Book Review: Bake Your Own Bread

Title: Bake Your Own Bread

Author: Floss and Stan Dworkin

Date: 1972

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-091886-3

Length: 197 pages plus index

Quote: “Bread baking is a lot like married love. The first loaves of bread you make are not the best you’ll ever make, but they’re better than any you’ve ever bought.”

The subtitle of this book is …and Be Healthier. True? Yes, in the sense that your kitchen probably contains fewer germs than a commercial bakery, and if you eat or freeze your bread while it’s fresh you won’t have to add any preservatives. When you start using whole-grain flour and meal you’ll be even further ahead.

That said, it’s also true that for some people, e.g. this reviewer, good health will not be possible until we stop eating bread altogether. Sad but true. The good news is that, once we achieve gluten-freedom and reprogram ourselves to think of wheat products as things that made us sick rather than things we crave, reading and even using this book won’t make us hungry.

(The day this review was written and posted on Blogjob, I was actually starving out a cold...no, the thought of fresh-baked wheat bread didn't torture me any more than the thought of fresh cat kibble did.)

Other people can safely eat bread in moderation, but when they bake bread and have it in the house they tend to binge-eat it. Some of these people are undiagnosed celiacs who will be cured of stubborn chronic conditions when they go gluten-free. Others are allergic to one or more of the other chemical compounds of which wheat is made, but are not gluten-intolerant, and may be able to use bread as long as they don’t binge.

Unfortunately, people in either of those two categories are likely to be drawn to the idea of baking their own bread. Binge-eating homemade bread may be a little safer than binge-eating factory-produced bread, but if you’re a carb-craver who really likes bread, baking bread may be a bad idea for you.

If you are not, and are not feeding, a carb-craver, you’ll enjoy having a book that contains complete recipes and detailed instructions for 34 different kinds of bread. Bread has its place in a balanced diet for most people, and learning to make your own is definitely worth the trouble. Baking bread at home is a great rainy-day treat for children; they’ll love all the mixing, kneading, and shaping. And you’ll always have not only good food to pack in a box lunch, but a conversation piece to take to parties and a gift your friends will recognize as “from the heart.”

Bake Your Own Bread also contains a long rant, unfortunately still mostly accurate, about the hazards of using factory-made foods. It’s not much fun to read but it does explain some, not all, of the emotion with which people discuss the pros and cons of “natural,” “organic,” and home-cooked food. Why do I say “some, not all”? Because in 1972 food crops hadn’t been genetically modified; selectively bred, yes, but bred only for traits that occur naturally in the plant genus being bred. The new hazards of gene-spliced foods, made from plants that have had DNA from animals or disease germs spliced into them, are only beginning to be confirmed. Much of the new information about these new hazards is still available to the general public only on the Internet; type “genetically modified grains” into your search engine if you want to spend a lot of time online becoming increasingly perturbed. Or you could skip the unpleasant reading and just start buying local organic grain.

Floss Dworkin died recently, “suddenly” and “too young,” in her late seventies. Her obituary lists Stan Dworkin as a survivor. There’s quite a lot of information about Stan Dworkin on the Internet but, so far as I’ve read, what’s not about the books he co-authored with his wife is about a younger man by the same name. 

Bread image from Agathabrown at Morguefile: www.morguefile.com/archive/display/189538

Posted on September 29, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, frugal, HealthTags homemade bread, natural food

What Really Happened to Jif?

This is not a fact-based expose post. This is an accusation. I may believe, in good faith, that the situation is worse than it actually is. I hope I do. But I believe my suspicions are grounded.

I couldn't really give Jif peanut butter full marks for flavor and quality. It's sweetened. I like the way peanut butter combines with sweet flavors, but the brand of peanut butter I always liked was JFG, which was flavored and preserved with salt only, and tasted like ground-up salted peanuts. You could really tell that JFG was fresh.

"Lower sodium" food sounded like a nice idea. Some people need a low-sodium diet,. and others can always add salt at the table, right? The trouble is that food that's bottled or canned in a completely "natural" condition, without salt, sugar, or some nastier chemical added to it, has a short shelf life. So food packers started preserving foods with sugar instead. That's fine if the original food was orange segments or pineapple rings, which nature intended to be sweet, but sugar in cornmeal, sugar in tomatoes, sugar in peanut butter...somebody Out There is probably putting sugar in sardines, by now.

Peanut butter manufacturers just loved the idea of preserving peanut butter with sugar because, when peanut butter is not infected with toxic black rot but merely becomes stale and rancid after sitting on a shelf for three years, it shows its age by picking up a nasty, sickish, sweetish flavor.

All the peanut butter packers in today's market are aware of this, and extend the shelf life of their products by dumping sugar into it. You can't tell by the taste whether Smuckers or Peter Pan peanut butter is ten years old. The smell deteriorates overtime but the stuff tasted like sugar from the day one. Apparently America's preschoolers aren't complaining--they're wired to seek high-calorie, high-sugar foods. Adults have always had mixed feelings about peanut butter, it seems. I can't say I really like Jif but it tastes less sugary/rancid than Smuckers or Peter Pan.

Not that I think of peanut butter as food, exactly. Celiacs digest food in different ways than non-celiacs do. For my purposes peanuts are food. Saturated fats, like the oil added to peanut butter to keep the natural ground-up nuts from separating into thin tasteless oil and dry tasteless crumbs, are mild laxatives that sometimes help push glyphosate-tainted food through my body faster. Since 2015 I've bought peanut butter, not every month, but on average probably about once a month.

Jif peanut butter served its purpose until last spring when Food Lion ran the big sale on it., Not that the savings were all that great, relative to the regular price,. That's the old Food Lion trick. When customers have complained about a few packages of whatever-it-may-be, Food Lion will immediately raise their regular price on that item, by about thirty percent.  Then they mark down the existing supply to about five percent off the previous regular price, so that it looks as if this is the customer's last chance to get a decent price on this item. Sometimes the customers have already found and complained about all the bad food in the batch. More often they have not. Food bought on a red-hot sale at Food Lion often has to be thrown away.

So I bought a jar of Jif on sale at Food Lion, and I was not thrilled.

Like most of the big-name food brands in the United States, Jif's marketing is ultimately controlled by one huge horrible corporation, but the manufacturers of the original product keep some control over things like labelling. Jif labels proclaimed that Jif peanut butter was gluten-free and GMO-free. Glyphosate-free they never promised, but a friend whose Glyphosate Awareness was raised by cancer used to say we ought to buy and promote things that didn't make us sick, and sure enough, Jif didn't make me sick. There was that. Between 2015 and 2020 that was rare and special.

As we sow, the Bible says, so shall we reap. What can we hope to reap when we've become a nation where nearly all the plant-based "food" has been deliberately poisoned?

Well...as I've mentioned, the quality of life in my neighborhood has declined ever since a Professional Bad Neighbor moved in.

The neighborhood had been a real community when the older generation were alive. Many of them were related to one another; the others were friends, as their parents and grandparents had been. Everyone agreed on the rules and boundaries. Everyone thought well and spoke well of everyone else. Those days are gone.

In the 1990s the neighborhood started to deteriorate. Everyone was hearing the worst of everyone else. Everybody was seeing acts of petty vandalism, and thievery that was below even the scale of "petty." I saw firsthand that deliberate efforts were made to suggest that people who had no quarrel with each other were the ones doing these things to each other.

For years all anyone learned about the identity of our "prankster," or "pranksters," was that a very small amount of the damage really was done by animals, while several people who had been accused died. Then I heard the prankster confess, loudly boasting that he was in the process of "running off all of" my relatives and me in order to buy all the land in the neighborhood. He had not bothered to make any offers to buy any property. He had been deliberately working for years to make people want to stay away from their ancestral homes.

Why would he want our land? It's not more valuable, in cash, than many other family farms in the area. Other family farms have assets ours lack. This man's family had owned such a farm. Two things had happened that might have made him want to leave his ancestral home.

One thing was that his family farm is situated on one of those beds of pinkish "Marcellus" shale. We called it "slates" when I was growing up. It's a kind of layered sedimentary stone that a child can crumble in one hand. By a more complicated process of "hydraulic fracturing" it can be made to yield burnable natural gas, sometimes in a form that shoots flames out the water taps of people whose property is being "fracked." Shale is harder to predict and control, even in nature, than the "frackers" like to admit. Pennsylvania has lost a large amount of land to an underground fire.

The other thing was that this Bad Neighbor's home must have become a sad place for him. In the year 2000 he lived on his ancestral farm, near his parents, one sister, and one brother, with his wife and the one child they had. Between 2005 and 2015, all of them died. A rational person might have considered that something he was doing, such as recklessly spraying poison on the land, could have had something to do with this. An irrational servant of Satan might have suppressed that kind of rational thought and tried to focus on making more people more unhappy with what had been a True Green community.

But he must have known he was on thin ice when he started harassing me. He is my third cousin. He and I inherited High Sensory Perceptivity from the same ancestors. He got away with some of his pranks because other people couldn't wake up as quickly and see as clearly, in the middle of a dark night, as either he or I can still do. Although I never seriously wanted to harass anybody in the way the Bad Neighbor does, I have the physical ability to do all of the same stunts he does. He is taller, and used to be faster. I am younger and have taken better care of myself. And I'm not going anywhere. The harassment slacked off for a few years.

Then I warned the neighborhood odd-jobs man that his efforts to control kudzu with glyphosate were turning his home into a kudzu graveyard, poisoning the vegetables in his garden (he'd sold me a bag full), and making him sick. He tried to warn the Bad Neighbor, for whom he worked, too. The Bad Neighbor listened to the warning, with some difficulty. (The odd-jobs man neither hears nor speaks very well. People who were brought up better tend to end up braying and bellowing at him, because he seems to hear and understand a little more when they do.) Then the Bad Neighbor brayed, "Oh, she wants some 'Roundup,' does she?"

From that day forward he has done his damnedest to keep the air in my neighborhood full of glyphosate vapors. Especially on Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Day, Easter Sunday, and the weekend of the Fourth of July, because those are days when my relatives were likely to gather at our ancestral homes.

That is the kind of person who wants a "right to spray," Gentle Readers. By insisting that local laws specify that there is no such thing sa s "right to spray" unless it be accompanied by an enumerated "right to stomp a poison-spraying fool into the ground, in self-defense," some of you may be able to keep Professional Bad Neighbors out of your neighborhoods.

This web site does not, of course, officially recommend stomping people into the ground. This web site recommends that all things be done "decently and in order." The decent and orderly way to deal with glyphosate sprayers is to revise our existing laws in a way that recognizes that spraying poison into the environment is a violent crime against people. It is always best to do things in a nice, orderly way. If the nice, orderly way fails, we may need to use whatever other way occurs to us, to defend ourselves against this violent attack.

Well...it's hard to know what a word spoken or printed may accomplish. I mentioned that my cats, who could no longer safely drink from the stream near my home, would not drink town water but would drink either Pure Life or Deer Park water. From a local store, those brands have been delivered, every week, ever since. Hmm. Serena is not as keen on pepitas as Heather used to be, but she loves pepitas from the Price Less store soaked in the broth from a tin of Great Value chicken. She likes Chicken of the Sea mackerel, too.

And, unfortunately for humankind, corporations as loathsome as Bayer can use and pay the kind of human wreckage who demand a "right to spray," too.

Well, you may ask, what has this to do with Jif peanut butter?

This is what. Jif has been one of the few big-name food brands that's shown enough overt friendliness to Glyphosate Awareness to use the "NO GMO" label.

Of course, labelling GMO and non-GMO food products is an idea enthusiastically approved by 96% of all humans polled on the issue, but you have to bear in mind that some people's brains show more glyphosate damage than others.

Consider, once again, the Bad Neighbor. If he'd wanted simply to farm the land, the way we'd all always done it, my elders and their heirs would have welcomed him. If he'd wanted to accumulate enough "big land" to lease it out to a company that rents time-shares to hunters, I would have said, "No! Not them! We can do better than that." And we would have been making money by now. Instead of which...As far as I would know, although several people have made dire remarks about the Bad Neighbor's cows, I think he actually poisoned them himself. He used to be considered intelligent, but that was fifty years ago.

I've told the ugly truth about glyphosate. I'm a target.

Jif acknowledged the truth that, whether specific genetic modifications are harmful or not, people do want to know whether they're eating GMO. Jif is a target.

That jar of Jif I bought at Food Lion was definitely substandard. It did not, however, contain the contaminants that got the plant shut down this summer. No salmonella; no rodent traces. It did contain...bad peanuts. Several pieces of peanut, black with rot. When picked out and put together the pieces did not form a single bad nut. The jar smelled of black rot because several rotten peanuts had been scattered into that batch of peanut butter.

The jar before that had seemed acceptable. But the jar before that had given me some sort of mild food poisoning. It wasn't salmonella. I had noted that "the cats think I smell contagious, and may be right since I do have a low fever," when I hadn't been in town or exposed to any virus. And after the symptoms had subsided, they returned when I ate a little more of that jar of peanut butter. They did not, however, include slimy greenish diarrhea.

The disgusting peanut butter was informative. The food poisoning might have been something other people didn't notice--I didn't have it tested. The black rot is toxic. The Board of Health could and should have shut down the Jif factory for the batch of peanut butter that had the black rot in it, alone. But they didn't. They shut down the factory for completely different reasons--the factory also, later, having been infested with salmonella-infected rats. Most rats are crazy about peanut butter but that does not explain how three completely different, unrelated things went wrong with the peanut butter at the same factory. If rats carried in the toxic agents (which is possible, because some wild rat species are known to drag food and other objects into places when they take food out) they were, at the very least, different rats, not carrying the same toxic agents. At least two, and I believe three, different toxic agents. One after another.

It's a question, not a proof...but if I were a Jif manager, I'd be looking for evidence of deliberate sabotage.

We know that Bayer will stoop very, very low.

We know the corporations are depending on tactics like censorship, whining to our government to protect them from the consequences of what they've done, and using such pathetic wastes of human intelligence as the Bad Neighbor to harass those who tell the truth.

I'd say that we know that Bayer's goons could and would have sabotaged Jif, and the only question is whether, in fact, they did.

 

So, how safe is it to buy the jars of Jif peanut butter that are coming back to grocery stores? I'd say the labels tell the story. If Jif's caved on the "No GMO" labels, the sabotage may end and the peanut butter may be fit for human consumption...depending on the GMO involved. If they're not telling which GMO are being used, it's probably the ones with genes from E. coli spliced in, which are trademarked as "Roundup Ready" and a guarantee that the "food" will have been marinated in glyphosate, and I personally wouldn't want to let my cats eat it.

Another GMO and Glyphosate Regulation to Comment On (Updated)

(Edited to reinsert a sentence that should have been visible yesterday and wasn't.)

In the excitement generated by California's success in banning glyphosate, this web site has not forgotten that there are other contaminants and GMOs out there that may be doing some of you more harm than glyphosate and "Roundup-Ready" (E. Coli) corn are doing you.

Sensitivity to these things is genetically determined. This web site basically belongs to two celiacs who are super-sensitive to glyphosate, with some help from a Cherokee who has much more trouble with sugar and alcohol than with gluten and glyphosate. I got into a conversation about this with a gentleman I met at church, who is Black. He said, "But what runs in my family is sickle cell anemia. My son has asthma, too--but when you were reacting to glyphosate sprayed along the railroad, he had no reaction at all, even though he lives two blocks above the railroad." If I'd been observing the young man, I might have noticed some reaction, but I don't doubt that he lives with other reactions that are much more unpleasant for him. And although none of us has noticed a reaction to BT corn (the other popular kind of GMO corn that most of us were eating before E. Coli corn hit the market), this web site used to have e-friends in India who claimed that people there were reacting to BT corn the way caterpillars react to BT infection, which is a horrible thing to watch; we feel for those people.

So I opened an e-mail about this proposed change in USDA regulations, which would require clear, readable labelling for most but not all GMO products in food...First, the link to the USDA site:

https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=AMS-TM-17-0050-0004

I'm on the mailing list of an organization that's come up with a clever idea for processing these things. They send everyone a form containing some facts, and if you click on "submit" the form to the appropriate agency, a tab pops up with a form that requires you to add an original comment that shows you're a human with some human interest in the issue.

Here's what I typed. (You can refer to this Comment Tracking Number, or make your comments entirely your own. You can send them your own documents.)

"

Your Comment Tracking Number: 1k2-93tw-9ijf

Your comment may be viewable on Regulations.gov once the agency has reviewed it. This process is dependent on agency public submission policies/procedures and processing times. Use your tracking number to find out the status of your comment.

Comment:GMO corn and soy may have been modified specifically in order to treat them with glyphosate. As you've probably noticed, there's a mania for "gluten-free" food these days because many people who don't even have the celiac gene (which I have) are having celiac-like reactions to grain products. We now know that glyphosate affects celiacs just as wheat gluten does, only more intensely, and has similar effects on some non-celiacs. We need no loopholes. In order for people who've invested heavily in producing "gluten-free" food to serve their market, and for celiacs and glyphosate-sensitive people to have any chance of being healthy, we need not only to have ALL GMO products plainly marked on food labels, but to have specific GMO's identified. (Celiacs can tolerate BT corn but have drastic reactions to E. Coli or "Roundup Ready" corn; on the other hand some immune-compromised people have horrible reactions to BT corn.) 

In fairness, I'm a celiac and the highly refined GMO corn syrup in some things I eat has not noticeably affected me--apparently the glyphosate is processed out of it. So I understand the argument that highly refined GMO products might not count. But others might not be so lucky, or the buildup of glyphosate residues in the environment might make me more sensitive too...and since other people will undoubtedly be sensitive to any new GMOs as those come on the market, you can save those people years of pain by requiring all GMO products to be not only clearly but SPECIFICALLY identified on food labels.

(I don't have a file to upload for you, but if anyone wants to read about the experience of a celiac with glyphosate-contaminated and GMO gluten-free food, I have a blog: priscillaking.blogspot.com. It has a search feature you can use to skip all the book and cat posts and read only the ones with "GMO" and "glyphosate" as topics, or, alternatively, click on the "Labels" at the end of this post: https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html. I'm terser and raunchier about this on Twitter, as @5PriscillaKing, and my recent relevant tweets probably show up under #GMO, #glyphosate, and #Monsanto or @MonsantoCo.)

"

Note that the fact sheet I'd already forwarded to them cited some of the information you can find at regulations.gov/document?D=AMS-TM-17-0050-0004, about what's in the proposed new rule, what needs to be in it, and who's being blamed for the loopholes. Your comments may actually be more interesting to the USDA if you read and cite this information yourself rather than sending them one more form...I don't know who's reading these things or how tired their eyes are.

(As Real Twits know...Twitter does not have a contract banning any potentially erotic content, so my Twitter account has no rule against mentioning body parts and I've even retweeted some graphics containing unprintable words. And I've tweeted some gruesome details about the celiac reaction to gluten and glyphosate. All this web site is going to tell you about that, due to our contract, is that this reaction is much more of a gross-out than our posts about cold-blooded animals.)

Heirloom Seeds in California

From Food Democracy Now:

"
Join the urgent movement to Save Important Rare Heirloom seeds: Enter this code [FOODDEMOCRACY], which can be entered at checkout, when you purchase heirloom seeds at Baker Creed Seeds at rareseeds.com.
Dear Priscilla,
Every year at Food Democracy Now! we look forward to attending Baker Creek's Heirloom Seed Festival in Santa Rosa, California. Also known as the world’s largest Pure Food Festival, it's our favorite conference of the whole year, with an amazing gathering of some of the most dedicated family farmers, seed savers and grassroots activists on the planet and the most incredible display of heirloom seeds.
Unfortunately, this year, an unexpected visitor from the biotech industry showed up with a camera and a hidden video recorder in his pocket. When confronted by activists who he had harassed online for years, this biotech bully admitted that he was there to find out more about the genetics behind all the incredible diversity of heirloom seeds at the festival!
Incredibly, over the years this biotech bully and his colleagues have launched major attacks on GMO labeling activists like us at Food Democracy Now!, scientists like Don Huber and Eric Seralini and even nasty attacks on Vandana Shiva and Food Babe author Vani Hari.
Now, they coming to the Heirloom Seeds Festival to try to pick up desirable traits that they could then use to genetically engineer new GMO crops from and sell these newly patented seeds to companies like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow Chemical and DuPont.
But we need your help to make sure that we can save the incredibly biodiversity of natural traits that have been found in nature and bred traditionally for thousands of years by local farmers and home gardeners.
This is why Food Democracy Now! is partnering with Baker Creek Seed Company to make sure you have access to these seeds and can help spread and protect their amazing diversity in your own home garden.
Please SHARE this Important message far and wide with friends and family today!

Baker Creek Seed Expo Unfairly Targeted, Harassed and Fined
If having an attack dog for Monsanto show up with undercover recording equipment wasn't bad enough, this year for the first time in the Heirloom Seed Festival's history, a local Sonoma county health inspector showed and started harassing vendors for things allowing visitors to taste test organic apples before they bought them.
According to a report in the local paper:

"Vendors and exhibitors at a popular natural foods event contend they were harassed and unfairly targeted by Sonoma County health inspectors who cracked down this week with fees and fines, as well as permit requirements.

Organizers of the National Heirloom Exposition at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds said previous health inspectors were positive and supportive of the three-day event, which ended Thursday. But this year was different.

Organizers said the treatment by health inspectors threatens the future of the Heirloom Exposition, which draws more than 15,000 people. They said it makes it challenging for the participation of backyard farmers and hobbyists who can’t give away an apple or tomato without a permit.

“We feel we’re not really wanted,” said farming entrepreneur Jere Gettle, who co-founded the Heirloom Festival and the Petaluma Seed Bank. “It’s taken the heart out of the event.”

It's hard to know what's changed from the previous 5 years, but it's no coincidence that this year an attack dog for Monsanto showed up and people start getting harassed. With the new proposed Monsanto - Bayer merger expected to go through, we need to make sure we support vibrant, independent sources for rare heirloom seeds and we hope that you'll take advantage of this opportunity to buy some seeds for your home garden or start your seed collection right now!
It doesn't matter if you have a full acre plot dedicated to growing your own fruits and vegetables during the summer or if you just want to put a few seeds in a pot on your windowsill.
It's important now, more than ever to make sure the incredibly biodiversity created by previous generations of farmers and home gardeners is passed down to the next generation of seeds savers.

• Join us today in protecting heirloom seeds for future generations. We need your help to make sure that all of nature's creations don't because the private property of corporations who have no interest in our health or the environment.

• Take this opportunity to purchase rare, heirloom seeds — rare heirloom vegetables for your home garden, or pick up flower seeds and bulbs and herb seeds for your backyard or the front porch. Or just collect a bunch of their heirloom seed packets for fun!

• Use this code [FOODDEMOCRACY], which can be entered at checkout, when you buy seeds today to receive a discount and a portion of your purchases will be donated to support our work at Food Democracy Now!.

We couldn't thank Jere Gettle and his amazing crew of seed savers at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds enough for protecting this incredible birthright of saving seeds and we wanted to make sure that if you care about seeds and biodiversity you have access to some of the most beautiful seeds and amazing heirloom fruits and vegetables on the planet.
Remember, democracy is like a muscle, either you use it or you lose it!
Thanks for participating in food democracy,
Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! team
Source:
1. “Uproar over Sonoma County’s handling of National Heirloom Exposition”, Sonoma Press Democrat, September 9, 2016 http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/2035?t=11&akid=1933.359821.NFzewF
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Unlabelled GMO Salmon?

According to an old Irish tradition, salmon is the king of fish. If they meant the tastiest or, apparently, the most nutritious of fish, those Irish bards were onto something. However, a corporation whose name isn't Hubris Inc., but should be, has been trying to improve on the salmon...tampering with its genomes to produce a "Frankenfish" that grows twice as fast as a natural salmon.

Salmon are big fish. The ones baked and split on restaurant buffet bars are chosen for being as long as the tray. The fish can grow bigger than that. Super-sized salmon could potentially not only out-compete, but gobble up, natural fish. And then what would humans eat if it turns out that super-sized salmon, like certain other GMO food products, make humans sick?

The essence of Trip Van Noppen's e-mail is below. The compromise GMO labelling legislation our Congress and President just approved will not require that Frankenfish be labelled differently from natural salmon. (In fact, if the fish are released into the ocean, and if they survive, it may become extremely difficult and expensive to tell them from natural salmon twice their age.)

Those of us who already know that we need GMO labelling, for health reasons, have learned the hard way that we can't depend even on our best elected officials to secure it for us. Corporations' employees also vote. (Sigh.) We have to leverage the Power of the Purse.

The lame and feeble compromise legislation we now have doesn't require corporations to admit that things they're selling as food may contain GMOs, in good plain English. It merely allows food distributors, especially the smaller distributors who are otherwise sometimes at a disadvantage, to brag loudly and clearly if they can prove that their products are GMO-free. And it drives activists to get active on the private level, sending our petitions to companies like ConAgra, General Mills, Frito-Lay, et al., to market food we can safely eat.

Tragically, this compromise may mean that we'll have to depend on "farmed" salmon, which, like factory-farm eggs, just aren't as good as the all-natural kind.

"

We knew the Food and Drug Administration would not require that new genetically engineered salmon be labeled to let consumers know what they’re buying, but now states are no longer allowed to label the fish!

Since I last wrote you about our legal challenge to government approval of GE salmon for human consumption, the House and Senate passed a bill prohibiting states from from labeling these fish. And on Friday, July 29, the bill was signed into law.

Additionally the FDA is still failing to analyze and prevent the risks these fish can cause to wild salmon and the environment.

We’re challenging this decision in court, and we need your help!

"

Obligatory Amazon link? I've not read the book below; it's one for my Wish List.

Veto or Improve?

I don't like backing down any more than my e-friends at Food Democracy Now do. I'm not really proud that all three of my Congresspeeps backed down on S764, the U.S. Senate bill that caved to Monsanto and allowed manufacturers to "label" GMO food products with wacky-looking computer codes instead of real labels.

But...

1. S764 does solidly enforce food manufacturers' privilege to brand food products as being GMO-free, which they can and should exploit for all it's worth during the years it'll take bigger manufacturers to get the GMO poisons out of their production lines. Some GMO foods are pure poison to me, while others don't noticeably affect me but do affect some people...either way, if you've had symptoms similar to salmonella, listeria, E. coli, etc., only more so, from inadvertently ingesting one genetically modified food product, you will pay more for anything that can legally be branded GMO-free.

2. S764 is a compromise with Big Food, yes. With Evil Monsanto, yes. I would prefer to see Monsanto held to account, stripped of assets to compensate those of us who've been sickened by "Roundup-Ready" (E. Coli) corn products, down to their shirts and then put'em on a chain gang in their shorts, yes.

3. Nevertheless, Morgan Griffith is an intelligent Congressman who has generally represented me and the conservative Ninth District of Virginia pretty well. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine seldom represent our district accurately at all--as Democrats, they're misrepresenting their party if they do represent us well--but they're intelligent men; you could insert a "non-family-filtered-word-of-choice" before "intelligent" if you want one. When those three agree on something, it does make me stop and consider why. I'm not thrilled by their compromise on S764, but as compromises go it is...intelligent.

With this in mind, I leave it to you readers whether you want to call the White House hotline set up for this purpose to "show Obama the movement." Bearing in mind that killing S764 will maintain better labelling in Vermont, but not necessarily maintain such labelling as we have in the other States, possibly including yours. If I thought White House staff would tally calls in favor of keeping S764 for now and immediately enacting something better next year, I'd use a phone minute on that.

"

"

Tim Kaine on GMO Labels

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, D-VA...once again missing the point. Electronic scanning doesn't count as labelling because most of the grocery stores and shoppers, at least here in the point of Virginia, don't have or need electronic scanners. We need to avoid adding extra expense to the process of buying groceries... grumble grumble grumble. Actually, I believe just giving manufacturers bragging rights, if they can claim their products are "GMO Free," is a step in the right direction...but this step could and should have gone sooo much further.

"

I believe consumers have a right to know what is in their food. For that reason, I voted for a bipartisan bill in the Senate on July 7th, 2016, to establish a federal requirement that GMO food products be labeled. The President is expected to sign this legislation into law.

This bill creates a national standard across all 50 states for how GMO products may be labeled. It provides three options for labeling: a statement saying the product contains GMO ingredients; a symbol conveying this; or an electronically-readable code, such as a QR code, that consumers can scan to find out GMO information. It eliminates a number of exemptions to labeling granted by Vermont's state-level GMO law so that some 25,000 more food products will be labeled.

I've heard from some Virginians who have concerns about several aspects of this bill, and I'd like to address them.

On the preemption of Vermont's state law, since food products are sold nationwide, I believe it is appropriate in this case for federal law to establish uniform standards for these products. Virginia's state government has no plans to label GMOs at the state level, so under this federal bill, Virginians will have access to GMO information on their store shelves for the first time.

On the definition of what constitutes a GMO, this bill's definition covers the GMO ingredients of all food products on the market today and gives the U.S. Department of Agriculture authority to close off any loopholes that companies may seek to exploit. Though certainly narrower than other definitions of GMO, the bill specifically clarifies that this does not apply to current standards of the USDA Organic certification. Consumers can rest assured that if they see "USDA Organic" on a product, it means the product is GMO-free.

On the availability of an electronic scanning option like a QR code as a form of labeling, the bill requires that the scanning option to be minimally cumbersome and to take the consumer directly to the GMO information. In addition, many food companies like General Mills, Kellogg's, and Campbell's Soup have already decided that an on-package GMO label is easier than this electronic option.

I agree that some improvements could have made the bill even better, which is why I voted with Senator Bernie Sanders and others on a procedural motion to allow more amendments during Senate consideration. Though this motion did not pass, I still believe this compromise bill is a major net win for those who believe consumers should have a right to know GMO information about the foods they consume.

Thank you again for contacting me and for sharing your views on this important issue.

Sincerely,

Tim Kaine

"

Morgan Griffith on GMO Labels

Editorial rant: This web site wants mandatory GMO labels, in large clear type, preferably in Spanish as well as English, as a requirement for any company that wants to market any GMO product as food--even for hogs.

Some of our correspondents are going to have a field day bashing Republicans and moderate Democrats who voted against mandatory GMO labels. Yes, of course manufacturers can start labelling food GMO-free, and they should. Yes, of course Americans can write (and e-mail) food manufacturers about their concerns. We're entitled to demand that "Roundup-Ready" products marketed as food be burned; we're entitled to demand that they be wrapped up in a great big symbolic shape--the cross has been taken--and burned outside Monsanto corporate headquarters. And that should happen.

But our Congress should also have held the entire nation up to Vermont's standards for GMO labelling, rather than dragging Vermont down.

That said, I do understand that GMO labelling may be a hardship for some food manufacturers. Of course, the longer we stall, the worse the hardship will be. If GMOs hadn't been sneaked into the food supply, meat processors wouldn't have to worry about verifying what hogs or chickens have been fed.

Meanwhile...food manufacturers are U.S. citizens. They vote. In a democracy they're entitled to lean on the U.S. Congress like everyone else. I only wish Virginia's congressional representatives, who represent more small than large food producers, had stood up for the right thing...like ten years ago. If only for the record.

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

On July 14, 2016, the House of Representatives considered the Senate Amendment to the House Amendment to S.764, dealing with GMO labeling requirements. This bill establishes mandatory labeling and disclosure requirements for genetically modified foods, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture would determine which foods qualify as genetically modified. Food companies would then be able to choose among several methods of labeling and disclosing that the product contains GMOs to consumers. The labeling and disclosure requirements contained in this bill would pre-empt state standards. States would be prohibited from establishing a labeling requirement for bioengineered (also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs)) in interstate commerce if the food is subject to the measures’national bioengineered food disclosure requirements. The Senate Amendment to the House Amendment to S. 764 passed the House on July 14, 2016.

I believe that this legislation was a case of a bad option vs. a worse option. The House version was a good bill (H.R. 1599) and I voted for it. While the Senate version would allow for some labeling requirements to be provided online, the mandatory requirement is unfortunate. I would anticipate that large food production companies will be unable to comply with this requirement since some of the food that they produce contains numerous ingredients such as corn, wheat, soy, etc. It will be difficult for them to determine if GMO products might be included due to cross-pollination with other nearby crops. Small manufacturers can more easily provide, with certainty, non-GMO selections as opposed to large companies. I would have preferred the House version become law, but the Senate version of the legislation is better than no action. This is because taking no action would allow a crazy quilt patchwork of state labeling laws to be implemented on companies that sell product in more than one state. Vermont already has such a law and failure to create a national standard now will cause such an unworkable patch work. Please know that I will keep your thoughts in mind should other legislation come to the floor of the House of Representatives regarding GMOs.

For more information on what is happening in Congress, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. If I may be of further assistance to you on this, or any other issue, please feel free to contact me in my Washington, DC office at (202) 225-3861. I remain

Sincerely yours,

H. MORGAN GRIFFITH

"

[Blank space represents a signature graphic.]

And how does this relate to Agenda 21? U.N. Agenda 21, breaking from traditional "Communist" ideology for practical reasons, calls for more support for huge factory farms owned by corporations, as opposed to small sustainable farms owned by families.

Label GMO Food in Plain English

Here's my version of an e-mail the Alliance for Natural Health is urging everyone to send to their U.S. Senators:

"
I apologize for this form letter...I'm disappointed to read the details of the new GMO compromise being offered by Sens. Roberts and Stabenow. The bill strikes me as a sneaky way to give Monsanto what it wants rather than the kind of labeling the overwhelming majority of consumers want.

The bill requires the labeling of packaged food containing GMOs in one of three ways: an electronic code that consumers can scan; a USDA-developed symbol; or a label. The bill leaves it to manufacturers to decide which of the three methods they prefer. Naturally they will prefer the code that can only be read with a scanner, which will be useless to most businesses and most individuals.

The QR code is hardly a label in any meaningful sense of the word. It *discriminates* against those who do not own smartphones--which is half of people living in rural areas, 75% of those over 65, and half of those making less than $30,000 a year. This legislation discriminates against all these people and especially the poorest Americans. Sens. Stabenow and Roberts should be ashamed of this.

An astounding 92% of consumers now want on-package labeling of genetically modified foods. As your constituent, I urge you to send this bill back to the House in a form that requires GMOs to be labelled in plain English, in clear and readable type.

And if they complain about that...I personally think the information should be available in Spanish, too. I'm willing to compromise on that part.

"

Label GMO's in Plain English

Dittos to the Institute for Responsible Technology. That cute little graphic means absolutely nothing to most stores, store employees, and shoppers who might be at risk for selling, buying, or consuming food that might make them ill.

"
Only 9 days remaining until the Vermont GMO labeling law goes into effect July 1!

We urge you to take action today.

Right now, Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) are working behind closed doors to hash out a new DARK Act that would once again erase state GMO labeling laws passed in Vermont, Connecticut and Maine, and replace them with QR codes or 800 numbers consumers would have to access instead of simple on-package labeling.

CLICK HERE for Senate contact information

Calls made today and tomorrow will be most effective.

"

GMO Labels: Dare Bet for Senator Paul

Here's a link that provoked too much thought to fit into a Link Log. Rand Paul shared this link on Twitter. It's a PDF--sorry--and it highlights the only major point on which I disagree with Senator Paul. It's worth sharing because it does contain some truth, but it also reflects political bias and chicanery.

Should individuals have the freedom to splice genes, even in plants? Meh. I believe "bioengineering" is a sin, but I believe Americans have freedom of belief.

Natural corn is a staff-of-life food for me. The Bacillus thuringiensis corn that puny little Zambia rocked the world by protesting, in 2002, hasn't done me any noticeable harm yet, so I didn't put a lot of energy behind other people's protests against it. E. coli ("Roundup-Ready") corn is a deadly poison for me. BT corn is poisonous for some other people, too, and other GMO's may be even worse for yet other people.

Maybe you have to have gone through the whole gluten/glyphosate reaction, from the "Why am I in such a vile mood all of a sudden?" through the double-over cramps all the way to the blood in the toilet, to realize how disgusting the unintended consequences of bioengineering can be. We are not talking about left-wing rumors here. We are talking about solid medical facts. If Professor Logomasini doubts these facts, she's welcome to join me in a public restroom a day or two after I've eaten unlabelled E. coli corn.

Professor Logomasini raises some valid points about political motivations behind some anti-GMO protests, but the demand that GMO products at least be clearly labelled is bipartisan, and no elected official can afford to ignore it. More than ninety percent of the people in every country want GMO food products labelled.

Yes, that may mean unnecessarily slow sales. Deal with it. Farmers can always cash in on the demand for the non-GMO food. (Would I pay a premium for this cornmeal mix if it could be marked, clearly and honestly, "GMO-Free"? Would the Pope be Catholic?)



Yes, it takes a little more work to tie nylon mesh over ears of corn, to keep out the earworms, than it does to spray poison on the corn or plant poisonous GMO corn...but if you want good-quality corn, it's worth that extra work. Anyway, if Senator Paul's constituents want to go GMO and glyphosate-free, I will personally haul this computer out to Kentucky and tie the nylon mesh on for them. Videotape it, too, if any Constitutional Civil Libertarians want to make a full-sized dare bet out of this.

I do recommend reading the study, if your computer reads PDF documents. I'll print it out, for the usual $1 per individual printout, if your computer won't open it. Those who suspect or know that E. coli grain products and/or glyphosate residues may be making you sick--which they may well be--need to know that, even though GMO labelling is a cause about as popular with all political parties as grandparents or puppies, GMO labelling can and will be exploited by people who want to expand it to support other things.

Glyphosate is killing a lot of birds and animals, sickening if not killing a lot of humans, and its use needs to be drastically restricted. How many parts per million of glyphosate can food safely contain? Based on some reactions I've had recently, I'd say one is too many. E. coli grain...if you think about splicing genes from bacteria that cause food poisoning into food, you probably don't need any experimental evidence to realize that it was basically a very bad idea. And, for testing this kind of thing--what could be better test subjects than the dumb animals in the chemical companies who develop and market ideas as fundamentally stupid as E. coli corn? I mean the ones walking around on their hind legs, wearing ties.

Does that mean every new product or technique should be subjected to twenty years of testing on convicts (the ones with no option of parole, the ones who half hope something does kill them)? Meh. We'd run out of convicts, and animal studies don't really tell us much about how things affect humans. (Even studies of Italian humans don't always tell us how things affect Irish humans.)

What about updating TSCA with a provision that, if a product has seemed to be safe under the current feeble test standards, if it is then released onto the market, and if people then start blaming it for actual symptoms they are in fact having, that product should be either banned or subjected to more exhaustive testing? For example, and this should be written into the law, Monsanto's glyphosate and E. coli corn products should be banned, and Monsanto should have to pay everyone who has been or may have been exposed to any of these products...down through the assets of the corporate decision makers until they're all standing around in one pair of shorts.

And if you think that sounds mean, talk to me in the hour when I first realize that, during the past 24 hours, I must have ingested some unlabelled E. coli corn product somewhere. I get sick, sadistic ideas, the details of which are banned under this web site's contract; if I were a young man and didn't know what was going on, I might even believe I wanted to act them out. I seriously believe that glyphosate is one of the ways the United States gets those sick, sadistic convicts who can never be released. Some of them may literally be...



Stand firm, Senator Paul. Be scientific. Be rational. And be brave enough to heed the will of the people. Some of the "chemical scares" Professor Logomasini discusses may have been merely "scares," but the hazards of unlabelled GMO food are real.

If I were a U.S. Senator, I'd demand that anyone associated with Monsanto publicly repent of having dumped unlabelled GMOs into the food supply, demand that any farm that uses Monsanto pesticides or grows Monsanto GMO crops label those crops as such, and lobby for GMO labels before that person could get into my office, send me an e-mail, or read my Tweets on Twitter.

https://cei.org/sites/default/files/Angela%20Logomasini%20-%20The%20Real%20Meaning%20of%20TSCA%20Modernization.pdf

Monsanto Seeks Further Protection from Congress

This post, Gentle Readers, is a bit of a system test. Some of you want and need the information...and I want to see how well this format works in the current version of Chrome and Blogger. The folks at Food Democracy Now invited everybody to share and repost this e-mail, with its fancy graphic, so here it is.

If you click on the links you can sign a petition to your U.S. Senators and the President, which is recommended. You can even send money to Food Democracy Now, which is recommended only after you've funded this project:

http://igg.me/at/frugalgraciouslivingchallenge/x/997637

...But really, what are we trying to do here? The U.S. Senate need to know where we stand. They already have that information. Big Money is being used to counterbalance that information. We don't have that kind of money ourselves, and might not send it to a nonprofit organization online if we did--we're talking billions of dollars. But we do have leverage over that kind of money...if we think about it.

Monsanto is bioengineering things that are being sold and used as food, although the evidence is increasing that they're not fit for human consumption (and, some say, they don't even burn very well). The chemicals dumped onto these things are doing a limited amount of harm by direct contact or as airborne vapors, but relatively few people are exposed to them in those ways. The "Frankenfoods" are doing harm when we eat them as food. Very few of us are going into the vegetable garden to pick an ear of E. coli corn (which is what this web site intends to call the GMO corn that gives me celiac sprue, until Monsanto at least has the decency to give it a brand name of its own--it is in fact made by splicing in DNA from bacteria that cause "acute food poisoning"). We are ingesting E. coli corn in the forms of corn starch, "modified corn starch," "modified food starch," corn syrup, etc., added to commercially processed food. If we stop buying those foods, and notify the food manufacturers that we've stopped buying them, (a) we'll feel better right away, and (b) the manufacturers will notice that using E. coli corn is likely to cost them money. And then the bottom will fall out of the market for E. coli corn.

If you are gluten-intolerant, or if you don't actually have the gluten-intolerant gene but are having reactions that mimic gluten intolerance, you need to be careful about eating even natural corn--in any case--corn bran naturally contains a biochemical that interferes with our use of niacin, so when we eat whole natural corn we need to eat other things that contain extra niacin. But, currently, you need to be extremely careful about eating E. coli corn, which is what most of the corn products in your supermarket are likely to be at the time of writing, and which may be producing all the symptoms of celiac sprue in some people who don't even have that reaction to wheat. Don't buy corn on the cob. Don't buy vegetable soup that contains corn. Don't buy corn tortillas. Don't buy ready-to-eat meals that have sauces thickened with cornstarch. Don't buy canned fruit that's sweetened, or canned soup or vegetable products that are "freshened up," with corn syrup. Don't buy processed foods that have their "flavors enhanced" with "modified corn starch" (which means monosodium glutamate made from corn). Be wary about meat made from cows, pigs, or chickens that eat corn--we don't know yet how dangerous this meat is, but there is evidence that E. coli corn has harmful effects on animals.

And tell the manufacturers, and the stores, what you're not buying and why. Let them know that GMO corn is unfit for use as anything but ethanol. We can get GMO corn off the market with or without the U.S. Senate's help.

"
RED ALERT: Right now a handful of Senators are trying to pass another Corporate Loophole for Monsanto to escape from complying with common sense state GMO labeling laws! - Stop Monsanto's GMO Trolls in the Senate - Every voice counts!
If you thought Congress couldn’t get any more corrupt, we’re going to have to ask you to sit down when you read this. When we woke up yesterday morning, we almost fell over when we read a New York Times front-page story about how Monsanto received extra legal protection from the House of Representatives last year when it passed a bill to update the 40-year-old Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), which leaves millions of Americans vulnerable everyday to more than 1,000 hazardous chemicals still in sale across the country.
In the process of writing this bill, an unknown member of the House of Representatives slipped a one-paragraph provision in the TSCA bill that exempts Monsanto from ALL financial liability from lawsuits and financial settlements sought for PCB contamination and cleanup sites.
This is essentially a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card for Monsanto, exempting them from BILLIONS of dollars of legal liability from lawsuits for damages which have been filed in several major cities, including Seattle and San Diego and a lawsuit filed last year from individuals seeking damages for diagnoses of a form of cancer known as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The St. Louis-based chemical and biotech seed giant is now claiming they “had nothing to do” with this new “Monsanto Clause”, even though Monsanto was the only company that made this toxic chemical.
According to the New York Times, “the provision does not mention the company by name, but between the early 1930s and 1977, Monsanto manufactured almost all of the 1.25 billion pounds of PCBs sold in the United States.”
That’s right, a member of Congress intentionally slipped in a provision to protect Monsanto’s toxic profits over those of individuals with cancer and major U.S. cities seeking millions in legal fees for cleaning up the cancer-causing PCBs, which are now pervasive in the environment.
Now, Monsanto is seeking extra legal protection from the Senate so it can continue to deny America’s their basic right to know what’s in their food by making state GMO labeling laws illegal.
Now Monsanto Seeks Special Legal Protection from State GMO Labeling Laws!
Today, at 10 am EST, the Senate Agriculture Committee is expected to vote to outlaw state GMO labeling laws in order to give extra legal protection for Monsanto and the biotech industry once again and we can’t let them get away with it!
Right now, Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) are desperate to try to prevent the state of Vermont’s GMO labeling law from going into effect on July 1^st of this year and your Senator could go along with it! Last summer the House passed a similar Dark Act bill by a vote of 275 to 150 and we can’t let the Senate pass this outrageous bill!
We need to make sure they hear – Loud and Clear – that we won’t allow them to steal our basic democratic rights to protect Monsanto’s toxic profits.
1. Make a call today! This corrupt deal – the ultimate Monsanto Protection Act – will be voted on today in the Senate Ag Committee and your Senators need to hear from you today!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/call/dont_let_Monsanto_and_GMA_kill_GMO_labelingt/?t=4&akid=1820.359821.EzTYvk
Tell your Senators to support mandatory GMO labeling and to stand up for your rights and the Constitution.
And
2. Click here to send a letter to your Senators today! Every voice counts!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_Monsantos_GMO_Trolls_in_the_Senate_Today/?t=7&akid=1820.359821.EzTYvk
After spending more than $100 million to defeat us in GMO labeling ballot initiatives in California, Washington, Colorado and Oregon, Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association are once again trying to get Congress to violate our basic Constitutional rights by making it illegal for states to pass reasonable and common sense GMO labeling bills like we did in Connecticut, Maine and Vermont.
Then SHARE this image far and wide to Stop Monsanto's GMO Trolls in the Senate!

Facebook link here - https://fdn.actionkit.com/go/1606?t=10&akid=1820.359821.EzTYvk
Deja Monsanto Vu ~ 2013 Congress Passes The Monsanto Protection Act
A little History Lesson: We’ve been here before! A little over 2 years ago, Monsanto lobbyists successfully snuck in a rider, which Food Democracy Now! called the Monsanto Protection Act, into an emergency must pass spending bill, a continuing resolution (CR) that only funded the government for 6 months because Congress now is so broken it can't even accomplish its basic business functions, like creating a budget, without the help of corporate lobbyists. They then use these intentionally manufactured spending emergencies to attach outrageous corporate loophole protections like the Monsanto Protection Act.
Despite overwhelming opposition, both chambers of Congress allowed the Monsanto Protection Act to pass and President Obama signed it into law in March of 2013.
Food Democracy Now! members like you were so outraged that you made more than 100,000 phone calls to the Congress and the White House and generated more than 250,000 signatures opposing the Monsanto Protection Act, which we then flew to DC and delivered to the White House. It was a moment that captured the attention of the White House and Congress and the world and made it clear that the People would not tolerate special interests, like Monsanto, to write our laws. Six months later, this unconstitutional loophole protecting Monsanto's profits was removed from the next budget bill - all thanks to action by people like you!
We can do this again - this our moment - It's all hands on deck! We are in the final hours to protect our right to know what's in our food and states' rights so we can achieve mandatory GMO labeling. Please share with your friends and call Congress today! Every voice counts!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/call/dont_let_Monsanto_and_GMA_kill_GMO_labelingt/?t=13&akid=1820.359821.EzTYvk
Remember, democracy is like a muscle, either you use it or you lose it!
Thanks for participating in food democracy,
Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! team
Sources:
1. “Monsanto Could Benefit From a Chemical Safety Bill”, The New York Times, Eric Lipton, February 29, 2016
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/1605?t=15&akid=1820.359821.EzTYvk

"

Funny Thing About Glyphosate...

(This post was excised from today's Link Log because it's long enough to be a separate post.)

It's a funny thing about glyphosate. One reason why getting this stuff labelled and banned seems to be so difficult, apart from the huge amounts of money Monsanto is throwing into the fight, is that, in fact, the observable effects of this poison vary from person to person. Effects on the same person may also vary depending on the level and method of exposure.

You may have read that a Monsanto employee blustered that he'd drink a cup of "Roundup" on television, then, when invited to do so, backed down. Actually, it's slightly hazardous to your health, but it's very interesting, to observe different people (and animals) in a place where "Roundup" has been sprayed. I've done it. No two results are alike. Most people exposed to "Roundup" don't immediately get cancer; many don't even display "their usual" allergy-type reaction--but if you observe closely, everyone shows some kind of adverse effects.

In one household I observed that (1) I didn't just have "hayfever" symptoms--my nose started spouting like a fountain, immediately; (2) another woman, who had had a stroke, had no "hayfever" symptoms, but during that day's physical therapy session she fell back to the level of progress she'd reached four or five weeks ago, and made very little further progress over the next two weeks; and (3) a man, who was normally energetic and intelligent with no particular memory issues, said he felt "low," took several naps during the next few days, and seemed forgetful enough to be accused of "getting old." (That "low" feeling and urge to nap--sometimes positive narcolepsy--is evidence of harmful effects on the kidneys; glyphosate has been implicated in some patients' kidney failure.)

My cat Mogwai survived exposure to airborne "Roundup" residues, but her personality changed during exposure; my cat Bisquit died, slowly and painfully, a few days after eating an exposed bird. And so it goes...babies may have more colic, children might have more learning problems, Dad might have a headache, Mom might have stomach cramps, on and on and on.

I'm a celiac; grain crops that have been genetically modified to be "Roundup-Ready," more like grass and wheat, are known to produce celiac reactions to E. coli corn (as distinct from natural corn, or BT corn--and if corporations want us to call bioengineered corn something other than "BT" or "E. Coli" after the disease germs from which DNA has been spliced into it, they'd better put brand names on it and advertise it). I've had celiac reactions to corn and rice, which I shouldn't have to worry about, during the past two years, but that's not the complete explanation of why I've spent so much of these two years feeling sick. After people started spraying "Roundup" on fresh produce as a "preservative" (since it kills many insects as well as plants), I've had occasional celiac reactions to things that aren't even grain.

For several months in 2015 I couldn't eat peanuts. Peanuts are a safe food for celiacs, they're cheap, they can be considered local, and I happen to like them, but for some strange reason, peanuts from our main local supplier and the store brands it supplies started to affect me just as if they contained wheat. Then the next year's crop came in, and lo and behold, peanuts were once again a safe food I could enjoy eating.

At the moment, potatoes seem to be a problem food. I'm not really keen on potatoes, but they're a safe food for celiacs and I've always thought of locally produced Lay's potato chips as a safe party food. At two parties last December I ate potato chips, and was sick. Was "Roundup" sprayed on the potatoes? Were the farmers experimenting with some wacky new GMO potatoes? All I know is, no more potato products for me this year.

A Real Twit and a really scientific reader asked me how I know whether it's the GMO corn, or glyphosate residues in the corn, making me sick. I don't know, of course. I can't know. Since the two things occur in combination, since there's no reason to plant E. Coli Corn unless you're going to drench it in glyphosate, it's likely to be both of those things...making me sick, making masses of other celiacs sick, and causing many people who are not genetically gluten-intolerant to have celiac-type symptoms.

Many people exposed to "Roundup" never get cancer, but there's reason to believe that "Roundup" is one of the more potent carcinogens that contribute to the cancer some people do get. Anything that damages the kidneys obviously contributes to the progress of any type of cancer, even if it's not kidney cancer.

If your neighbors still use this nasty poison, you can see that everyone who's been exposed to "Roundup" shows some sort of adverse reaction--but, when no two individuals show the same reaction, it's hard to pinpoint exactly how this poison is harmful to humans, cats, dogs, and wildlife.

http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-monsanto-glyphosate-idUSL1N12K2P820151020

What can we do? There's one guaranteed way to stop Monsanto poisoning the food supply...stop buying the food. Leave food producers and distributors with mounds of rotting food to try to burn, or feed to hogs, or dispose of as best they can. Meanwhile, write them nice, polite letters explaining how much you've always liked Lay's potato chips, or Fritos, or Zatarain's rice mixes, or Success Rice, or whatever other food products you like that may contain GMOs and/or glyphosate, but you're concerned about these GMO and glyphosate issues...you want to know it if you do buy anything that contains either GMOs or glyphosate. Ask them to test the foods they use and print the results of their tests on their labels.

Writing to elected officials is also nice, and Change.org is a wonderful way to encourage this type of changes, and some of you might even want to use Avaaz.org...but food manufacturers, faced with the fact that about 75% of Americans want GMOs banned and 90% want them at least labelled, are likely to be our best hope of getting the poison out of our food.

Jeffrey Smith on the GMO Battle

From Jeffrey Smith at the Institute for Responsible Technology:


"

Why We Are Winning the GMO Battle

What a year! The FDA just approved genetically modified salmon that could wreak havoc in the oceans and damage the health of consumers who eat it. The USDA approved genetically modified potatoes and apples that use double-stranded RNA that might reprogram our DNA if we eat it. The House passed a bill we call the DARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know) which, if the Senate passes a similar bill, could eliminate the possibility of mandatory labeling nationally or state-by-state. And Monsanto pulled out all the stops to get its propaganda talking points placed in major media around the country throughout the year.
So why am I smiling? Every time I hear one of these news items it reminds me that the strategy that the Institute for Responsible Technology chose to go with was the right one—and on that front we are totally winning.
Let me explain. There are two major categories for GMO activism: containment and elimination. For containment strategies we try to stop the approval of new GMOs or prevent them from being grown in certain regions. We certainly support those efforts, but some we win and some we lose. Case in point: salmon, apples and potatoes.
If you can eliminate GMOS, which is our strategy, you eliminate not only the current GMOs, but you eliminate the introduction of these newly approved GMOs, at least for many years.
So every time I see an approval of salmon, apple, or any new GMO, I think to myself, “We have to move quickly. We have to eliminate the market for GMOs before these new GMOs get introduced.”
Now let me share some very good news. In a recent New York Times article they shared information from the Hartman Group, which is doing consumer research on GMOs. The Times wrote, “Consumers are increasingly looking for information about the presence of genetically modified ingredients in their foods, according to research by the Hartman group.”
“‘The GMO issue is something that continues to be brought up in an unprompted way in our interviews with consumers,’ said Laurie Demeritt, chief executive of Hartman. ‘And when we look for things like fat, sodium and sugar, GMO is showing the strongest growth rate in terms of a characteristic that consumers are trying to avoid.’”
They said that about 58% of consumers are looking for non-GMO food. That’s huge! 184 million Americans are looking for non-GMO food! This is a huge victory. This is the metric we look for. Yes, the salmon and potato approvals were terrible, but the 58% shows that we are winning where it counts: in eliminating the market for GMOs.
Will the food companies continue to use GM ingredients that give no consumer benefit when they start losing large chunks of their market share? Of course not! IRT has been dedicated to behavior change messaging; to get the information out about the health dangers of GMOs, why to avoid GMOs, and how. This is the type of information that needs to be spread now. We need to do it quickly, before the salmon, the apples, and the potatoes are introduced so that we eliminate the market for GMOs. And for that we need your help.
Please make a generous contribution to the Institute for Responsible Technology so that we can convert the 184 million people looking for non-GMOs into committed non-GMO eaters. We know who they are, we know what to say, and we know how to say it. Please make a contribution this year, and if you can, make it automatic so that it continues month after month and we can count on it as we implement our campaigns. Together we will eliminate GMOs and protect our health and all future generations."

Tim Kaine on GMO Labels

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). Virginians who've signed the various petitions through which the people demand that, if GMO food is sold, it should at least be labelled, have probably received similar e-mails:

"Thank you for writing to me about genetically-engineered foods again.

Your willingness to voice your thoughts on the matters that are important to you is helpful. I value input from my Virginia constituents.

As we continue to discuss and debate the many significant challenges facing our Commonwealth and country, I hope that you will continue to contact me with your thoughts. This helps me understand my constituents better, and ultimately strengthens our democracy.

Thank you again for following-up with me."

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