The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla
King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s
available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or
audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles
are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a
document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and
sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided
that all sources of material are credited.
1. WHY THE IMPOSSIBLE BURGER WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO DIGEST
Vegan meat analogs are nothing new. George Washington Carver and Jethro
Kloss worked on some of the earliest ways to mix grain and legume proteins into
a “nutritionally complete” vegan protein loaf. In the early twentieth century,
researchers from Loma Linda University, at Loma Linda Foods, and the Kettering
College of Medical Arts, at Worthington Foods, marketed some commercially
successful, highly palatable, wheat-soy versions of “Numete,” “Protose,” “Proteena,”
“Veja-Links,” “Bolo-No,” “Wham,” “Skallops,” “Big Franks,” “Little Links,” “Chicketts,”
“Turketts,” and others. In the 1980s Morningstar Farms (a division of Worthington)
brought out Breakfast Links, Breakfast Patties, Grillers, and Scramblers,
followed by other “Textured Vegetable Protein” products that sold well enough
to be stocked by big-chain supermarkets.
Since most of these products were wheat-based, most contained
monosodium glutamate, and some also contained milk or egg, they were
unacceptable to many vegans. Specialty “veggie burgers” became quite a fad at
the turn of the century. Grandma Bonnie’s Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers were made
of rice, beans, potatoes, squash, sometimes tomatoes, herbs, and salt for a
nutritious, low-fat, hypoallergenic vegetable protein patty. Boca Burgers contained
a little more salt and fat but were also totally gluten-free, vegan, and
hypoallergenic. Other “veggie burgers” that contained either wheat or soy were
also marketed. While none of these products tasted much like the ground and
grilled beef patties known as hamburgers, they were intended to be equally fast
and tidy to prepare.
Now, a company calling itself Impossible Foods proudly presents the
Impossible Burger, a bioengineered soy product that they claim has been made so
“meaty” it even “bleeds juices” onto the grill. They’ve even invested enough in
this thing to get national fast food chains to offer the Impossible Burger;
other Veggie Burgers have been available only in locally owned restaurants. Their
promotional drivel even presumes to call the Impossible Burger “clean food.”
We really need a federal law about this. If “organic” food might be
allowed to contain 1 discernible part per billion of any chemical “pesticide
residue,” which had better be borax, tobacco, or chrysanthemum, then “clean”
food should have to be proved to contain ZERO “pesticide residue.” One part per
billion of glyphosate in something advertised as “clean food” should be grounds
for a million-dollar lawsuit.
And no point for guessing: the Impossible Burger started with “Roundup-Ready”
soybeans, so it oozes glyphosate.
Don’t eat it. Don’t touch it. Don’t use utensils that could have
touched it. The Impossible Burger is not only not “clean food”; it’s poison.
2. BUT OTHER FOODS HAVE BECOME POISON, TOO
Basically, if you want to eat truly “clean” food in any part of North
America, you need to have (or be very, very nice to someone who has) a
genuinely organic, “pesticide”-free farm. In the supermarkets? Deep-sea fish,
eggs, chicken, and turkey are likely, but not guaranteed, to be fit to eat. Beef
and milk are likely to contain glyphosate. In the produce department, garlic
and onions typically need less “protection” than other food and are likely, but
not guaranteed, to contain very little glyphosate. Grains, beans, seeds,
greens, and fruit are likely, though not guaranteed, to contain enough glyphosate
to cause people who show celiac or pseudo-celiac reactions to gush blood.
While a lot of people are going to say “Well, I have to eat something; if it kills me it kills me,”
those of us who can get clean plant food—even if it’s unconventional plants
like dandelions—can potentially help other people survive by just saying no to all commercial produce that’s not
certified “3-G-Free.” Supermarkets typically make it easy to ignore the fruit
and vegetables sections. Do that. Here I stand to testify that many of us will feel better if we eat raw wild
vegetables picked out of our never-sprayed gardens rather than
glyphosate-tainted lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, apples and carrots. And the farmers
need to know that spraying poison on food is just not an option they can use to
increase yields, ever any more; that sprayed veg are going to lie somewhere and
rot while people risk short-term nutrient deficiencies to eat clean,
glyphosate-free diets.
3. QUANTIFYING THE OBVIOUS: GLYPHOSATE AND COLORECTAL CANCER IN THE
YOUNG
And in the older, no doubt...Robert Kennedy traces the links between
exposure to glyphosate, which is known to cause colorectal tissue damage in a
minority of all living creatures studied, and colorectal cancer. Yes, the more
times you tear strips off any part of the body, the better chance cancer has to
grow in the damaged area.
4. THEY CAN’T GO BACK...
Monsanto/Bayer want to keep us in the box of thinking that the
alternative to one “herbicide” spray is another “herbicide” spray. They’ve been
warning for a long time that if we get glyphosate banned, farmers will “have to”
use dicamba (the active ingredient in “Spectracide”), “which is even worse.”
“Worse” may vary—if your body forms bleeding ulcers every time it’s
exposed to glyphosate, as mine does, you don’t think the nose and throat
irritation dicamba causes to everybody,
impartially, is worse. You think “What fun to be suffering only as much as the people who sprayed
the poison are suffering,” and actually you suffer less, coughing for a few
hours, than you would from the bleeding ulcers. However, all spray-on poisons
harm other living things, including other humans, typically without their
knowledge or consent. All spraying of poison on plants or soil should be
recognized by our legal system as a violent crime.
In my neighborhood some people tried switching from “Roundup” to “Spectracide.”
The whole neighborhood coughed, sneezed, and rasped alike. The people who were
less aware of their reactions to glyphosate, who almost want to believe that dizziness and fainting and vomiting are normal
parts of the aging process rather than that they need to move their lazy bones
to weed their gardens, rushed back to “Roundup.” Here’s a study that may show why
the resulting reactions, this summer, have been even worse...Why I didn’t just
see blood in the toilet bowl as usual, but saw nothing but blood in the toilet bowl for nine days, after eating one little
can of spinach (which used to be something I ate while recovering from celiac reactions. Why John Doe didn’t just feel
queasy after drinking one little V8, but had to bolt out and lean over the
porch railing. Mixing these two poisons apparently aggravates the effects of both.
5. IF YOU KNOW ANYONE IN ST. LOUIS, SEND THEM THESE NEWSLETTERS
It’s no longer news: Bayer’s persuaded the judicial system to stage the
next big Roundup cancer trial in Monsanto’s old home town, St. Louis, Missouri,
where they hope juries will think of Bayer as a big part of the local economy
rather than a foreign corporation that, if it cares whether Americans live or
die, probably prefers Americans dead. We have about another month to show the “Show
Me State” that we actually want Bayer to be kept alive, and profitable—under new
management that will steer Bayer back to forms of “weed control” that are
ethically acceptable, such as building hand-held and highway- and
railroad-adapted devices that spray steam
on target plants.
