AlterNet's Food Coverage

The Dark Side of Greek Yogurt

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:02:00 -0700

Chobani leaves a trail of waste too toxic to dump, leaving the industry scrambling for solutions to disposal.

The latest in "healthy" foods that are not actually good for us is Greek yogurt. Over at Modern Farmer, Justin Elliott explains that every three to four ounces of milk produces only one ounce of the creamy snack, and what's left becomes acid whey, " a thin, runny waste product" too toxic to dump because whey decomposition could potentially turn waterways into aquatic-life-destroying "dead seas."

Now, with a rapidly expanding $2 billion Greek yogurt market, the question has become, what to do with the whey? According to Elliott, the Northeast region alone produced more than 150 million gallons of acid whey just last year.

Though Chobani pays farmers to take their acid whey, this method has proven insufficient, as the waste product is difficult to incorporate into farming. Dave Barbano, a dairy scientist at Cornell, believes the small amount of protein in acid whey could be used in baby formula. Before he can say for sure, however, Barbano needs a cost-effective method of protein extraction, and is just beginning research.

The best solution right now may be converting lactose into methane for electricity. "Scientists at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have been experimenting for nearly a year on how to get edible-grade lactose out of acid whey," wrote Elliott, and in Scipio Center, N.Y., "they’re converting the lactose into methane that can generate electricity." But even that is expensive and problematic.

From Modern Farmer:

When the whey arrives from Chobani, some of it is mixed with the vast quantity of manure the farm produces daily. From the manure pit, the light brown soup (basically a river of shit) flows into a 16-foot-deep underground concrete tank known as an anaerobic digester. An innocent looking expanse of cement in a big, green field dotted with dandelions, there’s a lot going on inside, where a fetid mix of manure and whey percolate.
The material is heated up and kept in the tank for about 20 days, during which time bacteria break up the organic material—the lactose, in the case of whey—and release gases, including methane. The gas is fed into generators that produce electricity to power the farm and to sell to the local utility for use elsewhere.
But the setup, which Rejman and his brother had installed five years ago, required a big capital investment that would be out of reach for small farms. It cost $4.5 million, $1 million of which the Rejmans got back through a state subsidy.

They primarily built the digester for what Rejman calls “odor control” for their neighbors, as digested manure smells much less than the raw stuff (“You ever take a shit in the toilet and leave it in there?” Rejman asks, by way of explanation.) The whey is an afterthought. In any case, just 20 of New York’s the state’s 5,200 dairy farms have an operating digester, according to Curt Gooch, a waste management engineer at Cornell.
And if any of the big yogurt companies have come up with a better whey solution, they’re being cagey about it. “We are currently exploring other options for our whey, but nothing we are ready to discuss at this time,” says Chobani spokeswoman Lindsay Kos. Dannon spokesman Michael Neuwirth says the company is looking at the nutritional possibilities of whey, but “we don’t have any plans to announce at this point.”
...
Meanwhile, the tidal wave of acid whey is not slowing down. As one producer said at New York’s Yogurt Summit: “If we can figure out how to handle acid whey, we’ll become a hero.”

For more on the dark side of the Greek yogurt you've been eating, read the full piece here.

Moyers/Winship: Corporate Greed Is Poisoning America — Literally

Bill Moyers, Michael Winship, BillMoyers.com — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:26:00 -0700

As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy.

From BillMoyers.com:

At the end of a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, we should pause to think about another threat—the threat of too much private power obnoxiously intruding into public life.

Think of inadequate inspections of food and the food-related infections which kill 3,000 Americans each year and make 48 million sick. A new study from Johns Hopkins shows elevated levels of arsenic—known to increase a person’s risk of cancer—in chicken meat. According to the university’s Center for a Livable Future, “Arsenic-based drugs have been used for decades to make poultry grow faster and improve the pigmentation of the meat. The drugs are also approved to treat and prevent parasites in poultry… Currently in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting the sale or use of arsenic-based drugs in poultry feed.”

And here’s a story in The Washington Post about toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals used in poultry plants to clean more chickens more quickly to meet increased demand and make more money. According to Amanda Hitt, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign, “They are mixing chemicals together in these plants, and it’s making people sick. Does it work better at killing off pathogens? Yes, but it also can send someone into respiratory arrest.”

So far, the government has done next to nothing. No research into the possible side effects, no comprehensive record-keeping on illnesses. “Instead,” the Post reports, “they review data provided by chemical manufacturers.” What’s more, the Department of Agriculture is about to allow the production lines to move even faster, by as much as 25 percent, which means more chemicals, more exposure, more sickness.

Think of that and think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today – only a handful have been tested for safety. Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times, “Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundred s of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.”

Think, too, of that horrific explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Texas fertilizer plant. Fifteen people were killed and their little town devastated. The magazine Mother Jones noted, “Inspections are virtually non-existent; regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in populated areas.” For years, the Fertilizer Institute, described as “the nation’s leading lobbying organization of the chemical and agricultural industries,” resisted regulation and legislators went along. People can lose their lives when federal or state government winks at bad corporate practices — 4,500 workplace deaths annually at a cost to America of nearly half a trillion dollars.

As Salon’s columnist and author David Sirota observes, “If all this data was about a terrorist threat, the reaction would be swift — negligent federal agencies would be roundly criticized and the specific state’s lax attitude toward security would be lambasted. Yet, after the fertilizer plant explosion, there has been no proactive reaction at all, other than Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry boasting about his state’s ‘comfort with the amount of oversight’ that already exists.”

Finally, consider this story from ProPublica’s investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten about a uranium company that wanted a mining project in Texas that threatened to pollute drinking water. The EPA resisted — until the company hired as its lobbyist the Democratic fundraiser and fixer Heather Podesta, a favorite of the White House. Her firm was paid $400,000, she pulled the strings, and presto, the EPA changed its mind and said yes, go ahead and do your dirty work. In fact, ProPublica found that “the agency has used a little-known provision in the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to issue more than 1,500 exemptions allowing energy and mining companies to pollute aquifers, including many in the driest parts of the country.”

Of course, in a free society we’ll always be debating the role of government and its agencies. What are the limits, when is government oversight necessary and when is it best deterred? But it’s not only government that can go too far. As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy. Their ability to buy off public officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. When an entire political system persists in producing such gross injustice, it is making inevitable wholesale defiance.

How Coca-Cola's Ruthless Business Tactics Created a Despicable Global Powerhouse

Jill Richardson, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:27:00 -0700

Mark Pendergast's book, "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola" guides readers through decades of shrewd marketing campaigns and the company's ugly history.

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergast is the definitive history of the product so many see as a symbol of America itself. This impressive tome – recently released as a third edition with added new material – is not a critique of Coca-Cola, nor is it a fan’s tribute, as Pendergast reveals things the Coca-Cola Company doesn’t want you to know. (Yes, it used to contain cocaine.) He even reveals the drink’s original secret formula (which is less exciting than you might think).

Coca-Cola is not fascinating for what it is – colored sugar water with bubbles – but for what it represents. And that’s a point long known by the company’s marketers, with the exception of when they forgot it during the New Coke fiasco in the 1980s. Today, marketing students in business schools everywhere study that famous gaff.

Despite the decades-old slogan, “Delicious and Refreshing,” people do not drink Coca-Cola for the taste. They drink it because they associate it with positive things like friendship, fun, patriotism, and athleticism. Careful to market the drink to all people, everywhere, without alienating anyone, the ads are often vague. “Coke is It!” What is “it”? It’s whatever you want it to be, just as long as it makes you want to buy more Coke!

The book guides readers through the decades of marketing campaigns that built this image, most significantly during World War II, when Coca-Cola was made available to U.S. soldiers everywhere in the world, often at the government’s expense. When sales slumped, the answer was never changing the flagship product; it was a new ad campaign. Remind consumers that Coke = fun (or simpler times, or hope, or whatever feeling they crave) and they will drink more of it.

Because constant, never-ending growth is seen as essential, the other necessity is finding new channels to facilitate more Coke-drinking than ever before. Today, you can be 50 miles from nowhere in any country except Cuba and North Korea and if you crave an ice-cold Coca-Cola, you can get one. Even in places where few have clean drinking water or electricity, both needed to produce ice-cold Coke, some enterprising entrepreneur will have electricity and a cooler and plenty of Coke. The same cannot be said of nearly any other product.

The New Coke failure punctuates this strange phenomenon – that the world loves and guzzles an unhealthy beverage, but not for its good taste. Pepsi showed that in blind taste tests, more people prefer Pepsi over Coke. New Coke was tastier than both Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests. Surely consumers would love it. Except, they didn’t. They wanted fun, hope, patriotism, and everything else they associated with good, old-fashioned Coca-Cola, not some new, better-tasting concoction.

Readers seeking the dirt on Coca-Cola’s sordid past with Columbian paramilitaries and Guatemalan death squads will find these episodes covered briefly in this book. But the completeness of the company’s history in this book paints a bigger picture, and Coca-Cola’s tangles with death squads fit in as just one piece.

This is a company devoted to, above all else, making as much money as possible and selling as much Coca-Cola as possible. Period. Nazis get thirsty, too, you know. In almost every case, the company tried to please everyone and sell to everyone, without taking sides, unless it had no choice.

It’s no good that Coca-Cola did business with a Guatemalan bottler who allegedly hired death squads to murder employees trying to unionize. But that is all part of a larger pattern, a larger scandal – although there’s no conspiracy at all. The drive to increase profits and sales and market share at all cost is the company’s story, plain and simple. It took us from a 6.5-ounce drink only available at soda fountains to one available everywhere in sizes as large as 64 ounces.

Coca-Cola told us it wanted to teach the world to sing, but it’s far more likely it is giving the world diabetes. Today, a small Coke at McDonalds is 16 ounces. Pendergast, ever the balanced journalist presenting both sides, fails to definitely state that Coca-Cola is unhealthy. He generously points out that Coca-Cola creates jobs and donates to charity, even though he notes the company’s policy of “strategic philanthropy” – i.e. using “charitable” donations to gain access to valuable markets, particularly children.

The book is a long and somewhat exhausting read, but it’s also a captivating history of the development of America’s consumer culture (and terrible dietary habits) and it contains fascinating profiles of the men (yes, mostly men) behind the company, making readers wonder what a psychologist might have to say about these often tyrannical, driven workaholics.

Here are some answers Pendergast gave about his book and the company he wrote about.

Jill Richardson: Why did you choose the title For God, Country, and Coca-Cola?

Mark Pendergast: Coca-Cola has been a kind of religion to many people, including the inventor, John Pemberton, who died two years after he came up with it, and Asa Candler, who took it over and used to lead the singing of "Onward Christian Soldiers" at his sales meetings.

These were days when the drink was under attack for having cocaine in it and even afterwards for its caffeine content. So they felt like early Christian martyrs in a way, fighting for a just cause. Candler called Coca-Cola "a boon to mankind." Coke employees have always joked that they have Coca-Cola syrup flowing in their veins.

The drink has also become a kind of religion for consumers, a symbol of the American way of life as well. During World War II the drink was deemed an "essential morale booster" for the troops, and it was served in lieu of communion wine during the Battle of the Bulge. When New Coke was introduced in 1985, people wrote anguished letters as if they had killed God. Here is an actual letter I quoted in the book: "There are only two things in my life: God and Coca-Cola. Now you have taken one of those things away from me." I could go on....

JR: Can you explain Coca-Cola's relationship with the two ingredients in its name, coca and kola nuts? How much cocaine was initially in the product and when was it removed?

MP: Coca-Cola was named for its two principal drug ingredients. Coca leaf from Peru contained cocaine. Kola nut from Ghana contained caffeine. Original Coca-Cola had a very small amount of cocaine in a six-ounce drink, about 4.3 milligrams. The company took out all but a minuscule amount of cocaine in 1903 and the final amount in 1928.

JR: You imply in the book that it's attempted to sugarcoat (no pun intended) this part of its past, saying at some points that the product never contained cocaine. Is that true? Can you elaborate?

MP: Every time I go to the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, I ask the guides if Coca-Cola ever contained cocaine. They assure me that it did not. The official company line seems to be that Coca-Cola never contained added cocaine -- i.e., they didn't add white powdered cocaine, which is true. But it did contain fluid extract of coca leaf, which contains cocaine. For years, the company line has also been that the name "Coca-Cola" is just a "euphonious combination of words" -- i.e., it sounds nice. True, but the drink was also named for its two principal drug sources.

JR: How did Coca-Cola use World War II to establish its dominance abroad? And what impact did its role in the war have for their market at home?

Robert Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola, declared shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor that, "We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company." Coke was subsequently declared an essential product and Coke men called Technical Observers were sent overseas in army uniforms at government expense to establish 64 bottling plants behind the lines. As a result, Coca-Cola was put in position for global expansion in the postwar world.

American soldiers came home with an overwhelming preference for Coca-Cola. In a 1948 poll of veterans, conducted by American Legion Magazine, 63.67 percent specified Coca-Cola as their preferred soft drink, with Pepsi receiving a lame 7.78 percent of the vote. In the same year, Coke’s gross profit on sales reached a whopping $126 million, as opposed to Pepsi’s $25 million; the contrast in net after-tax income was even more telling, with Coke’s $35.6 million towering over Pepsi’s pathetic $3.2 million.

Soon after the war, when the Army quizzed 650 recruits, 21 had never drunk milk, but only one soldier had never sampled a Coke. As the company’s unpublished history stated, the wartime program “made friends and customers for home consumption of 11,000,000 GIs [and] did [a] sampling and expansion job abroad which would [otherwise] have taken 25 years and millions of dollars.” The war was over, and it appeared, at least for the moment, that Coca-Cola had won it.

JR: The impact when Coca-Cola entered new markets was increased sales for all beverages, not just Coca-Cola -- and less consumption of water and milk. Can you explain that?

Yes. As Coca-Cola and subsequently other competing soda companies increased marketing and other campaigns to out-do one another, that's what expanded the total soda market. When the market for soft drinks expanded, it helped competitors such as Pepsi, and when people are paying attention to the cola wars, they are less focused on water or milk.

JR: Coca-Cola's history practically reads like a marketing textbook. Can you tell us about its revelation of the little girl's Pooh bear? Why do Coke-drinkers love Coke so much?

Archie Lee, who was the ad man behind "The Pause That Refreshes" slogan during the Depression, noticed during a beach vacation, that his four-year-old daughter lavished such attention on her Pooh bear that other children fought over it, though other toys appeared more attractive. Lee took the incident as a parable. “It isn’t what a product is,” he wrote to Robert Woodruff, “but what it does that interests us”—and set out to plant the proper thoughts about Coca-Cola, which he wanted to make as popular and well-loved as the Pooh bear.

Coke lovers care so much about the drink for many reasons -- not least the ubiquitous, effective advertising that associates the drink with youth, energy, happiness. But many people also really do associate the drink with some of the best times in their lives.

JR: How has soda consumption changed in the U.S. from the drink's introduction over a century ago, back when a serving was 6.5 ounces? Was there ever a "turning point" when Americans switched from more modest per capita soda consumption to the amount they drink today, or has it been a gradual change over time?

MP: Amazingly, Coca-Cola was served in 6.5 ounce bottles for a nickel until 1955, when King-Size Coke was finally introduced. (“King-Size” drinks were 10 and 12 ounces, smaller than a McDonald’s small today.) Since then, the sizes grew steadily larger, and PET bottles meant they wouldn't break and weren't too heavy. Super-size me, indeed. But over the last decade, concern over the obesity epidemic has made Coca-Cola back off a bit, and now the company has introduced smaller mini-cans, along with the huge containers.

JR: Over the years, Coca-Cola has dealt with Nazis, dictators, South Africa's apartheid government, and even allegedly Guatemalan death squads. Should consumers hold Coke accountable for this dark part of its history, or is it all water under the bridge? Do you agree with Coke's position that it doesn't play politics, it just sells soda?

MP: Of course, the company, like any other business, should be held accountable for its actions, although as you suggest, many of these episodes are safely in the past. The Guatemalan death squads were in the late 1970s. Paramilitaries in Colombia killed union employees in similar fashion in Coke bottling plants in the 1990s.

Quite recently, human rights violations have once again occurred against Guatemalan bottling employees. The Coca-Cola Company has usually attempted to distance itself from such violence, saying that it doesn't control its bottlers, but that seems disingenuous, since the bottlers rely on Coca-Cola syrup from Big Coke.

On the other hand, let me point out that while Coke did business inside South Africa during the apartheid regime, it left the country for a while and then was very instrumental in helping to ease a peaceful transition to black rule under Nelson Mandela.

JR: The past decade has ushered in an enormous change in Coca-Cola's product portfolio. How has it changed and why? Do you think the day will come when Coca-Cola's flagship product is no longer its top seller?

MP: Coca-Cola has diversified in the face of increased competition from other types of beverages and in response to concern over the obesity epidemic. It purchased Glaceau, maker of Vitaminwater, for $4.1 billion, for instance, in 2007. Today the Coca-Cola Company sells 3,500 beverages worldwide, and about a quarter of them are low- or no-calorie.

The future is hard to predict, but I don't think that Coca-Cola will lose its place as the flagship product in the foreseeable future -- but I do predict that the combined sales of Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero will eventually surpass sales of regular sugary Coca-Cola.

9 Things You Should Know About the New Farm Bill

Patty Lovera, Food and Water Watch — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:56:00 -0700

The House and Senate will vote soon on the new bills -- but there are important differences.

This week, both the House and Senate Agriculture committees adopted their versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. This is the latest move in the long-running attempt to pass a “normal” 5-year farm bill to replace one that was last passed in 2008. Several attempts to pass a farm bill in 2012 were unsuccessful and the farm bill that is currently in effect is a short-term extension that expires in September 2013.

There are some significant differences between the House and the Senate, in both what their bills actually contain and in the process used to get them through the committee. Both sides had an abbreviated process, skipping the normal step of conducting a series of hearings to explore various issues before writing the bill. But the Senate Agriculture Committee took the streamlining even further, managing to discuss, amend and pass its version of the bill in a little under three hours on Tuesday. The House Agriculture Committee finished theirs in a marathon session that took most of the day, wrapping up just before midnight Wednesday night.

Now each bill (HR 1947 and S 954) has to go to the floor for the whole body to vote on. The Senate is going first, with leadership claiming they will do the Farm Bill as early as next week. The full House may see their bill in June.

Here are some key differences between the two versions and things to look out for when the bills are on the floor:

1. Fair Markets for Farmers: It’s been a long battle to get the USDA to stop the abusive practices used by meatpackers and chicken processors to cheat ranchers and livestock producers raged on in this round. The 2008 farm bill directed the USDA to write rules to address commonplace abuses in the meatpacking and poultry sector, and the meat industry has been on the attack ever since. After years of fighting to get those rules in effect, the House Ag committee’s version of the Farm Bill repealed the few provisions of the “GIPSA Rule” that remained, which prohibited some of the most abusive things chicken companies do to contract poultry growers. The amendment also prohibits USDA from taking any action to curb emerging abuses in the meatpacking and poultry sector. The Senate bill does not contain this provision to repeal the rules.

2. Country of Origin Labeling: Just like livestock fairness rules, the meat industry has been out to kill country of origin labeling ever since it was included in the 2002 Farm Bill. Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) and Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) each introduced amendments to repeal mandatory country of origin labeling, using the flimsy excuse that the World Trade Organization decision last year meant the program must end. The USDA is poised to release a technical change to COOL requirements that address the WTO decision, and there is no need for Congress to get involved in COOL at this point. The amendments were withdrawn in committee (probably because the enemies of COOL did not have the votes to win), but this issue will very likely come up again when the bills goes to the floor.

3. Food Safety: The 2008 Farm Bill shifted catfish inspection from the Food and Drug Administration to the USDA. U.S. consumers and catfish farmers wanted to replace the FDA’s lackluster inspection regime that allowed too many dangerous imports, hurting catfish’s reputation in the marketplace. Ever since, seafood importers have been trying to stop this from happening because they don’t want imported catfish to have to undergo the more rigorous inspection that would come with a USDA program. The House version of the bill repeals the catfish inspection program at the USDA and would move it back to FDA.

4. Organic: Organic agriculture fared much better in the Senate version of the bill, which restores funding for several “stranded” organic programs that expired last year, including data collection about organic agriculture, organic research funding and a cost-share program for newly certified organic farms and processors. Only the research program is funded in the House bill.

The biggest news on the organic front is that while critical organic programs have struggled to survive the last year’s craziness in the farm bill, both the House and Senate bills include language that would allow the creation of an organic “checkoff” program. The USDA-created checkoff programs fund research and promotion efforts for specific commodities (like cattle, hogs, eggs, etc.) by collecting a mandatory fee from farmers when they sell their products. Checkoff programs have paid for some famous advertising efforts like “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Got Milk?”

Problem is, many farmers hate the checkoffs because they think the funds (which come from their sales) are not spent on things that actually help them but instead fund trade associations that are often dominated by meatpackers and processors. The USDA has a long history of poor oversight of the funds, which allows a lot of industry mischief that doesn’t benefit farmers. Creating a checkoff program for all organic products is controversial and we and many farmers oppose it.

5. Nutrition Safety Net: Not surprisingly, both committees took big swipes at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) that provides a nutrition safety net for lower-income people. More than half of the overall savings found in the House bill were created by cutting SNAP by $20 billion. These cuts were five times bigger than the still-too-large $4 billion cut by the Senate committee. The cuts would squeeze people off SNAP largely by making it harder for people to qualify for the program. This was a topic of fierce debate in the House committee and will be a major issue on the House floor. Last year, the full House never voted on the Farm Bill, in large part because of controversy over food stamps.

6. Commodity Programs: Both the House and Senate bills end direct payments to farmers raising commodity crops and shift them towards crop insurance instead of government commodity programs. There was a big fight in the House committee over the dairy program, one that is sure to continue when the bill goes to the House floor. The House committee’s bill includes a program designed by Ag Committee Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN) that creates a program to pay dairy farmers when the margin between the price of their milk and the cost of the feed they buy drops below a set level. It also has mechanisms to discourage overproduction of milk when prices are low. Dairy processing companies that love buying cheap milk from farmers hate this program and fought hard to get it out of the bill but were unsuccessful. The Peterson program is more popular with dairy farmers, but doesn’t actually do enough to ensure that the price farmers receive for their milk reflects their total production costs, according to family dairy farmers.

7. Conservation: Conservation programs to protect fragile land, like the Conservation Security Program, have taken a beating in the last several rounds of budget cutting and Farm Bill extensions. This hasn’t really improved in either the House or Senate bills; both sides reduced funding for conservation by combining or eliminating existing programs. The Senate bill includes a requirement that farmers receiving government support to pay crop insurance premiums must be in compliance with conservation standards (conservation compliance was already required for the commodity programs). The Senate bill also added a focus on protecting bees and other pollinators and includes veterans to the list of types of farmers with designated conservation programs.

8. Beginning Farmers and Local Food: There were some improvements in programs for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, including a measure in the House bill to create a Socially Disadvantaged Farmer and Rancher Policy Center and support in both the House and Senate bills for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which provides funding to help site retailers selling fresh food in underserved communities.

9. House Amendment Attack’s States Ability to Regulate Food and Agriculture: An amendment by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) would effectively overturn state laws that set food and agriculture standards that are higher than federal rules. The broad measure is an attack on laws passed by states to establish more humane livestock rules (the purported aim of the amendment) but would also prevent states from setting stronger food safety rules, agriculture product standards, protections against invasive pests or livestock diseases or conceivably even efforts to label GE foods. Federal law should set a floor not a ceiling on what local citizens want in the food and farming systems; this language must be removed as the Farm Bill moves forwards.

We’ll have more news next week about when the full Senate will vote on the Farm Bill and what you can do to make the bill better.

How Monsanto Is Using Cronies in Congress to Take Away States' Rights to Label Genetically Modified Foods

Ronnie Cummins, AlterNet — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:20:00 -0700

Sources report that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach amendments to the Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on GE foods.

Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on genetically engineered (GE) foods.

In response to this blatant violation of states’ rights to legislate, and consumers’ right to know, the OCA and a nationwide alliance have launched a petition to put every member of Congress on notice: If you support any Farm Bill amendment that would nullify states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we’ll vote – or throw – you out of office.

On Wednesday, May 15, an amendment (the King Amendment) to the House version of the Farm Bill, inserted under the guise of protecting interstate commerce, passed out of the House Agricultural Committee. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. The amendment was proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), largely in response to a California law stating that by 2015, California will allow only eggs to be sold from hens housed in cages specified by California. But policy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law.

Will the King Amendment survive the Senate? No one can be sure, say analysts. However few doubt that Monsanto will give up. We can expect that more amendments and riders will be introduced into the Farm Bill--even if the King Amendment fails—over the next month in an attempt to stop the wave of state GMO labeling laws and initiatives moving forward in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and others.

Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have admitted privately that they’ve “lost the battle” to stop GE food labeling at the state level, now that states are aggressively moving forward on labeling laws. On May 14, Maine’s House Ag Committee passed a GMO labeling law. On May 10, the Vermont House passed a labeling bill, 99-42, despite massive lobbying by Monsanto and threats to sue the state. And though Monsanto won a razor-thin victory (51 percent to 49 percent) in a costly, hard fought California GMO labeling ballot initiative last November, biotech and Big Food now realize that Washington State voters will likely pass I-522, an upcoming ballot initiative to label GE foods, on November 5.

If Monsanto can’t stop states from passing laws, then the next step is a national preemptive measure. And all signs point to just such a power grab. Earlier this year, Monsanto slipped its extremely unpopular “Monsanto Protection Act,” an act that gives biotech immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill. During the June 2012 Farm Bill debate, 73 U.S. Senators voted against the right of states to pass mandatory GE food labeling laws. Emboldened by these votes, and now the House Ag Committee’s vote on the King Amendment, Monsanto has every reason to believe Congress would support a potential nullification of states’ rights to label.

The million-strong OCA and its allies in the organic and natural health movement are warning incumbent Senators and House members, Democrats and Republicans alike, that thousands of health and environmental-minded constituents in their Congressional districts or states will work to recall them or drive them out of office if they fail to heed the will of the people and to respect the time-honored traditions of shared state sovereignty over food labels, food safety laws, and consumers’ right to know.

Trouble in Monsanto Nation

Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.

In the U.S., despite mounting evidence of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.

Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Entropy reports that Monstanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly.

Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds. The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange” (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.

As a recent widely-circulated article points out:

The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto's failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).

In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu? GE apples, trees, and salmon.

State Labeling Laws: The ‘skull and crossbones’ that terrify Monsanto

Monsanto’s greatest fear isn’t a federal government charged with protecting the health and safety of its citizens. Congress and the White House seem only too happy to oblige the biotech industry’s unquenchable thirst for growth, power and dominance. No, it’s the massive, unstoppable (so far) grassroots movement of Millions Against Monsanto that strikes fear in the heart of the Biotech Bully. U.S. citizens are waking up. They’re demanding labels on genetically engineered foods, similar to those already required in the European Union. They’re calling for serious independent safety-testing of GE crops and animals, both those already approved (especially Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant crops) and those awaiting approval.

The anti-GMO movement has finally figured out, after 20 years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress, the FDA and the White House, that the federal government is not going to require labels on GE foods. Instead the movement has shifted the battleground on GMO labeling from Monsanto and Big Food’s turf in Washington D.C. to the more favorable terrain of state ballot initiatives and state legislative action—publicizing the fact that a state GMO labeling law will have the same marketplace impact as a national labeling law.

State laws spell doom for Monsanto. Companies like Kellogg’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, Dean Foods, Unilever, Con-Agra, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Smuckers are not going to label in just one or two states. Monsanto knows that U.S. food companies will go GMO-free in the entire U.S., rather than admit to consumers that their products contain GMOs.

As Monsanto itself has pointed out, labels on genetically engineered foods are like putting a “skull and crossbones” on food packages. This is why Monsanto and their allies poured $46 million into defeating a California ballot initiative last year that would have required labels on GMO foods. This is why Monsanto has lobbied strenuously in 30 states this year to prevent, or at least delay, state mandatory labeling laws from being passed. This is why Monsanto has threatened to file federal lawsuits against Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Washington if they dare grant citizens the right to know whether or not their food has been genetically engineered or not.

And this is why Monsanto’s minions are trying to insert amendments or riders into the Farm Bill that will make it nearly impossible, even illegal, for states to pass GMO labeling laws. And there’s nothing to stop them when Congress is filled with pro-biotech cheerleaders who could care less that 90 percent of U.S. consumers want mandatory labels and proper safety testing of genetically engineered crops and foods.

Countering Monsanto’s Final Offensive: Throw the Bums Out!

Only a massive grassroots resistance will deter the U.S. Senate and House from stomping on our rights. Only an unprecedented campaign of public education, petition-gathering and grassroots pressure will be able to convince the ever-more corrupt and indentured politicians in Washington D.C. to back off.

Eighteen state constitutions have century-old provisions for state registered voters to collect petitions and recall state and local officials, forcing them to either resign or stand for reelection. But what very few Americans, and even members of Congress, realize is that 11 states have constitutional provisions to recall U.S. Senators and House of Representative members, as well as state elected officials.

It’s time we exercise the full power of direct democracy, not just state and municipal ballot initiatives. We must continue to support efforts like the current state ballot initiative to label GMOs in Washington state, and county ballot initiatives to ban GMOs, factory farms and other corporate crimes, in the 24 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities where these are allowed. But we also need to use the power we have to recall and throw out of office our out-of-control Congressional Senators and Representatives as well.

If our elected officials in Congress continue to represent Monsanto and big corporations, rather than their constituents, then let’s throw the bums out! If the Washington political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, continue to trample on our inalienable constitutional rights and contemptuously disregard the 225-year principle of a shared balance of power between the federal government, the states and local government, then we have no choice but to recall them or throw them out of office.

Please join the nation’s organic consumers and natural health advocates in this strategic battle, the Food Fight of Our Lives. Please join this campaign to save, not only our right to choose what’s in our food, but our basic right to democratic representation and self-determination as well. Sign the petition. Tell your Congressmen and women, especially the 73 incumbents who voted last year to eliminate states rights’ to legislate on GMO labels, and those in the House this week who voted to support the King Amendment that “enough is enough,” “basta ya.” Power to the People!

Milwaukee Makes Five (Cities So Far): Fast Food Workers Strike for Higher Pay and Union Rights

Laura Clawson, Daily Kos — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:52:00 -0700

This wave of strikes hitting multiple fast food restaurants (and, in some cases, retail stores) in a single city for a day, then showing up in another city, is truly unprecedented.

Fast food workers in yet another city have walked out for a one-day strike, seeking better wages and the right to form unions. Milwaukee is the fifth city hit by such a strike in the past six weeks; there as in Chicago, retail workers are also joining the strike. The strategy is the same as in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit: A one-day strike by as many workers in any given store are ready to walk out, with community support not just at the time of the strike but the next day as workers return to their jobs. The complaints are the same, too:

Milwaukee Burger King employee Tessie Harrell says she earned the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour from 2008 through 2012, even after she was promoted to shift supervisor in 2011. Last year, she got a raise to $8.25 an hour. But she says that's not enough to pay the $650 monthly rent on her two-bedroom apartment and support her six children.
"I can't afford to buy my kids shoes," says Harrell, 34, who gets food stamps and $150 a month from her mother. "There's no way I should be struggling to make ends meet."

When a worker is on food stamps, that's an employer that is relying on taxpayers to augment wages, to bring workers up to the bare minimum they need to survive. Full-time work at $8.25 an hour—a full dollar above the federal minimum wage—still leaves a family of three below the poverty level.

This wave of strikes hitting multiple fast food restaurants (and, in some cases, retail stores) in a single city for a day, then showing up in another city, is truly unprecedented. Shoot, the first New York City strike back in November was unprecedented. While it remains to be seen whether these actions, or the organizing and actions up and down the Walmart supply chain, will have an effect, the simple fact that low-wage workers are fighting back against the poverty and routine intimidation they face is deeply inspiring. What other workers should be thinking about following their lead?

PERMALINK

Big Ag Wins This Round: Supreme Court Backs Monsanto in Ruling

April M. Short, AlterNet — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:32:00 -0700

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Indiana soy farmer's argument against the agricultural giant.

On Monday the Supreme Court sided with Monsanto in a legal dispute against an Indiana soybean farmer.

Seventy-five-year-old Vernon Hugh Bowman, who inherited his farm from his father, argued that his use of second-generation seeds did not violate Monsanto’s patent. Bowman’s supporters had hoped the Supreme Court would use the case as an opportunity to mitigate corporate control of agribusiness.

Instead, the court sided with Monsanto on Monday, stating that the planting of Monsanto’s pesticide-resistant “Roundup Ready,” genetically modified soybeans violated the company's patent.

Bowman’s defense had been that he did not violate the patent because Monsanto’s pesticide-resistant soybeans replicate themselves, and that he had used a second-generation variety of the soybeans. In an unusual planting tactic, he purchased the grain from the local grain elevator, which is usually used for feed, and planted it.

As a Washington Post article pointed out prior to the ruling, the big question was: “When a farmer grows Monsanto’s genetically modified soybean seeds, has he simply ‘used’ the seed to create a crop to sell, or has he ‘made’ untold replicas of Monsanto’s invention that remain subject to the company’s restrictions?”

Monsanto warned the court in its brief that an adverse ruling, “would devastate innovation in biotechnology,” which involves “notoriously high research and development costs.”

The court unanimously rejected Bowman’s argument, and Justice Elena Kagan said there is no such thing as a “seeds-are-special” exception to the law. She added that Bowman was not just a passive observer of his soybean crop.

“Bowman devised and executed a novel way to harvest crops from Roundup Ready seeds without paying the usual premium,” she told the court.

The justices also said they thought Bowman’s practices posed a threat to the incentive for invention, around which patent law revolves. The court ordered Bowman to pay nearly $85,000 in damages to Monsanto.

The Supreme Court's decision implies that Monsanto has the legal right to stop farmers from saving seeds from patented genetically modified crops one season, and plant them the next season.

Justice Kagan insisted that the unanimous ruling only concerned the case at hand, “rather than every one involving a self-replicating product."

As AlterNet’s Jill Richardson explained in February, however, Bowman vs. Monsanto could be considered a major win for corporate food producers in the long run.

Look Out: Corporations Promote ‘Right to Farm’

Margot Ford McMillen, Progressive Populist — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:22:00 -0700

If these resolutions passed, citizens would be asked to vote this dangerous language into our state constitution.

Every year for the last six or eight, family farmers and small-town residents in Missouri have had to fight off legislations designed to take away our local control and put all the lawmaking privileges in the hands of state lawmakers. Taken to the extreme, this would mean that county, city and township ordinances and laws would be void. No more city zoning, no health ordinances guaranteeing special treatment such as special regulations against noise, air pollution, water pollution and so forth, for county residents that demanded it.

The beneficiaries of these laws would be corporate do-badders who want to export costs like cleanups or health care for employees. Without regulations, they could get taxpayers to pay for pollution and social justice atrocities. It would be business as usual for them, only better!

This year, we have been dealing with bills introduced simultaneously in the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate to ensure “modern farming practices” forever. The resolutions on the House side said, “No state law shall be enacted which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology and modern livestock production and ranching practices, unless enacted by the General Assembly.”

Never mind that “agricultural technology,” “modern livestock production,” “ranching practices” are not defined. And never mind that they would seem to suggest methods of production like Confined Animal Feeding Operations and genetically altered crops. If these resolutions passed, citizens would be asked to vote this dangerous language into our state constitution. Where it would reside forever.

As I write this, just a few days after tax day, it looks like we’ve beaten back this particular monster. It is possible, of course, that all we’ve done is cut off one head to reveal two or three more, but the citizens have been calling lawmakers, pointing out the errors of the bills, and gaining support as the session moves forward.

But here’s the larger question: Where the heck did this idea of changing the constitution come from? We know who it benefits — the industrial agriculture system — and we know who it hurts — ordinary citizens. But who wrote this bill, now called “right to farm,” and who financed the possibility that it would get traction?

Thanks to the magic of Google, I quickly found three states with efforts for constitutional amendments similar to Missouri’s proposals. Another few keystrokes and I found the source of the language. It came from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. And on the ALEC website, a few more clicks took me to the list of legislative members from Missouri.

In November 2012, North Dakota, a state besieged with fracking (and, yes, ALEC has policies and sample legislation favoring that subject also) passed a “right to farm” amendment into the constitution. Its language is eerily like the proposal in Missouri: The right of farmers and ranchers to engage in modern farming and ranching practices shall be forever guaranteed in this state. No law shall be enacted which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology, modern livestock production and ranching practices.

While you might think this guarantees farmers against the frackers, please note the seriously vague and troubling words “modern,” “technology,” and the confusing phrase “no law shall be enacted …” So, in North Dakota, no county, township, parish, city or any governmental body will be able to pass a law or ordinance to protect themselves from chemicals, GMOs, CAFOs or any other kind of industrial farming scheme.

Not only will farmers be affected. This amendment can have serious repercussions for consumers: North Dakota, one of our chief wheat-raising states, will not be able to refuse to plant untested (and untrusted) GMO wheat under this Constitutional clause.

The same sort of language is being considered in Montana, another primary wheat-raising state, and in Indiana, one of the buckles on the corn belt. The Hoosier experience, summed up by Indiana’s TribStar.com, sounds just like Missouri. They say:

“House Joint Resolution 5 and Senate Joint Resolution 27, identical pieces of legislation making their way through the two chambers, seek to amend the Indiana Constitution to prevent any legislative body from adopting any rules regulating farming ...

“The amendment, apparently, would prevent any rules regulating large industrial agricultural businesses such as confined animal feeding operations. It would also prevent any laws that protect public health and private property rights for Hoosiers who are not farmers. Even zoning laws could be challenged.”

These dangerous laws could spell the end of rural life and the endorsement of fields farmed with robot tractors, sprayed by drones carrying Agent Orange and growing untested GMO crops with serious health consequences.

State by state, beginning in Indiana this fall, voters will confront this amendment and industry will spend the big bucks to get it passed. Find out if it’s active in your state, and who supports it.

Then call your friends and neighbors and work to defeat it.

6 Ways Scientific Studies Can Trick You

Jill Richardson, AlterNet — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:59:00 -0700

Scientific studies with phony findings are not as uncommon as they should be.

Ever see a headline boasting of an outrageous conclusion that some new scientific study found? These headlines pop up regularly, and they are a boon for publications that get lots of eyeballs reading their articles about the shocking new findings. Factory farming is actually good for the environment! Labeling genetically engineered foods will raise your grocery bills! Wow, really? No way!

These too-good-to-be-true – or too-bad-to-be-true – headlines are accurate, in that there was a study and it did come to those conclusions. But how accurate was the study? As it turns out, scientific studies with phony findings are not as uncommon as they should be. And far too often, bad journalism results in the uncritical reporting of these phony findings.

If you ever read about a study finding that all-cupcake diets are the key to longevity and good health, read the study to see whether the cupcakes tested were made from spinach and wheat germ. Here are some favorite tactics used to design a study to get the findings you’re looking for.

1. Start With a Wrong Assumption

If you live in California, you may recall hearing how labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods would increase your grocery bill. When a ballot initiative to label GE foods was first announced, voters overwhelmingly approved it. But by the 2012 election, it narrowly lost. A study “proving” that GE food labeling would make food costs in California skyrocket may be why voters had such a sudden change of heart.

How was that conclusion reached? The study authors – partially funded by the “No on 37” campaign – began with a wrong assumption. American consumers are just like European consumers, they figured. And, just like in Europe, when GE foods must be labeled, most food manufacturers will instantly remove all GE ingredients from their products. Because GE ingredients like corn and soybeans are present in almost all processed foods, reformulating every food sold in California to remove them would be massively disruptive to the food industry. In fact, it would raise food prices!

But their assumption is wrong. Europeans are willing to pay more for non-GE food, but most Americans aren't. So why would food manufacturers reformulate their products, resulting in higher prices, if they know most Americans wouldn't pay for it? They wouldn’t.

The average voter in California never heard these details. They just heard that their food prices were going up unless they voted no on Prop 37. So they did.

2. Throw Out the Data You Don’t Like

In 2012, researchers in the Netherlands published a study finding that organic agriculture yielded only 80 percent as much as conventional agriculture. Wow, is that true? Well, if it is, this study certainly doesn’t prove it. The study doesn’t actually prove much of anything…because the researchers disregarded any data they did not like.

Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union and a formidable agriculture expert, read the study and reflected that, “When you actually look at the paper, you'll see it's incredibly biased in favor of conventional ag, but in a very technical way.”

The study authors essentially picked and chose which data to include, excluding any “organic” method that did not meet the very strictest definition of the term organic, and throwing out any data from conventional systems that included “unrepresentative yield levels.” Details provided on that say: “Yield data for industrialized countries were considered unrepresentative if conventional yields appeared to be far below the regional average, unless this was caused by factors that can also occur in real farming situations, such as pests, diseases or droughts. For developing countries ‘unrepresentative’ implied conventional yield levels that seemed to be far below yields achieved under best farmers’ management.”

“In other words,” wrote Hansen, who is well-traveled and very familiar with agriculture in the Global South, “for developing countries, rather than compare organic to what local farmers that use some chemicals find, they dismiss all but the yields achieved using lots of chemicals under the best conditions – which is not what farmers actually face in developing countries.”

“Finally,” Hansen concluded, “look at their main hypothesis: 'Our hypothesis was that the closer conventional agriculture gets to the potential or water-limited yield, the larger the yield gap between organic and conventional systems will be.' In other words, they're not interested in the conditions that farmers face in the real world in developing countries.”

3. Oops, We Can’t Detect the Chemical in Question

Whenever you hear that there is none of a chemical in something, it’s time to ask: What’s the detection limit? What’s the smallest amount of the chemical they were looking for?

Take, for example, early studies of the pesticide Imidacloprid by its manufacturer, Bayer. A recent European report tells what happened when beekeepers began alleging that the pesticide was the cause of mass bee die-offs. Bees consume nectar and pollen, so Bayer’s first step was checking to see whether any of its pesticide was present in nectar or pollen.

In 1993, Bayer set the detection limit at 10 parts per billion (ppb). When it tested for its pesticide in nectar or pollen of treated crops, it couldn’t find any or it couldn’t quantify the amount detected. Clearly, this pesticide wasn’t harming any bees, because the bees weren’t exposed to it in nectar or pollen!

Six years later, in 1999, a study of sunflowers found 3.3 ppb of the pesticide in pollen and 1.9 ppb in nectar – amounts far below the previous 10 ppb detection limit! And, in 2001, scientists found that chronic exposure to 0.1 ppb of the pesticide kills a bee in 10 days. How much money did Bayer earn from pesticide sales while it stalled the science for six years with its high detection limit?

4. Findings That Aren’t Statistically Significant

“GMOs Cause Tumors in Rats” screamed the headlines after a French scientist named Seralini published findings based on a two-year feeding study using Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn and its pesticide Roundup. Oh my god, this is terrible! Americans have been eating the variety of Roundup Ready corn in question since 2001! We’ll all get cancer!

Okay, take a step back. Were the findings statistically significant? No, they weren’t. Consumers Union scientist Michael Hansen points out that the study only used 10 rats of each sex for each group tested. After publication, the study’s author also noted, “the sample size of their treatment groups was too small to allow them to draw conclusions with regard to long-term carcinogenicity and mortality.” Oops.

That said, in this case, Hansen points out that the data “suggests that there might be something there.” For the most part, the control rats were healthier than the rats that were fed Roundup or Roundup Ready corn. According to Hansen, if the findings were entirely random, one would expect that the number of control group rats afflicted with each morbidity would sometimes be more and sometimes be less than the number of sick rats in the treatment groups. He’d like to see further study using a statistically significant sample size.

5. Design the Study to Get the Results You Want

When the EPA allowed the commercialization of Bayer’s pesticide Clothianidin, they required the company to conduct a study proving that the pesticide would not harm bees. So Bayer performed a study.

It placed four beehives in the middle of 2.5 acres of treated canola. Bees, of course, go as far as several miles from their hive to forage so no doubt the bees feasted on plenty of pesticide-free nectar and pollen during the study. So…the scientists found that their pesticide caused no harm to the bees.

Beekeepers were outraged enough when they discovered the inadequacy of the study, but a revelation that came out two years later made matters even worse. In the U.S., clothianidin is used on corn and canola. Canola is a minor crop in the U.S., whereas corn is the most commonly grown crop we’ve got. Clothianidin-treated corn has about 10 times the levels of pesticide in its pollen as treated canola. Perhaps that’s why Bayer chose to perform its study on canola.

6. All of the Above

For a “Bad Science Sampler,” check out the studies used to justify the safety of the genetically engineered AquaAdvantage salmon. You name it, they did it. Again, Michael Hansen easily poked holes in their work until the study resembled Swiss cheese. They culled young fish with the worst deformities, thus excluding them from the data. They used sample sizes as low as six fish. And they used a detection limit too high to detect any growth hormone in the muscle and skin of any fish. (The GE salmon are engineered to produce extra growth hormone, so they might have looked a little harder to find it if they wanted to show there was no difference between GE salmon and non-GE salmon.)

As you can see, just because a study finds a conclusion, that doesn’t mean it’s correct. Poorly designed studies and statistically insignificant results happen all the time. Now, if only journalists did a little bit more digging about the validity of outrageous studies findings before they report on them.

7 Dangerous Food Practices Banned in Europe But Just Fine in America

Tom Philpott, Mother Jones — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:37:00 -0700

Want some arsenic with your sandwich?

The following article first appeared on Mother Jones. For more great content, click here to subscribe to Mother Jones magazine.

Last week, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, on the suspicion that they're contributing to the global crisis in honeybee health (a topic I've touched on here, here, here, and here). Since then, several people have asked me whether Europe's move might inspire the US Environmental Protection Agency to make a similar move—currently, neonics are widely used in several of our most prevalent crops, including corn, soy, cotton, and wheat.

The answer is no. As I reported recently, an agency press officer told me the EU move will have no bearing on the EPA's own reviews of the pesticides, which aren't scheduled for release until 2016 at the earliest.

All of which got me thinking about other food-related substances and practices that are banned in Europe but green-lighted here. Turns out there are lots. Aren't you glad you don't live under the Old World regulatory jackboot, where the authorities deny people's freedom to quaff atrazine-laced drinking water, etc., etc.? Let me know in comments if I'm missing any.

1. Atrazine
Why it's a problem: A "potent endocrine disruptor," Syngenta's popular corn herbicide has been linked to a range of reproductive problems at extremely low doses in both amphibiansand humans, and it commonly leaches out of farm fields and into people's drinking water.
What Europe did: Banned it in 2003.
US status: EPA: "Atrazine will begin registration review, EPA's periodic reevaluation program for existing pesticides, in mid-2013."

2. Arsenic in chicken, turkey, and pig feed
Why it's a problem: Arsenic is beloved of industrial-scale livestock producers because it makes animals grow faster and turns their meat a rosy pink. It enters feed in organic form, which isn't harmful to humans. Trouble is, in animals guts, it quickly goes inorganic, and thus becomes poisonous. Several studies, including one by the FDA, have found heightened levels of inorganic arsenic in supermarket chicken, and it also ends up in manure, where it can move into tap water. Fertilizing rice fields with arsenic-laced manure may be partially responsible for heightened arsenic levels in US rice.
What Europe did: According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, arsenic-based compounds "were never approved as safe for animal feed in the European Union, Japan, and many other countries."
US status: The drug giant Pfizer "voluntarily" stopped marketing the arsenical feed additive Roxarsone back in 2011. But there are still several arsenicals on the market. On May 1, a coalition of enviro groups including the Center for Food Safety, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit demanding that the FDA ban them from feed.

3. "Poultry litter" in cow feed
Why it's a problem: You know how arsenic goes inorganic—and thus poisonous—in chickens' guts? Consider that their arsenic-laced manure is then commonly used as a feed for cows. According to Consumers Union, the stuff "consists primarily of manure, feathers, spilled feed, and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys." The "spilled feed" part is of special concern, because chickens are often fed "meat and bone meal from dead cattle," CU reported, and that stuff can spill into the litter and be fed back to cows, raising mad cow disease concerns.
What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001.
US status: The practice remains unrestricted. US cattle consume about 2 billion pounds of it annually, Consumers Union's Michael Hansen told me last year.

4. Chlorine washes for poultry carcasses
Why it's a problem: As the US chicken industry has sped up kill lines in recent years, it has resorted to heavier use of chlorine-based washes to "decrease microbial loads on carcasses," the Washington Post recently reported, quoting a previously unreleased USDA document. As I've noted, the USDA is preparing to release new rules that would speed up kill lines still more as well as allow companies to douse every carcass that comes down the line with antimicrobial sprays, "whether they are contaminated or not." According to the Post, poultry workers face a "range of ailments" to the practice, including "asthma and other severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes, and sinus ulcers and other sinus problems."
What Europe did: The EU not only bans the practice, but refuses to accept US poultry that has been treated with antimicrobial sprays.
US status: As stated above, the USDA is preparing to roll out new rules that will increase the practice.

5. Antibiotics as growth promoters on livestock farms
Why they're a problem: Antibiotic use has surged on US animal farms in recent years—and now accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use. Meanwhile, meat sold in US supermarkets is rife with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for "nonmedical purposes," i.e., growth promotion.
US status: The FDA is floating new rules that would ban antibiotics as growth promoters—but the regulation would be voluntary.

6. Ractopomine and other pharmaceutical growth enhancers in animal feed
Why it's a problem: Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of US hogs, ractopomine makes animals grow fast while also staying lean. Unfortunately, it does so by mimicking stress hormones, making animals miserable. The excellent food safety reporter Helena Bottemiller looked at FDA documents and found that between its introduction in 1999 and 2011, the drug had killed 210,000 pigs—"more than any other animal drug on the market." Pigs treated with it, she found, suffer from ailments ranging from hyperactivity and trembling to broken limbs and the inability to walk. (Beef cows are fed similar drugs, as are turkeys.) Traces of these pharmaceuticals routinely end up in our meat—and according to Bottemiller, their effects on humans are little-studied.
What Europe did: Europe not only bars its own producers from using ractopamine, it alsorefuses to allow imports of meat from animals treated with it—as do China and Russia.
US status: Rather than trying to rein in ractopamine use, the Obama administration isactively seeking to force Europe and other nations to accept our ractopamine-treated pork.

7. Gestation crates
Why it's a problem: The sows that breed the hogs confined in US factory farms spend nearly their entire lives stuffed into crates "so small the animals can't even turn around or take more than a step forward or backward," the Humane Society of the United States reported. An undercover HSUS investigation of a sow facility run by pork giant Smithfield in 2010 found, among other horrors, this:

The animals engaged in stereotypic behaviors such as biting the bars of crates, indicating poor well-being in the extreme confinement conditions. Some had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates. The breeding pigs also suffered injuries from sharp crate protrusions and open pressure sores that developed from their unyielding confinement.

What Europe did: Banned them, effective this year.
US status: Pork giants Smithfield, Cargill, and Hormel have pledged to phase them out; several fast-food chains including McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Subway havepromised to stop buying from suppliers who use the crates; and nine states have banned the practice, HSUS reported. But the practice remains widespread, and as industry flack Rick Berman recently put it, a large swath of the pork industry "has no plans to stop using standard sow housing."

A Handful of Giant Food Companies Are Winning the Fight to Control Your Dinner Plate

Wenonah Hauter, Other Words — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:58:00 -0700

Corporate consolidation has enabled Monsanto, Nestle, Kraft, McDonalds and other giant companies to determine what we eat.

My new book is called Foodopoly. It’s about the corporate control of every aspect of our food system, from how what we eat is labeled to the pesticides we’re exposed to.

We, the people, must reclaim our democracy. We must reestablish strong antitrust laws to begin the work of fixing our broken, corporate-controlled food system. Our food system should work for consumers and farmers, not big agricultural, processing, retail, and chemical conglomerates.

How has consolidation enabled Monsanto, Tyson, Nestle, Kraft, Cargill, McDonalds and other giant companies to write our food policy, and why is it about to get worse? For starters, consider the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in the landmark Citizens United case. It allows corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to buy the political system. This practice comes at the expense of citizens and democracy itself.

The top 10 fast-food companies control 47 percent of all fast food sales. Together, these industries have commandeered local economies, and now it is clear that the era of family farmers and mom and pop stores has ended. What’s not as clear is the effect this has on our political system.

Foodopoly delves into the history of food and farm policy to explain how the food supply became so consolidated. For example, only four gigantic companies process 80 percent of the beef we eat, and only four retailers sell 50 percent of the groceries. Today, one out of every three dollars spent on groceries in the United States goes to Walmart.

Make no mistake: When those companies enjoy near monopolies and vast market power — both domestically and globally thanks to crooked free trade agreements — their profits enable them to contribute large sums of money to groups that lobby Washington very effectively.

The food industry spent $40 million lobbying the federal government in 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And the biotech industry has spent over half a billion dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures since 1999. Additionally, special interests spent $173.5 million lobbying on the 2008 Farm Bill.

Food & Water Watch, the non-profit organization I run, tries to fight back against the corporate control of our food system. Our organizational budget is about $12 million a year.

This summer, President Barack Obama will attempt to fast-track two trade deals — the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Both favor the interests of corporations and their financers over consumers.

These trade deals would increase export-oriented natural gas fracking, boost our food imports, undermine yet more domestic laws, and increase the corporate control of our natural resources. They will forever enshrine the very economic system that has led to an ever greater imbalance in income and wealth and increasingly frequent economic crises.

The changes needed to reform our food system and strengthen our democracy can only happen when the people demand better leadership. We need to address the political reasons our food system is so broken.

And we can’t just shop our way out of this problem.

Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of Foodopoly: The Future of Food and Farming in America. Foodopoly.org An earlier version of this article originally appeared at TripleCrisis.com.

Soda Industry Cashes In on Govt. Food Assistance Programs to Tune of $4 Bilion a Year

Stan Cox, AlterNet — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:03:00 -0700

The debate over dropping junk food from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in unpredictable ways.

As Congress resumes its wrangling over a long-overdue Farm Bill, conservatives are once again attacking their long-time bête noire, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They’re threatening SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program and by far the biggest item in the Farm Bill) with everything from mandatory work requirements for participants to deep program-wide budget cuts.

Once the Farm Bill has passed and all the political flatulence has cleared, though, budget hawks and Tea Partiers are unlikely to have succeeded in undermining SNAP. With the economy stagnating, unemployment and inequality festering, employers refusing to pay living wages, and one American in six now facing food insecurity, the bulk of public opinion is behind beefing up food assistance rather than gutting it.

But even among its fans and beneficiaries, there is recognition that SNAP could use some updating, especially with regard to its nutritional impact. So state governments from South Carolina to Maine to Wisconsin are considering legislation that would prohibit the purchase of soft drinks or other junk foods with SNAP credits.

Proposals for deploying food assistance as a tool to influence consumers’ buying decisions are deeply controversial. And the debate over whether or not to drop nutrition-free items from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in often unpredictable ways.

A sweet deal for Big Soda

Calls for an end to the soft-drink subsidy are coming from academia as well as from statehouses. A 2011 commentary last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued,

The government purchases millions of servings of sugar-sweetened beverages for SNAP participants each day. This practice arguably erodes diet quality and promotes chronic illness among individuals who are at increased risk of obesity-related disease because of limited financial resources.

Around the same time, a white paper from the Arizona State School of Nutrition and Health Promotion included this statement:

Restricting options for purchase of unhealthy foods can be a powerful strategy for improving diets of SNAP recipients. There is strong scientific evidence for a restrictive strategy, and there is precedence from other federal programs such as WIC [the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and NSLP [the National School Lunch Program], which limit benefits to the purchase of foods that are considered healthy.

Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has long advocated tight controls on the soft-drink industry, wrote last year, “To do nothing—while sugary drinks fuel an epidemic of obesity and other expensive diseases—would be reckless from a public health and fiscal standpoint.” Meanwhile, Daphne Hernandez, an assistant professor in the Human Development Department at Penn State, stated the case even more bluntly: “Continuing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund the purchase of soda through SNAP undermines the goal of SNAP.”

Advocates for limiting the range of products that benefits can buy have generally focused their efforts on carbonated drinks. For one thing, the sweet sodas make a nice fat target; the manufacturers rake in an estimated $4 billion per year from SNAP sales alone. Their products have a hefty impact, both nutritional and economic, and they could be easily identified and segregated automatically at checkout through SNAP’s electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card.

Joining the chorus of demands for restrictions are some right-wing activists and legislators—people who would not seem to have the nutritional status of SNAP participants uppermost in their minds. Accusing soda manufacturers of “SNAPping up welfare dollars,” David Alamasi of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a scandal-ridden antigovernment group, asserted last month that although he’s “a vocal proponent of Coca-Cola's right to sell any and all of its products,” he doesn’t want them being purchased with what he regards as his money. “When it comes to public assistance,” he stated in a press release, “I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire."

Republican legislative proposals in Wisconsin, Florida, and some other states have taken aim at all processed foods that contain more negative than positive nutrition. State senator Ronda Storms introduced Florida’s bill last year. It would have barred consumers from using SNAP benefits to buy "nonstaple, unhealthy foods." Storms told the Los Angeles Times, "If we're going to be cutting services across the board, then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."

Despite support from the ideological Right, Storms’ bill failed thanks to fierce corporate lobbying. The big soft-drink manufacturers, of course, work hard against all such legislation, but so do other corporate interests that rake in SNAP profits. The bill was attacked by lobbyists for the Snack Food Association, Corn Refiners of America, Florida Petroleum Marketers, the Convenience Store Association, and the Frozen Potato Products Institute.

When it comes to nutritional criteria for SNAP-eligible products, both support and opposition can span the full range of political ideologies. Proposed restrictions have been condemned by many food banks and economic-justice organizations, who argue that it’s paternalistic and unfair for the government to try to dictate the food purchases of low-income families while everyone else is left to choose freely. They argue that such reforms would take us back to the bad old days before the EBT card, when people using federal food coupons faced a potentially humiliating ordeal with every trip through the checkout line. Regarding proposed restrictions on Wisconsin’s SNAP-funded program, a food-bank executive argued, "Rather than creating hurdles, the state should make healthy food more affordable."

Most of the opposition to a soda ban among food-rights groups is indeed aimed at protecting the interests of SNAP participants. But in some cases, motives appear to be more problematic. In a 2011 report, the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research and Action Council maintained that purchasing restrictions would have many harmful impacts, among them an increase in “confusion and stigma at grocery check-out, potentially causing a decline in SNAP participation that could worsen food insecurity.” But FRAC, a consistently strong defender of food assistance, itself receives funding from a who’s-who of SNAP’s agribusiness and corporate food beneficiaries, among them the Coca-Cola Company, Pepsico, Inc., Mars Incorporated, the Sara Lee Foundation, and Walmart.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture, which administers federal food programs, has resisted any further tightening of food eligibility, on the grounds that classifying tens of thousands of types of food and keeping up with a constant deluge of new products would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Department researchers claim that “there are no widely accepted standards to judge the ‘healthfulness’ of individual foods”; that the “ingenuity of the food industry to develop new ones (for example, a prohibited candy bar adapted into a chocolate ‘granola bar’)” would always keep junk food a step ahead of any attempted regulation; and that “responsibility for enforcing compliance would rest in the hands of employees at check-out counters in 160,000 stores across the nation,” something considered unworkable.

USDA cites its own studies showing that dropping soda from SNAP would not significantly reduce consumption by low-income families. Most SNAP recipients use cash to buy a portion of their monthly food supply, and if restrictions were imposed, argues USDA, people would simply shift junk food over into their cash budget.

Who’s buying all that junk anyway?

It’s important to note that brisk sales of soda and other junk foods are not linked exclusively or even primarily to poverty. Households with incomes above $70,000 spend about 35 percent more each month on fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, and dairy products than do the lowest-income households; however, they also spend almost 80 percent more on what USDA calls “other foods” – a category that includes mostly less nutritious foods: “frozen prepared meals, ... packaged prepared foods, snack foods, ... , sugar and other sweets, fats and oils,” and, of course, soft drinks.

USDA’s figures show that middle- and upper-income Americans are 14 percent more likely to consume sweets daily and 23 percent more likely to consume salty snacks every day than are food-stamp recipients. Thus, says USDA, “the basis for singling out low-income food stamp recipients and restricting their food choices is not clear.”

But in other contexts, USDA apparently does believe in singling out low-income people. The second and third largest food assistance programs after SNAP—NSLP and WIC—both are designed to steer their recipients toward more nutritious diets. Smaller programs include the SNAP Nutrition Education program; a Community Food Projects Grant Program for low-income areas; the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center, aimed at extending access to nutritious food into urban “food deserts”; and expansion of electronic SNAP benefits in the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program.

Finally, under USDA’s Healthy Initiatives Pilot project, SNAP participants in Hampden County, Massachusetts are having 30 cents added to their monthly benefit for every dollar they spend on fruits and vegetables. There is talk, broadly supported, of extending this incentive to all SNAP participants.

Yet none of these federal nutrition programs is popular with hardline conservatives, because they all would expand food assistance rather than shrinking or eliminating it, and they encourage consumption of healthful foods without explicitly discouraging consumption of unhealthful ones.

“Informal rationing”

People living in poverty today are having to spend a punishing 37 percent of their income just to feed their families. That compares with 9 percent spent by households earning $70,000 or more. For millions of families, losing SNAP would mean coming up short in their struggle to cover rent or house payments, utility bills, transportation costs, and other necessary expenses.

But the fact that more than 15 percent of Americans now depend on SNAP has raised the blood pressure of right-wing lawmakers who resent having to spend tax dollars to help keep Americans fed and housed. The 2013 budget proposed by House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) would strip $135 billion from the program over the next ten years. But such crippling cuts are unlikely. Farm-state members of Congress and their friends in agribusiness, who have been crucial to keeping the program alive for almost fifty years, will continue to protect USDA’s two dozen food assistance programs, among which SNAP is the biggest. SNAP also receives unconditional political support from the big banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, whom the states grant contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to administer the EBT system.

Blocked from completely gutting SNAP, conservatives are resorting to harassment of those who participate in the program. Congressional Republicans are pressing for mandatory enforcement of a work requirement that would apply to all SNAP recipients--this in an economy that is already incapable of providing enough jobs. The Pennsylvania legislature reinstated an "asset test" that would drop from the SNAP rolls low-income recipients who have modest savings. A bill was introduced recently in the North Carolina statehouse that would require criminal background checks on applicants. And the right-wing media are trying to undermine SNAP by falsely claiming that the Obama administration "is promoting food stamps in Mexico."

All of this is part of campaign by Republican lawmakers to hamstring federal assistance programs—an attempted repeat of what they accomplished in the two decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash, when the government erected a series of increasingly stringent bureaucratic hurdles the purpose of which, according to legal scholar David Super, was to achieve “informal rationing” of benefits through the “personal choice model.” In other words, the government makes it such a hassle to obtain assistance that eligible applicants will just decide it's not worth it.

But the deepening of poverty and food insecurity over the past five years prompted the federal government to start tearing down many of those obstacles. For example, most states relaxed SNAP’s eligibility rules, in order to catch families before they fall below the poverty line and exhaust all of their savings. States have developed “SNAP outreach plans” and hired recruiters to let poor and borderline poor families know they are eligible. And some states are allowing food-stamp purchases at farmers' markets.

Alternatives to the soda subsidy

It is those efforts to strengthen food security that are so upsetting to Republicans, and that position puts them badly at odds with public opinion. A study published in last December’s issue of the journal Public Health Nutrition estimates that 77 percent of Americans would like to see SNAP funding either increased or kept steady. When people were asked about a range of possible policy changes, the most popular, with the support of 82 percent of respondents (including 76 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of SNAP participants), was “a proposal to provide additional money to SNAP (Food Stamp) participants that can only be used on fruits, vegetables or other healthful foods.”

A proposal to make sugary drinks ineligible for SNAP purchase was supported by 69 percent of all respondents and by 54 percent of SNAP participants themselves. If the soda ban was linked to a financial incentive to buy more fruits and vegetables, a whopping three-quarters of SNAP participants were in favor of it.

While many economically stressed parents might be relieved to have a new way to deal with their sugar-happy kids—by telling them, “No, don’t put that Mountain Dew in the cart, because our card doesn’t cover it” —people will probably tolerate only so much government intrusion into shopping decisions. And some of the more drastic health-promotion initiatives now under discussion might cross that line.

For example, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends that SNAP benefits pay only for a prescribed list of 28 specific food items. According to PCRM, “SNAP beneficiaries who limit their food purchases to these Healthy Basics and eat no other foods at all can easily achieve nutrition that is complete and superior to that of average Americans.” They are probably right about their list’s healthfulness, but it appears to have been compiled solely on the basis of nutrient concentrations and is bizarrely idiosyncratic. PCRM’s plan would permit SNAP to cover only five grain products: high-fiber bread, brown rice, quinoa, rolled oats and whole-wheat pasta. The only allowable legumes would be black or garbanzo beans, dried red lentils, and (no joke) frozen edamame. But not to worry: balsamic vinegar and cinnamon would also be allowed.

Other groups, in particular the D.C.-based Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, have suggested some much more practical enhancements to SNAP that would amplify the benefits of a soda or junk-food ban.

Protect and, if necessary, augment the program’s current funding.

Make children’s health a stronger focus (an approach suggested by the fact that an astonishing one out of every two young Americans will receive SNAP benefits at some point before turning nineteen).

Expand SNAP access at farmers’ markets, and encourage it by providing free or subsidized wireless terminals to handle the transactions (preferably without a subsidy to JPMorgan).

Reduce the prices of nutrient-dense foods and provide incentives to buy them.

Require stores, if they want to be certified as SNAP retailers, to stock more healthful foods and to market them more effectively.

There is little reason to expect any of these reforms to be adopted in the upcoming Farm Bill; Congressional SNAP supporters will be wholly focused on defending current benefits against cuts. But if individual states continue to propose creative experiments in improved nutrition, expanded access to farmers’ markets, and cutting predatory corporations out of the food chain—and if the feds don’t block those initiatives—more Americans will have a chance to stay better fed until our food economy can be transformed in more fundamental ways.

Would You Give Up Eating Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change?

David Sirota, AlterNet — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:45:00 -0700

A new report suggests that adjusting our diet can slow global warming. Now let's see if our politics will let us

In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million, aka way above what our current ecosystem can handle.

Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn’t cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush’s library and President Obama’s jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions — electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc. — require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can’t even pass a budget.

Here’s the good news, though: The fastest way to reduce climate change shouldn’t seem impossible, because it requires no massive new investments, technological breakthroughs or long-term infrastructure projects. According to data compiled by former World Bank advisers Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, it just requires us all to eat fewer animal products.

In their report, Goodland and Anhang note that when you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what’s needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn’t intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences — more precisely, by American consumers’ unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year.

If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here’s that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved “by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products” — read: animal products — “with better alternatives.” That’s right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency.

The trouble, of course, is that environmentalism and conservation — like everything else — have been unduly politicized. Consequently, opposing those once-universal values now seems to be viewed by many on the right as a constructive expression of patriotic defiance. Indeed, according to one recent study, many self-described conservatives will refuse to buy a green product once they see it marketed as being environmentally responsible. Similarly, another study shows that conservatives are prone to consume more energy when warned that they are already using a lot.

In light of that, I’m sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom. What they will really be proving, though, is that no matter how straightforward a climate change solution may be, we will never be able to combat the crisis until everyone is willing to sacrifice just a little bit, and nobody pretends ecological survival is anything other than what is: an apolitical, transpartisan priority.

Milk Industry Desperation Setting in as America Decides It Doesn't Really Want to Drink It

Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:28:00 -0700

Despite 20 years of “Got Milk?” mustache ads, milk consumption in the US falls more every year.

Despite 20 years of “Got Milk?” mustache ads, milk consumption in the US falls more every year. The National Dairy Promotion and Research Program and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Program cite competition from calcium-fortiﬁed and vitamin-enhanced beverages, milk’s lack of availability “in many eating establishments” (You can’t find milk anywhere!) and a growing percentage of African Americans and Latinos in the US population who are not traditionally big milk consumers.

Many other groups also shun milk, from teenagers and young adults to dieters, athletes and health-food eaters who reject the cholesterol, fat, calories and allergens. Several Asian ethnic groups also avoid milk, as do the lactose intolerant, the allergic, people who drink or smoke (the tastes don’t mix) and animal and environmental activists. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose pediatric advice shaped the entire Baby Boom generation, recommended no milk for children after age two, in his later years, to reduce their risks of heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and diet-related cancers.

To sell milk, marketers try to push the button that sells almost everything–It Will Make You Thin. But soon after debuting milk as a diet food, a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition of 20,000 men who increased their intake of low-fat dairy foods found they did not lose weight. “The hypothesis that has been ﬂoating around is that increasing dairy can promote weight loss, and in this study, I did not ﬁnd that,” said Swapnil Rajpathak, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The research behind the weight-loss claims was largely conducted by Michael Zemel, PhD, director of the Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee, who had “patented” the claim that calcium or dairy products could help against obesity. The patent was owned by the university and licensed to Dairy Management Inc., reported USA Today. Zemel’s coauthor, Sharon Miller, PhD, was later ensnared in a conﬂict of interest mishap with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

After investigating, the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection directed milk marketers to stop the weight-loss claims “until further research provides stronger, more conclusive evidence of an association between dairy consumption and weight loss.” Milk marketers then claimed that low-fat dairy products do not necessarily add weight and may have “certain nutrients that can help consumers meet dietary requirements”–pretty much the deﬁnition of “food,” when you think about it. Soon the marketing had been diluted to, “Soft drinks and othersweetened beverages are now the leading source of calories in a teen’s diet and these nutrient-void beverages are increasingly taking the place of milk.”

Like Big Pharma, Big Food is not above creating false medical benefits to move product. Milk marketers admit that they cite “research” to the medical and scientiﬁc press about milk’s value in breast cancer, hypertension, rickets and osteoporosis, according to their yearly report to Congress. They also admit to wooing African Americans by continuing “to spotlight the high incidence of high blood pressure among African Americans and to promote milk and milk products as a dietary solution as part of the DASH [Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension] diet.” Marketers also educate African Americans and other groups prone to milk allergies about “misconceptions” regarding lactose intolerance and show why “it should not be a barrier to including milk in the diet,” says the report.

Of course chocolate milk has been one of milk producers’ steadiest revenue streams because it tastes a lot better to kids than unflavored milk. But thanks to growing youth obesity, some school districts have banned the flavored milks because of their high sugar content. Milk producers have responded by adding controversial artificial sweeteners such as aspartame to the products, despite a different sets of risks they can present. Consumers and school districts have responded negatively and milk marketers and now petitioning the FDA to omit listing them on the label altogether. The government has a long history of not labeling ingredients people want to avoid from Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone in milk to GMO crops.

Why Is the FDA Still Allowing Arsenic in Chicken and Swine Feed?

Janet Allon, AlterNet — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:19:00 -0700

Food safety groups sue in federal court to get federal agency to do its job, and stop cancer-causing practice.

Eight food safety watchdog groups who are fed up with lax federal regulation of our food supply are suing Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg in San Francisco Federal Court.

At issue is the use of cancer-causing, arsenic-based products being used in both chicken and swine feed.

As reported in CourthouseNews.com, the complaint states: "Petitioners are requesting immediate action because the use of arsenic-based feed additives in food-producing animals poses a serious yet completely avoidable health risk to humans."

It all dates back to the 1940s when the FDA approved the use of arsenic-based food additives. And, for some reason, that approval still stands more than 70 years later, despite the fact that inorganic arsenic is a known human carcinogen. The arsenic additives being used now in the poulty and swine feed include Roxarsone, arsanilic acid, nitarsone, and carbarsone, and the residue of these have been found in most supermarket chicken, and all chicken sold in fast-food restaurants, according to a study conducted by one of the lawsuit's plaintiffs, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The plaintiffs say the FDA failed to respond to their request to revoke approval for New Animal Drug Applications that use "arsenic-containing compounds" in feed for chicken, turkeys and swine.

In February 2011, the FDA itself reported findings that chickens fed Roxarsone had higher levels of inorganic arsenic in their livers than chickens not treated with the additive, the complaint states. But the complacent agency has failed to take Roxarsone off the market, nor has it studied the effects of treating animals with other arsenic-based compounds.

The plaintiffs include: Center for Food Safety; Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; Center for Environmental Health; Center for Biological Diversity; Food Animal Concerns Trust; Food and Water Watch; Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility; Health Care Without Harm; and San Francisco Bay Area Physicians for Social Responsibility.

h/t: CourthouseNews.com

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