America Has Lost Its Way
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The source of health is biodiversity. The more participants in any ecosystem, the healthier it is. And this extends past organic gardens and farms to society at large. Inclusivity is healthy. Community is healthy. Compassion is healthy.
Now more than 50,000 Central American women and children have come to us for shelter when their home countries turned into gang-ruled narcostates, where mothers have been told that the gangs are coming for their teenage girls so they can be “girlfriends” for the gang members, when bullets threaten the lives of even very young children.
These people have been met with shrieking, hate-filled Americans who want them deported back to their home countries. We have truly lost our way. Who was it who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me”? Is it really going to destroy America to give 52,000 refugees in desperate straits a safe haven? I heard some of the protestors say these poor, frightened children and their mothers are bringing lice, scabies, disease, and crime to our land. Ew—cooties! What is this? Middle school? The real crime is the callous, inhuman hearts of the protestors.
The protestors call them “illegals.” The subtext is that they have brown skins and speak Spanish. And it’s the most sickening display of heartlessness I have witnessed in this country since the days of Jim Crow. These are people, people—our brothers and sisters. We should welcome them, adjudicate their cases, deport them if there’s no danger to them if they go back, but give them refugee status if they would return into harm’s way. I mean, put yourself in their shoes.
But that’s not the only instance of how this once-proud country is showing its mean-spirited and callous heart. Over 100,000 impoverished people in Detroit have had their water turned off. And American cities have sought to eradicate homelessness not so much by giving people shelter, but by making it illegal to be homeless. Citywide bans on things that homeless people need to do to survive are on the rise, according to a new report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Key findings: camping bans are up 60 percent since 2011, begging bans up 25 percent, loitering bans up 35 percent, sitting bans up 43 percent, and vehicle-sleeping bans are up 119 percent, according to The Huffington Post.
It looks like our endless wars and violence have curdled our spirit. Once we were a generous, open-hearted, optimistic people. Now we have lost our way. I remember on the night when Barack Obama was elected, he stood on a platform in Chicago and proclaimed, “Change has come to America.” How horribly sad that the change is in the wrong direction.
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WHO WOULDA THUNK? ORGANIC FOOD IS PURE AND NUTRITIOUS
From The New York Times, July 12, 2014:
“Adding fuel to the debates over the merits of organic food, a comprehensive review of earlier studies found substantially higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of pesticides in organic fruits, vegetables, and grains compared with conventionally grown produce.
“’It shows very clearly how you grow your food has an impact,’ said Carlo Leifert, a professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University in England, who led the research. ‘If you buy organic fruits and vegetables, you can be sure you have, on average, a higher amount of antioxidants at the same calorie level.’”
My take on this? This is news? Haven’t we known this for 60 years?
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ATTENTION YOUNG FARMERS
Here are two websites you should be aware of. 1) http://agrilicious.org/
2) www.thegreenhorns.net. If you are a small-scale organic farmer or want to be one, you’ll find a lot of great info and friends galore on these sites.
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CONGRESS THINKS IF YOU’RE ANTI-GMO, YOU’RE AN IGNORAMUS
Mike McAuliff, writing in The Huffington Post, makes this report:
WASHINGTON – It’s pretty rare that members of Congress and all the witnesses they’ve called will declare out loud that Americans are just too ignorant to be given a piece of information, but that was a key conclusion of a session of the House Agriculture Committee this week.
The issue was genetically modified organisms, or GMOs as they’re often known in the food industry. And members of the subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture (which, by the way, is the subcommittee in charge of promoting organic farming), as well as four experts, agreed that the genetic engineering of food crops has been a thorough success responsible for feeding the hungry, improving nutrition, and reducing the use of pesticides. (All nonsense, by the way.)
People who oppose GMOs or want them labeled so that consumers can know what they’re eating are alarmists who thrive on fear and ignorance, the panel agreed. Labeling GMO foods would only stoke those fears, and harm a beneficial thing, so it should not be allowed, the lawmakers and witnesses agreed.
“I really worry that labeling does more harm than good, that it leads too many people away from it and it diminishes the market for GMOs that are the solution to a lot of the problems we face,” said David Just, a professor at Cornell University and co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs. (You might want to give Professor Just your feelings on the idea that GMOs are “the solution to a lot of the problems we face.” He might enjoy hearing from some of the ignorant people who oppose GMOs. His email is drj3@cornell.edu).
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) agreed with Just and asked him, “What is the biggest drawback? Is it the ignorance of what the product is, just from a lack of education?”
“It is ignorance of the product, and it’s a general skepticism of anything they eat that is too processed or treated in some way that they don’t quite understand,” Just said. “Even using long scientific-sounding words makes it sound like it’s been grown in a test tube, and people get scared of it,” Just added.
There are terms for Professor Just’s casual put-down of anti-GMO people as uneducated, ignorant, frightened luddites who don’t understand the value of genetic engineering and are confused by long, scientific-sounding words. I think the terms are condescension, superciliousness, arrogance, and conceit. God knows that people who are skeptical “of anything they eat that is too processed or treated in some way that they don’t quite understand” need a good education by the learned professors at Cornell. They’ll set us straight for sure. Well, I’ll say this: Professor Just wins my 2014 award for arrogant moron of the year.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) agreed with another witness, Calestous Juma, an international development professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, that political leaders had been cowed by misinformed populaces into bending on GMOs, especially in the European Union, where Juma said hundreds of millions of euros have been spent on studies that have found GMOs safe. (He didn’t mention the studies that found GMOs to be harmful.)
“It’s obvious that while the science in the EU is incontrovertible about the health and safety benefits of genetically modified hybrid crops, that because of politics, people are afraid to lead, and inform consumers,” Schrader said. (Rep. Schrader shows his own ignorance here. The science is far from incontrovertible—in fact, one meta study that looked at hundreds of studies of the effect of GMO crops on biological systems in animals concluded that Roundup, the herbicide used in conjunction with GMO corn and soybeans, “may be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.”)
Also, entirely missing from the hearing was any suggestion that there are real concerns about the impact of genetically engineered food, such as the growth of pesticide-resistant “super weeds,” over-reliance on single-crop factory farming, decreased biodiversity, evidence of inflammatory disease in animals fed GMO feed, and a lack of a consistent approval process.
The issue may soon gain fresh relevance on Capitol Hill, where a bill backed by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) prevents states from requiring GMO labeling. It could get marked up as early as September. The bill also would allow genetically engineered food to be labeled “100 percent natural.”
The idea of the bill brought Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield to Capitol Hill to push back, along with Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who backs labeling.
Greenfield told HuffPost that labeling is a simple, inexpensive matter of letting people know what’s in their food, and letting them decide what they want to support and eat.
The upshot is that the “experts” and members of Congress concluded that Americans should be denied GMO labels because they are too ignorant.
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TIME FOR A NEW ‘DIRTY DOZEN – PLUS’ LIST
The Environmental Working Group’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ plus annual list of most contaminated fruits and vegetables is out. Print it out and push-pin it to your kitchen bulletin board.
http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/list.php
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY: PROPAGANDIST FOR BIG FOOD
The following information is from Bettina Elias Siegel, a former lawyer, freelance writer, and school food advocate. She now blogs about children and food policy at The Lunch Tray. She writes:
A new study by Dr. Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, seeks to determine why people — mothers in particular — develop so-called “food fears” about certain ingredients (such as sodium, fat, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG and lean finely textured beef otherwise known as pink slime) and what the food industry and government can do about it.
The study’s ultimate conclusion, that “food fears” can be addressed by “providing information regarding an ingredient’s history or the other products in which it is used,” is hardly controversial. But some other things about this study raise red flags, starting with the fact that what might be entirely legitimate concerns about particular ingredients are uniformly (and patronizingly) characterized as “food fears,” and that the study was funded in part by the Corn Refiners Association, the trade group representing manufacturers of the very “food fear” examined; i.e., concerns about high-fructose corn syrup.
But of greatest concern is how the study’s findings have been mischaracterized not just in the media but in Dr. Wansink’s own public statements about his data. Here’s a sampling.
From the New York Daily News
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Fear of food containing controversial ingredients may be fueled by Facebook. A new study suggests that people who avoid additives like MSG, sodium benzoate, and pink slime get most of their information from what they see on social media sites and elsewhere on the Internet.
From Today:
“Soy causes cancer.” “Gluten may lead to autism.” “There’s yoga mat material in your sandwich!” “Sugar feeds cancer!” Are your Facebook friends making you afraid to eat? New research in the journal Food Quality and Preference identifies who fears food the most –and it’s probably those of us most addicted to social media.
Despite a troubling lack of scientific support, Wansink seems intent on using his study to paint an unflattering portrait of those who obtain information about food ingredients online. These moms are militant “haters” of soda, candy, and chips. They’re so uninformed that they’re misled by inaccurate online sources, yet they share this false information on social media out of a need for approval.
Wansink is equally critical of the Internet itself, going so far as to say in his promotional video that “Reading about food ingredients on the Web is one of the worst things you can do if you want the facts…”
Why does Wansink seem so intent on demonizing the Internet and social media and those who rely on those outlets for food information? In the end, who benefits from these characterizations?
To the great consternation of the processed food industry, it is becoming ever more apparent that the Internet and social media are extremely powerful tools for advancing various food-related causes, from aiding grassroots activism to spreading viral videos promoting sustainable agriculture or decrying junk food, to making possible online petitions like the one I (Bettina) started in 2012, which garnered a quarter of a million signatures and within nine days led the USDA to change one of its school food policies. Indeed, since my petition victory, online petitions have become a favored tool among some food activists.
The junk food industry would no doubt prefer a return to the days when it alone controlled the narrative about food ingredients and food processing. Now, though, for better or worse, anyone with a computer can write a blog post, post a video or start an online petition about a food-related issue. If I ran a food company these days, I’m sure I would be lying awake at night, worried that the next Internet food campaign could have one of my own products in its sights.
So what better way to combat this growing threat than to delegitimize both the message (concerns about ingredients are “crazy food fears”) and the medium (seeking food information on the Internet is “the worst thing you can do”). It doesn’t hurt to also create an unflattering cartoon of the message’s recipient, the hapless, freaked out “mom.”
But unfortunately for food companies, the Internet genie is out of the bottle and there’s no turning back. So instead of commissioning studies that demonize the Internet, social media and/or “moms with food fears,” food companies should pocket that money and instead take to heart the one simple lesson to be gleaned from the many recent successes in Internet food activism: Consumers want transparency.
If a food corporation is currently engaging in any practice or using any ingredient which would not survive public opinion should it ever come to light, that company is taking a serious public relations risk in this new Internet age. And that, in my view, is the real “food fear” lurking behind Wansink’s latest study.
Now this note from Jeff Cox: Thanks to Ms. Siegel for this enlightening look at the Cornell study. What’s really troubling to me is that Cornell, a highly respected university, jeopardizes that respect when it supports so-called “science” whose obvious intent is to promote the propaganda of Big Food. People have food fears for a legitimate reason. It’s not the researcher’s job to take industry’s side against the public’s legitimate concerns. A more useful route might be to investigate the public’s food fears to see why they exist, in a fair, impartial, and transparent manner. Perhaps Mr. Wansink could have looked at the mounting evidence for the disastrous human health effects of glyphosate herbicide used in the production of GMO crops, rather than impugning the intelligence and education of the people who are reporting these studies.
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PRENATAL PESTICIDE EXPOSURE LEADS TO LOWER IQ IN KIDS
Children born to a group of 265 mothers living in low-income, public housing were studied. By age seven, children born to mothers in the group most exposed to pesticides scored 5.5 percent lower on a common test of working memory and 2.7 percent lower in terms of IQ, compared to children born to mothers in the low-exposure group.
A study carried out by U.C. Berkeley scientists, in cooperation with the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas, measured urinary metabolites of insecticides during pregnancy, and then from children at six months of age, and periodically through age five. A variety of intelligence and learning tests were used to measure the mental abilities of 329 children at age seven. Children born to the most heavily exposed mothers had an IQ deficit of seven points, or about 7 percent, compared to the low exposure quintile.
The senior author of this study, Brenda Eskenazi, told CNN.com that the impacts on intelligence found in their study were similar in magnitude to the adverse impacts associated with high lead exposures, in the 1960s and 1970s, and were comparable to a child performing six-months behind average in a school population.
If you want to know more, here are the studies:
Rauh, V., et al., “7-Year Neurodevelopmental Scores and Prenatal Exposure to Chlorpyrifos, a Common Agricultural Insecticide,” Environmental Health Perspectives, online April 21, 2011
Bouchard, M.E., et al., “Prenatal Exposure to OP Pesticides and IQ in 7-Year Old Children,”Environmental Health Perspectives, online April 21, 2011
Engel, S.M., et al., “Prenatal Exposure to OPs, Paraoxonase 1, and Cognitive Development in Children,” Environmental Health Perspectives, online April 21, 2011
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BUSH TAX CUTS GUTTED AMERICANS’ INCOMES $6.6 TRILLION
The following isn’t strictly about organic food and its production, but we are all folks who have to spend money to eat, and money seems in short supply these days.
Remember when George W. Bush took office and instituted the “Bush Tax Cuts” that were supposed to promote prosperity?
According to an analysis by Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston, formerly of The New York Times, the Bush tax cuts, touted as a harbinger of prosperity by the Republican Party, actually robbed each American taxpayer of $48,000 in pre-tax personal income during the 12 years of their existence, for a total of approximately 6.6 trillion dollars.
This is more than enough to pay for every student loan, car loan, and credit card debt in the U.S, while still leaving 2.4 trillion dollars in the pockets of Americans. It is the equivalent of an extra 11 dollars a day lost to each American taxpayer over the last 12 years.
Johnston analyzed rates of long term average personal incomes as reported by American taxpayers from 2000-2012, adjusting for inflation and population growth. In 10 of the 12 years when the Bush tax cuts were in effect, the average income shown on tax returns was lower than in 2000. In the two upside years, average income rose modestly, up $504 for 2006 and $1,744 for 2007.
Total those 12 years and the net shortfall per taxpayer comes to $48,010.
He notes that after 12 years of tax cuts, average real hourly wages are now 6 percent less than they were in 1972-1973.
Less than they were 40 years ago! Where did the money go?
Of the total national increase in income in 2012 over 2009, an astonishing one third went to just 16,000 households, almost 95 cents of each dollar went to the top 1 percent, while the bottom 90 percent lost ground.
Lest we forget.
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