Most people don’t realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the North American food supply.
The Future of Food, a chilling documentary created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety.
At first, Garcia thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the “terminator” gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.
“It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue.” That is, corporate control of the food system and the patenting of life.
She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the “green revolution” of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide. The chemical companies succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapped patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.
Garcia tells the David-versus-Goliath story of Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser. He’s one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company’s Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.
Ultimately, the film is a call to action — for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation. Labeling might just drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.
“Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn’t challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn’t stopped, at some point it will be too late.”
There are seven parts to this film. Watch them all.
The pet food recall brought home to some of us the changes in animal nutrition that have taken place since the mid-20th century. Rover’s and Fluffy’s table scraps were replaced by scientifically-formulated slop and kibble that aimed to provide optimum, all-life-stages nutrition.
We know that this is a highly profitable way of reusing the waste from the human food industry. Ground up and rendered bits that are not fit for human consumption, including 4-D and euthanized animals, can be reformulated into big bucks chow. Kind of like enriching potato chips with vitamins and preservatives, only a lot worse.
Read Ann Martin’s “Food Pets Die For” to find out why Rover and Fluffy are running up such big vet bills.
Anyway, to the topic at hand, it is no surprise that the agro-food chain presents us humans with more choices to become fat and sick too. Or not.
Here’s a vintage photo from Life Magazine of what the American poster family ate in the 1950’s.
“In this remarkable picture of plenty, Steve Czekalinski, his wife Stephanie and his sons, Stephen and Henry, are surrounded by the food they will have eaten this year - 2 ½ tons of it. The photograph, made for the Du Pont company’s magazine Better Living, is based on statistics on the American diet supplied by the Department of Agriculture.”
When Harold Evans was writing his history of the hundred years from 1889 to 1989, The American Century, he sifted through something like thirty thousand photographs, paintings, and cartoons, and chose the Czekalinski family picture.
“I am drawn to Alex Henderson’s carefully posed 1951 descriptive photograph of the Du Pont worker Steve Czekalinski with his wife and two boys. They are framed amid a cornucopia of good food, the 669 bottles of milk, 578 pounds of meat, 131 dozen fresh eggs, 440 pounds of fresh fruit, the coffee, cereal, flour, and so on that the typical American family enjoyed in the booming mid-fifties. It’s a materialistic and commercial image, and some will object to that, but the pursuit of plenty has been an American preoccupation—and the business of America is business, is it not? I admit I hesitated long before nominating the Czekalinski, but it also has something of the American character—it is an honest, unpretentious boast—and it suggests the central story of America in the twentieth century. Here is a man of Polish descent standing proudly and happily with his family, enjoying a prosperity never before known in the history of the world. A photograph that hints at a fulfillment of the American dream is not a bad way of marking the end of the millennium.”
O Devayani, you thought they would never die.
You bought a bag of tomatoes in October,
and ate most of them
half ripe, as they always are,
from the grocery store.
But — having momentarily lost
the taste for tomatoes –
you set two aside to ripen.
Week after week they remained
on top of the refrigerator,
not quite ripe,
yellowish-red, their skins firm,
their flesh smooth.
They didn’t ripen and they didn’t rot.
Months went by,
they remained the same as the day
you put them atop the refrigerator.
You laughed with your friends about them,
you speculated on the horrors
of genetically altered foodstuffs.
You thought of the half dozen you had eaten.
Would they stay in your stomach
month after month,
unchanged, forever, like the two tomatoes
on top of the fridge?
You read an article that said irradiating
vegetables
keeps them in a state of not quite ripe.
It didn’t say forever, but…
Irradiated food. One month,
two months
three months
four months
five months –
possibly in the sixth month,
first one and then the other tomato
began to rot.
They soon began to smell abominably.
Is this food?
Two tomatoes,
two immortal tomatoes.
O Devayani,
do you wonder
that you fear the sustenance
of this society:
fear, anxiety, permanence, insurance,
the desire to forego change
and death?
O Devayani,
a wise woman would fear to eat
anything at all.
Two Tomatoes, by Jan Haag
FlavrSavr tomatoes, thanks to Monsanto and friends. StarLink corn too. But their best shot was the Terminator.
Corporate multinationals like Monsanto could change the way farmers around the world have operated for millennia. Bent on controlling the food chain, their “technology protection system” rendered seeds sterile. It would protect their intellectual property - mostly herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Farmers would be forced to buy their seed at every planting.
So much for the myth that commercial biotechnology’s aim is to Solve World Hunger.
NDP tables a ban on Terminator seeds and technology
In related news, NDP agriculture critic Alex Atamanenko introduced a bill on May 31 banning “terminator technology” and committing Canada to sustaining farmers and the farming industry.
According to Jack Layton, “For generations, the world’s farmers have harvested seeds from their crops to replant for the next season. Yet this practice, which is crucial to farmers both here in Canada and in developing countries, is being threatened by multi-national corporations who seek to control the world’s food supply. We must not let this happen in Canada.”
Details of the campaign to support Bill C-448 and transparent GMO labelling at the following links:
Melamine, cyanuric acid, aminopterin, amilorine, amiloride, and now acetaminophen. What is this stuff doing in pet food anyway, and what else have they simply not reported yet?
According to Pet Connection, the FDA is investigating imported Chinese wheat gluten, corn gluten, corn meal, soy protein, rice bran and rice protein concentrate, in both the human- and pet-food systems. These products are widely used in human food production, in breads, pastas, “meat”-substitutes, pizza, baby formula, protein drinks and bars and more. The tainted pet food has also been fed to hogs, poultry and farmed fish.
The first recall had more than 60 million containers of cuts and gravy style food that turned out to have wheat gluten tainted with melamine, which is used in the manufacture of plastic countertops, cleaning agents, glue and fertilizer. The products were all made by Menu Foods under almost 100 different brand names at all price points. Subsequent recalls have included dry foods, and foods containing rice protein concentrate and corn gluten. At time of this writing, companies continue to pull products.
The Veterinary Information Network’s extrapolation indicates that pet deaths are in the range of 2,000 to 7,000, affected pets in the tens of thousands, with veterinary costs in the range of $2 million to $20 million.
To find out what foods have been recalled, what to do if your pet is sick, and how to prevent trouble, check out Itchmo’s pet discussion site, which focusses on the recall.
Alternative pet foods are emerging as the primary beneficiaries of the recent pet food recall crisis, and could enjoy double-digit growth rates over the next two years, according to a new study by market research firm Packaged Facts. Packaged Facts estimates there will be a brand shift in the market worth $1.3 billion to $4.3 billion in pet food sales. The report identifies the main beneficiaries in this brand-switching trend as “high-quality pet foods chosen as alternatives to traditional brands”.
