to toxic chemicals, places an emphasis on animal welfare, and keeps toxic runoff out of our waterways. In so doing, sustainable agriculture improves not just our personal health, but our collective environmental health.
The nutrient content in our food is going down because our soil is being degraded. Sustainable agriculture, by contrast, improves the food we eat by improving our environment. Instead of focusing on puny reports that tell us next to nothing and yet dominate the media with simple binaries, we should be taking an integrative approach to analyzing data and therefore face the hard truths before us. Sustainable agriculture improves the food we eat by improving our environment. As Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, two of our countries most respected voices on our soilwrote in a New York Times op-ed back in January, which continues to be as scary as it is relevant: “Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland.”
So we have a decision to make. If we chose business as usual, it will be at our own peril.
© 2009 Civil Eats
Paula Crossfield is the managing editor of Civil Eats. She is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post's Green Page and is a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio where she focuses on food issues. She is currently tending a vegetable garden on her roof in the Lower East Side. You can follow her on Twitter .

Destroying America's Family Farm: HR 2749. A Stealth Agribusiness Empowering Act

by Stephen Lendman

Global Research, July 12, 2009

America is the truest example of what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." Obama is upholding the tradition and then some.

In fact, in less than six months, he's done the impossible. With congressional Democrats, he's compiled a worse record than even his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, straight across the board on both domestic and foreign policies that include:

-- looting the nation's wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment  without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;

-- proposing greater Fed empowerment and global monetary control, disguised as financial reform;

-- expanding unbridled militarism through continued foreign wars, occupations, and stepped up aggression on new fronts with the largest defense budget in history - greater than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;

-- its first coup d'etat in Honduras against its democratically elected president, an attempted regime change in Iran, and perhaps others ahead against independent leaders called national security threats while continuing to support the world's most ruthless and corrupt tyrants;

-- presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;

-- continuing the worst of the Bush administration's torture policies and practice of lawlessness;

-- targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;

-- illegally spying on Americans as aggressively as under George Bush;

-- destroying decades of hard won labor rights;

-- eroding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other New Deal and Great Society social gains;

-- trying to control the media more aggressively than Richard Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;

-- refusing help for budget-stricken states like California; forcing them to impose austerity by gutting welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services at a time they're most needed; to be followed by bailout-rich banks, real estate developers, and other profiteers using "shock doctrine" tactics to buy state and other troubled assets on the cheap;

-- continuing to commodify education, end government responsibility for it, and make it another business profit center;

-- proposing health care reform that will tax more, provide less, place profits above human need, disdain vital change, and leave a broken system in place;

-- readying Americans for dangerous, mandatory vaccinations that jeopardize human health, well-being, and may even cause death;

-- the (June 26) House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel, create a new bubble through carbon trading derivatives speculation, yet do nothing to address environmental issues;

-- trying to revive the Real ID Act of 2005 with S. 1261: Pass ID Act, introduced on June 15 and referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; if enacted, it will erode personal freedoms by requiring all US citizens and legal residents to have a national identity card that will be needed to open a bank account, board an airplane, be able to vote, or conduct virtually all types of essential business; if embedded with an RFID chip, universal monitoring will be possible everywhere, all the time; and

-- the proposed HR 2749: Food Safety Enhancement Act (FSEA) of 2009 discussed below.

HR 2749 - the Agribusiness Empowerment Act

Introduced on June 8, it "amend(s) the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) to improve safety in the global market, and for other purposes."

Passed in 1938 to ensure public safety, FFDCA gives the FDA regulatory power over food, drugs, and cosmetics, later updated to include other biological products, medical devices, and products that emit radiation.

On June 10, FSEA was fast-tracked from the House Health Subcommittee to the Energy and Commerce Committee where on June 17 it cleared and was referred to the full House "for later consideration."

Like legislation introduced earlier this year but so far not passed, food safety is the presumed issue, but it's merely for cover. Current laws and regulations work well but they're not enforced, an issue this writer addressed in a previous article. It explained that the USDA is woefully understaffed, under-budgeted, and only perfunctorily carries out inspections.

A March 3, 2008 OMB Watch report highlighted the problem. Headlined, "Federal Meat Inspectors Spread Thin as Recalls Rise," it explained that USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is charged with ensuring safe meat, poultry and eggs, but its budget and staff haven't kept pace with its mandate.

In FY 1981, it had about 190 workers per billion pounds of meat and poultry inspected. By FY 2007, it was fewer than 88 or less than half as many. Yet under federal law, FSIS must inspect all meat, poultry, and egg products intended for commercial use. Its web site states: "Slaughter facilities cannot operate if FSIS inspection personnel are not present (and) Only Federally inspected establishments can produce products that are destined to enter commerce."

For these and other agribusiness products, reality belies the mandate as processors, manufacturers, and other corporate operators circumvent procedures, and according to inspectors interviewed, understaffing and lax policies contribute to the problem. An unsafe food supply results. Government policy is to blame, and FSEA and earlier proposed legislation aren't designed to help. They're vehicles to empower food giants, destroy small farmers, and harm the consuming public.

The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) Reacts

FTCLDF is an NGO representing farmers and consumers to:

-- "Protect the constitutional right of the nation's family farms to provide processed and unprocessed farm foods directly to consumers through any legal means.

-- Protect the constitutional right of consumers to obtain unprocessed and processed farm foods directly from family farms, (and)

-- Protect the nation's family farms from harassment by federal, state, and local government interference with food production and on-farm food processing."

Run by industry officials, the FDA is a front group for agribusiness, Big Pharma, and other related industries it "regulates." If enacted, FSEA will greatly increase its power and limit judicial restraints on its actions. Although some provisions address improving the "mainstream food system," the potential for "inappropriate application and enforcement" is worrisome because the bill's language is vague and deceptive. It also doesn't define greater FDA authority or explain how it will empower agribusiness giants at the expense of small farms, "local artisanal producers" and consumers.

As a result, FTCLDF opposes HR 2749 because it will "adversely impact small farms and food producers, without providing significant reforms in the industrial food system." It also fails to address underlying food safety problems, including "agricultural practices" and industry consolidation. FTCLDT denounces FSEA for enhancing abusive powers at the expense of long-standing family farm freedoms and consumer choice.

Its specific concerns are as follows:

Current law requires "food facilities" to register one time at no charge with the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. Under FSEA, annual registration and a yearly $500 fee is required except for farms that do the following:

-- ones in a single physical location that grow and harvest crops, raise animals or seafood;

-- "that pack or hold food, provided that all food used in such activities is grown, raised, or consumed on that farm or another under the same ownership; and

-- facilities that manufacture/process food, provided that all food used in such activities is consumed on that farm or another farm under the same ownership."

Farm processing doesn't qualify unless it complies with the above provisions. If foods are produced elsewhere, farmers buying them lose their "farm" designation and become subject to annual registration procedures, henceforth done electronically in violation of Amish and other Mennonite customs that consider this practice a violation of their faith.

Extensive registration paperwork will also have to include:

-- certification of a hazard analysis;

-- identifying, implementing, and validating effective preventive controls and monitoring;

-- instituting and verifying corrective measures to address problems; and

-- maintaining records of all of the above and re-analyzing for hazards.

These requirements apply to local as well as others engaged in interstate commerce.

A detailed food safety plan is required as well that includes effective controls, monitoring, corrective action, verification, extensive record keeping, and other procedures that will be time consuming and expensive enough to put many small producers out of business.

All registered facilities will be subject to federal inspection in contrast to current law that applies only to ones engaged in interstate commerce. FSEA also requires all food producers to make their records available to FDA inspectors on demand. It applies to "production, manufacture, processing, packing, transporting, distribution, receipt, (and) holding of (food) in any format and at any location."

According to FTCLDF, the "FDA would now be empowered to go on a 'fishing expedition' and search records without any evidence whatsoever" of a violation. Further, "farmers selling direct to consumers would have to provide the (FDA) with records on where they buy supplies, how they raise their crops, and a list of customers."

Currently, examination only applies if there is "a reasonable belief that an article of food is adulterated and presents a threat of serious adverse health consequences or death to humans and animals."

FSEA also imposes "traceability" provisions that require producers, processors, packers, transporters, and other food handlers to:

-- "maintain the full pedigree of the origin and previous distribution history of the food;

-- link that history with the subsequent history of the food;

-- establish and maintain a system for tracing the food (and)

-- use a unique identifier for each facility for such person for such purpose."

The above requirements leave many questions unanswered and may empower the FDA to enforce them onerously against small farmers, but loosely, if at all, for agribusiness because corporate officials run the agency and decide policy.

FSEA also empowers the FDA to impose growing standards called "science-based (ones) for the safe growing, harvesting, packing, sorting, transporting, and holding of raw agricultural commodities that - (1) are from a plant or a fungus; and (2) for which the Secretary has determined that such standards minimize the risk of serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals."

This and other bill provisions mask FDA's dubious track record of serving corporate interests to the detriment of small farmers and consumers. By imposing costly and burdensome regulations, it will be easier to claim independent producers don't comply, ban their output as adulterated, and put them out of business.

Under current law, the FDA can prohibit food sales based on "credible evidence or information indicating (it) presents a threat of serious adverse health consequences or death to human or animals." FSEA's standard is based on only a "reason to believe that (the food) is adulterated, misbranded or otherwise in violation or this act." In other words, suspicion alone without proof can prohibit food sales and put small producers out of business.

FSEA also greatly increases the FDA's recall powers. It currently can request a voluntary recall, administratively detain food, or file a court order to seize and prohibit its distribution. FSEA goes further by empowering the FDA to recall food based on "reason to believe that the use or consumption of, or exposure to, (it) may cause adverse health consequences to human or animals." No proof is needed, just the word of corporate officials running these agencies for the companies they represent and will return to in high-paying jobs.

Based on "credible evidence or information," FSEA empowers the FDA to quarantine a geographic area to prevent "adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals...." Without court order and solely by notifying an "appropriate official of the State affected," food distribution and sales can be halted even by producers unrelated to the problem's source.

Currently, anyone violating FFDCA provisions can be imprisoned for up to three years if there's proof of "intent to defraud or mislead." Under FSEA, it's 10 years and fines of up to $100,000 for individuals and $7.5 million for corporations for offenses like the following - failing to register a facility, "misbranding," or not conducting a "hazard analysis" or filling out required paperwork.

Further, each day a violation continues constitutes a separate offense so, in theory, perpetrators might get millions of dollars in fines and life sentences for failing to comply with burdensome regulations that never should be imposed in the first place. Currently, producers are only at risk if they've "introduced or delivered for introduction into interstate commerce adulterated food."

FTCLDF concludes the following:

"While higher penalties may....deter industrial food companies from repeated dangerous violations, the (FDA) has a track record of pursuing small farmers and producers; these penalties could be imposed to ruin people for actions that pose no threat to human health."

The FDA  notoriously serves the interests of industries it represents and betrays the public's well-being. Jeopardizing safer alternative sources to industrialized food is a frightening prospect to consider.

In 1970, Henry Kissinger said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people."  Concentrating control in the hands of a few Ag giants places everyone at risk. They plan world domination by patenting all life forms to force-feed GMO foods on everyone - even though eating them risks harm to human health. It's why FTCLDF supports small family farms, too vital to lose. It's why FSEA must be stopped. "Any food safety bill should target industrial food processors and imports while leaving (the nation's safe) local food system alone." Obama's plan does the opposite.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

·  Hormones,
·  Antibiotics
·  Rendered Dead Animal Wastes
·  GMOs
·  Pesticides/Herbicides.

·  Hormones,
·  Antibiotics
·  Rendered Dead Animal Wastes
·  GMOs
·  Pesticides/Herbicides.