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

implicates that glyphosate is, at “quite low levels,” according to Don Huber, plant pathologist and professor emeritus at Purdue University, “very toxic to liver cells, kidney cells, testicular cells, and the endocrine hormone system.” Additionally, the herbicide has been linked to miscarriages and premature births; it is implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and even autism.
    Once a friend said to us, “If you analyze food too much, you kill it.” My outspoken husband had a quick reply: “Yes, if you analyze food too much, you kill it, but if you don’t analyze it enough, it kills you.”
6. OUR FOOD IS HARMING THE EARTH.
    Not only is GM food probably unsound for the body, it leaves in its wake a host of other problems. The first is that insects and weeds evolve quickly to become superpests resistant to chemical controls. By 2006, eighty million acres were being planted with Roundup-Ready crops and being sprayed with Roundup. Then farmers began to notice that certain weeds were not killed by Roundup. Mare’s tail—a tall weed with 200,000 seeds per plant—was the first I heard of. It became resistant to Roundup in only eight years.
    During the past few years I’ve watched pigweed become resistant. At first only a weed or two would be left standing after a spraying, then the entire field would be dotted with pigweed. The solution, of course, is to spray even-more-potent herbicides, rocketing the farmers as well as the eaters ever further along a destructive path.
    A 2009 study by The Organic Center concluded that “the most striking finding is that GE [genetically engineered] crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the US over the first 13 years of commercial use of GE crops.”
    Besides the increase of resistance to the herbicides, tolerance to herbicides may be transferred to weedy relatives of GM crops through cross-pollination. Canola is a brassica, a member of the mustard family. Many wild brassicas will cross with canola, even Roundup- Ready canola; when they do, the wild brassica, like the Roundup-Ready canola, will no longer be killed by Roundup. Again, more powerful herbicides will be used, turning most farms into greater and greater point-sources for pollution.
7. OUR FOOD ANNIHILATES POLLINATORS.
    “Where bees can live, so can man.”
    —Juliette de Biaracli Levy
    The plight of our pollinators was outlined ingeniously by Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan in The Forgotten Pollinators . Farmer Frank Morton of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm in Philomath, Oregon, talks about the degree to which one attracts pollinators by seed saving. Morton’s approach is to return as many processes as possible to the wild, looking to the garden as an ecosystem. Bolting and flowering plants, for instance, furnish continuous nectar, pollen, shelter, and prey for beneficial species.
8. OUR FOOD IS NUTRITIONALLY IMPOTENT.
    The USDA identifies certain nutrients as vital: protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, vitamins (A, B-6, B-12, C, D, and E), as well as amino acids and minerals (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper). If every citizen followed the USDA’s dietary guidelines, it promises, the United States would see a 20 percent decline in cancer, respiratory, and infectious diseases; 25 percent less heart and vascular diseases; and 50 percent less arthritis, infant death, and maternal death.
    Corporate lackies will proclaim that a broccoli grown chemically (lifeless soil, drenched with cancer agents and endocrine disruptors) is essentially no different than one grown using organic practices (crop rotation, manures, legumes, compost, mineralization, microbialization). The studies beg to differ. Not only is there a difference, there’s a big difference—up to a 100 percent difference.
    A 2004 study of forty-three garden crops conducted by Dr. Donald Davis of the University of Texas–Austin