Free The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray

since they understand that sales of GM foods would decrease if consumers knew what they were buying. By not requiring corporations to identify GM products, the FDA (more interested in the business of moneymaking than in the health of citizens) robs citizens of the right to know what’s in their food. “Labeling is a situation where the FDA is officially charged with promoting biotechnology,” said Jeffrey Smith, a visionary activist who has worked for years to bring attention to the menace of GM products and who is the author of the best-selling Seeds of Deception.
    There is one way an eater can avoid GM food and that is to eat organic products. The National Organics Program, which writes the guidelines for inputs and systems that organic farmers may employ, prohibits the use of GM seeds. As Dave Hensen, director of the Arts and Ecology Center in Occidental, California, said, “Organics is one of the last lines of defense for all time.” However, there is no way to avoid eating GM foods entirely because of contamination. Acres USA, a sustainable agriculture magazine, reports that genetic drift has resulted in the contamination of all US corn, for example.
5. OUR FOOD IS HAZARDOUS TO OUR HEALTH.
    Actually we don’t know this yet. The story of the perils of GM foods has not been told, in part because the mouths of the storytellers have been duct-taped shut and in part because the story is not yet known. The need for scientific studies has been ignored; those conducted have been suppressed.
    The evidence of hazards in GM foods, however, is mounting. As Dr. Michael Hansen, senior scientist for Consumers Union, said in his 2002 lecture in Mexico entitled “Bt Crops: Inadequate Testing,” “There is increasing evidence—from both epidemiological studies and lab studies—that the various Bt endotoxins (including those from maize, cotton, and potatoes) may have adverse effects on the immune system and/or may be human allergens.”
    Some of the adverse evidence comes from Australia, where a pea weevil threatens the field pea industry. Common beans, on the other hand, carry a gene capable of killing the pea weevil. When researchers in a ten-year project to develop a GM field pea tested this gene, it did not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people. However, when the gene was transferred to the pea, the new GM peas caused allergic lung damage in mice. What is significant about this study is that it indicates that a transformation happening during the transfer process may make GM food hazardous.
    A variety of experiments have suggested caution is warranted on multiple fronts. For example, in spite of biotech’s arguments that genetic transfer from crops to humans is unlikely, a study at Newcastle University in Britain found that DNA from GM crops could be transferred to bacteria in the human gut. Other experiments have intimated connections between GM foods and significant medical conditions. In rats fed GM corn and potatoes, scientists observed abnormal white and red blood cell counts, inflammation of the liver, and unexplained growths in stomachs and small intestines. In 1998, a scientist at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, found that GM potatoes caused tumors and inflammation in the stomach lining of laboratory animals. The real world has even provided evidence of possible problems with GM foods. After Great Britain introduced GM soy, soy allergies rose 50 percent. Some Iowa farmers reported infertility (as much as 80 percent) in hogs fed GM corn.
    In addition, the harmful effects of glyphosate (Roundup) are now rising in the American consciousness. Glyphosate kills weeds by shutting down their defense mechanisms, weakening them, and inviting infections by soil-borne pathogens; it is also linked to nutritional deficiencies in plants. It kills soil microbes, even the advantageous ones. Further, it does not break down quickly in the soil, taking anywhere from a few months to up to forty years. Clinical data