Coalition of Unpopular Parents YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Did you know your food was grown in a lab?
"Genetically modified soy has been on the market just five years. Yet it already accounts for two-thirds of the US soybean harvest. Soy products are used in hundreds of processed foods, often to add texture and protein. So the biotech beans end up in pancake mix and baby formula, chicken soup and margarine, crackers and salad dressing, ice cream and granola bars.
Five years in, there are signs that the rapid spread of transgenic crops may be upending agricultural ecosystems - throwing colonies of soil microbes out of balance and shifting the types of weeds that crop up most often on fertile fields.
The experience of biotech soy also points up the lack of federal regulation, especially compared with other countries. The soy appeared in processed foods even before the manufacturers knew it was there... critics warn that (Monsanto's tests) were inadequate and raise questions about the enormous economic power that a company such as Monsanto wields in this new world..."
- LOS ANGELES TIMES, July 1, 2001
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"You're producing combinations of genes that cannot
be made in nature. You're putting bits of DNA into crops
when they've never been in the food system before.
It seems to me that level of novelty is enough
to merit an extra degree of scrutiny."
- Margaret Mellon, Molecular Biologist
"Unbeknownst to the residents of Sutter County, pharmaceutical (pharm) rice is growing in open-air fields in this rice-growing region of northern California. The rice has been genetically engineered with human genes to produce human proteins for drug production. This drug rice was growing within only a few hundred feed of conventional rice. Neither the USDA nor the state of California has any regulations on the production of these pharmaceutical crops, putting the environment and food supply at risk."
- Greenpeace, TRUE FOOD NOW
"The big chemical companies want to increase their control over the world food supply by marketing genetically engineered crops, but consumers in the West are leery of GMOs. So, in 2000, the US Congress approved a budget that included an estimated $30 million to promote biotechnology in the Third World. Money has also gone to support biotech research at American universities, and some of it went to help Third World and Eastern European governments encourage their regulatory agencies to approve the use of genetically modified food products. So regulatory agencies in the US, which have been asleep at the wheel on the issue of GMOs, will now train the regulatory agencies of the developing world.
The regulatory agencies have completely failed to protect American consumers. One example would be the StarLink incident, where genetically modified corn not meant for human consumption found its way into food. This mistake was not discovered by government agencies, but by the Gene Food Action Alert Coalition, a civic organization...A month later, after initial denials, the FDA finally acknowledged that a mistake had been made.
At the same time, the US is already sending genetically modified food to Third World nations without the consent of people there. In late 1999 and early 2000, when the Indian state of Orissa was hit by floods, the US sent food aid containing GMOs. The Indian government was not told that the food had been modified. Mozambique, the Philippines, Bolivia, and many other nations have received similarly tainted shipments of food aid. More recently, when Sri Lanka adopted progressive legislation banning imports of genetically modified foods, it was threatened by the US, and pressure has since been put on the government to remove the restirictions.
I am deeply disturbed by the way hunger has been used to promote biotechnology...The US government is "combating hunger" by allocating money from development-assistance programs to promote biotechnology in the Third World. And the civic groups that are opposing the corporate takeover of our food system and challenging genetic engineering are portrayed as selfish people who want to deny the Third World the benefits of biotechnology..."
-Anuradha Mittal, FOOD FIRST
"In 2001, over half of the cotton and soybean crops were genetically engineered. So was a quarter of our corn. Most of our corn and soybean crops are fed to animals, so the mean and poultry we eat is likely to come from animals raised on genetically engineered feed.
(New allergens ended up in genetically engineered crops) when scientists unwillingly transferred an allergen from brazil nuts to soybean plants. That underscores why it's so important that the government require companies to test genetically enginered foods...
When a gene is transferred from one organism to another, there's no way to know which chromosome the gene will end up on, where it will settle on that chromosome, or how it might alter -- or be altered by -- the genes around it. We need to guard against unexpected toxins in genetically engineered plants because we know it's happened with traditionally bred plants. Again, that's why these crops should be tested before we eat them."
- Doug Gurian-Sherman, Gregory Jaffe, Center for Science in the Public Interest
