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
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
-Albert Einstein
Have you had your head in the sand? #1, big businesses like Monsanto are the ones with the big bucks to fund the studies, so they can skew any research that is done any way they see fit. #2, if you truly believe things are thoroughly tested for safety before being released to the public, I have some beachfront property to sell you in the Arizona desert. MONEY talks.
(And, actually, the way we were growing things for thousands of years was working just fine. GMO and related practices have actually been destroying the sustainability of agriculture throughout the world. Which, again, comes back to money. That’s exactly what big Agribusiness wants – for everybody, everywhere to be dependent on them to provide new seed – in exchange for money – every single planting season.)
Do you honestly believe Monsanto has bucks so big that they’ve bought off every one of the third party researchers who have come out with studies time and again showing the safety of GM crops, as well as the journals and review systems studying the studies for their efficacy and methodology? Maybe you also believe they’ve been funding shoddy research that gets torn apart in peer review to further bolster their claims by disassociation? Prove it then.
You may think skeptics of the anti-GM movement have their heads in the sand but I say you’ve got your head in the clouds. Provide solid evidence for your claims or don’t make them at all.
I think we are mixing idealism and reality. It is easy to talk about idealism but very difficult to live in reality. The reality of large agriculture is brought on by capitalism, increasing shortage of farm workers, and the want of cheap products in North America. We are all to blame for this, not just one company. A thousand years ago people died of diseases, that are cured today, but today we have new diseases that will be cured by tomorrows science. Until the new world comes this will be the way it will be.
Quote of the day – Every Minute of Anger is 60 seconds of lost Happiness.
Amen to that Wes
Check out this article
Lets all remember in big business – Monsanto is small – sales of only 11.7 billion. Many other icon companies have sales way over this – for example Walmart had sales of over 130 billion. Is Monsanto a bully – yes, but pure capitalists. By reading many of the above comments most people are not any better.
Prove it. Prove anything you say in a double blind, neutral scientific study.
Are you serious? Those who are playing God are certainly not proving with double blind, neutral scientific studies that all of their tampering is safe for us. They’re just using us as guinea pigs. And when evidence eventually *does* come out, it is invariably that, oops, it actually *wasn’t* safe in the first place.
How ’bout those trying to do things OTHER than the way they were done for thousands of years with no ill effects have to prove the safety and efficacy of their methods before those methods are imposed on everyone without our knowledge or consent.
Well, for one thing we’ve never had as many mouths to feed as we do now, and the population is only going to continue growing. The way things have been done for thousands of years isn’t going to cut it any more.
Secondly the safety and efficacy of these new technologies are indeed proven to a reasonable degree of certainty before they are “imposed on everyone”. Same way our courts work. If a proper double blinded study proves something is safe it will take another proper double blinded study with expanded scope to prove it’s unsafe, or to expose side effects or counter indications or whatever.
This is how science works. It worked for tobacco, Vioxx, ephedra and countless other things, and it will continue to work that way.
People like Seralini spread disinformation with shady research and the ignorant see things like “virus” in the works and spread paranoia, and this all gets taken as truth and people start seeing conspiracies everywhere. Find some good evidence and put your trust in that, don’t just believe everything you hear because it sounds good.
I believe this CEO should read the study done at Iowa State University comparing the difference in yields by industry standards and the way farmers that care about the land and farm the old fashioned way
Do all Monsanto goons write at a fourth grade level, or just this one? GMO foods “are not bad”? Oh, I’m so glad he cleared that up in language I could understand.
Thanks for passing this along. Much appreciated.
Re: your exchange with sir biotech CEO — You really can’t make this stuff up…. Choice?! Come on. There is no choice in this dude’s world.
YOU ROCK!!!! Thank you for lam-blasting that CEO and his mumbo jumbo. your so awesome lol and i love love love your recipes and website. Muah! xoxo