Consumers (Vil)sacked by Big Ag again, with the help of the Whole Foods Market and friends

When pigs fly.......(Wiki Commons image)

By Laura Harrison McBride, editor/publisher of Eating Their Young: How the Greatest Generation Made the Baby Boom Into a Moveable Feast.

It happened in January, 2011, just in time for the growing season being harvested now. Whole Foods Market (WFM), Organic Valley and Stoneyfield Farms tacitly approved the use of the scourge of the earth, another Roundup Ready crop, in this case Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa.  So what? People don’t eat alfalfa, you say.

Horses do.

But people don’t eat horses, not in America, you note. And Roundup is not used in France where horses do enter the food chain in significant numbers.

You are what you eat, just as, the Age of AIDs, you sleep with everyone the person you slept with has slept with. Just so, you eat whatever what you eat has eaten. In America, alfalfa is a great part of the feed of many animals raised for food, both by Big Ag conglomerates and by organic farms. 

In her book, Eating Their Young: How the Greatest Generation Made the Baby Boom into a Moveable Feast, author Bryce Webster notes that in 2003, according to the conservative publication National Review, “only two percent of American farms were organic,  hardly a major threat to agribusiness. But any threat to the status quo is taken very seriously by the food conglomerates and, since they have the lobbying power and organic producers don’t, guess who wins?” She notes that the astronomical growth in the size and power of the USDA, and its increasingly corporate toadying, happened when the so-called Greatest Generation was ascendant.  Profits were king; human values? Not so much.

Big Ag, 1: Humanity, 0

With Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley and Stoneyfield Farms capitulating, it would seem that Big Ag has all but won, with the help of Mr. Obama’s hand-picked USDA chief, Tom Vilsack, definitely a disappointment in his catering to Big Ag at the expense of sustainability and any retrenchment from the industrial-strength farm policies of Mr. Bush’s administration.

An article on the Foodfreedom blog notes that WFM, under cover of a mealy-mouthed explanation for a retreat from the front-lines of food sanity, had approved of the USDA’s “conditional deregulation” of Monsanto’s “genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa.”

What does this mean? Simply that Monsanto, which has been cited more than once for its draconian tactics regarding farmers’ rights to plant whatever they like (click here, here and here for examples), can spread the alfalfa and its mutant genes across the land…where those genes will escape through a variety of vectors to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals.

Whether you eat it or breathe it, tinkered-with food is deadly

It is difficult to say which is worse, the food-chain contamination organic growers have been fighting for decades, or the “massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup” and the inevitable appearance, in time, of “Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.,” according to the Foodfreedom writer, Ronnie Cummins.

Cummins also noted that “a recent large-scale Swedish study found that spraying Roundup doubles farm workers’ and rural residents’ risk of getting cancer’.”

Risks of disease and death from agricultural chemicals has long been known, however.  Webster writes, “In October 1956, malathion sprayed to combat a fruit fly infestation “affected people with asthma and caused skin rashes,” A year later, “A Business Week columnist reported in September…that sixty persons near Glen Allan, a small Mississippi community near Greenville, were ill with a fevers of 105 degrees and suffered from ‘asthmatic breathing, various flu-like symptoms, and some pneumonia’.” The doctor who treated the victims, Webster reports, announced that spraying the cotton fields with insecticides had cuased the outbreak.

WFM claimed the high road in all this. It said it expected the USDA to regulate Monsanto, not cheerlead for it.

And a lot of us are still looking forward to seeing pigs fly…although with genetic engineering, that ludicrous event might not be as far-fetched as expecting your father’s USDA to do the right thing.