Are We Really Eating Healthy with GMOs in Place?

conniedj

I would encourage you all to look beyond whatever "we will feed the world" marketing is reported by the big Ag's multi billion dollar marketing machine.

Impoverished nations around the world are refusing to accept "donated" seed from gift horses like Monsanto. Why? Because of the strings attached. Their governments are looking beyond the momentary gain of seed to put into the ground to the inablility for the people who farm in those impoverished nations to purchase the pesticides and the annual seed renewal fees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jan/04/uk-government-enthusiasm-gm



Patented seed companies like Monsanto will just as easily go after small farms in impoverised nations, who's people were never made aware of patent law....just like they go after small farmers here in the states. Monsanto, and the like, are corporate bulllies with limitless legal funds to squash small farmers. It is absolutely shameful and sickening. And most of all indefensible. Taking away the right for humans around the world to save their seed saying "I own it, you have to pay me". That my friends is NOT going to feed the world! It will just feed the greed of an entitled and subsidized corportation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/haitian-farmers-commit-to_b_578807.html

crista_b

In...

...because I can't decide if I want to mock the tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracists...

...or join them.

man... another thread about our food killong us?

conniedj

For those who are serious about watching what's in your food, here is a great explanation on how the AG system is broken, and what 8 ingredients are either banned, or in some cases illegal in other countries. And guess what? They are all subsidized by your tax dollars!

http://blogs.prevention.com/inspired-bites/2013/05/23/8-ingredients-you-wont-find-hidden-in-organic-food/


By Robyn O'Brien~Fifteen year ago, if someone had suggested that I’d be writing this column, I’d have thought they were nuts. I had just accepted a position, fresh out of business school, working as an equity analyst on a team that managed one of the country’s largest mutual funds.

I was working as a financial analyst that covered the food industry. My day to day consisted of meeting with management teams, taking factory and store tours and cranking out reports on companies like Kroger, Safeway, Costco and Whole Foods. I wasn’t a foodie, and I couldn’t cook.

My job included crunching the numbers, learning business models and evaluating the costs of production and distribution of our food supply.

Thank goodness.

Because today, that experience has served a greater purpose: the ability to look at the current state of our food system, the financial engineering of the science behind it and the economically motivated decisions that food industry executives make to meet their fiduciary duty to drive shareholder return and sheds light on how these decision are affecting the health of our families.

And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’ve got a broken economic model at work in our food system. Chemical companies are rewarded with taxpayer funded resources called subsidies to promote crops grown in a chemically-intensive, genetically and financially engineered kind of way. Does it benefit the farmers? The jury is still out, but it does drive shareholder return for the chemical companies. While on the other hand, farmers that are growing things organically, which means by law without the use of synthetic pesticides and crops genetically engineered to require increasing doses of toxic weed killer, have to pay fees to prove that their crops are safe, then fees to label those crops with the “USDA Organic” seal and then they don’t receive the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs that the other farmers do.

Add to that the fact that American companies formulate their products one way for eaters over seas, without the use of artificial colors, genetically engineered ingredients, high fructose corn syrup, and it’s enough to get anyone going. But the fact of the matter is that what we have to add an adjective to the labels here and label food without certain new ingredients as “organic.” In other countries, it is more or less called “food” with the new ingredients, like genetically engineered ones (or “GMOs”) wearing the labels.

It can be frustrating to hear this. So what’s a consumer to do? Learn the Big 8. These are the ingredients which, by law and according to our very own United States Department of Agriculture, are not allowed into the production of foods that are made organically:

›High Fructose Corn Syrup
Artificial Colors and Dyes, Red 40, Yellow 5
›Aspartame
›Preservatives
›Artificial Growth Hormones
›Genetically Modified Ingredients
›Exceeding levels of Pesticides
Finely Textured Lean Beef Trimmings (“Pink slime”)
This can be tough to swallow. Especially if you really stop to think about it: our taxpayer dollars are hard at work growing our food in a chemically-intensive way, while farmers that are growing things without the use of these chemicals, things that even the President’s Cancer Panel has urged us to avoid, end up costing the consumer more to buy. It’s like we are being hit twice: once, subsidizing our chemically intensive agricultural system and twice, with the price of organic food if we choose to opt out.

It’s a broken system we’ve inherited, but it doesn’t have to be that way going forward.

The health of our country is largely contingent on the health of our food supply, and while the food industry argues that a lot of these ingredients are perfectly safe (just as the tobacco industry claimed the same of their products to our grandmothers), they are quickly removing them from their products in other countries (or never even introduced them in the first place). In order to make this free-from version of food affordable to all Americans, not just those in certain zip codes, isn’t time that we start doing the same thing here?