Prop 37: Hell To Pay for 'Healthy'

A recent visit to a nearby health food store opened my eyes to why some so-called 'healthy' food companies are spending money to defeat Prop 37: the truth would kill their business!

I needed mayonnaise for a sandwich and the health store was on my way, so I dashed in and was shown to the mayo aisle. 

 Needing about one tablespoon of mayonnaise for this sandwich, I was naturally somewhat reluctant to pay over $6.00 for a small jar of 'healthy' mayonnaise. But it set me wondering: what the hell was in healthy mayo to make it 'healthy' vs. ordinary mayo?

Turning the mayo jar over to the list of ingredients, it would be an under-statement to say I was a little shocked to find that the 'healthy' mayonnaise was made, depending on the brand, with either soy or canola oil – two commodities that are much more likely than not, genetically modified! And the scales fell from my eyes.

Currently somewhere south of 15% of all soybeans planted in the US are non-GMO (although this figure is currently trending up as of this writing; farmers are willingly switching acreage back from GMO soy to non-GMO - good news, though I cannot, as yet, tell why).  That 'less than 15% figure' is far too small to supply all the products using soy that sport 'healthy' and other monikers of health labels on their products.  Surely an organic behemoth like Whole Foods could absorb all that non-GMO soy crop and still need more for their vast in-house brands.  Where does the rest of this 'non-GMO' soy come from?  

Canola presents a slightly less smiley face.  According to an Oregon State Extension bulletin clear back in 2008, "Non-GMO winter and spring canola varieties are available, but they are rapidly becoming difficult to find."  If they were difficult to find in 2008, I wonder what it's like in 2012?  Canola was one of the first successful genetically modified introductions and currently about 90% of the United States' production of canola is GMO.  I couldn't find a figure for the percentage of Canadian production, but it is surely similar to the US figure.  Canola is a made-up name for 'rapeseed.'  "Rapeseed oil" was thought to be a tough sell to women shoppers, and since most of it was grown in Canada, someone came up with Canola as the name to sell.  Rapeseed is a brassica and rapeseed pollen can cross with cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and mustard.

Companies that label themselves as 'healthy' have no standard to prove the label. Imagine the shock of health food store shoppers finding products labeled “healthy” and sporting a GMO sticker to boot! Obviously, an informed shopping public would be a non-buying shopping public and if these companies have to charge over $6.00 for a small jar of 'healthy' mayo with GMOs, what's it going to cost if it is 'healthy' AND non-GMO? You can see these little producers squeezed out of the market completely – already they are marketing to a very small portion of the food buying public, any more shaving of their demographic and they are sunk.

Still. Profit before the public's health? The bottom line on this whole discussion, and it is an unassailable position, is that the public deserves to know what is their food.

I didn't buy the mayo. I got a packet of Best Foods (soy oil) mayonnaise. It didn't cost me $6.00 and it didn't claim to be healthy. Yes, it was most likely GMO, but they didn't take my money and try to pull the wool over my eyes. After Prop 37 is law, there's going to be hell to pay for a large portion of the food producing industry.

We all might have to go to mustard on sandwiches. As long as it hasn't crossed with GM rapeseed.

david

Starting To Take Back Our Food Supply: California's Proposition 37

The battle to just label genetically modified material in our food is heating up. Coca Cola, Pepsico along with a host of industrial ag folks are heaping money to fight California's Proposition 37 which would require proper labeling of genetically altered products in our food stuffs. There are a lot of reasons why genetically modified crops have no business in our food, and it would be easy to write an article about why the whole idea needs to be abandoned as one of the least-wise projects ever taken to enrich people at the expense of the earth, current populations and future populations.

The point of Prop 37 is not to ban these products but simply to label them. We label the components in our mattresses, but manufacturers are off the hook for telling mothers what is in the food they give their children?

To fight the initiative, seed giant Monsanto Co, soda and snack seller PepsiCo Inc and other opponents of the labeling measure have put up $25 million already and could raise up to $50 million. Reuters article 8/6/2012

This is very wrong. Monsanto and PepsiCo have decided their profits are more important than the health of children – their products are already labeled in most of the world, the sad news is that Monsanto has infested the United States government so thoroughly it is impotent to fight the multi-national corporations with no interest in the health of Americans (or any one else for that matter). Not only is our food unlabeled, these corporations have managed to avoid any possible regulation from any American government – in the countries not so easily bought and sold, Monsanto has had a much harder time gaining any kind of foothold in the food marketplace.

Monsanto has a record of lies and half-truths that parallel their long history of reckless behavior towards our planet and all the residents thereof. There should be no mistake in considering this a company that has a single thread of altruism in it's veins.

Reuters again:

While Mother Nature does her share of genetic engineering, human interventions have specific goals, such as increasing crop yields or helping plants survive droughts or attacks from pests.

This is sheer Monsanto hype. The company, and it's competitors have absolutely no interest in things 'such as increasing crop yields or helping plants survive droughts.' Their business model is heavily invested in telling us things like that, but even the USDA's own research (and the USDA is pretty much a shill for all of biotech) concluded after a 15 year study that genetically modified crops do not hold any significant edge in crop yield. And reports from the field over this last summer show that there was no benefit in having so-called 'drought resistant' GM crops because they were engineered to survive a mild drought but their engineering was drastically short of the resistance needed to withstand this year's drought (older, open pollinated corn did survive to produce a crop for some farmers and we could have had a substantially larger harvest if more open-pollinated seeds had been plated). The truth is that there is only one goal for any multi-national corporation and that is to make money.

Some companies do that by looking for long-term solutions that will benefit the world, but that is not the case for Monsanto. ALL of their genetic engineering has been to create a larger market for their herbicide, Roundup, or creating crops with pesticides in every cell.  At that they have been very successful. None of this technology though has been tested in the real world until just recently. And that means there is certainly no long term study on these crops. Anecdotal evidence though shows some frightening complications with farm animals fed GM corn, including an inability to bear offspring. As far as I am concerned, the simple lack of a long-term study of GM foods' effect on human beings is enough for a just government, not bought and sold on the black market, to forbid these products from being sold pending proof that they are not harmful to humans and the planet. These studies are now underway: unfortunately WE, you and I and our children, are the lab rats. We will prove, in our living and dying, whether or not this technology can make food that is safe to eat day in and day out. Note, you are already eating this stuff! 

Even if you are a vegetarian eating only from a health food store, chance are you are only limiting, not eliminating, these foods from your diet. Genetically engineered food is pervasive through out our country because the first Bush administration (in a memorandum authored by Vice President Dan 'Potatoe' Quayle) certified that GM crops were the same as non-GM of the same variety. Of course, our government then went ahead allowing these 'same' crops to be patented as something totally new and different. What are we to believe?

We should believe that all this is simply a plan to make profit and externalize the costs to others. Medical costs, environmental clean up costs are just a few that come to mind – these corporations are already externalizing their research costs!

So this is why Monsanto has invested over $4 million bucks to oppose a campaign that only seeks to label the presence of their same as/extraodinarily different technology. They speak out of both sides of their mouths and ignore the honest truth incessantly – enough for me to get several more blog posts about it.

Let's be clear: vote yes for Prop 37. Prop 37 only requires a more honest accounting of what is in our food. That's all.  These corporations are aware that as goes California so goes the rest of the nation, sooner or later, that scares the hell out of them.  It should. 

Opposing Prop 37 is standing up for dishonesty and deceit. We have enough of that. We need multinational corporations to be more accountable to us. Our government has refused to do it. It is incumbent upon us to do it. We all need this law, but Mothers, you must protect your children if not yourself.

Honesty in the labeling of our food should not be optional.

David King Speaking at Whole Foods Market, Venice CA

International Seed Day

 

 

As I sat down to write this, I learned that the Farm Bill has been approved by the Senate Committee and will be brought to a vote in the Senate Floor. I have yet to see what was a part of the finalized bill, but I am hoping that the Gillibrand Amendment was a part of the bill. That amendment, proposed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, would have required that five percent of annual funding for the AFRI program (Agriculture Food & Research Initiative) be used for making sure that farmers have access to locally adapted seeds and breeds, by focusing on public cultivar and bred development, and removing the hurdles that have hindered USDA's progress toward this goal.

This initiative was in the 2008 Farm Bill, but the United Sates Department of Agriculture (USDA) has succeeded in putting up roadblocks to avoid dealing with anything like open pollinated, farmer bred seeds, even though all of America's successful agriculture is based on just such seeds.

Remember that the seeds most gardeners cherish are not seeds bred by trained scientists and research facilities. Most of the seeds gardeners love and trust were bred by folks without degrees and often times even without education. They grew food in their own gardens for their families and prided their crops on much the same criteria we still do today: does it taste good? Is it suited to my climate? Does it succumb to disease or insects? And does it produce under adverse conditions?

Sadly, our modern seed production has little effort put to taste and nothing about adverse conditions. Food is bred to be shipped, ripen on the way to the market, last until the grocer has sold all of it and ease of picking for a picking machine. Not exactly qualities we admire in our gardens. But that's what we got when we began to allow professionals to do the breeding. Thank God we stepped out of our slumber in time, while there are still lots of varieties still left (although if you've seen the National Geographic July 2011 chart on our lost diversity, you have been staggered by what has been lost).

All was not lost. After all, Native Seed/SEARCH in Tucson, AZ has been saving the genetic diversity of the Southwestern Native tribes for a number of years and Bill McDorman and his wife, Belle Starr, have been offering classes in seed stewardship (and seed library stewardship); Seed Savers Exchange is probably the largest and most vibrant of our American seed saving organizations and now seed libraries are suddenly the rage across an awakening nation. And the work of the Organic Seed Alliance helps position our current culture to seed a more local and diverse agriculture. More people are aware of the value and importance of seeds – especially seeds that are not controlled and cannot be controlled by corporations.

It would be fitting for the Farm Bill to leave committee today with Gillibrand Amendment in place because, today, I learned, is International Seed Day. April 26^th was chosen as the day because it was April 26^th, 2004 that Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in IRAQ, issued and signed Order 81, which prohibits Iraqi farmers from reusing seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law. Thank the powers that be, Order 81 could not be successfully implemented due to the instability inside IRAQ. It may go down in history as one of the quirks of fate that denied Monsanto and other industrial ag firms their biggest victory of the new century.

Next year, I would love to see International Seed Day take on a lot more meaning and become a holiday that is recognized by gardeners and farmers everywhere. Time to celebrate the Percy Schmeiser's, the pioneer seed savers and people like Bill and Belle. Time to chose to eat a meal and consciously chew each bite thinking about the history of the seeds that nourish us still to this day – the same way our ancestors before us survived without the plenty we have today and it was those seeds that persisted through the drought or the flood or the war or the dust. They were sustained by these seeds; gifts from a grandmother to a son, from an old hand to a young one – over centuries, each generation in turn perfecting them a little more, whether consciously or not. WE were given this largess. WE must pass it on no matter what our government or society says.

In a large sense, we are like prophets of old that know where the richness of society really lies and know what must be done to save it – to pass it on to our children. So today, April 26, chew each bite one extra time with memory of the history you eat and resolve that we will not be the generation that fails our children.

david

Safe Pesticides – Safe for Whom?

There is a column making its way through my friends on Facebook declaring vinegar to be a 'safe pesticide.' I dislike the term 'safe pesticide' as it is often nothing more than an oxymoron.

The suffix of '-cide' is taken from Latin meaning 'to cut down, kill.' The more genericterms pesticide or biocide include more specific killers, like herbicide (weed killers), insecticides (specifically insect killers), fungicides and a bunch of others.

A compound doesn't get to be called a '-cide' unless it kills something, so the idea of a 'safe' pesticide is relative – 'safe' for whom? Obviously, it's not 'safe' for the thing it kills. And, in our chemical soup world, many folks seem to have become accepting that it's quite alright to eat food that is deadly for some species to eat.  But the concept of a 'safe' pesticides tugs at a conscious mind as something beyond reason.

At a recent panel discussion for gardeners in Santa Monica, I was horrified to hear an organic farmer promoting the use of nicotine as a general insecticide. His first offering was to a woman who wanted to rid her milkweed of aphids. She was growing the milkweed to promote monarch butterfly populations. As one who is called 'post-modern organic,' I was flabbergasted that she was even thinking of an insecticide at all! After all, if she's hoping to give the plant up to an insect, why would she be disturbed if a few aphids got in on the act? Her indignation towards me was very hostile as she vehemently declaring  he aphids were killing her plants. (In her defense, I was tired and hungry and when I'm tired and hungry, my diplomacy can be, um, 'challenged.')

Even rested and well-fed, call me naïve, but I think she's crazy. A plant that gets attacked by aphids is a weak plant to begin with - we can think of aphids as being Mother Nature's way of taking a plant out of the gene pool because it's not a good contender for passing on genetic material. So, if aphids kill her plants, I would postulate the plant was too weak to begin with. Still, why she has aphids does not beg the question as to why she wants to use a pesticide to kill them, but of course, I'm the one who thinks spraying a plant with poison so it will live long enough for human consumption is nuts.  And what kind of blinders does a person wear who can't figure why anything that kills aphids wouldn't also kill the Monarchs?  It continues to flabbergast me. 

All that aside, the final straw is that nicotine will kill EVERYTHING it touches as long as it's wet. It will kill the aphids. It will kill the Monarchs in all stages of their growth. It will kill honey bees and it will kill things in the soil if it is applied properly (pesticides are to be applied to the 'drip point' – this is standard practice and it means you spray until the solution begins to drip off the plant) and all those drippings fall into the soil and continue to kill until they are sufficiently diluted. This part of pesticide application is never talked about and we act as though it doesn't happen. But it does happen whether or not we study it.

So now to this 'safe' pesticide of vinegar. Safe? First of all, do not buy the hype. If it kills, it has a drawback, somewhere, somehow. And before I can say it's safe, I want to know what that drawback is because I don't want to have a surprise later on. Vinegar's main method of killing is by changing the pH to deadly levels for organisms - plants and or fauna depending on how it's used.  

Vinegar, just like nicotine, will kill or damage whatever it touches as long as it is still moist, still very acidic. 

I was very excited about vinegar about four years ago, using it as an herbicide on a noxious weed, False Garlic, Nothoscordum bivalve. False Garlic is a particular evil weed. The little white flowers dispense copious amounts of bubils, baby bulbs. They sprout on the surface of the soil. As the little leaves begin to reach skyward, the root springs out and begins to pull the plant under the soil. The more leaves on the surface, the deeper that bulb has been pulled under ground and, worse yet, the more baby bulbs have formed around it. When a gardener removes this plant at this stage, it might well be essential to remove close to a square foot of soil as well in order to insure none of the baby bulbs are left behind to torment you.

Nothoscordum bivalve, False Garlic

As an aside, False Garlic is obviously  a member of the Lily family by the way it looks, like onions and true garlic.  Apart from no edible bulb, the giveaway on a mature plant is that it smells like a spoiled garlic - it doesn't smell yummy.  It stinks.  

Seizing upon the lie of a 'safe' herbicide,  I elected to use vinegar on this difficult plant. I was pouring one to two cups of vinegar per plant because this species has a waxy covering which prevents the uptake of vinegar by most cells. It was necessary to get enough vinegar to percolate deep enough into the soil with enough strength to find the roots where there would be a better chance of being absorbed by the plant. I was having some success. But one day, as soon as I poured the vinegar onto a plant, two earthworms came up out of the ground writhing to their deaths in front of me. That's when I realized that the term 'safe' pesticide meant safe for me, but not for other creatures. It's also when I formulated my idea that pesticides always have unintended consequences.

It is my intention that humans begin to look at all the different '-cides' with more scrutiny. While we still do battle with perennial weeds that frustrate most of my attempts to get them gone,we have been able to achieve zero insecticide usage at The Learning Garden by having something in bloom throughout the growing season – and we often leave some of each crop to flower to help with that. Those flowers are often allowed to go to seed because we save seeds here as well. But in addition, no vegetable garden should be grown without some flowers blooming nearby. We also have several spots where we grow California Native plants to encourage more insects. 

The truth of the matter, the way to really defeat insects, is to invite more insects into the garden rather than try to kill off the ones you don’t like.

Our program to create an environment that encourages beneficial insects to make our garden their home, includes:

1. No insecticides what so ever.
2. Something in bloom all through the growing season.
3. Provide water for insects.
4. Willingness to allow plants to suffer some cosmetic damage.
5. Willingness to let some plants die if they get overwhelmed by insects.

I urge you to consider these options and allow other creatures to co-exist peacefully in your garden - if beneficial insects make your garden their home, you will have a balance in your garden that makes it healthier for you as you avoid all forms of  '-cides' that may have harmful effects we failed to realize.

And I continue to work on getting rid of False Garlic in a more efficient manner that doesn't kill off any of  my earthworms.

david

INTERMEDIATE VICTORY GARDENING!

Offered by The Learning Garden under the auspices of the University of California Extension:

Four classes to really give you the dirt on gardening! Expand your skill level and appreciate the world of plants so much better; introducing a new series of more advanced gardening classes!

The four session class will cover the following topics:

May 20 – Crop rotation; perennial food plants; companion planting How do plants interact with one another? What should follow what? How do I care for my fruit trees? I want to grow asparagus and artichokes, but I am a little intimidated; what do I need to know?

May 27 - Seed saving/vegetable breeding Why should I be concerned about saving seeds? Is it hard to save seeds? How can I tell if it's good seed? Isn't breeding vegetables best left to the professionals?

June 3 – Propagation and grafting and budding What is grafting and why is it important? Can I really have two apples on the same tree? Is grafting 'natural' and not some biotech kind of weirdness? When can I do it?

June 10 – Vermiculture/Composting What if I don't have room for a compost pile, I just have plants in containers on my balcony? Isn't compost a lot of work? How can I really compost in a small garden?

Each class is a stand alone unit so participants may attend all four for a discounted price, or take any combination of the classes – they are designed to be modular units of instruction. These are practical classes with hands on participation in each class. Taught by Gardenmaster David King and Master Gardener Emi Carvel, these classes will hone your gardening skills to new level.

Classes are $20 each; the series of four is discounted to $75. We may have some scholarships available depending on enrollment. A minimum $20 deposit is required to hold your space. You are encouraged to dress for our often cooler days here in The Learning Garden. We will make hot tea and/or coffee on cooler days; bring your own cup as we try to edge closer to zero waste. 

 

Contact David for other options.

Garden Master & Author David King At Santa Monica College on March 27

 

CONTACT:   Bruce Smith                                              FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

                        Public Information Officer                       DATE: March 12, 2012

                        (310) 434-4209                                          www.smc.edu

“SEEDS: LOCAL & GLOBAL” AT SMC MARCH 27

         Santa Monica College is pleased to present a free lecture, “Seeds: Local and Global,” by garden master and author David King on Tuesday, March 27 in Humanities & Social Science Lecture Hall 165 on the main campus, 1900 Pico Blvd.

         King is the founder of the Seed Library of Los Angeles and garden master of TheLearning Garden at Venice High School. An engaging and popular garden speaker, he is also a noted garden blogger and author of the forthcoming book, “Growing Food in Southern California: What to Do and When to Do It.”

         The Seed Library of Los Angeles was established to facilitate the growth of open-pollinated seeds among residents of the Los Angeles basin. The library is building a seed collection and repository, educating members about the practice of seed saving, and creating a local community of seed-saving gardeners

         King’s talk is sponsored by the SMC Global Citizenship Council, SMC Center for Environmental Studies and SMC Club Grow.

         For information, please call 310-434-3911.