[oyymoss]

dear friends,

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/55847/

be well, be love.

david

there's a lot you don't know about what's in your food
by vanja petrovic, alternet. posted july 3, 2007.

nearly three quarters of all processed foods contain genetically engineered ingredients, but you'd never know it by reading the back of your kid's cereal box or that pint of ice cream you've been craving. rather than being relegated to its own supermarket section, this food sits unlabeled on grocery store shelves, allowing a handful of transnational biotech companies to profit handsomely as consumers shop blindly.

in his new book, your right to know: genetic engineering and the secret changes in your food, andrew kimbrell explores the risks of this technology and what genetic engineering means to our health, the environment and the future of agriculture.

although kimbrell's book aims primarily to educate, it is also an easy-to-use activist guide on how to identify -- and avoid -- genetically engineered foods.

andrew kimbrell is founder and executive director of the washington d.c.-based center for food safety and the international center for technology assessment. as an author, lawyer, and activist for more than 20 years, kimbrell has been at the forefront of legal and grassroots efforts to protect the environment and promote sustainable agricultural production methods. his written work has appeared in the new york times, washington post, and harper's. he has testified at numerous congressional and regulatory hearings, and in 1994, utne reader named kimbrell as one of the world's leading 100 visionaries.

[DurryVony]

on the top ic gene splicing, ...the makers of breyers ice cream, unilever, now splice fish genes into it so it freezes uniformly. this was saddening to me as this ice cream had only a handful of ingredients in it and appeared to be good. won't touch the stuff anymore. it's dead anyway. not live milk like the people in the early 1900's used to have. our health is really suffering because of all of the additives in our foods. i've never seen so many ill people as i do in today's world. just take a look when you walk down a street and ask yourself how many healthy people you see. it is an eye opening experience.

i hear they are also splicing fish genes into the seeds of tomatoes now. why mess with an already perfect tomato.

kimbrell talks about gene hopping from gene-spliced rice plants cascading over to other farmer's fields who are growing non-gene-spliced rice and contaminating it. this is what was planned from the beginning by these gene-splicing companies so that they could make profits. you see, they put a terminator gene into the crop so that farmers can't just reseed their lands from some seed of the current crop. any seeds produced from these gene-spliced plants will not grow baby rice plants. hence, the farmers have to buy more seed and in the process the "mating plants" spread the non-terminating gene and rid the world of the normal god-made rice seeds.

most people in america don't realize that their food costs for conventional produce would be far higher than the price of organic produce if the farmers were not government subsidized for their crops. this is one of the main reason why conventional produce is cheaper to buy...but at what cost to your health?

charran