This appeared yesterday.
And, as my readers know, a specialty of this blog is rushing to protect
and defend Damsels in Distress (see posts on Food Babe) who are cruelly and
unfairly attacked by the Monsantoite Dragon.
So here’s to you, Celeb Moms—you’re not anti-science, and here’s why
you’re right and they’re wrong. Keep up
the good fight! And here’s my answer to
the “Science” Moms’ letter (my comments in italic):
Scientist and
Advocate Moms to Celeb Moms: Weigh GMO Food with Facts Not Fear
Kavin Senapathy—August 19, 2015. Biofortified.
Dear Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ginnifer
Goodwin, Sarah Gilbert, Jillian Michaels, Jordana Brewster, and other celebrity
moms speaking out against the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act:
We are scientists, science communicators, and farmers. We
come from varying educational backgrounds, work in different careers, live
across the country, and are of different ethnicities. Like you, we are moms.
As parents, we can all agree that our greatest fear is harm
to our children. President Obama said
after the Sandy Hook school shooting, “Someone once described the joy and
anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your
body all the time, walking around. With their very first cry, this most
precious, vital part of ourselves (our child) is suddenly exposed to the
world.”
We know your statements come from love and concern for your
children, because ours do, too. We feel that it is our responsibility to
clarify misconceptions about genetically engineered or genetically modified
organisms, often called GMOs. We want to provide insight into why we feed our
families food containing ingredients derived from GMOs and explain why we
oppose mandatory GMO labeling.
Celeb Moms, you’re now
supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy, thinking, “Oh, these nice ‘Science’ Moms,
they’re just like you and me—let’s hear what they’ve got to say”. But you and I both know that you’re just
being groomed for a very dodgy sales pitch.
Plant breeding and genetic engineering
Scientists use many methods to create new plant varieties. A
plant’s taste and color, drought and pest resistance are encoded in genes in
the plant’s DNA. Traditionally, new plant varieties are created by
cross-pollinating plants with desired characteristics. But in the same way that
we cannot choose only our best traits to give to our children, a plant breeder
cannot choose which traits are in the resulting plants. It’s left to chance.
See, the pitch has
opened with something harmless and platitudinous, just like the door-to-door
salesman who starts with a string of stuff to which you have to say “Yes”.
In radiation mutagenesis,
plants are bombarded with radiation in hopes that a desirable trait will
result from random breaks in the plant’s DNA. This method has been used for
decades and has led to may new plant varieties that we enjoy, including
varieties of wheat, peppermint, and grapefruit. These plants are eligible for
the USDA’s organic label and are not considered GMOs. Other plant breeding tools include chemical
mutagenesis, cell fusion, and chromosome doubling.
Now they go on to try
and confuse you with irrelevant issues. Stick to the point, “Science” Moms!
Genetic engineering is simply another plant breeding tool.
It results in a targeted genetic change or adds one or a few carefully chosen
genes to a plant. The technology may sound scary, but genes actually transfer
naturally between species.
Whoa! Just any species? Not on your life—at least one of the two
species has to be some kind of microbe.
Not so for genetic engineering—you can potentially put any gene from any
species into any other species. Not the
same thing at all. So this, like so much
else in GMO propaganda, is a half-truth?
Q: What’s the other
half of a half-truth? A: A half-lie, of course!
Genetic engineering has been used for decades to make
life-saving medicines including insulin.
Hundreds of studies show that the process used to create GMOs, and the
GM products currently on the market are safe, and scientific bodies around the
world agree.
Oh yeah? You mean like
the World Health Organization? Or the
Endocrine Society, America’s oldest scientific organization with its 17.000
members? If you want to know what
Science Says, what better source than Nature, one of the world’s top two
scientific journals? “Researchers,
farmers, activists and GM seed companies all stridently promote their views,
but the scientific data are often inconclusive or contradictory. Complicated
truths have long been obscured by the fierce rhetoric.”
The genetically engineered plants used today allow farmers
to apply fewer insecticides and less toxic herbicides.
Less toxic than
what--cyanide?
Some are disease resistant and drought tolerant. Apples and potatoes
that are just now entering the market will reduce food waste due to brown spots
and bruises. Scientists have developed additional beneficial traits that
haven’t reached the market due to unfounded fears and a burdensome regulatory
system. Examples include citrus greening resistant oranges that could save the
US citrus industry, and
blight resistant chestnut trees that could
repopulate the great chestnut forests of the US and provide habitat and food
for wildlife.
Oh, boo-hoo! Naughty old regulatory system! In fact it’s neither the regulatory system
nor the fears of consumers that have delayed the introduction of
greening-resistant oranges or bight-resistant chestnut. It’s the sheer difficulty of successfully
engineering GMO crops. It just takes a
long time to produce GMOs with highly specific traits like greening resistance
or chestnut-blight resistance—unlike very general traits like herbicide
resistance and insect resistance, which (unfortunately, as we’ll see shortly)
were introduced much more quickly.
Genetic engineering has even greater potential to help
farmers and families in other countries. Nutritionally enhanced plants like super
cassava and golden rice can help get children the nutrients they need to grow
up healthy and strong. Insect resistant eggplant and other pest or disease
resistant plants can reduce the need for pesticides…
Again, a half-truth,
so here’s what the half-lie is this time. “Pesticides” includes both herbicides
and insecticides. It may be true that
insect-resistance reduces the need for insecticides—the jury’s still out on
that one, insecticide-resistant crops select for mutated insects that can still
safely eat them, so while it was true at the beginning it may no longer be
so. What is certain is that
herbicide-resistant plants INCREASE the use of herbicides…not “maybe” or “just
does” but MUST increase it. Before there
were herbicide-resistant GMOs, you could only spray once, pre-emergence,
otherwise you’d kill your crop. Now they
spray three times while the crop is growing.
And even that’s not the end of it.
Bet you didn’t know this—even if they’re NOT growing GMO crops, they’ve
begun spraying them with RoundUp just before they harvest them, KILLING THEM ON
PURPOSE so they dry out fast and get to market sooner. And this is legal!
In other words, if
you’re not eating organic, you’re probably eating poison every time you open a
package of processed food.
…and help increase
farmer incomes so they can send their children to school. We worry that anti
GMO sentiments in the US could slow adoption of these plants in the places
where they are most needed.
Seriously? We’re talking about independent countries. Anyone who thinks they wait with bated breath
to see if there are any “anti GMO sentiments in the US” before they decide what
to do about GMOs is delusional.
Food labeling
As moms, we endorse informative, relevant food labeling to
protect consumers and help us nourish our bodies with varied, balanced, and
healthy diets. For example, labeling for nut, milk, or egg residue is relevant.
Severe allergic reactions are a real
concern. Nutritional information of protein, fats, fiber, sugar, vitamins, and
minerals are also relevant. This information empowers parents to prepare
nutritionally balanced meals.
You say you have the “right to know what’s in our food”. Labeling whether a product contains
ingredients derived from a GMO crop tells you nothing about what is “in” the
food.
Not even a
half-truth—a flat-out lie this time. If you eat GMO food, you have a roughly
nine-out-of-ten chance of eating RoundUp.
There’s no way they can deny this.
Back them into a corner and they’ll claim that by the time your
digestive processes have finished there’s so little RoundUp left that it
couldn’t possibly hurt you (they’d like to claim that you get rid of it ALL but
that’s so blatant a lie they daren’t risk it). Well, endocrinologists have
proved that levels as low as one part per million (OR LESS!) can seriously
affect hormones that are essential to your health, provoking many different
chronic diseases ESPECIALLY IN YOUNG CHILDREN!
Genetic engineering is a breeding method, not a product. It
isn’t an ingredient to scoop into a bowl. For example, sugar from GMO sugar
beets is just sucrose, there is nothing “in” it. It is just like sugar from
sugar cane.
“Pants on fire”
AGAIN! If the beets were sprayed with
RoundUp, it has RoundUp in it!
All food comes from organisms that have been genetically
altered by humans, with the exception of a few wild plants and animals.
True, but they were
produced by normal breeding methods, not by allowing them to be sprayed with
poison.
The ancestors of bananas, carrots, and many other foods are
almost unrecognizable. In the same way that information on whether a home was
built using an old fashioned hammer or a modern nail gun does not inform you
about the home’s safety or quality, knowing whether foods contain ingredients
derived from GMOs does not tell you about safety or quality.
Dumb analogy, as you
can see.
There are thousands of different varieties of corn grown
across the US, yet we know all of them as “corn” regardless of the breeding
techniques used in their development, and regardless of the many differences in
DNA sequences between varieties. Each farmer chooses which variety to grow and
which practices to use based on the environmental and economic conditions on
their farm. The term “GMO” doesn’t reveal whether
a plant variety is patented, what
pesticides were used in its production…
Oh no? It tells you that there’s at least a 90%
chance that it’s been sprayed with RoundUp or some equally poisonous herbicide.
…the size of the farm, or other details that many labeling
advocates may find important. These production process details and many others
are currently indicated though voluntary process-based labels such as
certified-humane, kosher, halal or grass-fed. Organic and voluntary non-GMO
labels, both of which exclude GMO ingredients, are very common and provide that
choice and information to those who want it.
Mandatory labeling of foods with GMO ingredients will
increase fear, and make foods more expensive for Americans families.
There’s no proof of
that, and anyway any price increase this caused would be minimal—just ask all
the European countries that already have mandatory labeling.
The “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act” recently passed in
the House and is being discussed in the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and
Forestry Committee. Anti-GMO activists, including Organic Consumers
Association, Only Organic, GMO Free USA and more, have portrayed it as an
attempt to hide what’s in our food, calling it the “Denying Americans the Right
to Know” Act.
Which is exactly what
it is, of course.
However, the text of the bill states that a GMO should be
labeled if it is materially different from its non-GMO counterpart, while
specifying that the mere fact of being GMO is not enough to be classified as
materially different. The bill also registers all GMOs that are used in food production,
establishes a national GMO food certification program to avoid a state-by-state
patchwork of GMO definitions and creates
national standards for labeling GMOs.
The whole aim of the
DARK Act is to prevent the people of individual states, counties and cities
from expressing their will—in other words, the DARK Act is a blow against
democracy and states’ rights. Tell your
senators to vote against it or you’ll never vote for them again!
Call to Action
Please, don’t co-opt motherhood and wield your fame to
oppose beneficial technologies like genetic engineering. Certain celebrities
have misled thousands of parents into thinking that vaccines are harmful, and
we see the same pattern of misinformation repeating itself here. When GMOs are
stigmatized, farmers and consumers aren’t able to benefit from much-needed
advancements like plants with increased nutrients, or plants that can adapt to
changing environmental stresses.
We, like millions of other Americans, line up to see your
movies, and respect your occupation. Though our jobs differ, we share a common
goal: to raise healthy, happy, successful kids.
Then you too,
“Science” Moms, should wake up to the fact that you’re feeding your kids
poisons—and STOP IT!
As moms we feel it is our responsibility to use the best
available information to protect our children’s health, and to let the best
science inform the choices we make for our families. We ask you to take the time
to learn about how genetic engineering is being used by farmers, and the
potential it has to help other moms raise healthy, happy, successful kids.
You have the opportunity to influence millions of people, so
please use that influence responsibly, and ensure that your advocacy is
supported by facts, not fear. Contact any or all of the undersigned, chat with
farmers who grow biotech plants, or visit a college campus and talk with
experts. We’re happy to discuss how this breeding method of genetic engineering
could be used in harmony with many other approaches to help feed the world’s
growing population, protect our environment, and preserve the Earth’s natural
resources for all of our children.
And make whopping
profits for Monsanto and the five other big seed-‘n’-pesticide
corporations—that’s what this is really about.
Sincerely,
- Kavin Senapathy:
Freelance writer, science popularizer, co-founder of March Against Myths, mother of two
(ages 4 and 2)
- Dr. Layla Katiraee:
Scientist, writer at FrankenFoodFacts
and Biology Fortified,
and mother of a 3-year-old
- Dr. Anastasia Bodnar:
Scientist, co-founder of the non-profit Biology Fortified, Inc.,
and mother of a 15-month-old
- Dr.
Alison Bernstein: Scientist, writer, mother of two (ages 7 and
2), AKA “Mommy
PhD”
- Julie
Borlaug: Associate Director for external relations at the Norman Borlaug Institute for
International Agriculture, and Strategic Initiatives, Texas A&M
AgriLife Research, and mother of a 6-year-old
- Dr.
Alison Van Eenennaam: University researcher and animal
biotechnology specialist, and mother of two (ages 15 and 17)
- Sarah Schultz: Nurse,
wife of a farmer, writer at Nurse
Loves Farmer, mother of two (ages 5 and 2)
- Sara,
science communicator and blogger at It’s
Momsense, mother of two (ages 5 and 7)
- Jenny
Splitter: Writer at Grounded Parents, storyteller,
mother of two (ages 11 and 4), Science Activist and food
allergy parent
- Joni Kamiya:
Biotech papaya farmer’s daughter, blogger at Hawaii Farmer’s Daughter.
Mother of three (ages 7 months, 5, and 10)
- Jennie
Schmidt, MS, RD – Farmer & Registered Dietitian, AKA “The Foodie Farmer” ,
mother of two (ages 15 and 17)
- Dr.
Denneal Jamison-McClung: University biotechnology educator, program
administrator and mother of an 11-year-old
- Krista
Stauffer: Dairy farmer, writer, blogger at The Farmer’s Wifee, Founder of Ask the
Farmers and mother of three (ages 8, 5, and 3).
Bottom line: It’s not the GMOs themselves that’s the
problem, it’s the stuff they spray on the GMOs.
And I’m sure you’ve noticed that the “Science” Moms don’t have word one
to say about THAT.
Final Score: “Science” Moms 0. Celeb Moms 1.
GO, CELEB MOMS!!!
