The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Ellix Katz

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Genetically Modified Invasion

The most widespread trait of these crops is herbicide resistance, largely to Roundup, manufactured by Monsanto. Through genetic drift, however, this trait is pervading non-GM crops. Rene Van Acker of the University of Minnesota has determined through testing that even certified non-GM canola contains up to 4.9 percent Roundup Ready material.
The pervasive spread of these crops is alarming in more ways than just being detrimental to heirloom species. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist, has this to say about genetic modification:

"If you design genetically modified DNA to jump into genomes and to overcome species barriers, then there is a chance that this DNA can… get into other unrelated species… to make new combinations."

Not only are the days of saving seeds rapidly vanishing, so is our confidence in what exactly we are eating, and the safety of it. The FDA Task Group on Food Biotechnology: Progress Report 2, on August 15, 1991, states four concerns with the safety of genetically engineered foods:

1. New substances for which safety is not established
2. Unexpected changes in food/feed composition that result from genetic modification
3. Labeling
4. Environmental issues

A few months after this came a statement from an FDA official, who wrote "The process of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different, and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks."

According to attorney Steven Drucker of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, there were references to potential unintended negative effects that, despite protests from agency scientists, were deleted from drafts of the FDA policy statements, and the despite all of this, the official FDA policy states that GM foods were safe, no riskier than others, and they had no reason to believe otherwise.

On this basis, genetically modified food entered the food supply. As of 2004, more than 85 percent of soy and 45 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified, and new GM foods are introduced every year.

Unknown agents account for approximately 81 percent of food-borne illness and hospitalization. Obesity, diabetes, and cancers, among others, are becoming more prevalent. Is this the result of GM foods? Although no one knows for sure, there have been some tests on rats:

• In 1995, biologist Arpad Pusztai observed that after only ten days on a GM diet, adolescent rats suffered immune system damage, white blood cell suppression, impaired organ development, and other problems.
• When comparing groups of female rats offspring whose diets were augmented with either GM soy, non-GM soy, or no soy from two weeks before conception through nursing in 2005, Russian scientist Irina Ermakova found that within three weeks of birth 56 percent of the GM soy group died, compared with only 9 percent in the non-GM soy and 7 percent from the non-soy groups.

In the United Kingdom, soy allergies went up over 50 percent after genetically modified soy was introduced into their market. In Russia, scientists report allergies in their country tripled after GM food introduction.

We may not even be able to protect ourselves by way of strategic shopping, either. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the National Uniformity for Food Act in 2006. If it becomes law, the truth of the source of our food will be legally hidden and we will all remain ignorant to its origins.

In other parts of the world, resistance is high to GM foods. The European Union allows the foods to be imported, but require that they be explicitly labeled as containing genetically modified ingredients. The only such requirement in the U.S. is in Alaska, and only applies to fish, particularly salmon.

The Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, a bill introduced to give U.S. citizens the power to differentiate GM foods through labeling, has gone nowhere.

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