My post on the how to keep Monsanto out of your home garden seems to have really hit a nerve with supporters of GM foods.
This morning, I received an email from the CEO/President of a large soybean seed company in the Midwest who writes:
I just read your article “The Four Steps Required To Keep Monsanto Out of Your Garden”. I favor choice when it comes to the food you eat and agree with you on that part . I do not agree that it is right to attack Monsanto and all the good work that they are doing to increase yields for farmers to keep the price of food low enough so the poorest of the poor can afford to eat. If we all had to eat organic many people in this world would starve due to the higher cost of food and lower production.
I respect your views but attacking Monsanto is not in the interest of poor people and world food production. GMO’s are not bad and have passed all the standards set by regulatory systems around the world and are proven safe. Thanks for listening.
My word for word email response?
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid my friend.
GMOs are far from “proven safe” as this CEO claims and the sob story that Monsanto is somehow helping the poor and starving people of the world is nothing but a PR stunt that while effective, has no basis in truth or reality.
As Mark Twain once said, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
There are many highly capable and obviously intelligent people that have completely bought the scam that GMOs are safe and going to feed the world baloney.
Perhaps this most recent news out of Europe will give them a much need kick in the pants to wake them up to the reality of the situation.
Independent Experts Find GM Foods Contain Dangerous Gene
The European Union’s official, independent food watchdog group, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is reporting that the approval process for GM crops failed to identify a poisonous gene discovered in 54 of 86 GM plants.
Most alarmingly, this viral gene known as “GENE VI” was discovered in the most widespread GM crops, notably corn and soy, which are heavily used in animal feed for livestock producing meat, milk, and eggs.
How did the viral gene get into the GM crops in the first place?
The problem starts right in the laboratory where GM foods are synthesized by an army of scientists playing God with millions of unsuspecting guinea pigs blithely buying unlabeled GM laced products at the supermarket.
These scientists insert foreign genes from other organisms (plant or animal) into a target plant using a technique which allows these foreign genes to “piggyback” on common soil or plant based viruses.
Assumption is the Mother of Error it seems as these scientists had expected that the virus genes transporting the foreign genes into the target plant would not be present once the GM plant was actually grown in the field.
The EFSA research (Independent Science News) has now conclusively shown that this major assumption upon which the supposed “safety” of GMOs is based is not the case.
Not. Even. Close.
How the presence of this viral gene could have been missed by the biotech companies, government regulators, and even university scientists is beyond comprehension.
The EFSA research indicated the following:
This situation represents a complete and catastrophic system failure.
There are clear indications that this viral gene might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance.
A reasonable concern is that the protein produced by Gene VI might be a human toxin. This is a question that can only be answered by future experiments.
Dr. Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC) which represents the biotech companies, had this to say in response:
... nearly three trillion meals containing GM ingredients have been eaten without a single substantiated case of ill-health. The combination of these two facts can give consumers a huge amount of confidence in the safety of GM crops.
I guess Dr. Little isn’t really paying attention to the skyrocketing cases of food allergies and digestive complaints in the past decade or so, particularly allergies to corn and soy, the top two GM crops.
It’s always easier to just continue with business as usual and hide behind PR campaigns focusing on starving children and fudged reports about the “safety” of frankenfoods when the corporate bottom line (and the McMansion mortgage payment) is at stake, isn’t it Mr. CEO?
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sources
Uncovered, the “toxic” gene hiding in GM crops: Revelation throws new doubt over the safety of foods
Just watched Thank You For Smoking. The parallels are stunning.
So we feed this dangerous gm food to cows, which basically destroys the health of the cow and over time kills all the cows. These sick cows are feeding the humans and passing on their sick cells and of course what you eat becomes you from the basic cell structure on up, your immune system, thereby eventually making everyone that consumes it sick until over time all the humans die too? Compromised immune system, one really bad bug and it wipes everyone out. Yep sounds like they’re up to something or just totally ignorant.
Amen, sarah! GMOs proven safe? Good night, Eileen! Are these people drinking gmo koolaid?!
I am amazed that people still think GMOs are safe. Although for a soybean seed company, it makes sense that they would support Monsanto, since such a high percentage of soybeans grown are GMO!
No surpirse that a CEO would offer that type of response. After all, it is the “company line” with which we continue to be bombarded in order to keep us dummies in step with their “plan”. Oh, that they would spend as much time teaching poor farmers in the world how to farm their own land (the old-fashioned way), no one would be starving.
Thanks Sarah. It’s you and others like you who have stepped up and pointed out the obvious. GMOs are not safe – never have been; never will be. I would like to recommend an amazing book written in 1972 but very pertinent today,. “The Secret Life of Plants” by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird. I found it at Amazon, and if you’ve never had the opportunity, I urge everyone read it and learn.
“Soilent green” as in we don’t know what we are eating.
I can’t remember the name of the movie that had Charleton Heston in it, but I do remember “soilent green”. For some reason articles like this make me think of “soilent green”.
Congratulations for being so brave. Being political helps to get promotions and all that at work, but has never done good in speaking the truth. Truth is hard to digest most of the times. I came from Mexico and it has been very hard to find food here; I mostly have to go to 8 different stores to get what I want (notice I live in El Paso Tx and good food culture is not precisely the high value here). My family had a small ranch in northern Mexico, we actually never used pesticides or anything (since they are expensive) and it is clear than you get less product than when you use pesticides, hormones, vitamins, etc. One thing I am always amazed is the size of the produce here; in my farm the products were considerable smaller (strawberries, plums, peaches,… tomatoes) but they had more flavor..(seems to me than USA makes a lot of water to come in the fruit and veggies, therefore no flavor). For experience I can tell you, it is very expensive going organic (expensive not in money, but in work); we (everybody, even 5 years old) would get very early to help to take care of the trees, etc) and most of the adults were in the fields until very late at night. It is hard. Unfortunately Mexico is losing their traditions and going into what we called “more advanced” kind of living. The “advanced” being more comfortable style (like doing tortillas with non-treated flour, buying processed food, eating at fast processed chains). It is really sad. At the end, it was the poor value than general people give to good nutrition the thing than sent to my family out of business; we were just to expensive in comparison with the produce that is coming from China. Eating well costs, however people prefer buying expensive clothing, cosmetics, shoes, etc. than spend money in good food. About Monsanto, it is the only seed you can find in Mexico now; at the beginning, most Mexican farmers were naturally distrustful of US seed produced (Old Mexicans do not trust since the war in 1821), but we give it a try not knowing this (this was around 1985-88) and my grandfather did not like it at all. The soil was different, final product was different, the flavor was different, the animals did not like it.. and at the end, we turned to our original supplier of seeds (which by the way went out of business). I really think people like you are educating other people and are keeping good food still alive. Thank you for that.
If GMO’s are so safe, why in the world are other countries banning them?