As I heard more about GE (genetically engineered, or GMO, genetically modified organism) food, over the past 5 – 10 years and got more furious about it as well – (these people have some nerve feeding us and our children frankenfood that is not safe.  It’s not been tested here and in Europe where is has been tested it’s been shown to cause many health problems) – I have tried to figure out how our family can cut out all foods with GE ingredients.

We started by joining a CSA.  A CSA is a community supported agriculture program.  This mean that you are buying, in advance, a share of a local organic farms crops.  We love our CSA and get a wonderful box every week of local, organic and seasonal fruits and veggies.  It’s introduced us to many new vegetables, and to my surprise, even our teens are eating new vegetables like swiss chard and kale. If you’d like to find a CSA near you visit Local Harvest, http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Our next step was to look at the meat we were eating.  We try to have our meat, chicken & fish as a condiment to our meals, making sure we have lots of veggies and grains as the base.  As most all the factory-farmed meat is fed GE soy we needed to find an alternate source of meat.  We found a few.  The first was our local health food store.  They have organic grass fed beef, organic free-range chicken and fresh fish.  They are more expensive but as far as I’m concerned, my family is worth is and I’d rather have us eat smaller portions of safer meats.  We also found a wonderful source of bison and have added that to our diets also.  Bison is a free range and very low fat meat that’s high in omega 3’s.  The taste is very similar to beef and even our pickiest eater liked it.

Next up, was grains and beans; actual whole grains and beans were easy.  Many health food stores, have bins full of organic rice, millet, couscous, and more and a wide variety of beans and lentils.  It got trickier when we started looking at processed foods.  I try to cook as much as I can from scratch (which is not as hard as you might think, if you’ve never done it before ;), but there are times we like processed items.  Things like chips, cookies, or the occasional loaf of bread led me to really start reading labels.  The first thing you want to make sure is not in anything you’re buying is high fructose corn syrup, or non-organic soy, and lately even sugar is suspect as many companies are using GE sugar beets.  This is another reason is so important we all call and let them know we will not buy their products until they’re GE free (see What we can do, https://www.momsforsafefood.org/What_we_can_do!.html ).

After having done all this, I thought we were doing pretty well.  Until I looked at condiments!  Canola oil is GE unless it’s organic.  And as most mayonnaise is made with canola oil unless it’s organic, same problem.  Little by little, we’re making all the small changes too.  I’m using organic safflower, or sunflower oil instead of canola, and we switched to a safflower mayo made by Hain. We’re not 100% GE free yet but we’re getting there, item by item.  If the ‘Frankenfood Fifteen’ (https://www.momsforsafefood.org/What_we_can_do!.html) want our business, they’ll need to make sure their products are GE free.  That will be a day to celebrate, for our health, our farmers health and the environments too.

Here’s a link for a terrific, free Non-GMO shopping guide: http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/Home/index.cfm

By Laura Sayre

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Natural-Health/Meat-Poultry-Health-Risk.aspx

You may be familiar with many of the problems associated with concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. These “factory farm” operations are often criticized for the smell and water pollution caused by all that concentrated manure; the unnatural, grain-heavy diets the animals consume; and the stressful, unhealthy conditions in which the animals live. You may not be aware, however, of the threat such facilities hold for you and your family’s health — even if you never buy any of the meat produced in this manner.

Factory farms are breeding grounds for virulent disease, which can then spread to the wider community via many routes — not just in food, but also in water, the air, and the bodies of farmers, farm workers and their families. Once those microbes become widespread in the environment, it’s very difficult to get rid of them.

A 2008 report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, underscores those risks. The 111-page report, two years in the making, outlines the public health, environmental, animal welfare and rural livelihood consequences of what they call “industrial farm animal production.” Its conclusions couldn’t be clearer. Factory farm production is intensifying worldwide, and rates of new infectious diseases are rising. Of particular concern is the rapid rise of antibiotic-resistant microbes, an inevitable consequence of the widespread use of antibiotics as feed additives in industrial livestock operations.

Scientists, medical personnel and public health officials have been sounding the alarm on these issues for some time. The World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have recommended restrictions on agricultural uses of antibiotics; the American Public Health Association (APHA) proposed a moratorium on CAFOs back in 2003. All told, more than 350 professional organizations — including the APHA, American Medical Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Academy of Pediatrics — have called for greater regulation of antibiotic use in livestock. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic-resistant infections an epidemic in the United States. The FAO recently warned that global industrial meat production poses a serious threat to human health.

The situation is akin to that surrounding global climate change four or five years ago: near-universal scientific consensus matched by government inaction and media inattention. Although the specter of pandemic flu — in which a virulent strain of the influenza virus recombines with a highly contagious strain to create a bug rivaling that responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic, thought to have killed as many as 50 million people — is the most dire scenario, antibiotic resistance is a clear and present danger, already killing thousands of people in the United States each year.

People, Animals and Microbes

From one perspective, picking up bugs from our domesticated animals is nothing new. Approximately two-thirds of the 1,400 known human pathogens are thought to have originated in animals: Scientists think tuberculosis and the common cold probably came to us from cattle; pertussis from pigs or sheep; leprosy from water buffalo; influenza from ducks.

Most of these ailments probably appeared relatively early in the 10,000-year-old history of animal domestication. Over time, some human populations developed immunity to these diseases; others were eventually controlled with vaccines.

Some continued to kill humans until the mid-20th century discovery of penicillin, a miracle drug that rendered formerly life-threatening infections relatively harmless. Other antibiotics followed, until by the 1960s leading researchers and public health officials were declaring that the war on infectious diseases had been won.

Beginning in the mid 1970s, however, the numbers of deaths from infectious diseases in the United States started to go back up. Some were from old nemeses, such as tuberculosis, newly resistant to standard antibiotic treatments; others were wholly novel.

“In recent decades,” writes Dr. Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture for the Humane Society of the United States and author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, “previously unknown diseases have surfaced at a pace unheard of in the recorded annals of medicine: more than 30 newly identified human pathogens in 30 years, most of them newly discovered zoonotic viruses.” (Zoonotic viruses are those that can be passed from animals to humans.)

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, including the increased pace of international travel and human incursions into wild animals’ habitats. But one factor stands out: the rise of industrial farm animal production. “Factory farms represent the most significant change in the lives of animals in 10,000 years,” Greger writes. “This is not how animals were supposed to live.”

Chicken and pig production are particularly bad. In 1965, the total U.S. hog population numbered 53 million, spread over more than 1 million pig farms in the United States — most of them small family operations. Today, we have 65 million hogs on just 65,640 farms nationwide. Many of these “farms” — 2,538, to be exact — have upwards of 5,000 hogs on the premises at any given time. Broiler chicken production rose from 366 million in 1945 to 8,400 million in 2001, most of them in facilities housing tens of thousands of birds.

On a global scale, the situation is even worse. Fifty-five billion chickens are now reared each year worldwide. The global pig inventory is approaching 1 billion, an estimated half of which are raised in confinement. In China and Malaysia, it’s not unheard of for hog facilities to house 20,000 or even 50,000 animals.

The Mechanics of Resistance

“Concentrated animal feeding operations are comparable to poorly run hospitals, where everyone is given antibiotics, patients lie in unchanged beds, hygiene is nonexistent, infections and re-infections are rife, waste is thrown out the window, and visitors enter and leave at will,” write Johns Hopkins researchers Ellen Silbergeld, Jay Graham and Lance Price in the 2008 Annual Review of Public Health. By concentrating large numbers of animals together, factory farms are terrific incubators for disease. The stress of factory farm conditions weakens animals’ immune systems; ammonia from accumulated waste burns lungs and makes them more susceptible to infection; the lack of sunlight and fresh air — as well as the genetic uniformity of industrial farm animal populations — facilitates the spread of pathogens.

The addition of steady doses of antibiotics to this picture tips the balance from appalling to catastrophic. Poultry producers discovered by accident in the 1940s that feeding tetracycline fermentation byproducts accelerated chickens’ growth. Since then, the use of antibiotics as feed additives has become standard practice across much of the industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that non-therapeutic animal agriculture use (drugs given to animals even when they are not sick) accounts for 70 percent of total antibiotic consumption in the United States.

The medical community has been cautioning for years against irresponsible antibiotic use among people, but in terms of sheer numbers, livestock use is far more significant. It’s a simple scientific fact that the more antibiotics are used — especially prolonged use at low doses as in factory farms — the more antibiotic-resistant microbes will become. Bacteria and viruses are also notoriously promiscuous, swapping genes across species and even across genera, creating what the Johns Hopkins researchers call “reservoirs of resistance.” “In some pathogens, selection for resistance also results in increased virulence,” they note. In other cases, otherwise harmless microbes can transfer resistance genes to pathogenic species.

There also are indications that factory farm conditions make animals more likely to excrete pathogenic microbes — suggesting another mechanism by which conversion to more humane farming methods would offer greater protection for human health.

Routes of Transmission

Most so-called bio-containment procedures for confinement livestock operations are more concerned with protecting the crowded animals from disease outbreaks than from preventing human pathogens from escaping into the wider environment. As the report from the Pew Commission points out, every step in the industrial farm animal production system holds the potential for disease transmission, from transportation and manure handling, to meat processing and animal rendering.

The increasingly globalized nature of the farm animal production system means that live animals, as well as fresh and frozen meat, are constantly crossing international borders, ensuring that diseases present in one location will soon spread elsewhere. But the biggest transmission route is waste: Confined livestock operations in the United States produce three times as much waste each year as our country’s entire human population — and yet all that manure is much more loosely regulated and handled than human waste. Antibiotic-resistant microbes, as well as the antibiotics themselves, are now widely present as environmental contaminants, with unknown consequences for everything from soil microorganisms to people. Canada’s largest waterborne disease outbreak, which infected 1,346 people and killed six, was traced to runoff from livestock farms into a town’s water supply. The U.S. Geological Survey found antimicrobial residues in 48 percent of 139 streams tested nationwide from 1999 to 2000. Other studies have detected resistant bacteria in the air up to 30 meters upwind and 150 meters downwind of industrial hog facilities.

A wealth of evidence links industrial meat and poultry directly with foodborne illness. When dioxin-contaminated chicken feed led to the removal from the market of all chicken and eggs in Belgium for several weeks in June of 1999, doctors there noted a 40 percent decline in the number of human Campylobacter infections. Repeated studies have concluded that as much as 80 percent of retail supermarket chicken in the United States is contaminated with Campylobacter. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that Salmonella-contaminated eggs caused 180,000 cases of sickness in the United States in 2000. E. coli O157:H7 is blamed for 73,000 illnesses in this country each year, including about 2,000 hospitalizations and 60 deaths.

Although thorough cooking and careful handling can minimize your risks, antibiotic resistance raises the stakes when someone gets ill: “One in two human cases of Campylobacter, and one in five cases of Salmonella are now antibiotic-resistant,” says Steve Roach, public health program director for the Food Animal Concerns Trust and a member of the executive committee for the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition. “And when you have antibiotic resistance, you have more complications, more blood infections, more mortality.”

In fact, public health experts are beginning to suspect that a whole host of infections not previously thought of as food-related may ultimately be linked to the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture. Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, for example, traced a multi-state outbreak of urinary tract infections among women in 1999 and 2000 to contamination with a single strain of drug-resistant E. coli found in cows. Dr. Lee Riley, lead author of a paper on the findings published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, cautioned that the findings indicated that “the problem of foodborne disease is much greater in scope than we had ever previously thought.”

And then there’s methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Previously confined largely to hospitals, MRSA is now killing more people in the United States each year than HIV/AIDS. A series of recent studies in Europe have demonstrated a strong causal link between MRSA and intensive pig farming in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Little or no data are available on MRSA in animals in the United States, but the bacterium is widely present on pig farms in Canada, which sells millions of live pigs to the United States annually, so it seems pretty likely it’s in U.S. pig factories, too.

All in all, the CDC reports that 2 million people in the United States now contract an infection each year while in the hospital. Of those, a staggering 90,000 die — a toll higher than that from diabetes. Numbers such as that are prompting some medical investigators to suggest that we may be entering a “post-antibiotic era,” one in which (as a paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2007 put it) “there would be no effective antibiotics available for treating many life-threatening infections in humans.”

Connections such as these aren’t always easy to prove, however, especially for drugs that have already been in widespread use for decades, which is one reason why regulations to reign in the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials have so far been largely lacking in the United States. The pending approval of an antibiotic called cefquinome to treat respiratory diseases in cattle offered a recent test case. Cefquinome is similar to cefepime, a last-resort antibiotic used to treat serious infections in people. (Both are fourth-generation cephalosporins, one of the small number of new antibiotics developed in recent years.) The FDA’s Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association, recommended against approval, warning that using cefquinome for animals would almost certainly render cefepime less effective for humans. But the FDA has apparently caved to industry pressure, claiming it lacks the authority to deny the drug companies’ request.

The Way Forward

Fortunately, there is a better way. No one wants high-quality food to be unaffordable, but increasingly it appears that as a human species we need to strike a better balance between cheap food and safe food. Sweden and Denmark have led the way over the past two decades in the development of commercial farming methods that minimize antibiotic use. Alternative management strategies include improving animals’ diets, changing weaning practices for pigs, cleaning facilities thoroughly in between groups and being more careful about mixing animals coming from different locations.

Scandinavian producers weren’t necessarily happy when their countries’ ban on non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics was put in place, but they’ve come to realize that they can still run profitable operations without them. Researchers in this country have shown that the same is true here: In 2006, a team at Johns Hopkins used data from poultry giant Perdue to show that the small advantage in weight gain associated with non-therapeutic antibiotic use was canceled out by the cost of the drugs. Organic farmers in many parts of the world have also shown that livestock can be raised profitably and humanely without the use of antibiotics.

“This is not a necessary problem,” says Lance Price, scientific advisor for Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future. “If you look at all the stakeholders in this equation — you and me, the doctors and hospitals, the producers — everyone but the drug companies can entertain alternatives. The only group that stands to lose from a more responsible use of antibiotics is the drug companies.”

A bill introduced in Congress in 2007, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, was one attempt to address these issues. Sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., the only microbiologist in Congress, and Senate Health Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the bill would have withdrawn approvals for feed-additive use of seven classes of antibiotics of value to human medicine and required producers of agricultural antibiotics to provide data to public health officials on the usage of the drugs they sell.

The costs associated with continuing industrial farm animal production are enormous. If it’s allowed to continue, industrial production as currently practiced could eventually eliminate a lot of other farming options (in addition to making a lot of us sick). As one Midwestern organic farmer explained to me, it’s simply not possible to raise pigs organically if you live too close to a confinement facility: The pathogen pressure is too intense. “Iowa has become a sink for pig diseases,” he said. They’re just in the air, and you can’t avoid them.

5 Nasty Microbes Linked to Factory Farming

Campylobacter: This is the most common cause of foodborne diarrheal illness in the United States, causing an estimated 2 million cases each year. Most don’t require medical treatment, but a small number (approximately 50 per year) end in death. Chicken and turkey are the usual sources: Studies have shown that most conventional chicken is contaminated when it leaves the processing plant. Rising numbers of Campylobacter infections resistant to a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones led the FDA, in 2000, to seek to ban fluoroquinolone use in U.S. poultry production. The ban was held up in court by drug maker Bayer, but was finally put in place in 2005.

MRSA: Staphylococcus aureus is a bacteria widely present in our environment and usually harmless, but in susceptible individuals it can cause life-threatening infections. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA (pronounced “mir-sah”), used to be primarily a problem in hospitals, but these days, cases of MRSA are increasingly likely to be “community-acquired,” and evidence suggests that factory farms are a source. MRSA can be spread by human or animal carriers with no signs of illness; a recent study found that nearly half of Dutch pig farmers, and 39 percent of pigs in Dutch slaughterhouses, were carriers of MRSA.

Salmonella: This is another bacteria causing frequent and sometimes serious foodborne illness, with an estimated 1.4 million U.S. cases each year, including 18,000 hospitalizations and 600 deaths. Salmonella can contaminate beef, poultry, eggs and even vegetables. Antibiotic-resistant Salmonella is on the rise: One strain, known as DT104, is resistant to five major antibiotics used in humans.

E. coli O157:H7: Most Escherichia coli bacteria are harmless, but a few strains, including the notorious O157:H7, can be deadly. Ground beef is the most common contaminated food source for people, but as the spinach scare of 2006 showed, other foods can also be affected. The toxic strains are linked to conditions in beef feedlots.

Enterococcus: Enterococci are a widespread group of intestinal bacteria that can cause serious infections in other parts of the body. Antibiotic resistance is a major concern with Enterococcus faecium, the strain most commonly associated with illness in people. In Europe, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) is a widespread environmental contaminant, where its emergence has been linked to agricultural use of avoparcin, an antibiotic closely related to vancomycin. In the United States, VRE is more often found in hospitals, and doctors are running out of treatment options: About 4 percent of VRE patients no longer respond to the antibiotic Synercid, a last-defense drug which is unfortunately related to virginiamycin, widely used in U.S. animal agriculture.

What You Can Do

Reduce the amount of meat in your diet. Industrial farm animal production is driven by rising global demand for meat. Healthy protein alternatives include whole grains, beans, nuts and dairy products. Think of meat more as a seasoning (as in soups and stews), not an essential, three-meals-a-day main course.

When you do eat meat, buy from local farmers practicing humane, sustainable methods. Seek out meat and dairy products labeled as “raised without antibiotics,” and tell your local market manager you’d like to see more such products on store shelves.

Contact your Congressional delegation and ask them to support legislation to limit antibiotics in livestock feed, such as the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, introduced to Congress in 2007.

Sound Science is Killing Us

By Joel Salatin

At a recent House committee hearing in Richmond, Virginia, the state Commissioner of Agriculture, Carlton Courter–seated next to me at the polished oval table that only government buildings

contain–proclaimed that “raw milk is just as dangerous as moonshine.”

That statement, of course, was based on “sound science.” Seated behind him were credentialed experts, the representatives of sound science. From industry personnel to Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services bureaucrats to Federal Food and Drug Administration academically credentialed professionals, all trumpeted forth sound science as the Holy Grail. With one voice, all of these cultural elites extolled the virtues of rBGH, irradiation, genetic engineering and pasteurization as representing sound science.

Those of us at the committee hearing who would dare to ask for consumer choice were called “borderline criminal” in our intent, because sound science has proven that consumers are incapable of informed, responsible, rational decision-making. These experts have done their consumer surveys, and they know that sound science proves that food choice is tantamount to Russian roulette on a plate. Only government food is safe food. Sound science dictates what is safe. No other standard will do. Only T-bone steaks wrapped in million-dollar, agriculturally prohibited, quintuple-permitted, government-sanctioned processing facilities are fit for human consumption. I can’t buy a pound cake from a neighbor girl who

whipped it up and baked it in the family kitchen. That’s not safe. Sound science has thus decreed.

But Coca-Cola is safe. McDonald’s Happy Meals are safe. So is irradiated food. Genetic engineering is the darling of sound science. And until just a couple of months ago, sound science decreed that

feeding brains and spinal cords to herbivores was state-of-the-art technology. Now the denizens of the ivory towers are debating whether or not to eliminate the feeding of chicken manure and dead chicken

carcasses to herbivores. Rest assured, when the edict comes down from the powers that be, it will be based on sound science.

Things are getting crazy. I’ve decided we all need some relief from sound science before it kills us. Please, relieve us from sound science. If all this is sound science, I want no part of it. And yet it is worshipped daily on the news by a fawning media too preconditioned to question pontifications from credentialed

scientists.

It’s time those of us in the alternative community shout a new truth from the housetops: “Science is not objective!” I’ve tried out this statement at several conferences this winter, and the result is a hushed, incredulous, shocked audience. Our Greco-Roman, Western, compartmentalized, disconnected, fragmented, linear, reductionist culture is steeped in the notion that we, more than any other people

in history, are scientific. We wear the mantra of science as if it bestows everlasting life.

At the risk of being labeled a Luddite, I would suggest that equally powerful is what is not readily observed. Matters of the heart. Belief systems. Soul. This is a decidedly Eastern approach: holistic,

connected, we’re all relatives, community, we. Science without soul is just as imbalanced and whacky as soul without science.

In his classic book Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future, Joel Arthur Barker notes, “The essence of the pioneering decision is: Those who choose to change their paradigms early do it

not as an act of the head but as an act of the heart.”

Eco-agriculture, to use the preferred Acres U.S.A. moniker, was developed by paradigm-challenging pioneers. From J.I. Rodale and Louis Bromfield to Charles Walters and Phil Callahan, these framers

of a new paradigm approached agriculture with a heartfelt, intuitive sense that all was not right down in the halls of the USDA. While farmers were dusting their children and cows with tons of DDT, these

pioneering thinkers did not yet know about the legless frogs and sterile salamanders that would be part of its toxic heritage.

But their morality, their ethics–their souls–demanded an alternative view. Daily I am assaulted by the cultural elite as being “unscientific.” What could be more unscientific than putting chickens out on pasture? Here in our neck of the woods, where the vertically integrated poultry industry got its start, I am known as a bioterrorist, because red-winged blackbirds, starlings and sparrows can touch our chickens–and thus, the reasoning goes, transport their diseases as they do to the immuno-deficient sound-science birds compressed in inhumane, fecal-factory, concentration-camp mausoleum

houses.

Pigs out on pasture is a backward notion relegated to a bygone era–while sound science gave us first the confinement hog house, which necessitated the docked tail due to stressed pigs biting each other, and today is driving government-funded research to find and eliminate the stress gene so these inhumanely compressed pigs won’t try to eat each other. The ultimate goal of sound science is to make pigs satisfied with their grotesque anti-pig quarters.

While I appreciate some of the scientific discoveries of our day, I also appreciate their limitations. I kind of like electric lights, four-wheel-drive tractors with front-end loaders and the low-impedence electric fence, to name just a few improvements. But when scientific discovery is used to destroy heritage wisdom contained in the DNA and the innate pigness of a pig or chickenness of a chicken, then it ceases to be an instrument of good and becomes instead an instrument of evil.

A diesel tractor can either pull an anhydrous-ammonia-fertilizer injector, or it can pull a manure spreader full of compost. It is the heart, the soul, the belief system that determines how technology

will be used. Electricity can be used to power feed augers and ventilation fans, medication timers and artificial lights in a confinement poultry house, or it can power an energizer hooked to high-tech, information-dense, polyethylene-stainless-steel-threaded poultry netting in a pasture setting. The belief system defines the use.

Many of us who have been in this eco- farm movement for a long time remember the early sound science experiments on land-grant research plots. In one infamous example, two plots that had been used for

countless toxic studies for decades were designated the organic plots, while two others were designated the conventional plots. Master’s degree students dutifully planted corn in each plot, The organic ones received no amendments. The conventional ones received the regular dose: fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide.

At the end of the season the two crops were measured, and the organic was woefully lacking. Plugging the results into a computer proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that half the world would starve under

organic farming. That finding of sound science became the backbone of the industrial warning against large-scale organic farming. Of course, anyone whose heart is in the right place understands that

organic by neglect is far different from organic by design.

Witness the current research regarding genetically engineered food. Corporate giants have carefully selected mature rats in their feeding trials to avoid ill effects. In Scotland, when pre-pubescent rats

were used under the same feeding regimen, all sorts of maladies occurred–poor organ development and behavioral changes. The agenda defines the discovery, and the heart defines the agenda.

Wall Street science will only find what satisfies Wall Street. The fact that it is championed as sound science makes it no more sound or truthful than a cult leader on an ego trip. Anything trumpeted as

“science” needs to be filtered through the heart. And if it is touted as sound science, you’d better filter it twice. It’s almost like the adjective “sound,” when linked with “science,” is a dead giveaway for: “We’re really making this one up, so we’d better dress it in more profound verbiage.”

The problem with sound science is that it changes every day. Look at the many instances of what has been commonly accepted as sound scientific practice, but has later been proven disastrous.

Here are a couple of examples:

1. *Spreading manure on dormant ground. Now it’s illegal in many areas because this material is winding                                            up in city water supplies. Intuitively, I know that nature does not apply soil amendments in the

winter because the living soil cannot metabolize nutrients when it is hibernating. I don’t need a bunch                             of scientists to tell me that.

1. *Feeding brains and spinal cords to herbivores. Duh! Herbivores in nature never eat carrion, or grain- based diets, or fermented forage, for that matter. I don’t need scientists to tell me that feeding herbivores dead animals may not be a good idea.

1. *Dusting everything with DDT. Not too long ago, this was the universal elixir, the key to the Green Revolution. Intuitively, I can’t figure out why I should use a bunch of stuff with the suffix -ide (Latin for death) to grow my food. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

1. *Cleaning out and sanitizing poultry houses. Now most farmers are aerating the bedding between batches to stimulate decomposition and encourage nature to grow the good bugs. We’ve been doing this for decades on our farm because virulent decomposition is nature’s sanitation model. No scientist needs to tell me that.

What are the new darlings of sound science? Irradiation, genetic engineering, more concentration, less domestic production, and a Wal-Mart on every corner stocked to the hilt with Archer Daniels

Midland, amalgamated, extruded, reconstituted, chlorinated, adulterated, manipulated, constipated pseudo- food. The only problem with this scenario is that the 3 trillion critters inhabiting my intestines–and yours–were not designed for these Wall Street concoctions. These critters don’t know anything about the liberal left or the religious right. They don’t even know who is running for president. They certainly aren’t familiar with the term “sound science.”

Nevertheless, if we do not respect and honor them, they will fail to function as the Creator planned–and if they fail, no miracle from sound science can reenergize them. I’m betting on heritage wisdom.

I’m betting on moral and ethical parameters that make sense to my heart. Everything else must fit that template. In eco-agriculture, we must boldly and humbly hold fast to our heart. It is what anchors us.

It is what moors us to truth when our culture vacillates every Monday morning with the latest discovery from sound science–not. Enjoy science, but only when it reinforces the spiritual, the heart. This reduces confusion and liberates the soul.

About the Author

Joel Salatin is a third generation clean food farmer who has refined

techniques for production of pastured animals that improve the

quality of the land, provide healthy food for consumers and bring a

fair return for farmers He is the author of four books on innovative

farming and has been interviewed for numerous radio and television

programs. His Shenandoah Valley farm was featured in National

Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine. His books , including You Can

Farm, Salad Bar Beef, Pastured Poultry Profits and Family Friendly

Farming, can be obtained from AcresUSA at (800) 355-5313.

prepared by The CornerHouse, UK

It is often claimed that genetically engineered crops are the only way to

feed a growing world population. Yet close analysis suggests that there are

at least 10 good reasons why the widespread adoption of genetic engineering

in agriculture will lead to more hungry people – not fewer.

1. Feed, Not Food

2. Engineering for Convenience

3. Substituting Tropical Cash Crops

4. Increasing Farm Debt

5. Promoting Inefficient Farming

6. Increasing Destitution

7. Unsustainable Agriculture

8. Lower Yields

9. Increased Corporate Control

10. Misreading the Problem

1. Feed, Not Food

The two main GE crops grown commercially in the United States – soybeans

and maize (corn) – are used to feed livestock, not people.

This may be good for GE companies and their partners in the grain trade,

but it will do little to relieve world hunger. Indeed, livestock production

in many Southern countries has often been at the direct expense of poorer

people’s diets.

Egypt, for instance, encouraged by USAID, invested heavily in livestock

from the 1970s onwards. The country now grows more food for animals than

for humans. Human supplies of grain have been made up through US imports

which contributes to Egypt’s external debt. The consistent beneficiaries

have been large US grain merchants which have exported US grains at hugely

subsidised prices to Egypt.

2. Engineering for Convenience

Much genetic engineering research in food has been directed at meeting the

commercial needs of food processors rather than the nutritional needs of

poorer consumers.

A report by the US Biotechnology Industry Organization suggests that more

biotech effort will be devoted to genetic techniques for delaying ripening

or rotting of fruits and vegetables and for improving their appearance so

that they can be transported over ever longer distances and kept on

supermarket shelves for longer.

Maintaining a system whereby food has to travel such long distances may be

good news for oil companies, airlines and motor manufacturers, but it is an

energy- and resource-intensive system which contributes little to the

nutritional health of hungry people in either South or North – and does

much to undermine it.

3. Substituting Tropical Cash Crops

Using genetic engineering to create substitutes for tropical cash crops

will destroy the livelihoods of the rural poor in many Third World

countries – aggravating poverty and hunger.

Several applications of biotechnology are aimed at growing tropical cash

crops in the North, or at producing in laboratories the substances

currently derived from such crops.

Canola, for example, has been genetically-engineered to produce oils which

would replace coconut and palm oils. Coconut oil provides seven per cent of

the total export income of the Philippines, the world’s largest exporter of

coconut oil, and direct or indirect employment for 21 million people, about

30 per cent of the country’s population. Other tropical crops at risk

include vanilla and cocoa.

Although some of these cash crop producers will be able to switch to

growing other crops, many will not. With their income from export earnings

slashed, few Southern countries will be in a position to compensate such

workers and farmers. They will be left to fend for themselves: many are

likely to become malnourished for lack of cash to buy food.

4. Increasing Farm Debt

Unlike many of the seeds currently grown by Third World farmers, GE crops

do not come free. Attempts through legislation and genetic engineering

techniques to sterilize seeds, and to deny farmers’ their ancient right to

save and exchange seeds from previous harvests will force them to buy their

seeds every year. In addition, farmers will also need to buy chemical

herbicides and fertilizers; without theses the GE seeds will fail to

achieve viable yields.

Many small farmers, who are already hard pressed by competition from

heavily-subsidised food imports from the US and by the removal of subsidies

on water and energy under structural adjustment programmes, will slide into

debt.

The result is likely to be yet another wave of farm bankruptcies, leading

to landlessness for poorer farmers and an increased concentration of land

as wealthier farmers and speculators buy up bankrupted farms.

By threatening the farm livelihoods of the very poor, GE crops can only

undermine the food security of small producers – hardly a policy for

“feeding the world”.

5. Promoting Inefficient Farming

Proponents of genetic engineering in agriculture argue that farm

bankruptcies are a regrettable but necessary price of greater efficiency in

agriculture.

In terms of output per unit of labour, small farms are less “efficient”

than large modernised ones. But in terms of gross output per unit of land,

smaller farms often outdo larger ones. In Thailand, holdings under one

hectare have been found to be almost twice as productive as holdings over

40 hectares.

Arguments for replacing “inefficient” small producers with “efficient”

large producers also fail to take account of the key role that small farms

(particularly household gardens invariably tended by women) play in

efficiently supplying informal household networks with food.

To displace such networks would almost certainly result in a dramatic fall

in the amount of unmarketed food available to poorer people.

6. Increasing Destitution

Many vulnerable smallholder producers displaced as a result of growing

genetically-engineered crops are likely to find themselves in a saturated

labour market. If they could get jobs, they would probably be low-paid,

insecure ones in the cities or on larger farms where workers are generally

paid piece rates.

In today’s global supermarket, food goes to those who have the money to buy

it. Only those who have the income to translate their biological needs into

“effective demand” get to eat. Those whose incomes are too low – who cannot

grow food for themselves – inevitably wind up malnourished.

The overall result of displacing “inefficient” small farmers is thus likely

to be increased famine and malnutrition – not a reduction in hunger as the

proponents of genetic engineering promise.

7. Unsustainable Agriculture

Genetic engineering in agriculture is likely to have adverse environmental

impacts which are in turn likely to undermine the ecological basis of food

production.

Genetically-engineered crops will stimulate the evolution of “superweeds”

and “superbugs” which will necessitate higher doses of chemicals and make

food supplies more vulnerable to pest damage.

The outcrossing of engineered traits to other plants also poses a major

threat to food production.

In addition, the adoption of genetically-engineered crops is likely to

reduce genetic diversity, resulting in fewer and fewer types of food crops;

the narrowing of the genetic base of food adds to the likelihood of pest

and disease epidemics.

Many of these problems stem from the fact that genetically-engineered crops

will be grown in industrial monocultures. Other forms of agriculture offer

far safer, proven andecologically-benign means of protecting crops against

pest damage.

8. Lower Yields

The genetically-engineered crops now being cultivated do not have

significantly increased yields. In some cases, yields are lower than those

for conventional varieties of the same crop.

In the first large-scale field trials in Puerto Rico in 1992 of Roundup

Ready plants, Monsanto scientists found statistically significant reduced

yields, averaging some 11.5 per cent, in three of seven trials.

Many of the first growers of Roundup Ready cotton in the Mississippi Delta

of the US complained in 1997 of low yields and poor quality, noting that

bolls dropped prematurely and were deformed. Over 50 growers filed

complaints with the newly-formed US Seed Arbitration Council; Monsanto has

since paid out substantial compensation.

Several analysts conclude that any further increases in crop yields in

modern food crops will almost certainly come from building on traditional

breeding methods – not from transgenics.

9. Increased Corporate Control

Mergers, takeovers, joint ventures and licensing agreements between plant

breeding companies, seed distributors, grain traders, chemical companies

and genetic engineering interests have resulted in some genetic engineering

companies gaining near-monopoly control over the growing and marketing of

some agricultural commodities.

Just ten multinationals (including Monsanto) have now cornered nearly 40%

of the world seed market. Monsanto itself estimates that half the US grain

industry is now using its genetically-engineered seed; it expects that by

the year 2000, all soybeans planted in the United States will be of its

Roundup Ready variety.

Seed companies may well take conventional varieties off the market or use

existing seed and patent legislation to restrict farmers growing such

varieties. The result could be a drastic reduction in farm biodiversity –

with a consequent increase in the vulnerability of crops to disease. Again,

hardly a way to ensure food supplies for the future.

10. Misreading the Problem

Underlying the biotech industry’s claim that GE foods are needed to feed

the world lies a fundamentally flawed analysis of the causes of world

hunger.

More food will undoubtedly have to be grown in future if the increasing

numbers of people in the world are to be adequately fed.

But the claim that GE crops have a positive contribution to make is only

plausible if one mistakenly assumes that the hungry must be hungry because

there is not enough food. In fact, more than enough food is already being

produced to provide the world with a nutritious and adequate diet –

according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme, one-and-a-half times

the amount required.

If one in seven people currently go to bed hungry, it is not because of an

absolute shortage of food, but because inequalities in political and

economic power deny food to people. As long as access to food depends upon

money, and as long as poorer people are excluded from food markets or from

land, significant numbers of people will be malnourished, hungry and

starving – whatever happens to the global food supply, and whatever happens

to the number of people in the world

Far from addressing these underlying structural causes of hunger, genetic

engineering will do much to exacerbate them. Ensuring food security

worldwide requires an approach to agriculturethat is, in almost every

respect, the reverse of that being promoted bybiotech companies and their

allies in government and regulatory authorities.

—————————————————————–

“Ten Reasons” is extracted from “Food? Health? Hope? Genetic Engineering

and World Hunger”, a 28-page briefing prepared by The Corner House, PO Box

3137, Station Road, Sturminster Newton, Dorset DT10 1YJ, UK. Email

<cornerhouse@gn.apc.org> Email versions available free.

—————————————————————–

Sarah Sexton/Larry Lohmann/Nicholas Hildyard/Tracey Clunies Ross

THE CORNER HOUSE

PO Box 3137,

Station Road,

Sturminster Newton,

Dorset DT10 1YJ

BRITAIN

Tel: +44 (0)1258 473795

Fax: +44 (0)1258 473748

Email: <cornerhouse@gn.apc.org>

Website http://www.icaap.org/Cornerhouse

By Linn Cohen-Cole

The slew of fake “food safety” bill in congress threaten us all and our democracy.

Some don’t believe that, but they would probably be happy to make sure that certain things are FOR SURE not in those bills.

So, it’s a simple thing to start with what CANNOT be in those bills before adding anything to them, for adding to what is there would dangerously legitimize them and that must not, under any circumstances or in any way, happen.

You will see list below.  If you can think of more items that are important, that would be great because the point is to make the bills safe and have them actually make our food safe, and this is something that should have included us, but didn’t.

To begin:

First off, in legal and solid language, any bills must make clear only industrial facilities are included.

Then, the bills (all of them, and there are a slew) MUST EXPLICITLY exempt from these bills and all government control:

all private holding of seeds – individual, farmer, seed exchanges, seed banks, etc.

all small farms including all soil, all water, all crops and all animals on them,

all gardens,

all homes,

all farmers markets,

all CSAs,

all roadside stands,

all small producers of food,

all farm to consumer sales,

all consumer choice over food,

all farm equipment (harvesting, transporting, seed cleaning),

all natural things on farms (manure, agricultural water, wild animals, birds, earthworms),

all natural methods of farming.

And the bills MUST ASSERT AND GUARANTEE:

full and inviolate property rights of farmers,

protection from the government bankrupting farmers, ever, through penalties,

the erasure of all data on farmers put on the data bank,

and full due process in all aspects in all our laws, etc.

And the bills must begin the decentralization of our food supply as well as reintroduce local food processing.

The bills must prioritize every and all possible protection of small farming.

PROTECTIONS:

Must outlaw all raids on farmers.

Must specifically strip Homeland Security of surge capacity for search, seizure and destruction of crops, animals and equipment, and all war on terror regulations threatening small non-corporate farming, including the government taking over farms for any purpose, at any time, for any use.

Must outlaw stacking of penalties against farmers.

Must encourage (rather than restrict) farmers’ putting on their websites (or in other ways) any truthful information and independent studies about their food (the same being true for supplement companies using that same truthful information and independent studies) that is of relevance to consumers.

Must insert strong and multi-layered due process protections between farmers (and their crops, products and animals) and our government which must not be allowed to ever use “disease outbreak” and “contamination” as its means to destroy wipe out their animals or crops so as to insert genetically engineered animals and crops, as a means of even more strangling monopoly over food and reduction of farmers to mere leasers of animals and seeds.

Must provide labeling of all genetically engineered food.

Must provide, on food derived from industrial feedlots, CAFOs, and processing plants, clear labeling of pesticide levels, of antibiotic residue levels, of hormone residue levels, of drug residue levels, of heavy metal levels.

Must provide country of origin labeling that is explicit to each country, with no mixing of products.

Must provide strict prohibitions and large penalties against corporate employees holding any jobs within the USDA and FDA,

a serious conflict of interest.

Must outlaw any legislator who receives PAC money from agribusiness from ever introducing bills pertaining to agriculture, and ever being on any committees or subcommittees in relation to agriculture, or voting on any bills relating to agriculture – all a serious conflict of interest.

Must reject in advance any and all bills that in any way reduce our country’s control over its own health standards and instead increase international control over food here, vesting power in the WTO and reducing our standards and our own control.

This is an incomplete list.

These bills must begin the decentralization of our food supply for the safe of true food safety and also food security and the bills must increase the independence of our food supply by including strict rules and penalties in the bills pertaining to no governmental interference at any point in direct farm to consumer sales.

And the fundamental survival needs for everyone – based on the rights of our farmers to farm, the rights of our gardeners to garden, the rights of all citizens to choose whatever food they wish without government interference, and especially the rights of all of us to own seeds and have water sources – must be GUARANTEED in these bills as basic human rights, as basic to our democracy, and as basic to life, itself.

This list takes the “I didn’t see that there” confusion out of an astoundingly vague and broad bill and begins to make it highly specific, and today, not a year from now, so the public can know what is involved and how it will affect them.

This list begins to lay out what “food safety” actually consists of.  Once that is done, then it will be easy to see which legislators are truly interested in “food safety.”

Take action — click below to contact your local newspaper or congress people:

Withdraw HR 875 immediately as well as SR425, HR 814, and related bills. They will destroy our small farmers, take control of seed, and trap us into GMOs and an industrial system just as we are turning a corner toward local, organic, sustainable sanity..

http://www.usalone.net/cgi-bin/oen.cgi?qnum=7478

Now, here are people you can thank for fighting these bills.  Here is a link to an R-CALF video which is well worth your time.

Editor’s Note: The second video below is what the author has recommended. It is a 5-min. segment from an entire film on the subject.  The first video is the introductory segment of that video (also 5 mins.), which OEN readers may find useful and informative. Click here for more videos by R-Calf.

http://www.youtube.com/user/laurelrcalf

These are people the left needs to meet – conservative, independent (non-corporate) cattlemen who believe in “fair trade” and real competition, and fought and miraculously stopped the JBS Swift merger (threatening control of 90% of beef in the world, vertically integrated).  And for a long time, single-handedly, they have held off NAIS (the dangerous core to the power in these bills and the beginning of chipping all animals and eventually, through Smart Grid, tracking everyone).

They are American heroes.  In an economy that has been shipped overseas, they have fought for local and American industry here.

They need us to all show up now.

And isn’t it way past time we realize these are not right or left issues we’re fighting but the destruction of our constitution since the Patriot Act went into effect?

Were it not for R-CALF, an organization most people have never heard of, NAIS would have sailed through by now and along with it, many other controls over food, land and seed.

Here is a link to let Congress and your local paper know how you feel about all this.

http://www.usalone.net/cgi-bin/oen.cgi?qnum=7478

And for those of you who feel the inclination to be part of this fight, reach R-CALF and feel what it’s like to stand with American cowboys against Simon Legree who’s back in with a pack of lawyers, twirling big slick mustaches, with a gleam in their eye to steal our ranches, our farms and everything else.  Offer to help out.  Offer to use lists you have access to.  Offer to post their video every place you can with a message from you about why this matters to us all.

Make this is the moment when right and left become friends and take on the bad guys together.

Author’s Bio: Met libertarian and conservative farmers and learned an incredible amount about farming and nature and science, as well as about government violations against them and against us all. The other side of the fence is nothing like what we’ve been taught to assume but great people with immense decency.

This was good news to read, and it’s a start. Now lets get labeling on our food too!

White House backs healthier eating

By Andrew Martin

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

2:00 a.m. March 22, 2009

ANAHEIM – As tens of thousands of people recently strolled among booths of the nation’s largest organic and natural foods show here, munching on fair-trade chocolate and sipping organic wine, a few dozen pioneers of the industry sneaked off to an out-of-the-way conference room.

Although unit sales of organic food have leveled off and even declined lately, versus a year earlier, the mood among those crowded into the conference room was upbeat as they awaited a private screening of a documentary called “Food Inc.” – a withering critique of agribusiness and industrially produced food.

They also gathered to relish their changing political fortunes, courtesy of the Obama administration.

“This has never been just about business,” said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, the maker of organic yogurt. “We are here to change the world. We dreamt for decades of having this moment.”

After being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House, which has vowed to encourage a more nutritious and sustainable food supply.

The most vocal booster so far has been the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has emphasized the need for fresh, unprocessed, locally grown food and, last week, started work on a White House vegetable garden. More surprising, perhaps, are the pronouncements out of the Department of Agriculture, an agency with long and close ties to agribusiness.

In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.” Two weeks later, the Obama administration named Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a longtime champion of sustainable agriculture and healthy food, as Vilsack’s top deputy.

Hirshberg and other sustainable-food activists are hoping that such actions are precursors to major changes in the way the federal government oversees the nation’s food supply and farms, changes that could significantly bolster demand for fresh, local and organic products. Already, they have offered plenty of ambitious ideas.

For instance, celebrity chef Alice Waters recommends that the federal government triple its budget for school lunches to provide youngsters with healthier food. Author Michael Pollan has called on President Barack Obama to pursue a “reform of the entire food system” by focusing on a Pollan priority: diversified, regional food networks.

Still, some activists worry that their dreams of a less-processed American diet may soon collide with the realities of Washington and the financial gloom over much of the country. Even the Bush administration, reviled by many food activists, came to Washington intent on reforming farm subsidies, only to be slapped down by Congress.

Even so, many activists say they are packing their bags and heading to Washington. They are bringing along a copy of “Food Inc.,” which includes attacks on the corn lobby and Monsanto, and intend to provide a private screening for Vilsack and Merrigan.

At the heart of the sustainable-food movement is a belief that America has become efficient at producing cheap, abundant food that profits corporations and agribusiness, but is unhealthy and bad for the environment.

The federal government is culpable, the activists say, because it pays farmers billions in subsidies each year for growing grains and soybeans. A result is an abundance of corn and soybeans that provide cheap feed for livestock and inexpensive food ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup.

But advocates of conventional agriculture argue that organic farming can’t provide enough food because the yields tend to be lower than those for crops grown with chemical fertilizer.

“We think there’s a place for organic, but don’t think we can feed ourselves and the world with organic,” says Rick Tolman, chief executive of the National Corn Growers Association. “It’s not as productive, more labor-intensive and tends to be more expensive.”

The ideas are hardly new. Farmland philosopher and author Wendell Berry has been making many of the same points for decades. What is new is that the sustainable-food movement has gained both commercial heft, with the success of organic and natural foods in the past decade, and celebrity cachet, with a growing cast of chefs, authors and celebrities who champion the cause.

It has also been aided by more awareness of the obesity epidemic, particularly among children, and by concerns about food safety amid seemingly continual outbreaks of tainted supplies.

While their arguments haven’t gained much traction in Washington, sustainable-food activists and entrepreneurs have persuaded more Americans to watch what they eat.

They have encouraged the growth of farmers markets and created such a demand for organic, natural and local products that they are now sold at many major grocers, including Wal-Mart.

“Increasingly, companies are looking to reduce the amount of additives,” says Ted Smyth, who retired this year as senior vice president at H.J. Heinz, the food giant. “Consumers are looking for more authentic foods. This trend absolutely has percolated through into mainstream foods.”

The sustainable-food movement also owes much of its current success to pioneers in the organic and natural foods industry. Many started their businesses for idealistic reasons and have since turned their startups into major corporations.

Manufacturers improved their organic and natural products so they could compete with conventional foods on packaging and taste. Whole Foods Market also lured more mainstream customers by creating lush displays of produce and fish that have influenced more traditional grocers.

Nancy Childs, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University, said sustainable food activists forced the public to focus on the quality and sourcing of food. She says that “continual attention in the news” also gave the movement legs.

But Childs worries that some of the activists’ recommendations for buying fresh, local or organic food cannot be adopted by many Americans because those foods may be too expensive. “By singling out certain lifestyles and foods, it’s diminishing very good quality nutrition sources,” she says. “Frozen goods, canned goods, they are not bad things. What’s important is that people eat well, within their means.”

“We’d all love to live on a farm in Vermont, right?” she adds.

Find this article at:

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/mar/22/1b22food224234-outlook-upbeat-food-activists/?uniontrib

© Copyright 2009 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. • A Copley Newspaper Site

We saw the corporation last weekend, for the second time, and it’s such an amazing movie and a must see movie!  You can buy it from www.thecorporation.com  or Netflix carries it and there are clips on YouTube.

I really knew much less then I thought I did about corporations, how they came into being and why they’re not ideal –  to say the least! –  for social responsibility.  It’s a long movie and the first 15 minutes is a bit chaotic – make sure you watch past it – because once the intro is over it gets into the issue in a very understandable and entertaining way.  The film has many wonderful cameos including Howard Zinn, Michael Moore and Vandana Shiva, who we wrote about a few blog posts ago. It’s highly recommended and even our teenager watched this one with us.

There’s also a very informative section about Monsanto and gmo food.

Here’s the info from their site:

WINNER OF 26 INTERNATIONAL AWARDS! 10 Audience Choice Awards including the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal “person” to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics – including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

“AN OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF OUTSTANDING EXTRAS, there is basically another 6-hour (!) documentary included.” MovieFreak

Along with the groundbreaking 145-minute theatrical version of the film, the two-disc DVD has eight hours of never-before-seen footage. In addition to two commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and Q’s-and-A’s, 165 new clips and updates are sorted “by person” and “by topic.” Get the details you want to know on the issues you care about. Then, check out the web links for follow-up research and action.

THE CORPORATION is Canada’s most successful documentary… EVER!

The film is based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan.

Here’s their site: http://www.thecorporation.com