Author: Katherine

A mighty band of citizen activists, along with the Nebraska Farmers Union, are taking on a city council and a corporate giant. And they need your help.

Retail giant Costco wants to build the largest chicken factory farm in the U.S., in Fremont, Nebraska. The city’s elected officials have approved the project. But the people and farmers in surrounding cities, whose lives will suffer the most, are fighting back.

Costco and the Fremont City Council are singing the same old tired tune, that a giant factory farm will bring jobs to the city.

What they don’t want Fremont residents to know, is that those jobs will be low-paid and dangerous, that the water pollution generated from another huge factory farm will be devastating for Nebraskans, whose water is already badly compromised by agricultural runoff, and that local farmers will get ripped off under contracts stacked in favor of the retail giant.

We’re so impressed with what Nebraska Communities United is doing to stop this project—including organizing workshops to help local farmers farm profitably, sustainably and independent of corporate control, that we’re asking for your help.

Your local natural health food store could never get away with stocking its shelves with Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Toxins that cause cancer and birth defects don’t belong in “health” food stores.

So how do some of these stores get away with stocking Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, when our testing revealed that ten of 11 flavors contain glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup?

This week, we called 290 of the best natural health food stores and co-ops nationwide to find out which ones sell Ben & Jerry’s.

We’re relieved to report that most—198—don’t. But unfortunately, 92 (31 percent) do. Here’s the list of natural health food stores and co-ops that sell glyphosate-contaminated Ben & Jerry’s. If your store is on this list please take this letter to the store manager and ask him or her to stop selling Ben & Jerry’s. After your visit, fill out this form to let us know what happened.

Most of the stores that sell Ben & Jerry’s  display it right next to the organic brands they sell—a move that misleads consumers into thinking Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is organic, too.

It’s tough to even know where to start with this one, but here goes.

A company called Impossible Foods, with $257 million in venture capital funding, recently launched its fake, genetically engineered Impossible Burger—even though, the FDA (supposedly in charge of food safety) can’t say if the burger’s “secret sauce”—soy leghemoglobin—is safe.

How can Impossible Foods put soy leghemoglobin in food if the FDA hasn’t deemed it safe? The New York Times explains:

The F.D.A.’s approval is not required for most new ingredients. Companies can hire consultants to run tests, and they have no obligation to inform the agency of their findings, a process of self-affirmation.”

While you let that sink in . . . here’s the other half of that story. Impossible Foods asked the FDA to weigh in on the safety of its “secret sauce” ingredient, even though it wasn’t required to. The agency did. This is what regulators wrote in a memo to Impossible Foods:

“F.D.A. believes the arguments presented, individually and collectively, do not establish the safety of soy leghemoglobin for consumption,” nor do they point to a general recognition of safety.”

Despite that statement, the Impossible Burger went to market. Because, as it turns out, a company can introduce into the food system a product or ingredient that the FDA says may not be safe—as long as the FDA doesn’t say the product is unsafe.

That’s one issue with the Impossible Burger. Here’s the other. According to Max Goldberg, author of “Living Maxwell,” Impossible Foods uses genetic engineering to make the secret sauce that the FDA won’t say is safe. In his column, which appeared on the same day as the New York Times article, Goldberg raised the question of genetic engineering, and whether Impossible Foods is misleading consumers. Goldberg explains how the Impossible Burger is made:

On Saturday, May 20, activists took to the streets, all over the world, for the sixth annual March Against Monsanto protests.

As in years past, the Organic Consumers Association wholeheartedly supported this year’s march. We promoted it through our website, newsletter and social media networks. We mailed out about 400 packets of anti-GMO and anti-pesticide banners, bumperstickers and leaflets, to March Against Monsanto organizers.

We have always actively participated in the global March against Monsanto, and we will continue. But we also recognize that anti-Monsanto protests alone have not forced enough change, fast enough.

As Occupy activist Micah White said in a recent interview with National Public Radio, protest alone does not give us political power. How true—if we learned anything from our years of work trying to pass GMO labeling laws, it was this: As long as corporations own our politicians, no amount of public support, no amount of protesting a corporation, without also addressing our broken political system, will move us in the direction we want to go.

“How could we have ever believed that it is a good idea to grow our food with poisons?” – Dr. Jane Goodall

Two new reports published in recent weeks add to the already large and convincing body of evidence, accumulated over more than half a century, that agricultural pesticides and other toxic chemicals are poisoning us.

Both reports issue scathing indictments of U.S. and global regulatory systems that collude with chemical companies to hide the truth from the public, while they fill their coffers with ill-gotten profits.

In announcing his pick last week for Secretary of Agriculture, Trump heaped predictable praise on Sonny Perdue, promising that the former governor of Georgia will “deliver big results for all Americans who earn their living off the land.”

We predict that Perdue will indeed deliver “big” results—but he’ll deliver them to his friends in Big Food and Big Ag, not to America’s rural farmers, and surely not to America’s consumers.

If it’s true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, well, judge for yourself whose side Perdue is really on. 

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), that multi-billion-dollar lobbying group that represents Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Coca-Cola, General Mills (you get the picture) rushed to praise Perdue’s nomination. In a statement, GMA’s president said her group “looks forward to working with [Perdue] on issues key to keeping America’s food the safest and most affordable food supply in the history of the world.”   

Coming from the GMA, leader of the charge to keep labels off GMO foods, we know that “safest and most affordable food” is code for “industrial chemical GMO food.”