THANK THE FDA: ORGANIC FOOD CAVES TO SYNTHETIC CARRAGEENAN, INOSITOL & CHOLINE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 31, 2012 4:29 PM

CONTACT: Cornucopia Institute Mark Kastel, 608-625-2042

Wildfires Rage at New Mexican Organic Meetings

Farmers, Consumers and Public Interest Groups Square off Against Corporate Interests

WASHINGTON - May 31 - Passions flared at the semiannual meeting of the USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the federal advisory panel approved a number of synthetic ingredients for use in organics, over the objection of the majority of industry participants.
The meeting came on the heels of the release of a report by an organic industry watchdog, The Cornucopia Institute, outlining corrupt practices in the constitution of the board and their past approval processes.  The NOSB, created by Congress, is legally mandated to ensure that no substances are allowed in organic foods that pose a threat to human health or the environment.
The most controversial material approved at the meeting was carrageenan, a stabilizer and thickener synthesized from seaweed.  Carrageenan has been shown to trigger gastrointestinal inflammation, which is known to cause serious intestinal disease, including cancer.  "Degraded carrageenan," which is present in all food-grade carrageenan, is classified as a “possible human carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Academy of Science in United States.
"If there was ever a poster child for an ingredient that has no business being in organic food, or any food for that matter, it's carrageenan," said Charlotte Vallaeys, Director of Farm and Food Policy at Cornucopia.
In their report, The Organic Watergate, issued earlier in May, Cornucopia documented what they called "systemic corruption" at the USDA that resulted in what was characterized as biased technical reviews and approvals of synthetics for use in organics.  Their findings illustrated that the materials were being evaluated by food scientists working directly for corporate agribusiness and then approved by a body (the NOSB) illegally stacked with agribusiness representatives.
"The beauty of the law that was passed by Congress, the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA), was that the majority of 15 NOSB seats were reserved for farmers, consumer advocates, environmentalists and others public interest representatives as a balance to corporate power," said Mark Kastel, The Cornucopia Institute’s Codirector.  "The law has been ignored and the organic chickens are now coming home to roost—undermining the integrity of the organic label."
"The Organic Trade Association (OTA), an industry lobby group, and its powerful members, can now get approval for virtually anything they want.  It has turned the entire regulatory process into a mockery," Kastel added.
The Cornucopia Institute, which is preparing to challenge the inappropriate board composition in federal court, also just filed a formal complaint with the USDA's Office of Inspector General (OIG), Ms. Phyllis Fong, asking her to investigate the organization’s allegations.
In their complaint, they used NOSB member Carmela Beck as an example.  Ms. Beck was appointed by USDA Sectary Tom Vilsack to serve on one of the seats reserved for an individual who "owns or operates" an organic farm.  Ms. Beck neither owns nor operates an organic farm, but is a full-time employee of a giant privately-owned agribusiness, Driscolls, the largest conventional and organic berry producer in the United States.
"This is a clear-cut violation of OFPA, in which Congress charged the USDA with protecting organic stakeholders and consumers," explained Kastel.
Cornucopia’s letter to the OIG also cited direct conflicts of interest on the board that should have caused certain members to recuse themselves from voting on carrageenan‘s relisting on the National List of approved substances in organics.
Ms. Wendy Fulwider, a full-time employee at the CROPP Cooperative (Organic Valley) and a NOSB member, appropriately disclosed a conflict of interest.  Organic Valley had sent a representative to publicly lobby the board to approve carrageenan, citing Organic Valley’s use of the material in soymilk, whipping cream and chocolate milk.  In addition, NOSB members reported direct contact from Organic Valley’s CEO, who had called them individually to lobby for their vote.  And Organic Valley submitted written comments in advance of the meeting advocating that the board vote for the synthetic material.
However, the staff at the USDA’s National Organic Program ruled that Ms. Fulwider’s disclosure did not constitute a conflict of interest that required her to abstain from voting.
"If the direct economic impact of this vote on Organic Valley, and their covert and overt lobbying for carrageenan, does not constitute a conflict of interest, then nothing presented to this board will ever disqualify a member from voting," lamented Cornucopia's Kastel.  "The fix is in."
At the meeting, Michael Potter, CEO of Clinton, Michigan based Eden Foods, illustrated that companies do not need to sacrifice foundational organic values in order to compete in the $30+ billion industry.  Potter, whose company is a respected and leading producer of diversified organic groceries, pleaded with the NOSB to act as a "gatekeeper" for the authenticity of organic food.  He asked the board to employ the "Precautionary Principle" and to “always be certain that what they do is appropriate for organic food.”
Potter, who started his oral testimony by stating for the record that Eden Foods is not a member of the Organic Trade Association, told the board, "Organic food is supposed to be an alternative to industrialized food" and that he objects to "the greenwashing for more, easy, and cheap to produce, quasi-organic food."  He then poignantly asked the Board:  "Should organic food be better for large corporations, or better for the people?"
After learning about the scientific research pointing to carrageenan’s serious human health impacts, Potter committed to removing carrageenan from the handful of Eden Foods products that currently contain it.  This is in stark contrast to other companies, like Dean Foods (Horizon and Silk), Organic Valley, and Dannon (Stonyfield), which all sent representatives to the NOSB meeting to lobby for carrageenan’s approval in organics.
In addition to carrageenan, the board approved synthetic inositol and choline, two nutraceuticals, for use in all infant formula.  This was a controversial decision as well, since the FDA only requires that these synthetic nutrients be added to soy-based infant formula.
"These nutrients are found naturally in dairy-based formula and many foods.  It's a risky gimmick to add their synthetic version to organic foods, which is the last refuge for parents seeking to avoid chemical additives and give truly natural food to their infants and children," said Cornucopia's Vallaeys.
The Cornucopia Institute has taken the official position that the NOSB, which is not a scientific panel, should leave decisions about required food fortification with synthetic nutrients to the FDA.  At last fall’s meeting, the NOSB approved the use of the controversial synthetic ingredients DHA and ARA, patented by Royal DSM/Martek Biosciences Corporation, for use in formula and other organic foods.  Neither are recommended or required by the FDA.  
"The organic regulations allow any nutrient required by the FDA to be added to organic food.  The NOSB should not be listening to lobbyists from pharmaceutical companies and trade groups like the International Formula Council.  They should leave scientifically based decisions about the essentiality of synthetic nutrients to the FDA," said Vallaeys.
"The decision to relist carrageenan, and to allow the synthetic nutrients choline and inositol for infant formula, prevailed by one vote," Kastel observed.  "There is no doubt that if the board were legally constituted, with truly independent members instead of corporate imposters, the decisions would be radically different and the true values of the organic movement would be upheld."
While The Cornucopia Institute remains bullish on the organic label, it has published a series of studies and scorecards rating organic brands, to address the shortcuts some corporations are applying to organic production.  These reports and scorecards empower consumers and wholesale buyers to make informed purchasing decisions.  They can be found on the Cornucopia website.
"There is currently no alternative for consumers, who are seeking safe and nutritious food, other than direct, local marketing by farmers,” concluded Kastel.  "Despite the corporate take-over of organics, dedicated organic customers are not going to go back to conventional food.  There are just a few of the 300 or so synthetic and non-organic ingredients approved for use in organic food that are questionable—and we are going to work like hell to get them out.  But in conventional food, there are thousands of highly toxic inputs, and there's no doubt about the danger of many of these compounds."
"The integrity of organic farming and food production," noted Kastel, "is worth caring about."

###

The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit farm policy research group, is dedicated to the fight for economic justice for the family-scale farming community.  Their Organic Integrity Project acts as a corporate and governmental watchdog assuring that no compromises to the credibility of organic farming methods and the food it produces are made in the pursuit of profit.  Their web page can be viewed at www.cornucopia.org.   

Source:  http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/05/31-7

GMO LABELS...CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' IS BECOMING A REALITY...

How California Could Force the Rest of the US to Label GMO Foods

—By Tom Philpott

| Thu May. 31, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

A sign at a pro-labeling rally in San Francisco in February. Rainforest Action Network/Flickr

In November, California voters will decide on a ballot initiative that would require labeling of all foods containing ingredients from genetically modified crops. The initiative made it to the ballot after almost 1 million Californians signed a petition in favor of it—nearly double the 504,760 signatures needed under the state's proposition rules. The campaign that organized the push to get the measure on the ballot focused on possible health effects of GMO foods.

This news will not likely be applauded by my friends over at Croplife America, the main trade group of the GM seed/agrichemical industry. The big GMO crops—corn, soy, sugar beets, and cotton—are processed into sweeteners, fats, and additives used widely by the food industry. Everything from high fructose corn syrup-sweetened Coke to soybean oil-containing Hellman's mayo would have to bear a label reading something like "Contains GMO ingredients."
That would send a shockwave through the food industry—one that could ultimately be felt on the industrial-scale US farms that have been devoting their land to GMO crops for years, and the companies that profit from selling them patented seeds and matching herbicides. The reason isn't just that California represents an imposing chunk of the US food market. It's also that a food-labeling law that starts in California is unlikely to stay in California.

To see why, look at the case of another practice beloved of US agribusiness: that of stuffing egg-laying hens into cages so tight that they can't turn around.
Back in 2008, California voters mulled a ballot initiative to ban that production method by 2015. The egg industry fought the proposal bitterly—but Proposition Two (as it was known) won anyway, by a margin of nearly two-to-one. Two years later, the California legislature passed a law applying the new rules to all eggs sold in the state—foiling the industry's threat to close shop in California and send in eggs from hens caged in other states.

But the initiative was never really just about California. Its main champion, the Humane Society of the United States, was clear about that from the start. As HSUS's Paul Shapiro told Grist weeks before the 2008 vote, "Nobody can ignore the fact that California is the largest agricultural state in the country and it's often a trend-setting state. We envision national reforms coming from passage of Prop. 2.”

Shapiro's words proved prescient. In July 2011, less than three years after the California initiative's passage, executives from the egg industry's main trade group joined forces with their peers from HSUS to propose national legislation that would essentially make the California rules the law of the land. The legislation hasn't gone anywhere yet, but with the industry vowing to support and not crush it in Congress, the days of stuffing hens in tiny cages seem numbered.

Why did the egg industry crack? Did these hard-boiled execs experience a sudden pang of conscience over the plight of the millions of hens confined in their egg factories? More likely, they were acting in deference to a basic law of capitalism: differentiation costs money. Nearly 38 million people live in California—12 percent of the entire US population, and 17 percent of the US egg market, according to the USDA. It's costly and cumbersome to apply one set of production rules to eggs for California's vast horde of consumers, and another to everyone else.

So the egg industry wants a set of standards that applies nationwide. Similarly, if massive food processors like Kraft and Unilever are forced to label essentially all of their products just for the California market, it likely won't be long before they're pushing for national labeling—or simply just labeling everything for the national market.

It's hard to say how consumers would react to national GMO labeling, but there's evidence that a substantial portion of them might reject GMOs and demand alternatives. A recent national poll by the Mellman Group found that 91 percent of respondents favored GMO labeling, a result that was roughly consistent among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. The fact that they want that information suggests that they may be willing to act on it.

If they do, they'll initially find that the only way to avoid GMOs is to buy certified-organic products, which by USDA code can't contain GMOs. As of last year, genetically modified seeds accounted for 94 percent of US soy and three-quarters of corn and cotton (which makes it into the food supply in the form of cottonseed oil, a popular fat for the food industry). A move to labeling would likely create a robust market in non-GMO, conventional versions of those crops, giving large-scale farmers incentive to transition away from GMOs and cutting into the profits of giants like Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont. If a substantial percentage of them did, that would be a hard blow to the profit plans of the big agrichemical companies, whose business models are based on constant growth, not shrinkage.

As I've written before, herbicide-tolerant GMO technologies have pushed US farmers to apply ever greater doses of ever-more toxic herbicides. New-generation GM seeds from Monsanto and Dow promise to accelerate that trend. So far, regulatory agencies like USDA and EPA have proven utterly unable to check this slow-motion, GMO-generated gusher of agrichemicals onto our prime farmland and ultimately into the water of millions of people.

Where regulators have failed, California's voters might ultimately make a difference.

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/05/california-gmo-labeling

© 2012 Mother Jones

25 BILLION TONS OF CRAP - BROUGHT TO YOU BY FACTORY FARMS

Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste than U.S. Population

Mike Barrett
NaturalSociety
May 29, 2012

If you thought you were a major contributor to pollution, just wait until you hear this. Factory farms produce 100 times more waste than every single person in the United States combined. The amount of waste produced by these factories is in such mass quantities that it is virtually impossible to clean up properly. Much of this waste is dumped into the water supply, drastically increasing overall water pollution as well as contributing to the pollution found in drinking water.

Back in 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a decision that affected many factory farms. They stated that any confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), also known as factory farms, “designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge” animal waste must apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit under the Clean Water Act. The livestock industry ridiculed this notion.

There have been past rulings concerning this issue that forced farmers to have a permit to discharge waste and to have a set plan as to how the waste would be discharged, or they would face civil or criminal penalties. The 2008 ruling went further with the issue, putting even more criteria in place to follow.

A ruling on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, ruled that the EPA has no right to require CAFOs to apply for permits unless they actually discharge waste. But if a CAFO does in fact discharge waste, the EPA can then require that CAFO to apply for a permit.

Nutrients in animal waste cause something known as algal blooms, which use up oxygen in the water and effectively cause a lack of oxygen for aquatic life to survive. These lifeless areas are called “dead zones”. The most notorious of dead zones can be found in the Gulf of Mexico, where it extended a record 8,500 square miles during the summer of 2002 and stretched over 7,700 square miles during summer of 2010, and is always fluctuating. Ammonia, a toxic form of nitrogen released during waste disposal, can be carried via air over 300 miles before being dumped back onto the ground or into the water, where it causes algal blooms and fish kills.

The past laws set in place forced CAFOs to apply for a permit and create a plan to handle the massive amount of waste the animals would inevitably generate. With this law changing and lowering the standards at which factory farms are run by, CAFO’s will be able to wait until the last minute before they decide to dump the waste. Despite the fact that the EPA will be able to penalize them for such actions, the CAFO’s will already have done the damage to the environment by ridding their land of millions of gallons of manure.

The simple fact is that factory farms are causing problems, and are still being widely used today.

• The number of hog farms in the United States has dropped from 650,000 to 71,000 over the past 30 years, however, the number of hogs remains nearly the same.
• In 1999, only 2% of hog farms in the U.S. accounted for more than 46% of the total number of hogs, as reported by U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• 10 total companies produce over 90% of the nation’s poultry.

Additional sources:

AlterNet

NRDC

Source: http://naturalsociety.com/factory-farms-produce-100-times-waste-us-population/#ixzz1wUL4Muzu

HERE'S WHAT AMERICANS EAT

The Average American Diet

Mike Barrett
NaturalSociety
May 17, 2012

Unfortunately, Americans have some of the worst diets in the world, and everyone else knows it. With the average American consuming 24 lbs of artificial sweeteners, 29 lbs of french fries, and over 600 lbs of dairy per year, the average American is in a state of crisis. The average American diet is heavily responsible for the escalating obesity rates and is ultimately contributing to the development of illness and diseases.

According to the below infographic, the average American consumes about 1 gallon of soda per week, which equates to more than 18 fluid ounces, or 1.5 sodas per day. These sodas are loaded with sugar, with a 12oz can containing 35-45 grams – an amount that exceeds the recommended daily intake of ~15 grams. What’s more, these sugars are typically in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, one of the cheapest, and most health-hazardous forms of sugar that can be used.

Another concerning number in the average American diet is the amount of artificial sweeteners consumed; this includes substances like aspartame, Splenda, Sweet N’ Low, and Equal. None of these artificial sweeteners are healthful, and are even having a negative impact on your health.

• One study found that 67% of female rats exposed to aspartame developed tumors roughly the size of golf balls or larger.

• Is Splenda safe? This toxic sweetener also has many dangers. Some effects associated with Splenda are shortness of breath, joint pains, eye irritation, swelling of facial muscles, ski breaking out into hives or rashes, and more.

• Saccharin, best known as Sweet ‘N Low has been shown to have carcinogenic links. During the 1960′s, studies on rats indicated saccharin was related to bladder cancer, but the FDA has allowed saccharin to remain as a food additive.

Needless to say, there are many more problems associated with the average American diet. While consumption of food shown in weight (as the inforgraphic shows) isn’t the absolute best way to pinpoint the issues with any diet, the numbers do give us a representation and idea of how much we’re eating. If you want to compare generalizations between nations around the world, take a look at what the world eats.

Check out the infographic below for some startling statistics.
Source:  http://naturalsociety.com/average-american-diet-infographic/

POLAND: MONSANTO GMO CORN - DEFINITELY LINKED TO COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER (CCD)

Poland beekeepers kick Monsanto out of the hive, successfully ban bee-killing GM corn

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer 

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036010_Poland_Monsanto_GM_corn.html#ixzz1wRzuNgGo(NaturalNews) A significant health freedom victory has taken place in the European nation of Poland, where all plantings of Monsanto's MON810, a genetically-modified (GM) variety of maize (corn) that produces its own built-in Bt insecticide in every kernel, have been officially banned.

The decision comes after thousands of protesters recently took to the streets in demonstration of the undeniable fact that both MON810 and the chemicals applied to it are at least partially responsible for causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the worldwide phenomenon in which entire swarms of honey bees disappear or turn up dead.

"The decree is in the works. It introduces a complete ban on the MON810 strain of maize in Poland," said Polish Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki, who also explained to the press that pollen from MON810 appears to be responsible for further devastating the already dwindling bee population throughout the country and elsewhere.

According to reports, Poland's decision to ban MON810 makes it the first nation to formally acknowledge that Monsanto's GM corn is definitively linked to CCD. It also affirms the findings of several earlier studies that have identified a link between Bt GM crops and bee deaths, including independent research conducted by Pennsylvania beekeeper John McDonald.

McDonald's research found that bees foraging near Bt crops did not gain the proper amount of weight, and failed to produce honey in their honey supers (honey storage bins) when they should have. Their non-Bt crop counterparts, on the other hand, produced more than double the amount of honey they needed to survive the winter (http://www.naturalnews.com/025287.html).

Back in early March, nine European countries -- Belgium, Great Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, and Slovakia -- successfully blocked an effort by the Danish EU presidency to allow expanded cultivation of GM crops in Europe. And around that same time, France imposed its own ban on MON810.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to forge ahead in the unmitigated, and largely unregulated, cultivation and use of GM crops. Despite countless grassroots efforts to put at least some restraint on GM agriculture, including a number of state initiatives that would require GMO labeling on food, Monsanto's products continue to dominate much of the American agricultural landscape.

To learn more about how you can support the preservation of honeybees in your local community, be sure to visit: http://www.honeybeehaven.org/content/take-pledge

Sources for this article include:

http://www.polishnews.com

http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issues/alert/?alertid=22033501

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036010_Poland_Monsanto_GM_corn.html#ixzz1wRzRMmd8

WHO OWNS - AND IS TAKING OVER - THE LAND AND RESOURCES LEFT ON EARTH?

Land grabbing hurts the world’s poor more than climate change, Fred Pearce argues

By Tom Templeton

A version of this article originally appeared in The Observer.

30 May 2012

Investigative journalist and author Fred Pearce has a new book out this week: The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth, which explores “how Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.” Here he answers questions about the book and his long career reporting on environmental challenges.

Q. What inspired you to write The Land Grabbers?

A. Over the last few years, I became aware of this hidden revolution taking place around the world: the buying up of vast swaths of land by foreign entities from beneath its occupiers. Soaring grain prices in 2007/2008 led to countries such as Saudi Arabia and South Korea worrying about their national food security and buying up overseas land. Then speculators and investors started piling in on the back of that. The net result is that poor farmers and cattle herders across the world are being thrown off their land. Land grabbing is having more of an impact on the lives of poor people than climate change. No one has put together the global picture of land grabbing so I wanted to take a closer look.

Q. How much land has been grabbed?

A. No one really knows. A lot of reported deals never happen and a lot of the largest are done secretly. Oxfam says more than 2 million square kilometers [772,204 square miles] in the last decade have been grabbed, two-thirds of them in Africa. That’s like Spain, France, Britain, Italy, and Germany put together.

Q. Who’s doing the grabbing?

A. A vast and colorful cast of characters: Gulf sheikhdoms, jumpy governments worried about food security, Chinese state corporations, Wall Street speculators, Russian oligarchs, Gaddafi’s henchmen among many. Also some big conservation funds. Most likely your pension fund has a slice of the action too.

Q. How did you research the book?

A. I’m an old-fashioned reporter — I want to go see. So I’d read about a big land deal in the papers and go to find what was going on. I traveled to 10 or so countries where the most egregious grabbing is taking place: the savannah of Brazil, the forests of Indonesia, the inner Niger delta of Mali.

Q. Some governments bend over backwards for the grabbers …

A. If you drive into one region of Tanzania your mobile phone beeps with a text welcoming you to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A major general in the UAE army has bought exclusive hunting rights to a 400,000-hectare [988,422-acre] national park there. There are stories of them using spotlights off vehicles at night to shoot leopards with AK-47s and burning the bush to beat the game towards the guns. And the Tanzanian government’s elite paramilitary unit keeps the Masai families off the land.

Q. Who’s losing out?

A. Wherever I went, people were being moved off with little or no regard for their historic or cultural rights. The grabbers want big spaces — 50,000 hectares [123,553 acres] — and you can only get that if you take commonly owned ancestral lands. They come in and put in an airstrip and a compound and roads and canals and the villagers are told to go to the nearest town and they lose absolutely everything.

Q. You wrote the first popular book on climate change, Turning Up the Heat, in 1989. How’s that story going?

A. We have political consensus; the clean energy technology is there; it’s in our interests environmentally and economically; smart corporations can make a profit from the change; and we have shown with the banking crisis that if there’s a trillion-dollar price tag, we can pay it. But still nothing. If we can fix the banking system, then why not the climate system? It’s governments that lack the balls.

Q. What about the theory that what the West does is irrelevant, what with the Eastern economies growing so rapidly?

A. Well, the Chinese have an environmental movement. There’s huge concern about local pollution — smog, kids with high levels of lead from smelters, chronic poisoning, and so on. It’s like Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down — environmentalism was how political space was developed. It was the channel by which you could attack the political system. It wasn’t directly attacking the state or the Communist party but it was a damn good way of coming in the side door.

Q. In 2006, you wrote The Last Generation, a book about tipping points rapidly speeding up climate change.

A. There’s huge concern about this. Historically, climate change does not happen in a gradual way, we have periods of stability and then a lurch. Over the last few years, we’ve been losing dramatically more Arctic sea ice in the summer than was predicted. There are concerns that the monsoons could switch off as a result of current changes in the Atlantic and that warming could cause methane to bubble out of the melting Siberian permafrost, which would then speed up warming even more. So things could get out of control much quicker than predictions suggest.

Q. What makes a good science writer?

A. Some see themselves as part of the scientific priesthood, but you should be independent, like a political correspondent looking at politicians. This got me into trouble over “Climategate.” There was some disturbing stuff in terms of people taking shortcuts, trying to ensure that rival scientists didn’t get their stuff published, colluding against freedom of information requests. It didn’t undermine the climate change science but it deserved the light of day. A lot of people didn’t like me writing it up.

Q. In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, you traced your own environmental footprint. Did you change your lifestyle after that?

A. Not a great deal, I have to admit. My house leaks energy and in my work I fly a huge amount, which means my carbon footprint is sky-high. My wife is still a better recycler than I am.

Q. But the journey made you think as much about your social footprint as your environmental one?

A. It made me realize there’s a kind of green imperialism where we are just screwing up a lot of lives for uncertain benefit and a sense of personal virtue. For example, the carbon footprint of flying green beans from Kenya is no greater than that of growing them in a hothouse in the Netherlands. And there is huge benefit attached to the farmer. How dare I decide that I want to penalize them to make myself feel a little bit better?

Q. What’s the least green thing a person can do?

A. Well, drinking Fiji Water, which has been shipped around the world from the South Pacific, doesn’t make much sense. It rains here too.

Q. Most of the stories you cover seem full of pessimism.

A. I’m interested in the life-support systems of the planet and they can be in peril without us knowing it. Take the ozone layer. Once scientists found that chlorine-based refrigerator chemicals were causing the problem we responded quickly and basically we only just caught it in time. Scientists say we might easily have used bromine-based chemicals in refrigerators instead, in which case we would have destroyed the ozone layer before we realized the problem.

Q. Does all this keep you up at night?

A. No. You can plan for the future, but you can’t predict it.

Read an excerpt from The Land Grabbers.

Source:  https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/137a1012ce649071

HFCS: MY BODY CAN TOTALLY TELL THE DIFFERENCE - HFCS BLOCKS INSULIN FOR THINKING AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH

FDA: High-fructose corn syrup will not be called ‘corn sugar’

By Twilight Greenaway

The image the Corn Refiners Association might have hoped to conjure with the term “corn sugar.”

There has been a lot of back and forth about real and perceived differences between sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) over the years — including here at Grist, where Tom Laskawy has explored the contentious topic at length. And while the science is definitely still unfolding, the fact that the Corn Refiners Association has shown a strong interest in blurring the line between the two is certainly compelling reason to suspect there are, in fact, some noteworthy differences.

As of Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agrees. The agency released an official response to the Corn Refiners Association’s 2010 request to refer to the substance as “corn sugar” with a resounding no. The reasons they gave read as benignly technical, but also hint at the differences in the kinds of processes needed to make sugar and HFCS (one being a highly industrial, synthetic process resulting in a food that could not exist in nature if we wanted it to). The statement reads:

 … the use of the term “corn sugar” for HFCS would suggest that HFCS is a solid, dried, and crystallized sweetener obtained from corn. Instead, HFCS is an aqueous solution sweetener derived from corn after enzymatic hydrolysis of cornstarch, followed by enzymatic conversion of glucose (dextrose) to fructose.

The report also points out that the name “corn sugar” is already spoken for, and is used on food labels to describe dextrose.

But it’s not just concerned parents who want to see a clear distinction maintained between the two additives. The Sugar Association also appears to be holding a hard-line. The industry group even went so far as to issue a press release recently when a medical study out of UCLA resulted in the headline “Sugar can make you dumb.” The group blamed the Corn Refiners Association’s “multimillion-dollar advertising campaign” (which no doubt includes the often-parodied moms-at-a-birthday-party television commercials) for generating the confusion.

Indeed, the UCLA study would also give me pause if I were in the sugar business. (Okay, I admit it gives me pause anyway.) When the team of scientists “zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar,” a press release from the school reads, they found that “eating too much fructose could block insulin’s ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar for the energy required for processing thoughts and emotions.”

Now if that study had focused on a substance recently rebranded “corn sugar” would its implications be nearly as meaningful? Maybe not. Thanks to this move by the FDA, we don’t have to wonder about that — for the time being.

Source:   http://grist.org/corn/fda-high-fructose-corn-syrup-is-definitely-not-corn-sugar/