The Death of Real Food: Monsanto and the Elimination of Trans Fats

[marmar]

from HuffPost:


Elissa Altman

The Death of Real Food: Monsanto and the Elimination of Trans Fats
Posted July 20, 2007 | 02:05 PM (EST)


The gauntlet is down, the oven mitts are off, the pork confit's been eaten and the sweet butter is gone. Perhaps, for good.

I have long bemoaned the banning of trans fats, but not for the obvious reasons: not because I believe that the government should take the role of Educator rather than Decider, and put responsibility into the public's hands, lest we all turn into pod people who are comfortable having others make choices for us. Not because I believe that basic classes in nutrition should be a requirement in all public schools, at the Federal level. (If prayer can make it onto the agenda, how come required nutritional guidance can't?) Not because I believe that artificial trans fats should be stricken on the basis that they are not foods, but are assembled in laboratories. Instead, I have bewailed the banning of trans fats because, in an effort to replace cheap cooking oils with ones that meet new standards and guidelines, the ban has occurred concomitant to a strategic plan by the engineered food and seed industry -- led by Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Monsanto -- to invent newer, better, and more acceptable industrial cooking oils without partial hydrogenation, containing zero trans fats, and therefore suitable in the eyes of politicians and shareholders alike.

What has been absent from the debate surrounding artificial trans fat-free products is that many of them may be far more dangerous than trans fat themselves are thought to be: Cargill's specialty trans fat-free canola seed has been engineered using Monsanto's Roundup Ready™ technology, which renders seeds herbicide-resistant. Archer Daniels Midland, who will be processing Monsanto's Vistive ™ trans fat-free soybean seed for the Kellogg Corporation, among others, is also engineered with the Roundup Ready™ trait. In a press release dated January 31, 2005, Cargill announced that their seed would be ready for commercial growing "as early as 2007." Archer Daniels Midland, in a press release dated January 2006, expected to grow 40,000 acres of Vistive ™ trans fat-free soybean seeds for crushing shortly thereafter. In the first quarter of 2006, Monsanto reported a 634 million dollar gross profit, with the bulk appearing in seeds and genomics, compared to a 491 million dollar gross profit in the first quarter of 2005.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but if trans fat-banning cities were really so desperately worried about our collective heart conditions and overall health, wouldn't it be better, cheaper, safer, and far more delicious for restaurants and food manufacturers to be required to use naturally-occurring fats in moderation rather than industrially-produced ones bent on end-of-fiscal-year results? Wouldn't it be prudent for Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Monsanto to, in the interest of public disclosure and safety, let consumers know that what we are buying has been bred and/or treated with a substance bearing no small connection to the herbicide that many of us will be using in the coming weeks to kill poison ivy? Shouldn't the FDA demand a clear labeling of trans fat-free alternatives as having been produced with Roundup Ready™? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elissa-altman/the-death-of-real-food-m_b_57120.html

[DemBones DemBones]

1. The words "Monsanto" and "real food" shouldn't appear in the same sentence,

(or title, as is the case here.) Monsanto is one of the worst corporations in the world, IMO.

I have long thought that manufacturers should be required not only to list all ingredients but to specify whether it contains any genetically engineered organisms, and, after all we've learned lately about Chinese foods, specify whether a food is from, or contains ingredients from, another country (and, if so, what country.)

It's very odd that clothes are labeled as to country of origin, even labeled "Made in USA of imported fabric," but we don't get that sort of information about food.

[Broke Dad]

2. Amen

The 2007 Farm Bill is supposed to come out of committee with stricter food labeling requirements and more emphasis on organic foods. If you care about what you eat, you should let your congressperson know that you support stricter labeling and protection for organic farmers. The House Ag Committee made a deal yesterday the beef will be labeled "grown in Mexico or the United States" and pork will be labeled "grown in Canada or the the United States." Apparently, Cargill, Smithfield, Tyson and others want to blur that line for country of origin of our meat as their pound of flesh for allowing stricter labeling.

Monsanto has a Roundup plant just down the road from me. I have heard from employees at the plant that the inert ingredients in Roundup are more harmful and polluting than the active ingredient and someday Monsanto will be whacked by the EPA for billions to clean up the fallout from Roundup.

FYI, did you know the two ways that Monsanto makes genetically modified seeds is to use a cancer cell from trees and splice that into the other seed sell with the modified DNA? The other way they splice DNA is to use .22 shells and "shoot" the modified DNA into the plant cell they want to modify. The tree cancer cell is particularly effective, because Monsanto has figured out a way to "hollow out" the tree cancer cell and add other DNA into the cancer cell to graft to the plant tissue that they want to modify.

So the question that Monsanto does not want us to ask is: Are genetically modified crops more like DDT, a ticking environmental time bomb, or are they more like Borlaug's Green Revolution which allowed millions in India and Asia to live because of better seeds and farming techniques? Sounds like a Ray Bradbury sci-fi novel . . .

With regard to Chinese food ingredients, be afraid, be very afraid . . .

[DemBones DemBones]

3. Thanks for all the info. I don't think "Mexico OR the United States"

or any other "X or the US" is acceptable for labeling. They know where the meat is from, they can label it but don't want to. It won't affect us because we're vegetarians but I object on principle to such an inane plan.

I was just over at kucinich.us and read something I hadn't known before:

"In the 106th Congress, his call for labeling and safety testing of all genetically engineered foods provoked a $50 million advertising campaign by the biotech industry. Kucinich hosted an international parliamentary session, attended by officials of 18 countries, on the social, economic, political and health impact of genetic food technologies."

$50 million to convince people that GMOs should not be tested for safety or labeled to inform the public. Why didn't they spend the money on testing and labeling? Because they know it's not safe, perhaps?


About Roundup: do you know about the Canadian farmer who had all his canola crop and all the seeds he had saved for 40 years confiscated when Monsanto spies found a few Roundup-Ready plants in his fields. (Yes, they send out spies to look for unauthorized growing of their patented plants.)

He contends that he did not plant them, that they got there from an adjacent field whose owner was growing the Roundup-Ready canola. He had been saving his own seed for 40 years to improve his crops, wouldn't want the Monsanto plants. But a Canadian court ordered him to pay a huge fine, on top of his loss of crops and seeds.

Worse yet, he says the Roundup Ready plants came up again the next year on his land and he couldn't eradicate them. They just kept coming back. That's frightening. He's been fighting Monsanto for ten years or more now. I haven't checked on the case lately, don't know if he ever got rid of those GM plants or what's up with the court case. Will look it up later tonight.

Have the guys who work making Roundup ever told you what the ingredients are? That would be interesting to know. It may be on the label, for all I know. There would have to be Material Safety Data Sheets on each ingredient that would describe all the potential hazards. I worked in an organic chemical plant (which of course has nothing to do with natural foods!) and the workers had access to the MSDS for the chemicals they worked with. That's probably how the guys you know found out the inert ingredients are hazardous.