Major Food Manufacturers Push to Label Genetically Modified Products as “Natural”

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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Food manufacturers who use genetically modified (GMO) ingredients want permission from the federal government to stamp their products with the word “natural.”

The Grocery Manufacturers Association has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve their plan, which would mean any food containing GMO corn, sugar and other such ingredients could be sold as “natural.”

One advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), blasted the food companies’ proposal.

Scott Faber, vice president of the EWG, called the association’s request “audacious.”

“It’s like they’re trying to get the government to say night is day and black is white,” Faber told The New York Times.

The request comes as food manufacturers are increasingly under attack from opponents of GMO ingredients. At least 65 lawsuits are pending in various courts aimed at forcing companies to stop using the word “natural” to describe products with GMO elements.

PepsiCo settled one such lawsuit in August over its use of the phrases “All Natural,” “All Natural Fruit” and “Non-GMO” on bottles of Naked Juices. The company said it would remove “All Natural” from the drinks’ packaging and pay consumers $9 million.

However, PepsiCo will still use “non-GMO” on the juices, even though they are not certified as such.

Who's To Blame for Our Polluted Tap Water?

(Water and access to safe drinking water are to me the biggest issue under the radar. We all need it, and big corporations are doing everything they can to either obtain it and sell it at ridiculous mark ups, or pollute it so bad, it destroys whole regions of crops and people's lives. From Nestle and T. Boone Pickens buying up any aquifers and springs everywhere and selling it at prices most poor people can't afford, or the Natural Gas Industry destroying the water table in Pennsylvania with their fracking (so that folks can light their tap water on fire!), big corporations are out of control. Destroying access to water will be an extinction event if someone doesn't figure out how to stop these greedy shortsighted corporate dicks.--jef)

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The real culprits are the industries that dump pollutants into our water, and the elected officials who are failing to fund our drinking and waste water systems.
By Wenonah Hauter, AlterNet
Posted on January 8, 2011

Recent coverage of the revelations of increased levels of hexavalent chromium (also known as chromium 6) in some of our nation's water supplies vilified the wrong institutions: our municipal water utilities. The real culprits are the industries that dump this and other pollutants into our drinking water sources, and the elected officials who are short-sightedly failing to fund our drinking and wastewater systems.

I repeat: tap water and the public agencies that provide it are not the enemy.

A vital resource, tap water is sometimes taken for granted until something goes wrong. Unfortunately, this lax attention often starts at the federal level, where not enough money is allocated to modernizing and maintaining public drinking water systems, and a blind eye is often turned to the ways in which industries are allowed to exploit and pollute them.

While hexavalent chromium can end up in water naturally, industrial pollution can cause it to reach levels that threaten public health. The current problem with hexavalent chromium reflects decades of insufficient government regulation of the chemicals used by major industries in the U.S. Every year, more than 80,000 chemicals, many of them suspected carcinogens, are approved for use by industry, and discharged into waterways that also happen to serve as drinking water sources.

The presence of hexavalent chromium in some municipal water is yet another sign that it's time for the U.S. to renew its commitment to providing consumers with safe, affordable tap water. Unfortunately, this requires money, and water utilities across the country lack the funds to meet Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for drinking water quality, much less more protective ones to fix problems not addressed by the EPA. Inadequate federal funding for local public water systems only exacerbates these problems even more.

Rather than putting the onus on municipalities and taxpayers to clean up the mess left by major industries, the EPA needs to step up and do a better job of thoroughly testing the safety of chemicals before allowing them to be dumped into our water.

Consumers using this recent scare as an excuse to abandon tap water in favor of the bottled kind should think again -- almost half of all bottled water comes from tap water supplies. Moreover, independent testing by the Environmental Working Group found 38 contaminants present in 10 brands of bottled water.

Despite these recent developments that may suggest otherwise, U.S. tap water is among the safest in the world. And unlike bottled water, your local utility tests it hundreds of times a month for toxic chemicals. Tap water is also the most environmentally sustainable and socially equitable way to provide drinking water to the public. But in order to keep it that way, we must protect our source water by tightening regulation of the chemicals that threaten the integrity of this vital public resource.

Industry Front Group Gets Taxpayer Money to Convince You to Eat Pesticide-Laden Food

Thanks to the USDA, your hard-earned money has been given to a special interest group representing giant agribusiness and its pesticide company cohorts.
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2010

Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.

The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) is a front group representing California's large produce growers and marketers and suppliers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer. Some of the member organizations include the California Strawberry Commission, Western Growers, the California Table Grape Commission, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and the California Association of Pest Control Advisers. A look on the pesticides section of AFF's Web site shows headlines such as "US Farmers are Environmentalists Too" and "Everything Doesn't Cause Cancer," as well as produce industry documents refuting a recent study that linked pesticides to ADHD.

According to CDFA's press release, AFF will use its new taxpayer-funded grant, to "generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues," by "utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts." The press release also charges that "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years" and "continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health."

As a part of its campaign, AFF commissioned a report by four toxicologists and a nutritionist that critiques the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) "Dirty Dozen" list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Of the experts who wrote the report, two have links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a food industry lobby group, including one who served as the executive director of ILSI's Risk Science Institute, and two who serve in university positions endowed by major corporations (Mars, Inc. and Dow Chemical). The report nitpicks EWG's methodology because the dirty dozen list measures which fruits and vegetables typically contain the most pesticide residues but does not assess which pesticides, and thus, which foods, actually carry the most risk of harm to one's health.

The AFF report also takes issue with the assertion that dietary exposure to pesticides can harm one's health. It points out that environmental and occupational exposures to pesticides are often much higher than dietary exposures (i.e. a farmworker who works among fields where pesticides were sprayed is exposed to more pesticides than the average person who eats fruits and vegetables that were grown using pesticides) and that there are relatively few studies in existence that focus specifically on dietary exposure to pesticides.

The AFF report also defends the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of pesticides and the ability of those regulations to keep Americans safe, points out the importance of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet, and refutes the notion that organic produce is more nutritious than produce grown with pesticides.

Will Allen, author of The War on Bugs, refutes the idea that dietary exposure to pesticides is inconsequential, pointing to a study of school children ages three to 11 who ate diets of conventional food. Their urine and saliva were tested over the course of a year, including during two five-day periods when they switched to diets of organic food. The study found that the levels of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and malathion corresponded to changes in fresh produce consumption throughout the year. Furthermore, when the children switched to organic food, the levels of organophosphates in their urine and saliva quickly dropped to undetectable or nearly undetectable levels. The study concluded that "dietary intake of OP pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children."

A look at the CDC's 2009 Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals shows that Americans carry a "body burden" of a number of different pesticides. The study examined the blood and urine of Americans in three different periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004) and reported on the pesticide and pesticide metabolites found. Some of the pesticides found in our bodies were clearly due to past use of the chemicals. For example, DDT and its more persistent breakdown product DDE were still found as of 2003-2004 even though DDT was banned in 1972. However, many of the pesticides detected, such as organophosphates and carbamates, both nerve poisons, are still used today.

The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list, under attack by AFF, begins with peaches as the most contaminated fruit, followed by apples, nectarines and strawberries. In his book, Allen breaks down the pesticides used on two of these four fruits. In 2004, California peach growers used 124 separate pesticides on their orchards. Nearly three-quarters of the 468,804 pounds of pesticides used on California peaches that year were accounted for by 12 pesticides: organophosphates phosmet, diazinon, and chlorpyrifos; carbaryl (a carbamate insecticide); herbicides glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, oryzalin, simazine, and the highly toxic paraquat dichloride; fungicides copper oxide and iprodione, and the soil fumigant methyl bromide (a chemical being phased out worldwide).

For strawberries, Allen estimates that an average 335.4 pounds of pesticides were used per acre of strawberries grown in California in 2004. That year, California strawberry growers used 184 different pesticides, but only six accounted for over 80 percent of all pesticides use: soil fumigants chloropicrin, methyl bromide, 1,3-dichloropropene, and metam sodium, and fungicides sulfur and captan. Allen points out that all four fumigants (which he says are "among the most toxic chemicals on earth") are restricted-use pesticides, meaning that they may only be applied by trained and certified applicators due to their toxicity. All four chemicals cause acute toxicity and they are listed as Bad Actor Chemicals by Pesticide Action Network. 1,3-dichloropropene and metam sodium are carcinogens and both methyl bromide and metam sodium are developmental toxins.

Additionally, three of the four fumigants (all except 1,3-dichloropropene) are restricted in California, requiring farmers to obtain special permits from the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) in order to use them. Allen says farmers applied for these permits because of "farm practices of growing carrots and strawberries and potatoes in the same place year after year after year after year, never rotating their crops to break the pest cycle for that crop." He says farmers should listen to the wisdom of generations of farmers before them instead of taking advice from "chemical merchants" so they can retain "the art of rotation and soil nutrient balance, which enables farmers to naturally control pests and disease." Despite their toxicity and restricted status, methyl bromide, metam sodium and chloropicrin account for over 60 percent of all pesticides use on carrots.

But, even if many pesticides are used on fruits and vegetables and the main route of exposure to organophosphates (and perhaps other classes of pesticides) is dietary, do the residues of pesticides in fruits and vegetables actually harm our health? For one thing, there have been recent findings about the link between organophosphates and ADHD. One study published this past May found that each 10-fold increase in urinary concentration of organophosphates was associated with a 55 to 72 percent increase in likelihood that a child ages eight to 15 would have ADHD. Of the 1,139 children in the study, 93.8 percent tested positive for detectable levels of one or more metabolites of common organophosphates. A second study, published in August, linked prenatal exposure to organophosphates to increased levels of ADHD in children once they reached five years old. In this case, each 10-fold increase in a pregnant mother's urinary concentration of organophosphates led to a 500-percent increase that her child would be diagnosed with ADHD at age five.

Pesticide Action Network criticizes the EPA's regulation of pesticides, saying they do not account for additive and synergistic effects. "Since the Environmental Protection Agency regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address -- and so they usually don't," says a statement on its Web site. The organization cites human health impacts linked to pesticide exposure including birth defects, cancers, Parkinson's Disease, and a host of developmental and neurological disorders and reproductive and hormonal system disruptions. "Given the complexities of chemical causality and disease-formulation," they ask, why take the chance of consuming even residual levels of pesticides in our food at all?

The President's Cancer Panel report, released this past May, concurs, saying that "approximately 40 chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known, probable, or possible human carcinogens, are used in EPA-registered pesticides now on the market." Noting that the levels of pesticides allowed in food by the EPA have been criticized as inadequate and influenced by industry, the report unequivocally cautions Americans that "exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications."

Kari Hamerschlag, a senior food and agriculture analyst for Environmental Working Group, criticized AFF's notion that publicizing which fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides is dangerous because it decreases fruit and vegetable consumption, citing USDA data showing that consumption of many foods listed in the Dirty Dozen have actually increased in recent years. The Environmental Working Group has not advocated avoiding conventionally grown fruits and vegetables if one cannot find or afford organic. Furthermore, she says, "if AFF's goal is increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, why don't they address the root causes why people do not eat more produce?"

Environmental Working Group, Californians for Pesticide Reform, and 50 other organizations signed a letter calling out CDFA for its misuse in taxpayer dollars in awarding this grant to AFF. The letter reads, in part, "We object to the department's decision to fund an industry communications initiative against legitimate public interest concerns related to pesticide residues on food. The award of this grant strikes a blow to California's expanding organic produce industry and places the department in opposition to the public's interest in reducing pesticide exposure. This action also represents a fundamental failure to implement a fair and balanced grant selection process."

Meet the Food Industry Front Groups That Push for Carcinogens in Your Food

Pseudoscience, front groups and smear campaigns against scientists questioning industrial agriculture are used to convince the public that chemical-ridden food is safe.
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet, July 12, 2010

"You've probably heard of the 'Dirty Dozen' -- a list of produce items identified by the Environmental Working Group that reportedly contain too many pesticide residues. I thought you might like to know about this webinar that provides perspective on pesticide residues," said an email sent by Elizabeth Pivonka, a registered dietitian who serves as the president and CEO for the Produce for Better Health Foundation.

She sent the email to a few employees of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who then forwarded it on to employees of state health departments. The webinar, which claimed to expose the "real" danger of the "Dirty Dozen" ("scaring consumers away from eating fresh fruits and vegetables" and having a "negative impact on public health at a time when we are facing an obesity epidemic"), was put on by the Alliance for Food and Farming -- a self-described non-profit organization made up of agricultural groups seeking to "educate and inform consumers and the media on issues of food safety and farming."

Sounds benign, right? In fact, it sounds downright helpful. Fortunately, after the CDC employees failed to question the webinar, an employee of the New York State Department of Health shot the webinar invitation out to a listserv asking, "Is this an industry group promoting conventional farming?" One look at the Alliance's Web site is enough to answer that with a qualified yes! The front page of the site touts in large font that "U.S. farmers produce the safest, most abundant food supply in the world" -- that's industry codespeak for "please don't question us -- just buy and eat the food we give you no matter how we choose to produce it." But who does the alliance represent? The Web site does not say, and when asked, the organization refuses to divulge its members -- a common tactic of industry front groups.

In fact, the Alliance for Food and Farming represents a number of mostly California-based farm and pesticide groups including the California Strawberry Commission, the California Farm Bureau Federation, the California Association of Pest Control Advisers, Western Growers, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Tomato Farmers, and the California Table Grape Commission.

You might remember the California Farm Bureau from the movie Food, Inc., in which they were caught on film arguing that foods containing clones should not be labeled. Or perhaps you've heard of the California Strawberry Commission's pet cause du jour: legalizing the pesticide methyl iodide, a carcinogen so potent it is used to induce cancer in the lab. In other words, this is not the bunch that government regulators and health professionals should turn to for unbiased, factual information about the danger of pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables.

Front groups are a common vehicle industry uses to delude, confuse, and sometimes overtly defraud the public. In her book, Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé explains how the food industry learned its tactics from the tobacco industry, citing a 1969 tobacco industry internal memo: "Doubt is our product. It is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

Lappé says, "The food industry long ago saw the benefits in fomenting confusion; confusion defuses public outcry about our toxic food system. Long after the discovery of the neurotoxic, carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting effects of farm chemicals, we're still debating the merits of organic agriculture." In addition to front groups, she lists industry-funded pseudoscience and well-financed smear campaigns against scientists questioning industrial agriculture as other tactics often used to convince the public they are providing us with unbiased facts.

With its relatively meager budget and unfinished Web site, the Alliance for Food and Farming is just an amateur among a field of more established, well-funded front groups like the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) and the Center for Consumer Freedom (each with budgets in the millions). These groups are regularly quoted in the media as if they were legitimate sources of information and not astroturf organizations for the chemical and food industries. With its authoritative-sounding name, ACSH even managed to have itself listed as a "Resource" on the official Web site for a recent CNN special called "Toxic America," despite the fact that ACSH put out its own press release blasting the special as "bizarrely unscientific." As part of its strategy, the Center for Consumer Freedom maintains a number of issue-specific Web sites with names sure to guarantee search engines will find them like FishScam.com and MercuryFacts.org, both to counter the notion that some fish contain dangerous levels of mercury and humans should limit consumption of them.

The organizations named above are non-profits, which means a certain amount of information about them can be uncovered by looking at the financial disclosures they file with the IRS, but industry fronts can take other forms. For example, the Web site TruthInFood.com is maintained by Food-Chain Communications, a marketing firm that clearly specializes in promoting industrial agriculture and processed foods. While a list of its clients are not easily obtained, its founder, Kevin Murphy, has connections with many large beef and dairy industry organizations, including the National Grocer's Association and the National Council of Chain Restaurants.

Then there's the American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology (AFACT), a group founded solely to defend the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH). When AFACT was founded, Monsanto owned rbGH (it has since been sold to Elanco, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly). Conveniently, a consultant to Monsanto helped organize AFACT and the marketing firm Osborn & Barr (which includes a former Monsanto executive among its founders) gave the group money. AFACT calls itself "grassroots," but it is about as grassroots as a smokers' rights group organized by a tobacco company.

These front groups serve as one piece in a much larger puzzle intended to influence government, the media, health professionals and consumers. Members of Congress and their staff wake up to Capitol Hill metro stations plastered with advertisements from industries wishing to influence them, receive invitations to fancy events and educational briefings, and meet with lobbyists who provide them with industry-funded research and whitepapers. One industry group might lobby the government to allow the use of a pesticide, for example, and then turn around and claim (directly or through a front group) that the pesticide is safe because the government allows it.

Journalists, seeking to add "balance" or controversy to their stories, can always go to these organizations for quotes countering the statements of environmentalists, physicians and consumer advocates. And even when journalists -- or even universities -- are not seeking to feature the industry point of view, industry or its front groups are always there to insist they are given a chance to make their case. (In the case of universities, this often occurs when major donors threaten to withhold funding if certain speakers are invited to campus or professors teach courses on topics the donor finds inconvenient. And, unfortunately, the universities often side with the donors.)

With all of this misinformation, how can an average citizen discern between truth and propaganda? The most important thing to do is to consider the source of any message. One handy tool for this is Sourcewatch.org, a wiki maintained by the Center for Media and Democracy. Often, when a front group will not tell you which organizations or corporations are behind it, Sourcewatch* will. (Full disclosure: I am currently working with the Center for Media and Democracy, but I've used the site as my go-to on front groups for several years now.)

Another method is checking with organizations you know you can trust. In the case of the safety of pesticide residues on produce, the Produce for Better Health Foundation (whose donors include nearly every fruit and vegetable industry group and corporation imaginable) claims that pesticide residues on the Environmental Working Group's "Dirty Dozen" list fall within the amount EPA and FDA say is "generally regarded as safe." I attempted to register for the Alliance for Food and Farming's webinar (twice!) but was not permitted to participate, so I can only imagine its message is similar to this one.

So does that make pesticide residues safe? Consider a quote from the recently released President's Cancer Panel: "We have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons throughout our shared environment. They are now in amniotic fluid. They are in our blood. They are in our urine. They are in our exhaled breath. They are in our mother's milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to this use of poisons throughout our agricultural system? We won't really know that answer until we do another experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, a healthier agriculture, and see what happens."