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If the Hippocrates maxim that “food should be considered as our first medicine” is right, we are on the brink of some really bad medicine. Recently, Obama selected as his “Food Czar”, a former Monsanto executive and FDA manipulator, Michael Taylor. More recently, the Orwellian labeled Food Safety Enhancement Bill (HR 2749) was passed easily by the House of Representatives.

The bill is on a fast track for Senate and Presidential approval. If it becomes law as written, this combination of a corrupt Food Czar and misleadingly named Food Safety Bill threatens to take out the food that is medicine and leave us with the food that is poison.

The Food Safety Bill Threatens Safe Food

Before you consider most of this bill as benign or even helpful, as many main stream outlets are promoting, read on and do your own research on the ambiguity of the bill, of which interpretation and enforcement will be left to the discretion of The Food Czar.

The Food Safety Bill does next to nothing to protect consumers from the industrial foods of agribusiness giants such as Monsanto and their ilk. It has the potential to be an instrument of legal oppression for small farmers, organic farming, even farmers’ markets and food co-ops. Some indicate the Bill’s language is broad enough to even include home vegetable gardens!

Setting a uniform fee of $500 annual, regardless of company or farm size, for the privilege of being policed by the FDA is a relatively minor inequity. This bill, when passed into law, gives the FDA the power to have random inspections on any food producing or storage group without probable cause. There have already been raids on food co-ops, such as the Ohio Department of Agriculture La Grange co-op raid in December of 2008, where all the food was seized without testing.

According to Gunny G Online: “This astounding control will include the elimination of organic farming by eliminating manure, mandating GMO animal feed, imposing animal drugs, and ordering applications of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers, thus, will be locked not only into the industrialization of once normal and organic farms but into the forced purchase of industry’s products.”

HR 2749 creates severe criminal and civil penalties, including prison terms of up to 10 years and/or fines of up to $100,000 for each violation. Does it include judicial review, Congressional oversight, a defined and limited set of penalties and punishments for a defined set of “crimes”? Not even. The so called Food Safety Bill hands carte blanch enforcement to the whims of Obama’s Food Czar.

Introducing Obama’s Food Czar

“The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US Food Safety Czar. This is no joke”, says Jeffrey Smith about Michael Taylor’s appointment in a recent Huffington Post article. Jeffrey Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette. Perhaps that is exaggerated, but Michael Taylor’s history with Monsanto and the FDA through the corporate/government revolving door is scary enough to provoke such an assertion.

In the early 1990’s, Michael Taylor was an attorney for Monsanto. He was parsing legalese and loopholes for the wonderful group that has brought the world DDT, PCB’s, Agent Orange, NutraSweet (aspartame), bovine growth hormone, GMO foods, toxic pesticides and weed killers (Round Up), and terminator seeds.

Michael passed through the revolving door connecting the corporate world and government more than once to ensure Monsanto’s unabated success with pushing profitable poisons into the world’s food supply.

After functioning as a lead attorney with Monsanto, he managed to be appointed as the FDA Policy Chief. From that position he wrote a “white paper” (an authoritative official declaration) on the safety of bovine growth hormones. He ensured that dairy farmers using Monsanto’s rbGH would not be required to label its milk products with the bovine growth hormone, which passes puss and toxins into the cow’s milk.

This white paper also gave Monsanto the ability to sue dairy farmers who labeled their products rbGH or growth hormone free, which Monsanto zealously pursued to financially destroy small dairy farmers. Monsanto Mike also oversaw the FDA ruling that dairy farmers who labeled their products as non rbGH needed to include that the FDA has determined there is no difference between milk from rbGH cows and non rbGH cows, which is a complete lie.

Author/journalist Jeffrey Smith was tipped from a former Monsanto scientist that three colleagues at Monsanto, upon discovering the hazards of milk from rbGH injected cows, switched to organic dairy products. Some FDA scientists also knew of the dangers and the improper testing by Monsanto. But they don’t make the final decisions. That’s a function of the FDA Policy Chief, and that was Michael Taylor.

The revolving door swooshed around and Michael Taylor landed back in Monsanto as vice president and chief lobbyist. Only months ago the door spun around once again and Michael Taylor became the senior advisor to the FDA commissioner. Good timing. From that position he could easily be promoted into Obama’s cabinet as the Food Safety Czar.

In case you may still doubt USA government collusion with Monsanto, here’s an interesting item from “Monsanto Buys Terminator Seeds Company” by F. William Engdahl. “In March 1998 the US Patent Office granted Patent No. 5,723,765 to Delta & Pine Land for a patent titled, Control of Plant Gene Expression. The patent is owned jointly, according to Delta & Pine’s Security & Exchange Commission 10K filing, by D&PL and the United States of America, as represented by the Secretary of Agriculture.”

The title “Control of Plant Gene Expression” refers to terminator seeds. These seeds make it impossible to save seeds from a harvest for replanting the next crop, an age old tradition for most farmers. This is a nail in the coffin of independent farming world wide, as once farmers begin using GMO seeds, they have to come back to buy again and again. Monsanto bought Delta & Pine Land (D & PL) in 2008, and now the USDA shares the terminator seed patent rights for royalties with Monsanto.

When Big Business owns Government, it is called fascism. When Government owns Big Business, it is called communism. Does this mean we will now have both for our food supply?

What This Means to Consumers

It means this bill will have the FDA, along with the USDA, to act as minions directly instead of indirectly for Monsanto and other literally unhealthy corporations. The FDA would be linking up with other World Trade Organization (WTO) efforts to control farming world wide, while catering to the greedy ambitions of International Agribusiness, its related industries, and Processed Food Manufacturers. FDA, USDA, and WTO bureaucrats are sponsored and headed by the enemies of organic and wholesome food farming.

The WTO is capable of legally levying ridiculous fines or mandating trade sanctions, including food sanctions, on regions that don’t comply with WTO governed organizations, such as WHO (World Health Organization), the organization that is ushering in dangerous forced vaccinations for 195 member nations. The WTO is planning severe farming regulations that are expected to be world wide.

Setting up a Food Czar from Monsanto with FDA connections via his revolving door career means that rbGH dairy, GMO’s, terminator seeds and pesticides for crops will dominate in our food supply and prosper as “safe” while organic and wholesome foods will be declared dangerous and become a threatened species. The main stream media is already publicizing propaganda against organic food.

You may want to start your own organic garden by yourself or with others soon. This is what the Cubans did in defense of all the trade sanctions imposed on them. And most of Cuba’s crops are now organic!

Activists don’t seem to feel confident about the bill losing steam on its fast track to becoming law. They have decided the best that can be done is petitioning for rewording of key passages with the Senate to soften HR 2749 before it gets to the president for ratification.

About the author
Paul Fassa has managed to survive the normal American diet and his youthful folly by studying real, not medical mafia, health matters informally with his wife over several years, and incorporating them into his lifestyle as a vegetarian. He also practices Chi-Lel Chi Gong, and he is trained as a polarity therapy practitioner. He is dedicated to warning others of the corruption of food and medicine in our time, and guiding others in a better direction for health.

In case you were still curious to learn what really goes on behind the closed doors of beef slaughterhouses, the release of a secret video by the Humane Society (www.HSUS.org) silenced the skeptics and naysayers by revealing the horrifying atrocities committed against diseased cows by slaughterhouse employees (click here to see the Humane Society investigation). As the secret videos show, cows at the Westland slaughterhouse in California were forklifted, electrocuted with cattle prods, kicked and otherwise abused by workers in order to get them into the processing lines so they could be used as meat for the human food supply.

These actions, of course, were taken in violation of federal law. USDA regulations state that non-ambulatory cows (those that can’t walk) should never be used in the human food supply due to the risk of disease (mad cow disease in particular). But given that non-ambulatory cows cause a financial loss for slaughterhouses, there is a strong financial incentive to drag, shove, shock or otherwise kick those cows into the processing line so that their flesh can be transformed into a few more bucks of profit for these beef processing companies (and all the companies downstream that use beef, too, like fast food chains, canned soup manufacturers, providers to school lunch programs and so on).

In reaction to the secret video, the USDA has issued a massive recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef. That’s the largest ever in the history of the United States. Five felony counts of animal cruelty were charged to the pen manager who worked at the plant, and three misdemeanor charges were filed against another employee. The company has not yet been charged with anything. Note that this would have never happened unless the Humane Society video had brought all this to light.

About 37 million pounds of the recalled beef had already been set to school lunch programs at the time of the USDA recall. But here’s the real kicker: Most of that beef has already been eaten by schoolchildren!

By the way, I’ve also posted a really nice podcast on this subject that was recorded live from a bamboo rainforest in the high Andes of Southern Ecuador. The background sounds are simply amazing, and the discussion is deep. Click here to view all podcasts now.

There’s also an important video clip we’ve just posted on beef and processed meats from the movie All Jacked Up. Click here to see the video.

Click here to read more…

www.naturalnews.com

Great River Organic’s stone mill a beacon to the past

Glenn Robeck doesn’t mind working nose to the grindstone.

While most flour mills today are high-tech commercial giants with lightning-fast steel rollers that churn out flour for the masses, Robeck earns his living at rustic Great River Organic Milling. Here, centuries-old, slow-turning granite millstones grind organic grains into flours for a niche market of artisan bread bakers and health-conscious consumers.

“At the end of the day, it’s more than just a paycheck,” said Robeck, the mill’s long-time production manager. “You have to earn your livelihood, but it’s nice to feel you’re also doing something that leaves the world a little better place.”

The small mill, tucked in a quiet valley 6 miles east of the Mississippi River, is one of just a handful of granite stone millers left in America. It’s a beacon to the past, before Wisconsin was America’s Dairyland and when wheat was the state’s big crop.

Great River Organic Milling has a growing following among those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods - in this case, flour milled with the whole grain left intact, which commands roughly three times the price of refined flour.

When the process for refining flour was invented in the 1870s, it was considered a major breakthrough, giving the baking staple a longer shelf life, and grains more diversified uses. But refining also snatched valuable nutrients. Whole-grain flour, by contrast, is everything nature intended.

“This is 100 percent whole grain,” Great River Organic Milling owner Rick Halverson shouted above the steady hum of machinery that moves raw grain through the mill in a loop. “All the natural, nutritional components of the grain go in the bag.”

The downside is a shorter shelf life, as the germ of the grain is left intact. The germ contributes much of the grain’s protein, folic acid and other B vitamins, carotenes and other antioxidants, plus omega-3 fatty acids.

But the omega-3 fatty acids also cause rancidity.

So Great River only makes its flours to order, unlike industrial millers that ship product cross-country to vast networks of supermarkets and commercial bakeries.

Sweet smell of success

A pleasant, nutty aroma wafts through the mill that was cobbled together in a red pole farm shed in the 1970s. Robeck said he finds satisfaction in watching demand for organics grow, including organic grains and flours. “Every acre farmed organically is 1 less acre farmed with chemicals,” he said.

The refined flour industry took a hit several years ago when the low-carb Atkins diet sent bread sales plummeting. But the diet caused barely a ripple at this mill, as its customers consistently follow natural, whole-food diets, which include whole grains, Halverson said.

“Now, with the slow food and locally grown foods movements, we’re getting more and more calls from people asking, ‘Where do you get your grain?’ ” Halverson said. The company knows all its suppliers, he added. Each bag of raw grain is labeled with the farmer’s initials.

Quality is crucial to customers such as bread baker Cameron Ramsey, owner of Madison Sourdough. He has been buying flour from the mill for 15 years.

“(Great River) is very unique, and when they go, who’s left?” Ramsey said. “They’re a vanishing breed, man.”

Great River began processing organic grain from nearby farms in the mid-1970s, long before organic was cool. The stone mill tradition harkens back to an era in Wisconsin from roughly 1850 to 1880, when the state grew one-sixth of the nation’s wheat.

Back then, flour mills were small-town fixtures, noted Margaret Bogue, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor.

“Wheat was a crop that moved west with the population from the East,” she said. Milwaukee was the largest flour milling city west of the Appalachian Mountains until it was displaced by St. Louis in 1871.

Wheat growing in Wisconsin tapered off markedly in the 1880s, Bogue said. The constant replanting of wheat fields had depleted the soil of nitrogen, and blight set in, forcing a wholesale shift.

By the turn of the 20th century, most Wisconsin farmers raised dairy cows. Cheese factories began replacing flour mills, Bogue said.

Along with flours, Great River Organic Milling makes three hot cereals: Multi-Grain with seven grains; a Breakfast Cereal blend of wheat and rice; and Highland Medley, a three-grain blend similar to Irish oatmeal. Great River also makes four types of pancake mix.

The original mill here, Little Bear Trading Co., went bankrupt in 1992. Office manager Nadine Bayer, Robeck and another mill employee bought the building and equipment from the bank to revive the mill under a new name, Great River Organic Milling.

They sold to Halverson four years ago because they recognized the company needed to grow, Bayer said.

Halverson, who had extensive sales experience with food ingredients, bought the mill on one condition: that Bayer and Robeck stay on to help run it. Since then, sales have grown from $274,000 to just over $600,000, Halverson said.

Great River Organic Milling’s main business is bulk flour for artisan bakers, including bakers in Chicago, Madison and the Twin Cities. The mill also handles high-protein, gluten-free grain called brown teff, which is grown in Ethiopia.

Retail is the fastest-growing segment. Great River began with about 40 regional food co-op customers. Now the mill has 400 to 500 retail customers, including Outpost Natural Food Stores and Sendik’s in the Milwaukee area, and some Sentry stores. Sales also extend to Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky.

But the mill’s most famous customer traveled a much greater distance.

Will Steger took the mill’s wheat and rice breakfast cereal to the North Pole in 1986 during his famous dogsled expedition.

By KAREN HERZOG
 kherzog@journalsentinel.com

www.jsonline.com/

As a nutritionist who straddles conventional and complementary therapies, I attend numerous lectures, workshops, and conferences in both realms. I can generally tell you whether a gathering is one of conventional practitioners or complementary practitioners simply by seeing who’s drinking what!

Where conventional practitioners such as registered dietitians, nurses, and medical doctors are meeting, the familiar, brightly colored cans of diet soda, sweetened with the artificial sweetener aspartame, prominently dot the meeting-room landscape. Not so in a gathering of complementary practitioners such as naturopaths, “alternative” nutritionists and chiropractors. Bottled or filtered water is the rule here.

It’s an apt example of the conventional medical mindset butting heads with the philosophy of the health providers who are natural-living advocates. Aspartame, which goes by names such as Equal, NutraSweet, and Spoonful, is and has been the giant among artificial sweeteners for the twenty years it has been around. Almost any “diet” food out there, in addition to the diet sodas, will surely have aspartame in its ingredient list. Holistic practitioners tell their clients and patients to never use the stuff—that it’s literally poison. Conventional practitioners usually encourage its use. Many, perhaps most, of my dietician colleagues, for instance, consider aspartame, with zero calories, pivotal in weight-control programs. Their perspective is that it’s a safe replacement for high-calorie sugary foods that sabotage dieters’ best intentions.

“No, no, no!” shout an escalating number of health practitioners, professionals and laypeople. They point to ugly and debilitating side effects from the use of aspartame, including headaches, memory loss, slurred speech and vision problems. For years, these aspartame opponents were but small voices muffled by the incredibly loud sounds of money talking. Under the ownership of the giant international chemical company Monsanto, aspartame thoroughly trounced its competition by using an unstoppable combination of marketing brilliance and limitless spending—along with tactics characterized as morally and ethically corrupt.

One critic, David Rietz, denounces Monsanto for plying “agency [e.g. Food and Drug Administration, FDA] officials with gratuities and/or very favorable future employment, politicians with campaign funds/PAC money, non-profit foundations with endowments, scientists with research grants, and the media with lots of advertising dollars” all for the sake of defending its safety and, hence, its ironclad hold on the artificial sweetener market. Monsanto sold its aspartame ingredient business in 2001 to a number of buyers (including, by the way, MSD Capital, which is computer king Michael Dell’s investment firm).

The voices of dissent have grown louder with the advent of the internet. Rietz, for example, is the owner and master of one of thousands of “anti-aspartame” internet websites (www.dorway.com). Like so many other “anti-aspartame” crusaders, Rietz founded his website after years of battling debilitating health problems and finally regaining his health after discontinuing his use of the artificial sweetener. Examining why so many attest to aspartame’s role in scores of severe adverse reactions is beyond the scope of this article. But one thing is certain, despite what appears to be a concerted effort on the part of aspartame’s makers to negate the allegations of health problems, adverse reactions from aspartame are real.

This was eloquently borne out in 1996, when Ralph G. Walton, MD, professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio University’s College of Medicine, conducted an analysis of all the medical studies—164 of them at the time—dealing with human safety as it relates to the use of aspartame. The studies were separated into two categories: 74 of the studies were sponsored by the aspartame industry and 90 of them were non-industry-sponsored studies. Dr. Walton found that of the 74 studies sponsored by the aspartame industry, 100 percent of them claimed there were no health problems associated with aspartame use. Of the 90 studies that had no connections to industry, all but seven of them identified one or more problems with aspartame use. Interestingly, of the seven studies that did not find problems, the FDA had conducted six. Critics suggest that since a number of FDA officials eventually went to work for the aspartame industry, these six studies should be considered industry-sponsored research as well.

Knowing all this, if a person desperately wanted to lose weight and was prepared to risk the safety problems associated with aspartame, would it make sense to use this sugar substitute as an easy and effective tool for weight control?

Hardly! Dr. Walton, who has also studied the effects of aspartame, is emphatic when he tells me, “Probably one major contributor to obesity is the widespread use of diet products!” A chorus of non-conventional health professionals echoes his statement, which can just as well be read as a warning. The reasons are not simple; they involve complex biochemical reactions linked to hormones and brain chemicals.

Aspartame itself doesn’t have any calories, but basically, one of its ingredients, the amino acid phenylalanine, blocks production of serotonin, a nerve chemical that, among other activities, controls food cravings. As you might well imagine, a shortage of serotonin will make your brain and body scream for the foods that create more of this brain chemical—and those are the high-calorie, carbohydrate-rich snacks that can sabotage a dieter. Obviously, the more aspartame one ingests, the more heightened the effects. Simply put, aspartame appears to muddle the brain chemistry.

Nutritionist Susan Allen, RD, CCN, at Chicago’s Northwestern Center for Integrative Medicine, suspects that something additional is going on in many of her patients who have been using aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. Allen believes that when they consume them, the sweet taste of no-calorie sweeteners triggers their bodies to release insulin, even though there is no food to feed the cells. Normally, when we eat, the sugar in that food, which is derived from carbohydrates, is broken down into simple sugars, like glucose, which then enter the blood stream (we call it “blood sugar”).

We depend on insulin (secreted by the pancreas) to usher that blood sugar into our cells to supply energy and maintain normal blood sugar levels. The problem Allen sees is that an “insulin-sensitive” person who uses artificial sweeteners teases his or her body into thinking food is on its way, so insulin is released. But when the body discovers it was cheated out of food, it revolts by throwing a food-craving tantrum that can only be quelled by eating blood sugar food that will more than likely be high-calorie sugary snacks. “I point out to them how it doesn’t make sense… they’re trying to save themselves sugar but then they eat more foods that are going to raise their blood sugar anyway.”

Yet, the unabashed public acceptance of artificial sweeteners, namely aspartame, is fueled by the approval of a host of scientific and professional organizations, including the American Dietetic Association, American Heart Association, American Medical Association and the National Cancer Institute. Is it any wonder that some 200 million Americans use this ubiquitous product?

Rebecca Ephraim, RD, CCN is a Registered Dietitian and Certified Clinical Nutritionist with seventeen years in media and mass communications. She currently serves as anchor/producer for the Chicago National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate. See her website or email her at rebecca@consciouschoice.com.

A study to be published in the February 2008 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives finds that children who eat a conventional diet of food produced with chemical-intensive practices carry residues of organophosate pesticides that are reduced or eliminated when they switch to an organic diet. The study is entitled “Dietary Intake and Its Contribution to Longitudinal Organophosphorus Pesticide Exposure in Urban/Suburban Children” (Chensheng Lu, Dana B. Barr, Melanie A. Pearson, and Lance A. Waller) and includes authors from Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, and the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.According to the authors, “The objective of this article is to present the data of assessing young urban/suburban children’s longitudinal exposure to OP [organophosphate] pesticides in a group [of] young children participating in the Children Pesticide Exposure Study (CPES). The results from this study identify not only the predominant source of OP pesticide exposure but also the profile of exposures in children that are vital in formulating the strategies, both from the regulatory policy and personal behavior change perspectives, in reducing children’s exposures to OP pesticides.”

The study design included 23 children, male and female, from the Seattle area, ages 3-11 years who only consumed conventional diets and were recruited for a one-year study conducted in 2003-2004. Of the 23, 19 completed the study. Children switched to organic diets for five consecutive days in the summer and fall sampling seasons. The authors measured specific urinary metabolites for malathion, chlorpyrifos and other OP pesticides in urine samples collected twice daily for a period of 7, 12, or 15 consecutive days during each of the four seasons. According to the authors, “By substituting organic fresh fruits and vegetables for corresponding conventional food items, the median urinary metabolite concentrations were reduced to non-detected or close to non-detected levels for malathion and chlorpyrifos at the end of 5-day organic diet intervention period in both summer and fall seasons. We also observed a seasonal effect on the OP urinary metabolite concentrations, and this seasonality is correspondent to the consumption of fresh produce throughout the year.” And, “Considering the lack of residential use of OP pesticides among the families of CPES-WA children, consumption of conventional diets is likely to be the sole contributing factor to the seasonality effect of pesticide exposures.”

The authors point out that few studies evaluate the longitudinal exposure to pesticides that all children experience. According to the authors, “Most of the studies published in the literature have either targeted children living in agricultural environments or have used a cross-sectional design with spot sample collection.”

The authors raise concerns about inadequate attention being given by regulators to chronic low-level exposures to pesticides, such as those found in their study. They point out that, “Using spot biomarkers [one-time measurement of urinary metabolites] of OP pesticide exposure to examine the link between adverse health outcomes and cumulative OP pesticide exposure is obviously an inadequate approach.”

Corresponding author: Chensheng Lu, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road, NE, Atlanta, GA 30322, (404)727-2131, (404)727-8744 (fax), clu2@sph.emory.edu.

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/?p=275

Kraft Foods Inc. uses a cream cheese byproduct to help power a New York plant. Sara Lee Corp. plans to run a New Mexico bakery using solar energy.

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is turning up the heat on the food industry. After years of taking on the oil and coal companies, environmental organizations are scrutinizing the makers of Oreos and Jimmy Dean sausages, and that’s attracting the attention of consumers and investors.

Fearing retribution from environmentalists that could taint their brands, Kraft and Sara Lee are among companies responding by reducing the amount of energy and water they use.

“CEOs ignore this environmental movement at their own peril,” said Steve Hellem, executive director of the Global Environmental Management Initiative, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization whose members include Kraft and other large corporations.

“If a company is identified as environmentally irresponsible, it will hurt their reputation and brands. The food companies know they need to focus on this, but they are still trying to figure out what to do,” he said.

Sara Lee got the message after bombing in a recent ranking: New Hampshire-based advocacy group Climate Counts gave the Downers Grove foodmaker 2 out of 100 points for its reporting of green policies and efforts to reduce its impact on the environment.

Audra Karalius, Sara Lee’s vice-president in charge of environmental issues, said the score was the result of not providing information to the group. The company is working to improve its rating, she said.

“The food industry has never been under siege before about environmental issues,” she said. “But that is changing, and we have learned that if we don’t talk about it, people assume you aren’t doing it.”

Two weeks ago, Sara Lee added a section to its Web site detailing its commitment to environmentally friendly practices. In the next six months, Karalius said, the company plans to provide more specific information about water and energy usage.

She said Sara Lee is reconfiguring its distribution centers so it can shorten its truck routes and save more than 240,000 gallons of fuel in the coming year. The company also is looking at alternative energy: After studying windmills to power its New Mexico bakery, Sara Lee opted for solar panels.

Kraft reports on its Web site that it has decreased energy usage by 14 percent in the last five years. The Northfield company is powering about a third of a New York plant with methane gas created by adding bacteria to whey, a byproduct of cream cheese production.

It also has repackaged its Miracle Whip in plastic containers instead of glass, reducing the number of trucks needed for distribution, a spokeswoman said.

“There is definitely increased awareness around global warming with Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize,” she said. “Consumer awareness is definitely higher than it has ever been.”

At least 30 percent of shoppers look for environmentally friendly products and packages when selecting brands, according to a study released this month by Chicago-based market researcher Information Resources Inc.

Investors are taking notice, too. Some Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have begun to review companies’ environmental policies as part of their investment research reports.

Boston-based consultant Ceres Inc. runs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group of more than 60 institutional investors who manage a total of $4 trillion in assets. The network looks at how companies set environmental policies and deal with climate change.

Institutional investors “want to know how companies are positioning themselves around this risk,” said Andrea Moffat, a Ceres director.

These changes can be costly for food companies that have thin profit margins. Kraft and Sara Lee decline to comment on the cost of their green initiatives.

Publicly reporting energy and water use will become increasingly important for the companies as they compete for the environmentally conscious consumer, said Paul Dickinson, CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project, a London-based non-profit whose Web site tracks corporate greenhouse gas emissions data.

“If you are part of the solution, you will make a lot of money,” he said. “And if you are part of the problem, you will go bust.”

©2008 by Crain Communications Inc.

Source: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_9959.cfm

The second circuit federal appellate court on Thursday will hear a challenge to an EPA rule that allows people to be used as guinea pigs in tests of toxic pesticides. The lawsuit, NRDC V. EPA, was brought before the court by a coalition of environmental, farmworker and health groups in 2006. The groups contend that the agency’s human testing rule violates a law passed by Congress in 2005 mandating strict ethical and scientific protections for pesticide testing on humans. At the time, the House Committee on Government Reform found “the actual experiments being considered by EPA are deeply flawed and rife with ethical violations.”

“Testing poisons on people is unethical and against the law,” said Shelley Davis, Beyond Pesticides board member and deputy director of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy and education center for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, based in Washington, D.C.“The EPA should stop accepting these industry funded tests.”

Previous human testing by industry produced serious ethical and scientific problems including one instance in which a company told participants they were eating vitamins, not toxic pesticides. In other instances citied in the lawsuit, researchers ignored the adverse health effects reported by the participants.

“The only people who get what they want out of these immoral tests are the chemical companies,” said Aaron Colangelo, a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior attorney representing the petitioners. “Their testing methods are questionable at best, the only purpose they serve is to weaken pesticide safety standards, and ultimately the people who grow and harvest our food suffer the consequences. This practice must end.”

In 2005, Congress passed a law strictly forbidding the use of pregnant women and minors in pesticide tests. A loophole in the new EPA rule will allow testing of pregnant women, infants and children. Low-income people and students are the most likely to participate in these dangerous experiments, for which they usually receive a few hundred dollars. However, participants injured in the studies are not guaranteed medical care outside of the testing period.

The groups contend the EPA rule violates international ethical standards enumerated in the 1947 Nuremburg Code by permitting the EPA to set safety standards based on tests conducted with only a handful of healthy people. In most tests, participants are not representative of the U.S. population, the test period is scientifically problematic, and group size is not large enough to detect potential harmful health effects.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of NRDC, Pesticide Action Network North America, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, Pineros y Campesinos del Noreste, and Migrant Clinicians Network. Attorneys for the petitioners are NRDC, Farmworker Justice and Earthjustice.

Human testing, which was stopped by a moratorium in 1998, was reintroduced in 2003 by a court ruling on a pesticide industry suit. Following the reintroduction of human studies, EPA began to develop a rule for such testing. This came despite flaws found in such studies, and took into account industry pressure to approve testing in children, among other allowances.EPA released its final rule in 2006, despite the Congressional report decrying human testing in 2005. At the time, committee member Rep. Henry Waxman stated, “What we’ve found is that the human pesticide experiments that the Bush Administration intends to use to set federal pesticide policies are rife with ethical and scientific defects.”Beyond Pesticides rejects human testing as unethical and dangerous to both test participants and agricultural workers exposed to toxic, approved pesticides. For more information on the timeline of human testing regulation, click here. For more information on the lawsuit, view the Petitioners’ brief and Reply brief.

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/?p=267

Although the biotech industry and our indentured corporate mass media would have us believe that recent scientific advances in food and farming are derived from genetic engineering and chemicals, according to UK-based GM Watch, the real breakthroughs in farming in 2007 came from organic and sustainable agriculture:

1) In 2007 a deluge of new scientific studies from a wide variety of institutions indicate that in comparison to genetically modified (GM) crops, organic agriculture can better feed the world, reduce global warming, provide greater nutrition, and boost the economy. Digesting new research on the topic, the United Nations announced that organic agriculture is the best way to feed the world and help stabilize the climate.

2) A wide range of new, non-GM crops over the last year are bringing hope to farmers around the world. Some of these include:
- A wheat variety that can withstand high salinity in soil, thereby opening up vast tracks of land previously considered “dead”.
- Non-GM corn and rice varieties that can tolerate droughts.
- Indian farmers find traditional cotton varieties to be much more stress-resistant than GM cotton.
- Iron fortified non-GMO maize strain reduces anemia rates in children.
-Discovery of non-GM variety of allergen-free peanut.

Learn more: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_9572.cfm

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has struck an arrangement with agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. that gives farmers in four states a break on federal crop insurance premiums if they plant a majority of Monsanto-brand seed corn this spring. Farmers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota need to plant 75-80% of their crops with Monsanto’s (and only Monsanto’s) GM seeds to receive the “premium rate discount”. The arrangement has raised some eyebrows, particularly among organic farm groups that argue the government agency should not be promoting corn that promotes herbicide use; the Monsanto brands are resistant to Roundup (main ingredient, glyphosate) and contain chemicals that kill insects and other plants.

Monsanto’s deal is legal, according to USDA officials, who point out that such arrangements were encouraged in a 2000 crop insurance passed by Congress. The idea is to give farmers a break on their insurance premiums if they use corn seeds that are higher yield and show resistance to insects and other threats. USDA officials said they are aware of the appearance of favoritism toward one of the nation’s largest agricultural companies. “We knew it would look that way,” said Shirley Pugh, a spokeswoman for USDA’s Risk Management Agency, which administers federal crop insurance. “But other companies can come and do the same thing. We are making the discount available because the corn has shown the traits necessary to reduce the risk.”

The deal with St. Louis-based Monsanto was approved September 12, 2007 under a provision called the Biotech Yield Endorsement (BYE) program, which is part of the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000. No other companies have taken advantage of the program, Pugh said. The insurance premium benefit to farmers, according to USDA, will be about $2 per acre, or $2,000 for a typical 1,000-acre farm. Crop insurance prices have skyrocketed for farmers as corn prices have reached near-record highs in recent months. Today, corn trades at about $4 a bushel, double the price of about two years ago. Those prices have continued to stay high because of increased demand from the ethanol industry, which uses the grain to make fuel, as well as increased corn exports and demands from cattle-feeding businesses. Crop insurance rates can be as high as $50 an acre, according to Kurt Koester, a vice president and co-owner at AgriSource Inc., a crop insurance agency in West Des Moines, Iowa, involved in the pilot program. Several years ago, Koester said premiums were about $15 to $20 an acre. “Farmers are going to face some really tough decisions here,” Koester said. ‘They’ve got this high-value corn sitting out in their fields. When you take the cost of this crop insurance, even with government subsidies, there’s going to be sticker shock.”

The pilot program with Monsanto covers the country’s four most productive corn states. It involves corn that contains YieldGard Plus (which protects against corn borers and rootworms) with Roundup Ready Corn 2 (which tolerates the herbicide Roundup) or YieldGard VT Triple technology from Monsanto, the company said. The deal with the Agriculture Department was finalized this month. The corn grown is generally used as cattle feed and as raw material for ethanol plants. Monsanto won the BYE designation by providing three years’ worth of research that convinced the USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Corporation board that its triple-stack corn variety produces higher yields under difficult conditions, such as weeds and corn borer.

“It really bore out what we’ve heard from our farmers, saying over and over again that these triple-stack technologies in the corn plant help protect against weeds and root worms,” said Darren Wallis, a Monsanto spokesman. “What this does is reduce the risk for the farmers.”

Monsanto, however, has earned the wrath of organic agriculture and environmental groups, mostly for promoting the growth of genetically altered crops. Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, characterized the USDA-Monsanto BYE arrangement as one of many examples in which the department has sided with big agribusinesses instead of smaller farmers and farm groups. He said the BYE program will leave farmers with little choice but to buy Monsanto seed. “We definitely have a problem with all the benefits that [Monsanto] gets,” Cummins said. “If you really look at our crop subsidy program and what’s given to farmers, you really see a lot of those subsidies going to purchase genetically engineered crops.”

Cummins also said that the USDA-Monsanto arrangement excludes organic farmers. Most of the corn acreage in the four states involved is insured, according to USDA figures. Of the 11 million acres planted in corn in 2006 in Illinois, about 9 million acres, or 79 percent, had federal crop insurance, according to USDA. In Indiana, 68 percent of corn acres were insured, in Iowa, 87 percent and in Minnesota, 89 percent.

http://www.beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/?p=256