Dark Act

We have Sainsbury’s and Safeway to thank for the fact that there are no GMOs in our food, (though still in animal feed).

One of the first GMO foods to hit the market, back in 1995, was the Flavr-Savr tomato, created by a company called Calgene.  The idea was that that tomato would stay fresh on the supermarket shelf for longer.  Nobody checked how it travelled and the first shipments to American supermarkets ended up soggy and bruised due to some unforeseen aspect of genetic engineering and despite all the research showing no evidence of health risks. 

Tomato growers in California weren’t happy but the huge planting of tomatoes in 1996 got turned into tomato puree and was sold in tins at Sainsbury’s and Safeway at a considerable discount to the normal tomato puree price.  In other words, it was dumped on the British market to try to salvage a GMO disaster.   The supermarkets proudly labelled the puree as ‘Made with Genetically Engineered Tomatoes’ and consumers, who had never heard of GMO, just bought them because they were so much cheaper.  Then in 1998  Dr. Arpad Puztai, one of Britain’s most renowned and trusted experts on food safety,  spoke out on TV about his research on the dangers of GM potatoes.  The rats had shrinking brains, livers and hearts and he said he wouldn’t eat a GM potato unless more research into its safety was completed.   Puztai was promptly sacked from his job at the Rowett Research Institute and gagged, with the threat of losing his pension.  Then they sacked his wife. This happened allegedly after Monsanto phoned Clinton who phoned Tony Blair who phoned the heat of Rowett Professor James and told him to gag Puztai.  Puztai’s career was ruined, he had a couple of heart attacks and continued to campaign for his research to be duplicated, which has never happened.  The Government set up a ‘Biotechnology Presentation Group’ to try to mask the reality about GMOs.

But it was too late.  The Soil Association and its European counterparts lobbied strongly for labelling of GMOs and got their way.  After all if it was good enough for Safeway and Sainsbury’s customers, what about everyone else?   Labelling was agreed at an EU level and nobody ever tried to sell a GM product again.  The public were on high alert after the Puztai scandal and weren’t going to be duped.

In the USA it was different.  Americans didn’t know what GMOs were, although they were in their corn chips and other staple foods.  When the realisation came the Organic Consumers Association campaigned for labelling so people could choose.  Eventually, after heavily contested votes in California and Washington the little state of Vermont (Bernie Sanders’ home state) passed a law saying GMOs needed to be labelled.  Some food manufacturers complied.  Then came the DARK Act.  (Denial of Americans Right to Know). This was introduced in Congress to prescribe that any GMO information can be reached via the QR code on the packaging and shoppers could simply check the QR code to find out what GMOs were in their prospective purchase.  Hmmm…so this is how that would work. Well, you scan the QR code and go the manufacturer’s website, where you are greeted with an array of products you might like to know about, then you choose the produce you are scanning and get to a list of ingredients and more advertising, then you can click on each ingredient to see which one is a GMO.  Then, after about 10 hours of shopping, you have a basket full of food that is GMO free.  Or you just buy organic.

The new law was signed into effect by Barack Obama who, as a presidential candidate, promised that he would bring forward GMO labelling.   He has the support of 93% of American consumers, who a respected ABCNews poll recently showed want labelling. 

Here in Britain and in Europe we take GMO labelling for granted.  In the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy the will of 93% of can be blocked by the resistance of a handful of companies with political influence that dwarfs that of the citizenry.  I wonder how the 93% of Americans who thought they were on the way to having GMO labelling, 20 years after we secured it in Europe, must feel now.   Where there were referendums on GMO labelling, as in California, more than $30 million was spent with scare advertising to deter voters

End of the road for Monsanto?

When we lived in Omaha we’d drive through the countryside up to Sioux City past endless fields of corn.  Along the roadside were signs with the name of the seed company who supplied their seed, mostly ‘Pioneer’ or ‘DeKalb.’   The seed company salesmen were local guys who had gone to school with the farmers and were known and trusted.  They’d buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie and arrange to take you on a fishing trip to Canada.  So in1996 when Monsanto paid a fortune for the DeKalb seed company it bought all that intergenerational love and trust.   In 1997 Monsanto bought Holden’s Foundation Seeds, who produced the parent seed that most of America’s corn is bred from.  At Iowa State University, Professor Neil Harl took a look at the prices Monsanto was paying and calculated that they were paying 2 to 3 times market value on the basis of sales and profits.  His conclusion?  Monsanto’s strategy was to gain monopoly control of the seed supply in order to increase their prices and profits.  Monsanto’s patent on Roundup ran out in 2000, so they needed to lock farmers into using it before cheaper alternatives flooded the market.

Sure enough, by 2000 US farmers had no choice – their favourite seed varieties were now only available Roundup Ready and could only be grown with Roundup.  Monsanto had America’s farmers by the short and curlies.

Once they had America under their thumb they went to work on Argentina, where they grow their seed corn to sell in the US, as well as soybeans.  This year in Argentina 30,000 doctors called for Roundup to be banned because of the horrific epidemic of disease  it had triggered in farming regions.  More recently the WHO rated Roundup as a ‘probable carcinogen.’  Within days not a garden centre in Holland or France stocked Roundup.

In their latest  financial statement, Monsanto reveals that it is losing $5 million a day.  You don’t need a degree in Economics to know that’s not sustainable for very long.  Their world seems to be falling apart rather quickly.

In the US, for all the crap about ‘feeding the world’ things are going pear-shaped. 40% of America’s GMO corn gets converted to ethanol to be compulsorily mixed with gasoline, feeding Fords instead of people.  The oil industry hates ethanol – they are being squeezed enough by the Saudis without having to compete with subsidised bio-fuel.  But without ethanol, half of America’s farms would go bust. Corn prices are currently 50¢ a bushel below break even.  Farmers can’t afford to pay inflated prices for Monsanto’s GMO corn and Roundup, so sales are dropping.  Roundup-resistant ‘superweeds’ are now infesting half of America’s farms, refusing to die despite a huge increase in herbicide applications and the bringing out of retirement of pesticides like 2,4-D that had been removed from the market because they cause cancer.  What an unholy mess.

Monsanto recently ambitiously tried to take over Syngenta, their main competitor, but that deal fell apart – both companies face the awful reality that their R&D isn’t coming up with new products that work – like drug companies they depend on patented medicines to protect inflated profit margins.

In September the New York Times revealed that Monsanto bribes scientists to make claims for GMOs that are unsupported by evidence.  Nobody will believe a man in a white coat again who touts the benefits of GMOs without wanting to check his bank account. 

In 1999 Patrick Holden and I had a meeting with Hugh Grant (Monsanto’s CEO) and other Monsanto executives under the guidance of the Environment Council, who sought to reconcile our views on GMOs.  My notes of the meeting show Patrick and I actually had to explain what organic farming meant.  Monsanto had no idea of organic principles and asked us to repeat this as they felt they needed to understand it properly.  They knew we opposed GMOs but just thought we were stupid Luddites.

Monsanto is running out of road:  hired liars in white coats can’t fool anyone any more; tobacco-style Roundup poisoning lawsuits beckon; farmers can’t afford to pay high prices for seed and chemicals that don’t work;  resistant weeds and insects refuse to die; country after country worldwide is declaring itself GM-Free; the demand for labelling of GMOs in the US is reaching a climax and now Wall Street is losing interest in phoney biotech claims.

Genetic engineering was the great hope for industrial agriculture – it would solve all the problems that pesticides and chemical fertilisers had caused.  It didn’t happen.  Instead, smart companies like Rijk Zwaan in Holland are using genomics to naturally breed stronger, healthier plants than anything from Monsanto or Syngenta. 

E F Schumacher wrote: “Modern man…talks of the battle with Nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side.”   Nature’s allies have fought for 20 years against the GMO takeover attempt – let’s hope that we are finally on the winning side.

GM - Dream or nightmare

The American people are going to be very, very angry when the truth about GM food finally comes out, writes Craig Sams

When Mark Lynas got up at the National Farming Conference this January and said he was an environmentalist who realised he had been wrong about GM and that we should all adopt it, at once something smelt bad. He said the organic movement and Indian peasant farmers should stop fighting against the inevitable, crops to combat malnutrition and grow in drought conditions were being delayed and we have to feed the world. Owen Patterson, the new ‘Environment Minister’ attacked opponents of GM and said we couldn’t let the world starve any more (no mention of the subsidised biofuels NFU members are bribed to grow so we can burn food instead of eating it). He also said we’re all eating meat from animals that eat GM feed, so resistance is futile.

All part of Big Biotech’s new campaign to break the GM opposition in Europe. In that same week Poland banned two previously permitted GM crops. France one and various other European countries hardened their resistance. In Africa, Kenya joined the growing list of countries that completely banned GM seeds and imports of GM food. A scandal erupted in China where kids were fed toxic GM food without their knowledge in a falsified experiment.

It’s war!

The first casualty in War is Truth. Truth in the GM wars died back in the mid 1990s, now much more is at stake: the credibility of science. It’s a shame that it has come to this and that the men in white coats are trotting out the lies again.

When Monsanto discovered the DNA in petunias that makes them immune to Roundup, they fired petunia DNA into soybean DNA again and again until they got a mutant soybean that was resistant to Roundup. Bingo! With the Roundup patent expiring in 2001, they needed some way to keep farmers hooked on their herbicide and not migrate to cheaper generics at one third of the price. However, saying “We can continue to overcharge you after patent expiry for Roundup” didn’t make marketing sense. “Higher yields”, “Lower herbicide usage”, and ‘Feeding The World” were more buzzy.

They tested the GM soybean for yield and found yields were actually lower. US farmers found that Roundup usage actually increased. The biotech firms also claimed that in the pipeline were crops that could grow in salinated soils (every year we lose another 120 million hectares of farmland that’s become so drenched in chemical fertilisers that they can no longer support life – the salination is not seasalt, its salts of chemical fertilisers). There weren’t. Then they said they would develop crops that would grow through droughts. That never happened either, 17 years on. If a witness in a court of law has a record of lying they are not trusted again. Here the same old stories are trotted out, without any supporting evidence, and Tory ministers parrot them uncritically.

Monsanto had to get past the FDA, guardians of America’s food safety. Top scientists studied Monsanto’s feeding trials and counselled a ban. They were overruled by the political appointees who run the FDA, a good many either past of future Monsanto executives. The EU was easier. The CAP is so corrupt that the EU Council of Auditors have refused to approve their accounts for nearly a decade. Getting Commissioners to approve was a piece of cake.

In 1996 4% of the US soybean crop was GM. But an investigation carried out by the UK Food Standards Agency raised suspicions that all soy exports were deliberately contaminated with GM soy to deny EU users any choice.

They reckoned without Richard Austin of Rainbow Wholefoods, who galvanised the natural foods industry to boycott GM TVP from soya and GM soya lecithin, Greenpeace and the Soil Association drew a red line and the market has segregated GM and non GM ever since. This enables Waitrose to guarantee that all their own brand products are GM free, including the feed that goes to their meat animals.

The British government commissioned the most trusted and respected GM scientist, Arpad Puztai, of the Rowlett Institute, to do research GM to shut the critics up. Puztai found that GM potatoes caused cancer and deformities. He was abused by the Royal Society and his career shattered. Other researchers who got the same results were also fired or publicly humiliated by their fellow scientists. Not once has any independent research body been commissioned to duplicate their results. Too much money is at stake for the truth to come out. But it must.

We need to have proper research. Not by Monsanto’s scientists, not by Syngenta’s scientists – you can buy a scientist for about £60,000 a year, according to New Scientist magazine’s employment pages. The huge human guinea pig experiment with GM food in the US coincides with a calamitous deterioration in public health. The American people will be very, very angry when the truth comes out.

Fetishist? No, just enjoying food and having fun

You Aren’t What You Eat takes pot shots at fetishistic ‘foodists’ while eulogising genetic engineeringists. I can only despair at its author’s warped logic.

Stephen Poole writes for The Guardian and has authored a fascinating book on video games in which he explores and describes video games as ‘semiotic systems that provoke aesthetic wonder.’

Time to confess.  Not many people know this, but I am in the very highest rank globally of players of the Raw Thrills arcade game ‘The Fast and the Furious.’ I am also (blush, blush) the world’s number one in Namco’s classic Propcycle game.  So I am well into the aesthetic wonder of arcade games, in the true Clive Bell sense of emotional immersive aesthetic experience. I get the buzz. Poole articulates what gamers like me feel when they play and gives intellectual backbone to what shallower souls would condemn as adolescent time-wasting.

So I Kindled this book with high anticipation.

His new book You Aren’t What You Eat sets out to debunk wide swathes of food culture.  Its basic premise is that we have ponced up food ridiculously, taking something as boring and fundamental as keeping alive and turned it into a recreational obsession.

With a title like that you’d think that he might have a proper go at Gillian McKeith. Indeed, he does, but she is a small player: he’s after much bigger game in his shooting gallery of culinary and gastronomic targets. In fact the people who get put down in this book are so admirable that I feel somewhat humbled to have been elevated to their company. Gwyneth Paltrow, the Prince of Wales, Heston Blumenthal, the Soil Association, Nigella, even the saintly Delia, all wither before his fire.  Even Elizabeth David gets a barb or two. But, when he finally gets to the subject matter of his title, it is Craig Sams that gets the kicking.

In this book the starving poor are dying because rich middle class liberal ‘foodists’ won’t let them enjoy the abundance and benefits of GM crops that will resist drought, insects and grow like billy-o.    There is a several page paean to Monsanto and the wonders of genetic engineering that could have been written in 1996, so naïve and credulous does it read.  The Soil Association care more about a ‘hunk of rock’ in space than they do about the people on it.  If vegetarians care so much about living things, why do they chop up innocent carrots?  Don’t look for logic or rationality here, this is a fogeyish rant.

I wondered at first what this book reminded me of and then I remembered: Kraft-Ebbing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis.  This was a 19th Century tract that pruriently described case histories of sexual antics of all kinds and then condemned them one by one as deviant and perverse.  In the days before freely available internet porn, i.e. back in the 50s when I was a lad, this sort of stuff was where adolescents got their sex education. We’d just skip that last tedious moralising bit at the end of each of the 238 case histories. You Aren’t What You Eat is the gastronomic equivalent.  There are lurid case histories of every aspect of ‘gastroporn,’ covering everything from the gluttony of ancient Rome and Mesopotamia right through to the latest blow-torched culinary excesses of Heston Blumenthal.   Each drooling description of foodie antics concludes with a sharp moralistic condemnation.  As with Kraft Ebbing, you get the voyeuristic thrill, then the shutters close and you get the moralistic lecture about the evils of letting things get out of hand.

This book is scatological and jizzological. The book is peppered with unattractive images of bulging fat gourmands dribbling over their food while people starve in the developing world.  We read of dung adulterating food in Victorian England, film scenes where poo featured (“Brazil”).  We see Nigella Lawson compared to a bukkake star with globs of glutinous caramel dripping from her lips onto her breasts.   Then, just when he gets you going, the cold water of moralisation puts out the fire. Again.  And again.  Sheesh!

I’m not sure that Poole gets the point of foodiesm.  He tries to take it too seriously. Food is fun. We love it.  It’s a chance for us to let our hair down and get a bit frisky and to get out of our ruts.  We eat to live and we live to reproduce.  We love food and we love sex.   We love them because they are F-U-N.  Serious fun. As long as nobody gets hurt, what’s the problem?

Perhaps the answer lies in his attack on me.  Like every faithful reader of NPN, he has read my article on Epigenetics, which sets out the diametrically opposite argument to the title of his book.   You remember, the one where I wrote about the recent discoveries by molecular biologists that your DNA changes in response to dietary and environmental factors and that these changes become ingrained in your children and grandchildren.   So I wrote

“There is a responsibility here, too – we owe it to future generations to do right by them.  We may have bankrupted their financial future, but we shouldn’t plunder their piggybank of health as well.”

Sorry, I know this review is about Poole’s book, not about me, but you’ll see where I’m going with this.

He goes on to acknowledge (he must have read the same Guardian article last year that I did) that this food-changes-your-DNA thing does make sense.  So…you are what you eat.  Ah, but the trials were with rats, Poole writes, so let’s not jump to any premature conclusions abjout whether food will change human DNA. Well, I’m as sensitive as the next anti-vivisectionist, but if you believe the science then what happens to lab rats is a pretty good indicator of what happens to people.  He knows he’s on weak ground here, so he changes tack and goes after me for guilt-tripping parents to make them enjoy delicious wholesome food instead of whatever Poole would have them eat.   Nobody likes a blackmailer and Poole’s response to my  ‘moral blackmail’ is presumably to eat a Mega Mac and chips just to show his grandkids that they can’t intimidate him about their heredity.

But this is the heart of the matter. Either you are or you are not what you eat. You can’t be both. Poole admits that you indeed are what you eat but then says that we shouldn’t feel morally blackmailed by future generations to pass healthy DNA to them. OK, screw future generations, but I still want my DNA to be pretty healthy. If there are genetic causes of disease and food changes your genes for good or for bad then food can be a cause of disease. This is the ‘You are what you eat’ argument proved by the science of epigenetics, begrudgingly agreed by the author of a book that has a title that states the opposite.

Confused? Just keep eating the GMOs and for goodness sakes, don’t have any fun while you’re at it!

Do as I say, not as I do. World leaders eat organic, push GM

Our democratically elected leaders have a nasty track record of forcing GM food on their citizens while quietly eating organic at home

We are all used to voting for politicians on the basis of promises that are broken as soon as the election is over. Why can’t they just do as they say? Our elected leaders have power, but it is constrained. The highest and mightiest Presidents and Prime Ministers must still kneel before higher authorities: the barons of the press, industry, agribusiness, oil, war, drugs and finance.

This is the distortion that makes democracy so disappointing. We elect our leaders so they can create the society we want, but they have to support interests that conflict with what is best for society. The result is climate change, pollution, war, banksterism and disease

The organic movement was founded on selfish but noble ideals. If we look after the soil on this planet, then we can enjoy the fruits of that soil in a balanced healthy diet without fear. The Soil Association, the founding organisation of the global organic movement, built this philosophy into its name. Sounds obvious, but if you are an agrichemical company or if you just want to rape the land and move on then such high-minded idealism can be an obstacle to enriching the bottom line. Short-termism is where the money lies. The more costs you can externalise, the more profit reaches the bottom line.

We have suffered inexplicable and inexcusable stupidity from successive governments when it comes to the food supply. Whether it’s permitting toxic pesticides, GM, or subsidising biofuels, rational behaviour is absent. Organic farming has been treated by our governments as a marginal activity that is for middle class eccentrics and freaky hippies who refuse to grow up.

So what are these freaks like when they’re at home?

David Cameron – Tory Farming Minister Jim Paice tells the 2012 Oxford Farming Conference we can’t go on ignoring the benefits of GM foods. But at home in the Cotswolds, Samantha Cameron sensibly shops at Daylesford Farm Shop, a resolutely organic store that proudly never stocks GM foods and sells organic vegetables, meat, baked goods and dairy products produced on the farm.

Barack Obama – promised GM foods would be labelled if he got elected. Now he opposes labelling. He brutally overrode the USA Supreme Court to allow GM alfalfa and sugar beets. But at home his wife Michelle turns the White House garden organic so that the Obama family have a safe local food supply

Mitt Romney – steered Monsanto onto the GM track in the 70s; his Agricultural Advisory Committee is headed by Monsanto lobbyist Randy Russel and packed with other Monsanto supporters. But at home Mitt himself only eats organic, (especially his favourite peanut butter and honey sandwiches). In 1998 Romney’s wife Ann got off intravenous steroids for her multiple sclerosis and successfully restored her health with organic food and acupuncture, which she now sticks to religiously

Bill and Hillary Clinton – Bill strongarmed the EU to accept GM when he was President. Hillary still pushes GM worldwide. But at home, according to their executive chef at the White House, the food they ate was organic and Hillary had a pesticide-free roof garden.

George W Bush – Promoted GM and tried to weaken organic standards. But at home Laura Bush insisted that all food in the White House was organic

Tony Blair – expressed ‘frustration’ with people who opposed GM and called opposition a ‘flash in the pan.’ But at home his wife Cherie told me: “I can’t wait to tell my husband that I met the man who makes his favourite chocolate!”

Notice a pattern here?

In China – the Special Food Supply Center supplies China’s political elite with organic, strictly non-GM food including hormone- and antibiotic-free meat. However, recent government incentives have led to 40% annual organic market growth in the past 5 years, so there is a trickle down effect

What on earth is the point of democracy if all it achieves is a healthy natural lifestyle for a handful of our rulers while they hypocritically impose dangerous, untested GM foods and carcinogenic pesticides on the rest of us?