The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear a first-time case about the risks of genetically engineered crops. Named Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, the case before the high court will be yet another step in an ongoing battle waged by the Center for Food Safety to protect consumers and the environment from potentially harmful effects of genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Howdy!
It’s been sometime since I wrote on JCarrot, but I have some big news and I’m asking for your help!

In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa. USDA failed to conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) before deregulating the crop. An EIS is a rigorous analysis of the potential significant impacts of a federal decision. The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the GE plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in an EIS.

Did you know that McDonald’s is “going green?” In Germany, the red background behind the iconic golden arches is being replaced by green backgrounds. This redesign is just one example of blatant “greenwashing,” explained Denise Garbinski this afternoon at the Hazon Food Conference.

Garbinski, a Registered Dietitian, natural foods industry veteran, and founder of Botanical Nutrition, led a session titled “The Greenwashing of Food: Be an Informed Consumer,” part of the conference’s Food Justice track. Greenwashing, she explained, is the set of efforts a company takes to appear environmentally friendly, when in reality, the majority of their work is not. As “going green” becomes increasingly popular, for companies it means increased cash. And so, more and more food companies claim they are environmentally responsible. It turns out, that’s often not true. They’re simply repainting the background green.

Recently, while sitting in a waiting room, I casually flipped through Audubon magazine.  Suddenly, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.  What?!  A Monsanto advertisement in an environmental magazine?

Audubon’s mission statement says: “Audubon magazine provides a place where nature enthusiasts, outdoor adventurers, and socially conscious consumers can discover, connect with, and be inspired by the natural world’s extraordinary beauty and diversity.”  Monsanto—of Agent Orange,  farmer-suing, seed-patenting , genome-tinkering , and crop-spraying fame—is hardly a logical bed fellow.

You can see the ad for yourself, here.  What’s truly infuriating about seeing the ad in Audubon magazine is that Monsanto is clearly targeting the environmental and food justice crowd.  Buzz words like “a changing climate,” “conserve more,” “use…fewer resources,” and “sustainable agriculture” give the illusion that Monsanto is on our side.  They are anything but.

Never one to bite my tongue, I sent Audubon an e-mail:

I was horrified to see a print ad for Monsanto in your magazine.  Monsanto is a foe of the environment, and their advertisement was nothing but propaganda.  Your magazine stands for environmental protection and advancement; Monsanto stands for big business at the expense of farmers, the environment, and health.  The vast majority of Monsanto’s attempts at genetic engineering ultimately increases pollution and endangers the public with unknown health risks.  I urge you to sever your business dealings with Monsanto.

The publisher of Audubon magazine promptly wrote me back:

The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby.  Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH.  “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.

So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes.  As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh.  I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda.  I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way.  The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes.  But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film.  If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.

In another important case against Monsanto and the USDA, the Center for Food Safety has again prevailed, demonstrating that GMOs pose serious risk of harm to organic farmers and consumers, and that the USDA is failing to sufficiently protect us from the contamination that can result from the planting of these crops – this time in Sugar beets! As lead counsel for CFS on this case, I’m excited to share the news with you!

A Federal Court ruled yesterday that the Bush USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) “RoundUp Ready” sugar beets was unlawful. The Court ordered the USDA to conduct a rigorous assessment of the environmental and economic impacts of the crop on farmers and the environment.

Cross-posted from the Green Prophet

Recent laboratory tests have discovered that consumers in Israel are eating Genetically Modified Organisms – whether they like it or not.

Tests by Milouda Quality Control Laboratories, which analyzes food destined for sale in the European Union, discovered GM soya in popular foods sold in stores across Israel, reports Haaretz. Food contaminated with GM included baked goods, packaged schnitzel and meat substitutes. Israeli favorites like falafel could also potentially contain GM if they are fried in soya oil.

Biotechnology research may be big business in Israel but, as far as I am aware, no GM crops are grown commercially in the country. However, it is clearly being imported and is entering the human food chain via processed foods or animal feed. In addition to denying consumer choice – and putting public health at risk – GM contamination could precipitate an economic disaster for the Israeli food industry.

Yeah, I know, as Jews we’re supposed to rest from our weekday labors on Shabbat. Jews who observe Shabbat more traditionally than I do tend to refrain from social action on Shabbat, including the practice of tikkun olam, repairing the world. However, there is a ruling in Talmudic law (isn’t there always?) that allows us to sidestep Shabbat prohibitions against typical activities, called pikuach nefesh, saving a life (soul). Here’s a more complete explanation of the concept.

So why am I violating Shabbat by posting on The Jew and the Carrot today?

Ever since the right to privacy went down on sheepskin, there’s been a cornucopia of confusion about whether or not American law should regulate personal choices, and what those “personal choices” are. As law makers get more and more worked up over “the epidemic of obesity”, and their constituents’ new interest in food, they look to legislate people’s eating habits from both the consumer (taxes on soft drinks, calorie counts in fast food) and the producer ends. As I listen to pizza makers bemoan the loss of transfats, community activists struggle to increase access to fruits and vegetables in poor neighborhoods, and local curb-sitters mark the price of a smoke in NYC, I get to wondering where all of this interest in our personal  habits comes from, and whether the government really has the right to legislate it in the first place.

I asked my brother, the recent law school grad (though not yet lawyer) to dispel some of the mists of obscurity surrounding civil rights in general. What follows is a highly simplified version of his explanation, as filtered through my not-too-legal mind.

For some reason, I get stopped all the time in the produce section at Whole Foods. I don’t know what it is about me that suggests why I would be able to explain the difference between lacinato and regular kale, or whether golden beets are as sweet as red ones (especially since neither of these vegetables were part of my diet as recently as a year ago), but there must be something.

However, I’ve had an encounter that I can’t shake. I was standing by the grape tomatoes, trying to decide between the organic ones from Florida (but were they the product of slave labor?) and the local greenhouse tomatoes from Connecticut (fewer food miles, but what about pesticides?), when a woman about my grandmother’s age began talking to me out of the blue. You could tell she was in a bit of sticker shock at the Whole Paycheck prices, and she said to me, “You know how much these are at Shoprite? 99 cents.”

In Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, one of her characters is sitting in a diner with visitors from another planet. One of the aliens picks up a container of non-dairy creamer and says “Trudy, this is what we’re made of.”

In homage, for years, in my family, whenever we ate something that was super-processed, we referred to it as “alien food.” As in, “What is this soup made of?” “Aliens.” There is even a cake that my mother makes from a mix that we just refer to as “aliens cake.” This Kahn-Troster-ism can be very confusing if you join our clan at a later date, as my husband discovered when he innocently asked what was for dessert, and got the answer “aliens.” Alien food was not something we were defensive about, but the fact that it had its own term signified how small a part of our diet highly-processed food was. And any time I indulge in something with a long list of unpronounceable, unrecognizable ingredients, or with no real nutritional value, I think “This is what we’re made of.”

The more I get involvement in the food movement, though, the more I realize that we’re made of aliens, too.

Good news folks! At least somebody is making money in this dismal bear-eat-bear economy, and guess what, it’s an agricultural company! Well…sort of.

I’m going to have to apologize for my inappropriate levity come Yom Kippur, but Monsanto “The Man” Company doubled their net income on seeds this last quarter. It hurts, I know, but it hurts us less than in hurts the soil in Argentina.

Analysts credit the rise in profits to an increase in corn production in South America. According to the article linked above, for every million new acres of corn (converted from soy production), Monsanto’s share goes up one dollar. According to some clever commentators on The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, we ought to build an equation that estimates how many farmers Monsanto needs to sue at 50K per patented grain of pollen for the same increase.

Wow,
The conference was something incredible. I feel so blessed to be a part of this growing community and movement, and I thank those of you who joined us at Asilomar and contributed in a myriad ways to the 3rd annual Food conference. I truly look forward to witness how we all take the next steps forward, through personal choices, communal activity, public policy outreach, the development of new educational opportunities, and ….

At the conference, I was given the honor of sharing my vision for the New Jewish Food Movement, and I thought I would also share it here. So, I have shared those words below. I hope you might get some inspiration from my vision, but more importantly, I hope you will be inspired to think of how your vision fits into Hazon’s work, and even share your vision here on JCarrot.

Happy New Year
zelig

——– (more below the jump) ——–

Today Obama announced Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, as his pick for secretary of agriculture (yep, that’s really him up there. Republican’s aren’t the only ones who know how to field dress large mammals).

Mr. Vilsack has been described as everything from middle-of-the road to evangelical biotechnology-lover. In November, he described himself as out of the running, saying that the Obama administration hadn’t contacted him about the job. Today at a press conference, President-Elect Obama said he didn’t know where Vilsack got the idea that he wasn’t being considered. Regardless of where he got it, the announcement took the spotlight off of Mr. Vilsack and quieted the then-clamorous opposition to his nomination.

Read below the jump for more on Vilsack’s positions.