My post on the how to keep Monsanto out of your home garden seems to have really hit a nerve with supporters of GM foods.
This morning, I received an email from the CEO/President of a large soybean seed company in the Midwest who writes:
I just read your article “The Four Steps Required To Keep Monsanto Out of Your Garden”. I favor choice when it comes to the food you eat and agree with you on that part . I do not agree that it is right to attack Monsanto and all the good work that they are doing to increase yields for farmers to keep the price of food low enough so the poorest of the poor can afford to eat. If we all had to eat organic many people in this world would starve due to the higher cost of food and lower production.
I respect your views but attacking Monsanto is not in the interest of poor people and world food production. GMO’s are not bad and have passed all the standards set by regulatory systems around the world and are proven safe. Thanks for listening.
My word for word email response?
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid my friend.
GMOs are far from “proven safe” as this CEO claims and the sob story that Monsanto is somehow helping the poor and starving people of the world is nothing but a PR stunt that while effective, has no basis in truth or reality.
As Mark Twain once said, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
There are many highly capable and obviously intelligent people that have completely bought the scam that GMOs are safe and going to feed the world baloney.
Perhaps this most recent news out of Europe will give them a much need kick in the pants to wake them up to the reality of the situation.
Independent Experts Find GM Foods Contain Dangerous Gene
The European Union’s official, independent food watchdog group, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is reporting that the approval process for GM crops failed to identify a poisonous gene discovered in 54 of 86 GM plants.
Most alarmingly, this viral gene known as “GENE VI” was discovered in the most widespread GM crops, notably corn and soy, which are heavily used in animal feed for livestock producing meat, milk, and eggs.
How did the viral gene get into the GM crops in the first place?
The problem starts right in the laboratory where GM foods are synthesized by an army of scientists playing God with millions of unsuspecting guinea pigs blithely buying unlabeled GM laced products at the supermarket.
These scientists insert foreign genes from other organisms (plant or animal) into a target plant using a technique which allows these foreign genes to “piggyback” on common soil or plant based viruses.
Assumption is the Mother of Error it seems as these scientists had expected that the virus genes transporting the foreign genes into the target plant would not be present once the GM plant was actually grown in the field.
The EFSA research (Independent Science News) has now conclusively shown that this major assumption upon which the supposed “safety” of GMOs is based is not the case.
Not. Even. Close.
How the presence of this viral gene could have been missed by the biotech companies, government regulators, and even university scientists is beyond comprehension.
The EFSA research indicated the following:
This situation represents a complete and catastrophic system failure.
There are clear indications that this viral gene might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.
A reasonable concern is that the protein produced by Gene VI might be a human toxin. This is a question that can only be answered by future experiments.
Dr. Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) which represents the biotech companies, had this to say in response:
... nearly three trillion meals containing GM ingredients have been eaten without a single substantiated case of ill-health. The combination of these two facts can give consumers a huge amount of confidence in the safety of GM crops.
I guess Dr. Little isn’t really paying attention to the skyrocketing cases of food allergies and digestive complaints in the past decade or so, particularly allergies to corn and soy, the top two GM crops.
It’s always easier to just continue with business as usual and hide behind PR campaigns focusing on starving children and fudged reports about the “safety” of frankenfoods when the corporate bottom line (and the McMansion mortgage payment) is at stake, isn’t it Mr. CEO?
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sources
Uncovered, the “toxic” gene hiding in GM crops: Revelation throws new doubt over the safety of foods
The man is delusional. I just read an article about quinoa. It was a cheap, plentiful indigenous food, until it became popular. Now the price has tripled, at least, and the poor people of South America export it to rich Americans, rather than feeding their children. Now they use the money to buy – what exactly? Cheap Monsanto soybeans? The same thing is happening in Peru with the exported asparagus and is it Columbia? – wherever the tea roses come from. The land no longer grows food for the people, just mono crops for export.
If everyone was eating organic whole foods, they would not be expensive.
good point!
Excellent point! I try and buy Organic when possible. Had a group of friends over for brunch yesterday, wanted to add asparagus to the menu and almost dropped dead when I saw the Organic Asparagus was $8.00/lb vs $1.64 for the code 4### asparagus
Agreed. And we would all be halthier too!
Great point. I can provide proof of this. Here in Germany, for example, GMO crops are highly regulated and often fined if they cross pollinate with neighbor crops. The opposite is true in the U.S. Here Organic produce, and Organically raised livestock that produce meats, milk and eggs are just slightly higher priced than ‘conventional’ items. Again unlike in the U.S.
Ha! Your email response was epic–love it!
Oh, and check out Food MythBusters — they have done some great work on this stuff!
I agree with Kindra. The “we need GMOs to feed the world” myth is pretty deeply entrenched and widespread, even among many environmentally and socially conscious people. Nevermind all the safety concerns about GMOs. Fundamentally, we must improve access to fresh food and make smaller scale and subsistence farming a viable option again, both in the US and worldwide. If people can grow (or trade for) most of their own food, rather than needing income to buy it, that can solve part of world hunger. We have plenty of food here in the US but it’s mostly in the form of grains being fed to livestock!
Thank you for what you do Sarah! Keep up the great work!
Whew. You TELL it, Sarah!
People are waking up! There’s no stopping it. Maybe we will never be a majority, but we are here to stay.
So basically, it’s okay to feed garbage to poor people? Nonsense! What’s sad is this CEO likely believes the lie he’s been fed.
Well said!
I live in Nebraska-the heart of fields full of corn. Most of this corn is used for feed for cows, high fructose corn syrup and bio-fuel. I’m sorry, when farmers claim “we need GMO’s to help feed the world’, it’s just bull****! They are fooling people, thinking this is corn that we eat in our food-besides hfcs. We don’t need corn to feed our cows-cows were not created to eat corn! And we don’t need hfcs to make us fat and make our kids act crazy! I’m just tired of that “let’s feed the world” excuse because what they are growing is for the wrong reasons.
EXACTLY. Most GMO crops are NOT used directly for human consumption but are instead used for animal feed, chemical production, fuel, and corn syrup. Kindra hit the nail on the head!
Kindra,
Farmers only know what they are lead to believe! In order to make any changes the farmers are the ones that must be educated!! Bring the fight to the farmers. Every farmer in America will have to unite in order to make a dent in the damages that Monsanto and Gang have made. For now, farmers hands are tied. America, Stand by Your Farmer because they can not win this fight, alone!
I live in IA, my brother-in-law farms in NE. A while back we were talking about GMO’s & he stated his renter turned the livestock into the field and they wouldn’t touch the ears of corn but foraged around it. He made the comment about what are we eating, if the animals wouldn’t eat it.
I live in arkansas and you wouldn’t believe the soy and rice fields around here..about the time they started making roundup and spraying it on the fields OUTSIDE town i started having bouts of nausea when i would smell it. also..most rice and soy produced here goes to animal feed and to make beer..just FYI…no feeding the poor..and anyway. food is already priced to high for truly poor people to afford it here, and its only going to get worse.