USDA Revokes ‘Grass Fed’ Standard
Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on USDA Revokes ‘Grass Fed’ Standard
First Big Ag and its henchpeople at the USDA and the FDA didn’t want you to know whether your food contains GMOs. No reason for labels, they said. There’s no difference between regular food and GMOs, they said. Quit being such worrywarts, they told the public.
Then they took away the labels stating where the meat in the meat counter comes from. No reason to tell you, they told the public. No reason for you to know, they said. Maybe it comes from the sweet grasslands of western Canada or maybe from the polluted fields near smoke-choked Beijing. Meat is meat, they said Quit being such worrywarts.
Now we discover that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) has rescinded the labeling standard for grass fed meat that was developed over the course of four years and finalized with the support of national farm and consumer organizations in 2006, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition reports.
“Meat labeling just became even more confusing for farmers and consumers,” said Ferd Hoefner, Policy Director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “USDA is revoking a label standard that had widespread farm and consumer support. Actions such as this take us into a Wild West situation, where anything goes and both farmers and consumers lose.”
In revoking the standard, the AMS states that having a strong, clear, consumer-friendly labeling standard “does not facilitate the marketing of agricultural products in a manner that is useful to stakeholders or consumers” because a different USDA agency, the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), must approve meat labels and “there is no guarantee that a USDA-verified production/marketing claim will be approved by FSIS.”
“The rationale that a strong USDA label standard for grass fed beef is not useful because it might not be recognized by a partner agency is outrageous,” said Hoefner. “It is both sad and true that these two USDA agencies often do not coordinate, and worse yet that in some cases FSIS has looked the other way, allowing particularly unscrupulous meat companies to abuse the USDA standard,” Hoefner said. “But the common sense solution is not to revoke the standard, but instead to tackle the lack of interagency communication head-on.”
The revocation notice gives producers using the grass fed label 30 days to either convert the newly revoked USDA grass fed label to their own private grass-fed standard, or, if they don’t have a private standard, to develop a new grass fed standard.
“Rather than bringing consistency and common sense to our food marketing system, USDA seems to be throwing in the towel,” said Hoefner. “This is terrible public policy that will create a multitude of non-uniform labels, which will open the door to more confusion and subterfuge in the marketplace. It is an affront to consumers, who have the right to know how their food is raised, and to the farmers whose innovation and hard work created the trusted grass fed label standard.”
The grass fed label standard now being revoked stated among other things that grass, forbs, and forage needed to be 99 percent or more of the energy source for the lifetime of a ruminant species after weaning in order to qualify as grass fed. Prior to the setting of that standard, grain fed animals were often sold as grass fed, with USDA’s approval.
So, let’s sum up: You can’t know whether your food has been genetically altered. You can’t know where it comes from. And now the government won’t vouch for grass fed beef being grass fed. You have to trust the ranchers to do that. But 15 years ago, when we last trusted the ranchers to do that, “grain fed animals were often sold as grass fed, with USDA’s approval.”
Okay—so logically, what are the next steps in the complete submersion into darkness of our conventional food supply? Do we really have to know what kind of meat is in the package? Maybe the label should just say MEAT. Even that may be too revealing for the corporate food industry. Why should you know whether it’s meat in that package? Maybe it should just be labeled FOOD. Or maybe, there should be no labels at all, just an aisle in the market with packages wrapped in plain brown butcher paper under a sign that says: EAT THIS AND STFU.
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CDC FINDS ‘RARE STRAIN’ OF E. COLI IN CHIPOTLE OUTBREAK
Last week in this space, I smelled a rat in regards to Chipotle’s outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. Too many powerful, prosperous, and unscrupulous corporations have good reason to see Chipotle fail, thus curbing the chain’s attacks on GMO and conventional foods.
Seems I’m not the only one whose nose was offended. Here’s Mike Adams, writing in NaturalNews: “After observing recent events involving Chipotle and E. coli, here’s my analysis of the situation: Chipotle’s E. coli outbreaks are not random chance. They are the result of the biotech industry unleashing bioterrorism attacks against the only fast food company that has publicly denounced GMOs.
“How do we know? The CDC has already admitted that some of these E. coli outbreaks involve a ‘rare genetic strain’ of E. coli not normally seen in foods. Furthermore, we also know the track record of the biotech industry engaging in the most criminal, dirty, sleazebag tactics imaginable against any person or company that speaks out against GMOs.
“Doctor Oz, for example, was maliciously targeted in a defamation campaign funded by the biotech industry earlier this year. The onslaught against Oz was initiated because he publicly expressed his support for honest GMO labeling on foods.
“As the attacks escalated, Doctor Oz had his own team investigate the source of the attacks and found they were all biotech industry shills, some with felony criminal records and long histories of dubious propaganda activities targeting anti-GMO activists.”
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SCIENTIST LINKS BEE DIE-OFFS TO PESTICIDE, IS GAGGED BY USDA
One of the world’s top bee scientists has been suspended for publishing research on bee-killing pesticides, according to the folks at SumOfUs.
Jonathan Lundgren was an award-winning scientist for 11 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But once he started publishing data linking pesticides to bee and butterfly die-offs, he was ordered to stop talking. When he refused, he was suspended.
Now Lundgren is fighting back. He’s filed a whistleblower complaint to make sure that corporations—whose influence extends to the USDA–can’t get away with gagging science.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen corporate-influenced governments trying to silence bee scientists. In the U.K., the government silenced scientists who disagreed with a decision to lift a ban on bee-killing pesticides. Big Ag lobbyists wanted the ban lifted, but when the scientists wouldn’t go along with it, the government simply told them not to publish their views.
But this time the corporations picked on the wrong scientist. Lundgren is refusing to back down. Now a judge has ruled that Lundgren’s whistleblower complaint may go forward — meaning he has a real chance of getting justice and showing how corporations are exerting undue influence over government research.
SumOfUs is a worldwide movement of people working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.
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NEW BILLS WOULD GUT STATES’ CONTROL OVER TOXIC CHEMICALS
A new set of bills that aims to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) may nullify the efforts of states such as Maine and California to regulate dangerous chemicals, according to an article in The Intercept.
The Senate’s bill, passed just before the 2015 holidays, is particularly restrictive. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act—named, ironically, for the New Jersey senator who supported strong environmental protections—would make it much harder for states to regulate chemicals after the EPA has evaluated them, and would even prohibit states from acting while the federal agency is in the process of investigating them.
The Senate’s version has some significant differences from the House bill—the TSCA Modernization Act that passed in June — and the reconciliation process is now underway. If the worst provisions from both bills wind up in the final law, which could reach the president’s desk as soon as February, the new legislation will gut laws that have put Oregon, California, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, and Washington state at the forefront of chemical regulation.
There is little question that the original Toxic Substance Control Act is broken, as even industry has recently begun to admit. TSCA, passed in 1976, was born from outrage about the health risks of asbestos and PCBs, and it gave the EPA the authority to regulate tens of thousands of toxic substances. But the process was heavily influenced by the chemical industry, which initially opposed regulation before helping to write the law. The final legislation grandfathered in the vast majority of some 82,000 chemicals now registered for commercial use. In the almost four decades since TSCA went into effect, the federal agency has required testing for only about 200 chemicals. Of those, just five were partially regulated at the federal level.
Since 2014, while Congress was hashing out the new TSCA “reform,” the top 10 chemical companies and organizations spent more than $125 million on lobbying, The Intercept reports. Industry lobbyists again wrote the new bill. Dow Chemical Company and Koch Industries each spent more than $21 million, while DuPont spent more than $14 million, according to MapLight, a nonprofit group that monitors money in politics. The American Chemistry Council contributed more than $18 million, including $150,000 to the Super PAC supporting the gubernatorial bid of David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana who co-sponsored the bill. Chemical industry contributions were significantly higher for the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors than for other members of Congress.
In response to inquiries from The Intercept, the American Chemistry Council provided a written statement, saying it has “been working tirelessly to help pass legislation that will bring TSCA up to speed with modern science and create strong, nationwide regulatory certainty that will build consumer confidence in the U.S. chemical regulatory system for citizens in all 50 states, protect human health and the environment from significant risks, and meet the commercial and competitive interests of the U.S. chemical industry and the national economy.” Chemtura provided the following comment: “Though it is premature to speculate on the impact of an updated TSCA program on specific state legislation or products, Chemtura supports an updated TSCA and looks forward to working with regulators when the time comes for implementation.”
The Senate bill, which would also override state restrictions on air and water quality and waste disposal if they’re inconsistent with federal law, has a wide range of supporters, including the American Petroleum Institute, the Chambers of Commerce; the Auto Alliance; the National Association of Manufacturers. Perhaps the most damning endorsement came from ExxonMobil’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, who recently described the bill in an op-ed in Roll Call as “just the comprehensive overhaul we need.”
Meanwhile, the House version of the bill, which preempts states from regulating new chemicals, is supported by more than 100 industry groups, including the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, CropLife America (which represents pesticide manufacturers and distributors), the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, and the Chlorine Institute.
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