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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] There's a Lot You Don't Know About What's in Your Food
  • Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:12:43 -0600


http://www.alternet.org/story/55847/
There's a Lot You Don't Know About What's in Your Food
By Vanja Petrovic, AlterNet
Posted on July 3, 2007

Nearly three quarters of all processed foods contain genetically
engineered ingredients, but you'd never know it by reading the back
of your kid's cereal box or that pint of ice cream you've been
craving. Rather than being relegated to its own supermarket section,
this food sits unlabeled on grocery store shelves, allowing a handful
of transnational biotech companies to profit handsomely as consumers
shop blindly.

In his new book, Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the
Secret Changes in Your Food, Andrew Kimbrell explores the risks of
this technology and what genetic engineering means to our health, the
environment and the future of agriculture.

Although Kimbrell's book aims primarily to educate, it is also an
easy-to-use activist guide on how to identify -- and avoid --
genetically engineered foods.

Andrew Kimbrell is founder and executive director of the Washington
D.C.-based Center for Food Safety and the International Center for
Technology Assessment. As an author, lawyer, and activist for more
than 20 years, Kimbrell has been at the forefront of legal and
grassroots efforts to protect the environment and promote sustainable
agricultural production methods. His written work has appeared in the
New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's. He has testified at
numerous congressional and regulatory hearings, and in 1994, Utne
Reader named Kimbrell as one of the world's leading 100 visionaries.

AlterNet talked with Kimbrell via telephone.

Vanja Petrovic: How did you become interested in genetically
engineered food?

Andrew Kimbrell: I became very interested in genetic engineering in
general; it stemmed from my early work in appropriate technology.
There was an E.F. Schumacher book, Small is Beautiful -- great book,
everyone should read it. What Schumacher was saying is that we're
going to have to devolve our technologies and change our economics to
fit nature, otherwise we're going to destroy ourselves. And I thought
that was inevitable and became part of that. And it wasn't until
genetic engineering that I realized that some people were saying,
"Listen, let's not change our technology or our economic system to
fit nature, let's change nature -- including human nature -- so that
it fits our technology and our economic system."

So, for example what we have with genetic engineering, if you spray
herbicide on crops, it kills them, it kills everything green, it
doesn't just kill the weeds, it kills the crops. So, the idea would
be, as weeds become resistant to herbicides, to stop using them, and
find other ways of weed and pest control. But that didn't fit the
needs of ... the chemical companies. That would mean less of their
product. So, instead of changing their technology and economics to
fit nature, they said "let's change plants so they can withstand huge
amounts of our chemicals" -- herbicides -- and four out of every five
acres of genetically engineered plants in this country and in the
world are planted solely because they can tolerate these herbicides.

Petrovic: Why did you choose to write this book now?

Kimbrell: Actually, I didn't choose to write this book right now. I
wish I could have stopped my fingers three years ago.

But, there are a number of reasons I wrote this book. One, the
industry has been very powerful in the media. It has been able to
influence the traditional media. So, a huge number of Americans
believe that genetically engineered food is feeding the world, that
it's increasing nutrition, that it's making better flavored food, is
creating drought resistant crops, it's curing kids in Africa. This is
complete science fiction. ... It's a marginal technology at best --
it is not curing anything, it is not feeding anything.

As a matter of fact, as we've seen in corn and soy, we have seen
actual yield decreases because of genetic engineering. Not an
increase, no more vitamins. We've seen, actually, FDA studies that
show that it actually decreases vitamin content in food. So, why is
it popular? Why do farmers use it? Because it's very convenient. You
don't have to spot spray your herbicide just on the weed, you can,
for the first time, aerial spray your herbicides over your entire
crop and it won't kill your crop, it'll just kill the weeds.
Although, those weeds are becoming more and more resistant and now
we're having to use more and more.

Petrovic: What are the dangers of genetically engineered food?

Kimbrell: Genetically engineered food is the first really
artificially lab created food that we have. Basically, you (the
scientist) are putting foreign bacteria, foreign viral chains,
foreign anti-biotic resistant genes into each cell of every food. So,
every cell of every genetically engineered food, every one, has a
novel bacteria, has novel viral promoters, has a novel genetic
construct whether it be the herbicide tolerant gene or the Bt, and
has an anti-biotic marker system.

So each one of these, this genetic set, which is completely new and
is placed at random really within each cell within each genetically
engineered food, brings with it threats. Those threats are documented
by the FDA, by the good scientists there -- not the policy people who
forgot to listen to them -- and the risks are: it could take a
nontoxic food and make it toxic. ... It can create new human
allergies ... significantly reduce the vitamin content in the food,
and ... there has been peer-reviewed scientific evidence that it can
be harmful to the immune system.

The environmental risks are that it's biological pollution. We know
now, we've seen over and over again that this is not simply a tool
for the farmer, this is an evasive living pollution. It pollutes
conventional, it pollutes organic, makes these farmers unable to sell
these crops to the European market, to the organic market, and it
creates the gene jump to create super weeds. In the case of fish,
documented, peer-reviewed science out of Purdue University says that
the release of these genetically modified fish, because of the
unexpected changes in these fish, could create complete extinction
for species like salmon and stripped bass.

Petrovic: Any social risks?

Kimbrell: Yes, there are social risks. What happens here, and we've
documented this in the book, is that because of Monsanto (a St. Louis-
based chemical company) having farmers signing technology use
agreements, what you're basically seeing is farmers becoming tenant
farmers for Monsanto. And farmers who have been polluted --
unintentionally polluted -- are being sued, and have been sued by
Monsanto. Farmers who did not understand, who did not sign a
technology use agreement, and did not understand what this technology
was about, are being sued. Saving their seeds, cleaning their seeds
is becoming an illegal activity where they are faced with hundreds of
thousands worth of damages because Monsanto filed lawsuits.

This is really kind of corporate terrorism against America's
farmers. ... It's really (destroyed) the social fabric of a lot of
America's farmland and it's amazing to me that this has gone unreported.

Petrovic: Is organic farming in danger of disappearing?

Kimbrell: No, I don't think that organic farming is in danger of
disappearing. One of the myths that the book also tries to bust is
that people think, "Oh, Pandora's Box is open, we're over, we're
doomed." Not true at all. We, the Center for Food Safety, and a
number of other organizations who we work very closely with, have
been very successful in stopping genetically engineered wheat. ...We
have stopped primarily genetically engineered rice, we have stopped
genetically engineered fish, and that's in this country. Around the
world, these foods are being rejected.

Petrovic: In your book, you talk about Tom and Gail Wiley -- North
Dakota farmers who grow over a thousand acres of food-grade soy. When
they landed a contract with Japan, the prospective buyers tested the
crop and they discovered that the 1.37 percent of the soy had been
contaminated with of genetically engineered seeds. Does the Wiley's
story ring true for a lot of farmers in America?

Kimbrell: A lot of farmers are facing that and worse. At least they
got their crop ... We have literally hundreds of thousands of farmers
in the South that literally cannot plant rice because of rice
contamination. ... So, yeah, it has become and it will become an
increasing problem because it's living pollution. These
contaminations to the extent that we now know -- and our government
seems to think this -- are coming from very small field trials. Even
if (only a few species are affected) ... when it's released, since
it's biological pollution, it disseminates, grows and mutates.

Petrovic: Why has three quarters of agricultural genetic diversity
been lost in the past century?

Kimbrell: We've seen a devastating loss ... that has happened because
of hybrid monoculture, that has happened because of industrial
agriculture. In my book, Fatal Agriculture, we have all these experts
who explain how that happened. It is the monoculture that we see in
our crops even before genetic engineering even came on board in '96,
'97. And that's already a tragedy.

It's not like genetic engineering is the only bad thing that ever
happened in agriculture. That hybridization of monoculture is bad in
a number of ways, but the loss of diversity is also a loss of food
security. If you have one type of corn, one type of tomato, one type
of wheat out there and there is a corn blithe or a wheat blithe there
is no genetic diversity to protect that crop. We saw that with the
corn blithe a couple of decades ago and we had to get corn from South
America to save us ... Genetic engineering, of course, is monoculture
on steroids... It's the ultimate monoculture, but it's also an
unnatural monoculture because it has genetic material in it that's
never been in that plant ever before. I mean, you're not only
crossing species, you're crossing phyla.

Petrovic: Will we reach a point when there is no genetic diversity?

Kimbrell: We'll never reach the zero point because there will always
be some natural mutation, but I think we're going in the opposite
direction now. We have tremendous efforts now to save local seeds;
that's part of one of the documentaries that I'm making, we're
showing that there really is a future of food. That's very encouraging.

But obviously if we were to continue down the path of industrial
genetically engineered agriculture, yeah, you would get to a point
where literally -- and we're almost there in some cases -- where
literally you have one variety, or two varieties of lettuce, one
variety of corn, one variety of tomato, where it'll be so monoculture
because that's the easiest one for them to grow in large quantities,
the easiest one for them to store, and the easiest one for them to sell.

We're at a real crossroads for the future of food. ... We're either
going to continue down the industrial path all the way to genetically
engineering our food so that it literally becomes nothing but a tool
of industrial agriculture, including withstanding all these poisons.
Or, we're going to go down the organic and beyond way, which says no
to genetic engineering, no to irradiation, no to this massive
alteration at the atomic and genetic level.

Petrovic: What changes would you like to see the FDA make?

Kimbrell: Oh, thank you for bringing up my favorite agency. ... There
is no mandatory testing, there is no mandatory labeling, what they
did set up is what they call a voluntary consulting process. So, if
you're putting a new genetically engineered food on the market, you
can choose if you wish, to consult with the FDA if you have
issues. ... Can you imagine this with drugs? If you tell the drug
companies, "Oh, no, you don't have to test, you don't have to label
your drug, but if you think it's going to kill somebody, you should
probably consult us."

I mean, no one would accept that. No one would accept that with car
safety, no one would accept that with virtually any aspect of what's
going on, yet we're accepting it with genetically modified food? ...
That really is a corporate coup d'etat.

Petrovic: With the help of this book can people completely avoid
genetically engineered food and for how long?

Kimbrell: Yes, with the help of the book, if they read the book
carefully, and follow the instructions, they will be able to avoid
virtually all -- there may be some enzymes in cheese, for example,
some very, very minor enzyme stuff -- but for all practical purposes,
yes, they will be able to avoid GMOs.

The intriguing part of your question is for how long. And we will, on
the Center for Food Safety Web site have continuing updates on what's
going on. ... For now this will protect you, but that shouldn't make
us feel good about our government. If it had mandatory labeling you
wouldn't need this book. You wouldn't need to take all this time and
effort because they should have done it for you.

Petrovic: Why do you think topics that you cover in this book, such
as herbicide-resistant super weeds, super pests, and the dangers to
organic farming don't show up in the mainstream media?

Kimbell: You should look at their advertisers. I mean if you look at
the advertisers of even National Public Radio -- they're not allowed
to have advertisers, but they have underwriters -- you'll see major
biotechnology companies. ... And I also think there is a "gee-whiz"
quality, particularly in America, that anything that seems
technological and new is automatically better.

Petrovic This book is different from other books on genetic
engineering in that it's much more practical and accessible. What was
the thought process behind that?

Kimbrell: There's been a lot of books out there that are really good,
but let's face it a lot of people had a hard time getting through
high school biology. A lot of people have not been spending a lot of
time on biology. So, we wanted to present it in a very accurate way,
and that's why the whole book is exhaustively footnoted ... however,
we wanted to present it in a way that would be fun, interesting and I
think very beautiful, I hope you agree. I think it's very attractive,
very interesting, very engaging and after all, that's what we're
about. We wanted people to understand and present this in a very
interesting way.

---------

Vanja Petrovic is an editorial intern with AlterNet.






  • [Livingontheland] There's a Lot You Don't Know About What's in Your Food, TradingPostPaul, 07/03/2007

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