Chemicals and additives found in the food supply and other consumer products are making headlines regularly as more and more groups  raise concern over the safety of these substances. In a statement released yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked for reform to the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. The group is particularly concerned about the effects these substances have on children and babies.

Last month, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) held hearings on the safety of food dyes but failed to make a definitive ruling—the most recent study on Bisphenol-A (BPA) added to growing doubts about its safety but the FDA’s stance remains ambiguous. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the FDA is not ensuring the safety of many chemicals.

Yet while the FDA drags its heels and hedges on the safety of these substances, Americans are exposed to untested combinations of food additives, dyes, preservatives, and chemicals on a daily basis. Indeed, for the vast majority of Americans consuming industrial foods, a veritable chemical cocktail enters their bodies every day and according to the GAO report, “FDA is not systematically ensuring the continued safety of current GRAS substances.”

The term GRAS refers to “generally regarded as safe,” the moniker the FDA uses to regulate food additives, dyes, and preservatives. The trouble is this system is not effective. Dr. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, said in an interview that many additives in our food supply are never even tested. That’s because the GRAS designation is a voluntary process—instead of being required to register food additives, companies can notify the FDA about their product, but only if they so choose. Hansen added that even for those additives considered GRAS, he didn’t have much faith in the designation.

So just how many of these largely untested and unregulated chemicals is the average American consuming every day? As of yet, no study has determined this number nor has looked at what the effects of the various combinations might be. But according to the Body Burden Web site, there are 80,000 chemicals in commerce and the site says that, “No one is ever exposed to a single chemical, but to a chemical soup, the ingredients of which may interact to cause unpredictable health effects.”

There are only a few studies that evaluate the combined effects of food additives. One 2006 study published in Toxicology Science concludes that the combination of several common additives appears to have a neurotoxic effect: “Although the use of single food additives at their regulated concentrations is believed to be relatively safe in terms of neuronal development, their combined effects remain unclear.” Of the four additives looked at, only one is now banned in the U.S., while the rest remain in the foods on our grocery store shelves. In a 2000 study, researchers looked at the combination of four major food additives or a mixture of six typical artificial food colors and found indications of toxicity in both.

And perhaps the most alarming study dates back to 1976 from the Journal of Food Science. In this study, young rats were fed a low-fiber diet along with sodium cyclamate, FD&C Red No. 2 and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate individually and in combination. While the study found that any one of the three food additives given individually had little negative effect, the combination of all three additives resulted in weight loss and the death of all test animals within fourteen days. Sodium cyclamate is an artificial sweetener now banned in the U.S., but FD&C Red No. 2, a food dye, and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate, an emulsifier, are still in regular use in the food supply, according to the FDA’s Web site.

BPA, another regularly used chemical, has raised a number of concerns. The most recent study found that when participants switched to a diet with minimal amounts of canned foods or plastic food packaging, urinary levels of BPA decreased by more than 60 percent after just three days. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly all Americans have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies, which has been linked to breast and prostrate cancer, infertility, early puberty in girls, obesity, and ADHD. This study indicates how quickly the body will excrete BPA if given the opportunity, but here’s the key: The body must be given the opportunity to do so. Many Americans don’t take three-day fresh food breaks from a diet based largely on packaged and processed foods. What’s more, BPA is just one of the chemical compounds with potentially harmful effects entering into our systems.

Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like based on some popular “health food” items:

• One serving of Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Antioxidants Berry Yogurt Crunch contains more than 13 different additives, preservatives, and food dyes, including Red 40 and Blue 1, which are known to cause allergic reactions in some people and mutations leading to cancer in lab animals. It also contains BHT, monoglycerides, and cellulose gum. In addition, conventional milk often contains residues of artificial bovine growth hormones, known endocrine disruptors as well as antibiotics used in industrial milk production.

• Dannon Light & Fit Peach yogurt contains more than 11 different additives including Red 40, aspartame, potassium sorbate, sucralose, and acesulfame potassium.

• A Subway sandwich of turkey and cheese on nine-grain bread with fat-free honey mustard, peppers, and pickles contains more than 40 different additives, preservatives, and dyes. The pickles and peppers have yellow 5 and polysorbate 80, the bread has ten different additives including dough conditioners, DATEM, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and the turkey contains ten additives as well.

The person in this example has consumed more 60 food additives eating breakfast, a small snack, and lunch alone, to say nothing of dinner, dessert, further snacking and drinks. Consumers Union’s Dr. Hansen told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were up to 100 additives or more that people are taking in on a daily basis.”

And it’s not just food. A number of additional toxins also enter our systems from other industrial sources and often come in the form of phthalate plasticizers and parabens—both of which are used in personal care products, some medications, and even foods and food preservation. Most Americans use some form of shampoo, soap, lotion, and antiperspirant every day, and these toxins, applied to the skin, are absorbed dermally.

According to a 2010 study, like BPA, parabens and phthalates can clear our bodies relatively quickly but only if we aren’t exposed to them on a regular basis. The study states, “For serious health problems to arise, exposure to these rapidly-clearing compounds must occur on a daily basis.” Phthalates are associated with infertility, obesity, asthma, and allergies, as well as breast cancer; parabens are a cause for concern regarding breast cancer.

So what if it’s not the dyes alone, the preservatives alone, or the BPA alone, but some haphazard combination thereof that has yet to be studied or evaluated properly? Jason August, with the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety, admitted as much in his defense of food dyes in relation to ADHD recently when he said, “There were other factors in most of these studies that could have been the reason or could have gone hand in hand with the dyes to create these problems in these particular children, including preservatives.”

This is precisely why the FDA needs to be more rigorous with its testing of individual additives and start evaluating the combined effects or “other factors” that August so blithely refers to here.

Chemicals used in all of these industrial products are big business—food corporations own some of the largest personal care companies and they’re profiting on multiple fronts with cheap, industrial ingredients. For example, Nestlé owns 30 percent of the world’s largest cosmetic and beauty company L’Oreal—tightly regulating these substances and evaluating potential harm would be a financial hardship for these corporations.

But the real hardship is placed on the American people who trust that the foods they eat are properly regulated by the government and safe for themselves and their families. How long will the FDA continue to put the health of the American people at risk with its antiquated policy? Let’s hope with pressure from groups like the AAP, changing consumer demand, and continued headlines, the FDA will finally do its job.

Photo: 1970s Monsanto advertisement, via Christian Montone on Flickr

Good News for SF Farmers

San Francisco urban agriculture advocates are rejoicing after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted last week to amend the zoning code to allow small-scale commercial farming in areas previously deemed residential.

The shift will allow farming enterprises under an acre in size to grow and sell produce within city limits without an expensive conditional use permit (CUP) (previously around $3,000) or a lengthy bureaucratic process. Little City Gardens, the only for-profit farm in San Francisco, has been engaged in a year-long process with the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA) and the Mayor’s office to draft new legislation for urban agriculture and shepherd it through the approval process. The cost of a permit is now only $300 and urban farmers will also be allowed to sell value-added products such as jams, salsa, and herb salts along with produce they grow.

Little City Gardens—whose farm near in the Mission Terrace neighborhood has earned a great deal of community support—has already announced plans for a CSA subscription program on their website. “Each week the box will include a bag of salad greens, cooking greens, roots, and herbs, as well as some form of communication (newsletter, artwork, recipe, etc) related to either the produce or the farm in general,” the site reads.

Although no one else appears ready to take advantage of the ruling just yet, Dana Perls, co-coordinator of the SFUAA, told the SF Weekly she thinks “this will have a trickle-down impact on people who work at Alemany [Farm] or Hayes Valley [Farm] who’ll be much more likely to farm their own land.”

Nonprofit urban farming groups also have the potential to have a larger impact on their communities, thanks to the new legislation. As SFUAA co-coordinator Antonio Roman-Alcalá wrote in a recent article here on Civil Eats, “Should for-benefit (i.e., non-profit) farm projects seek to raise some of their operating funds through sales, including of value-added products, this will now be allowed. This could also open the door for social justice-minded urban farms to create truly green jobs without requiring so much grant funding.”

It’s All About the Conditional Use Permit

In Oakland, the spotlight is on Novella Carpenter, the author of Farm City and an urban farmer known for her boundary-pushing experiments in backyard livestock. Until a few weeks ago, Carpenter had been selling her homegrown produce at a farm stand in her neighborhood; she stopped, however, after she was approached by a city official and told she was in violation for not having a permit.

Carpenter has blogged at length about her experience over the last three weeks as she’s struggled to untangle a knot of rules and regulations. She learned that growing vegetables on an empty lot in Oakland was in fact illegal without a permit (regardless of whether she was selling them). However, starting on April 14, when phase one of Oakland’s new urban agriculture laws took effect, that is not longer the case. Now, she’s been told, all she needs is a business license to grow and sell produce. But Carpenter’s goats, ducks, chickens, and rabbits are another case all together. Phase two of the urban agriculture laws will relate to animals, but it won’t take effect until next year. Although she raises the animals for home consumption alone, Carpenter is playing it safe. “I don’t know what kind of rules they’ll come up with and I’d rather have my CUP grandfathered in,” she says.

In the meantime, Carpenter has also been told that she may need a second permit for the farming she’s doing on property surrounding the apartment she rents, which is adjacent to the empty lot (the latter of which she owns). So, last week, she set out to raise the necessary $2,500 through her website, and on Wednesday announced that her goal had been met.

Meanwhile, thanks in part to a general petition supporting improved zoning for urban agriculture from the Oakland Food Policy Council and an outpouring of personal responses by Carpenter’s fans and supporters, Oakland mayor Jean Quan’s office has been inundated with phone calls and letters.

“I don’t want special treatment,” says Carpenter, who has been openly reluctant to ask for support. On the other hand, no one else has come forward to say they’ve been similarly fined. And, indeed, it may be Carpenter’s near-celebrity status (and a possible complaint by animal rights activists) that called attention to her farm.

The recent zoning changes in San Francisco happened in large part because of the existence of the SFUAA, which boasts nearly 50 member organizations and gained early support from Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor David Chiu. Carpenter has some hope that the nascent East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance, which was initiated by Esperanza Pallana from Pluck and Feather Farm, could take some of the pressure off Ghost Town Farm and initiate more of a community approach.

“It’s hard to be out on the front lines,” says the author/farmer. “I’m not made for politics.” But, as reluctant as she is, Carpenter is a powerful spokesperson for the right to farm in the city. When she learned that her home was in a zone of Oakland where farming was deemed illegal, she saw the problem as much bigger than her own. “This is a food sovereignty issue, especially in West Oakland,” she says, a traditionally under-resourced area, where grocery stores are scarce. She adds, “Folks around here have enough to deal with—and they’re not even allowed to grow chard?!”

Of course, not everyone looking to produce their own food in Oakland will take it to the level that Carpenter has. “I understand I might be an extreme example,” she says. “But I think I might be the future. More and more people are going to look for ways to grow their own food. So we have to find a way to make it legal.”

A version of this article was originally published by CUESA

This is a story about crap–literally, tons of it. Piling up in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and being sprayed onto farm fields, animal manure is polluting the nation’s waterways and is nearly impossible to regulate.

Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling [PDF] reversing the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requiring CAFOs to obtain a Clean Water Act permit in order to pollute. The court did uphold the EPA’s right to fine those that do pollute after the fact. Here’s the rub: Farmers are not responsible for manure that exits their property and enters waterways when it rains.

This is one of the many lawsuits against the EPA–issued by both environmental groups and pro-agribusiness organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, National Pork Producers Council, and United Egg Producers. For a small agency, with a $10 billion annual budget, it seems a lawsuit is the only way to force the EPA to take action. Hamstringing the EPA, which is high on the national Republican agenda [PDF], is both part of the grand plan of maintaining business as usual for agribusiness interests and a coordinated effort to step up the culture wars ahead of the 2012 election.

The EPA has been taking heat from agribusiness interests for decades, but that heat has been ratcheted up since Republicans took the House this year. Congress has called in EPA head Lisa Jackson to question her so many times, they’ve joked about giving her a parking space. She’s been asked, for example, about her plans to regulate greenhouse gases after a court mandate required it and about a plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay–the largest estuary in the U.S.–which is surrounded by industrial farms. In fact, the questioning has at times even become absurd, with GOP committee leaders stoking fears of regulating “cow flatulence, farm dust or milk spilled on dairy farms.”

Critics claim that the EPA stepping in to regulate greenhouse gases or farm run-off would eliminate jobs. There is, in fact, no proof or precedence from other environment-protecting regulations to demonstrate this and Jackson eloquently argued that regulation instead spurs creativity and creates jobs in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal last December, on the 40th anniversary of the agency’s founding.

The history of that founding is instructive: In 1970, appalled by the deteriorating quality of the air and water, 20 million people took to the streets (the largest American protest ever) on Earth Day and demanded that the Nixon Administration do something. This was just months after the Cuyahoga River in Ohio had caught fire because of flammable pollution.  The EPA was created and laws were written to support it: the Clear Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which gave the agency the ability to clean up where industrialization had made a big mess.

Along with banning the pesticide DDT, which has been linked to cancer and persists in the environment today, and taking on the biggest polluters, one of the early jobs of the EPA was to stop the practice of allowing human waste to be dumped in our waterways. It turns out that this was causing excessive algae growth, killing fish and other creatures, and was rendering these waters unswimmable. Since modern sewage treatment plants became de rigueur in the U.S., the problem has developed anew: Virtual animal cities producing tons of manure without any really sane method (ponds lined with plastic, anyone?) for keeping it out of our waterways have sprung up in greater numbers, with similar results. A tide of Republican deregulation along with a lack of interest or understanding by the public of the issues has allowed the problem to progress.

Every year nearly 10 billion animals are being raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S., and industry wants the public to believe that their waste is being used as a resource. But the fact of the matter is that there is just too much of it and it is filled with chemicals and antibiotics–chickens are often given feed that contains arsenic, for example. Those antibiotics might even be increasing the amount of nitrates in our drinking water. Manure was once a part of a functioning farm, but now it has become ersatz–stinking up rural areas, causing fly epidemics, and being linked to illnesses.

The Chesapeake Bay could set a precedent for cleaning up America’s waterways after years of run-off has spawned inter-sex frogs there and has created a “dead zone”–an area lacking oxygen where fish go belly up–which covers 40 percent of the Bay and is destroying the local fishing industry. The Chesapeake Bay isn’t alone: In the Gulf of Mexico, where nitrates and other run-off from Midwestern farm fields empties out of the Mississippi, there is a dead zone the size of Connecticut.

The EPA set out to clean up the Chesapeake Bay by putting it on a ‘diet’–regulating how much run-off from farms can enter the Bay. This set off a fire storm from agribusiness interests–the poultry industry in particular operates many facilities near the Bay, the House has attempted to defund the project and the Farm Bureau filed a lawsuit to take on the proposed Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) limits. These critics argue that voluntary measures are working just fine.

Unlike USDA, which is caught between promoting and regulating food and FDA, which deals with food, drug and product safety on an ever threatened budget, EPA has always understood its role as having to play the bad guy: Getting us to change things because it’s the right thing to do and because it improves our lives in the long term. It remains to be seen whether or not the public will rally in support of the EPA this time around. In light of the fact that a Democratic House and Senate couldn’t pass a climate bill–even with concessions to Republicans–and our president has not prioritized the environment like many might have wished, the EPA may be our only hope for making real changes that impact the way we produce our food.

Photo: aerial of a dead zone

For further insight on the pollution in America’s waterways, I highly recommend the Frontline documentary Poisoned Waters, which can be watched for free in its entirety here.

In both the case of the Chesapeake Bay watershed’s vast chicken factories and that of GM alfalfa, industrial agriculture is admitting that it needs to trash its neighbors and the surrounding landscape to thrive. It wants us to believe that there are no alternatives if we want to feed ourselves plentifully.

The idea that protecting the environment is a luxury we can’t afford is a standard defense for corporations in many sectors–though typically only trotted out by the dirtiest industrial polluters (e.g. coal and oil companies).

This argument tends to be more effective when the environment that’s being trashed has already been depopulated by economic forces (as in the sad decline of rural America). And as the natural gas drilling industry has discovered, it’s a lot easier to steamroll the widely disbursed residents of West Texas than it is when you’re drilling near population centers in New York or Pennsylvania. Still, the thing agribusiness has going for it is that, by and large, it has moved its biggest operations away from media and public attention.

But I do wonder in the two cases Philpott addresses, if agribusiness is using this threat as more an act of desperation than clever strategy. In the case of the Chesapeake, for which it is the primary cause of pollution at this point, industrial agriculture is mostly benefiting now from the unwillingness of local governments to take responsibility for the mess created by overuse of fertilizer and under-treatment of factory farm waste.

In fact, the “sky is falling” rhetoric is a direct response to the EPA’s move to penalize state and local governments for polluting the bay. As this WaPo article documented, the actual desire is to force farmers to pay, not consumers. When faced with the continued death of an eco-system from which millions of residents of several states benefit, claims of falling skies may not quite be enough.

As for the new USDA policy that supports protecting organic agriculture from contamination by genetically modified crops–on this point, agribusiness is all bluster. The USDA is partly doing this out of good intentions, but mostly because the science, and far more importantly, the courts, are demanding this policy shift. Even the Supreme Court, packed as it is with an industry-friendly majority, had to acknowledge the real risks of genetic contamination to other, legitimate forms of agriculture. And the series of losses in court over GM sugar beets has forced the USDA to bend, if not break, the law to maintain any plantings.

This fight is one to be welcomed. It represents the coming of age of organic ag. It doesn’t mean the reign of agribusiness is anywhere near over–but it does mean that organic agriculture is big enough and financially successful enough to represent a sector worthy of legal and policy protections. After all, there’s now real money at stake!

Look at me getting all sunny. Must be something in the water… Too bad agribusiness doesn’t want to clean it up.

Originally published on Beyond Green

When the New York Times reported on the growing phenomenon of underground food markets in New York City earlier this month, the Greenpoint Food Market in Brooklyn was forced to shut its doors.

The Times article “put us on radar with the officials,” wrote Joann Kim, the market’s organizer and founder, in an email to market devotees. “Since then we have gone back and forth with the city trying to find a solution to how the market can keep its mission while adhering to rules and regulations.”

Kim, 26, began the market after baking for friends and family grew from a hobby into a means of providing supplementary income. “I didn’t find the right channels or environments where my goods were welcomed,” she said. “So I daydreamed of a flea market setting selling only homemade food made by people like me: amateurs with an inkling in the kitchen and a special recipe up their sleeve.”

As food safety becomes a growing concern nationally, these small, artisanal producers have fallen under scrutiny for preparing their goods in uncertified home kitchens, and selling food items without liability insurance or a permit. However, to meet these requirements would mean that pursuing most small food businesses would not make financial sense.

Nationwide, certain states have opted to relax food safety laws for small home producers, re-igniting debate around how to balance food safety with laws that allow for small food businesses to thrive. In New York State, baked goods, candy (except chocolate), jams, spices, and snack foods like popcorn are exempt from the requirement of using a commercial kitchen. In Maine, small farms are allowed to slaughter chickens and sell them directly to consumers without oversight, and one legislator in Wyoming hopes to do away with all restrictions for home cooks selling directly to consumers altogether. While opponents claim that these kinds of exemptions put the public at risk, small producers argue that the face-to-face relationship with their customers provides a different kind of food safety guarantee.

“As many restrictions, regulations, and safety guidelines our federal legislative bodies can dream up, people are still dying from Salmonella from processed meat or tainted vegetables,” said Rich Awn, who has sold kombucha–a fermented tea beverage–under the name Mombucha at the Greenpoint Food Market. “As responsible makers of healthy food, we know better than to serve a product that’s ‘unsafe’.  We’re making it in the same way we’d make it for ourselves, our friends, and our families and in the spirit of fellowship, we want to share it and sustain the process.”

Awn and Kim are part of a surging movement in which cooks often bypass culinary school and restaurant kitchens, preferring to cut their teeth in home kitchens. Kim speculates that the enthusiasm around becoming a “small batch food producer” could be related to both career experimentation as people lose jobs in this economic downturn, as well as an “interest in learning not only how to make food but knowing where it came from and who exactly made it.” She said, “the direct connection, the human interaction that you’re able to get at the food market gets everyone excited and builds a strong incomparable sense of companionship and community.”

However the market, she stressed, is not an end in itself. “People do not make a whole lot of money at the market,” said Kim. “[It] serves as an incubator for folks to test their product, to see if it’s viable, and if it’s something they can take to a bigger, vaster level within launching a food business.”

Last Saturday, in lieu of the market, Kim hosted a panel, featuring Bob Lewis, Chief Marketing Representative at the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets; Sam Miller, Assistant Commissioner of the Intergovernmental Affairs Bureau at the NYC Health Department; Stephen Levin, Greenpoint City Council member; and a few of the producers, including Awn and Jessamyn Waldmen, the creator of the successful food and social justice venture, Hot Bread Kitchen. Over 50 people, many of whom have been vendors at the market, brought their empanadas, baked goods and prepared dishes to share as they participated in a town hall-style discussion about the future of the market.

One of the most promising ideas the panelists spoke about was turning a 2,500 square foot space in Greenpoint into an affordable incubator kitchen for around 30 cooks. Foundation, private, and corporate donation money, as well as membership fees, would help keep the prices low for producers testing the viability for their product. In addition, operating like a cooperative would mean that participants could teach classes, or run the planned retail shop in exchange for kitchen time. “This is for makers who’ve been producing goods out of their homes, unregulated, who are ready to take the next steps to legitimizing their business and willing to contribute their skills, time, and creativity to the benefit of the cooperative on the whole,” said Awn.

For now, the Greenpoint Food Market intends to be up and running again on July 24th, but all participants will have to comply with permits and food protection regulations. Meanwhile, Kim will continue talks with the Department of Health around the possibility of using group permits or other measures to amend food policy as it pertains to small markets.

“Working with local government to open an incubator kitchen is not exactly what I had in mind when creating [Greenpoint Food Market],” said Kim. “But it’s a beautiful evolutionary process with some serious growing pains but with hopefully a happy ending.”

From the article:

Biotech crop supporters say there is a wealth of evidence that the crops on the market are safe, but critics argue that after only 14 years of commercialized GMOs, it is still unclear whether or not the technology has long-term adverse effects.

Whatever the point of view on the crops themselves, there are many people on both sides of the debate who say that the current U.S. regulatory apparatus is ill-equipped to adequately address the concerns. Indeed, many experts say the U.S. government does more to promote global acceptance of biotech crops than to protect the public from possible harmful consequences.

Gillam goes on to describe the crux of this regulatory failure:

A common complaint is that the U.S. government conducts no independent testing of these biotech crops before they are approved, and does little to track their consequences after.

The developers of these crop technologies, including Monsanto and its chief rival DuPont, tightly curtail independent scientists from conducting their own studies. Because the companies patent their genetic alterations, outsiders are barred from testing the biotech seeds without company approvals.

Unlike several other countries, including France, Japan and Germany, the United States has never passed a law for regulating genetically modified crop technologies. Rather, the government has tried to incorporate regulation into laws already in existence before biotech crops were developed.

The result is a system that treats a genetically modified fish as a drug subject to Federal Drug Administration oversight, and a herbicide-tolerant corn seed as a potential “pest” that needs to be regulated by USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) before its sale to farmers.

This curtailment hasn’t stopped USDA researcher Robert Kremer, who has found possible detrimental effects of glyphosate (aka Roundup) on root systems and soil microbes. From the article:

…[Kremer] has spent the last several years studying soil and plant growth tests that appear to show ravaged root systems in biotech “Roundup Ready” plants.

The crops have been subjected to glyphosate applications and on the surface appear to be impervious to the weed-killing treatments as the genetic alteration allows. But the roots seem to tell a different story.

“This is supposed to be a wonderful tool for the farmer … but in many situations it may actually be a detriment,” Kremer said. “We have glyphosate released into the soil which appears to be affecting root growth and root-associated microbes. We need to understand what is the long-term trend here,” he said.

Kremer’s findings highlight why independent, unbiased research is so important: what we don’t know might hurt us.

On April 27th, the US Supreme Court will hear a case in which Monsanto is appealing a District Court judge’s ruling that requires the USDA to prepare an environmental impact statement on GM alfalfa. This will be the first case heard in the Supreme Court dealing with biotech crops. (Justice Clarence Thomas once worked as an attorney for Monsanto, but has not indicated that he will recuse himself). Should the court rule against Monsanto, it could set a precedent for stricter oversight before GM crops are put on the market. The USDA, meanwhile, has completed its environmental impact statement, but has yet to release the final version.

Some other interesting things from this report: Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, Roger Beachy, Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — all proponents of GMO technology –  go on the record for tighter regulations. Fedoroff, a crop biologist by training, said “We preach to the world about science-based regulations but really our regulations on crop biotechnology are not yet science-based.”

Another interesting thing worth noting in this report is that when the US State Department is first mentioned, it is followed by this descriptive clause: “which promotes GMO adoption overseas.” This is the first time I’ve seen this task of the US State Department so clearly laid out in print, though from the rhetoric used by Clinton, Federoff and USAID head Rajiv Shah, it is an obvious truth. In fact, promoting GMOs abroad seems to be the standard operating procedure for the government these days. The Global Food Security Act in the Senate, for example, effectively earmarks a chunk of its $7.7 billion dollar funding pot  in biotech giveaways. More than one hundred groups have already signed onto a letter [pdf] opposing this controversial language in the bill.

The problem remains: Without thorough research, and so many questions left unanswered about GM crops, should we really be promoting them with such fervor abroad?

The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops began last Friday in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels–and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.

It’s hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government’s claim that they’re shocked, shocked to discover there’s anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been–in Washington at least–the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it’s the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing.

And while the whole of the industry will get attention, much of the focus so far has been on Monsanto, which thanks to its aggressive practices–along with support from the USDA–now controls up to 90% of the seed business in some markets. It’s to the point that in many parts of the country non-Monsanto (and thus non genetically engineered seed) are simply unavailable to farmers.

The Justice Department is already investigating the company and it will undoubtedly get a lot of attention during these workshops. But knowing the Obama administration’s support for biotechnology generally and reading between the lines in this NY Times article on the issues involved with Monsanto, I’m starting to get concerned.

The way the article characterizes the debate, the goal appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto’s intellectual property, i.e. the herbicide-tolerant genetic traits in its seeds, rather than to broaden access to conventional seeds:

Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking.

Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition.

But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry.

The rest of the article focuses on the legal battles between Monsanto and Dupont, another biotech giant, over access to Monsanto’s patents. It may very well be that the anti-competitive behavior the government punishes is that which prevents even greater adoption of biotech seeds — the opposite of what many progressives want out of anti-trust enforcement.

Until we can displace agricultural productivity as the only measure of success of government policy, even this new attention to anti-competitive practices is unlikely to lead to meaningful reform. To me the focus must be on finding ways to increase farmers’ share of consumers’ spending without threatening significant increases in food prices — there is, after all, no government that likes to champion policies that increase the cost of food. Nothing puts a damper on electoral prospects like bread riots.

Keep in mind that a mere 7 cents of the consumer’s food dollar gets to the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution costs. The only way we can get to a win-win — and not be forced to choose between higher farmer income or higher retail prices — is to let the middleman, i.e. the processors and yes, the retailers — take the hit. Sadly, I don’t think Walmart, Safeway or Whole Foods are on the agenda at the moment, even though some experts believe the real squeeze on farmers comes from them.

It’s when we start having discussions like that and start recognizing that a relentless focus on agricultural production simply is not consistent with helping rural economies that I’ll believe we might just be getting somewhere.

Originally published at Beyond Green

The FDA finally released its BPA report. The good news is that the FDA now admits that BPA—the endocrine-disrupting, heart disease-causing ingredient in plastic food packaging and can linings—isn’t entirely safe (contradicting the agency’s statement from 2008 that it was), particularly for infants and children. The bad news? There’s not much the agency can do about it. Here are the immediate, limited steps the FDA feels it can take “to reduce human exposure to BPA in the food supply”:

support the industry’s actions to stop producing BPA-containing baby bottles and infant feeding cups for the U.S. market;

facilitate the development of alternatives to BPA for the linings of infant formula cans;

and support efforts to replace BPA or minimize BPA levels in other food can linings.

In short, BPA can continue to be legally used until further notice, even in baby bottles, and certainly in food and drink can linings. Not exactly the outcome some of us were hoping for. Oh, but don’t worry, the FDA assures us that more studies are forthcoming—as if we don’t have enough data already.

And buried in the report summary is an excuse admission from the FDA that, in essence, its hands are tied:

Current BPA food contact uses were approved under food additive regulations issued more than 40 years ago.  This regulatory structure limits the oversight and flexibility of FDA.  Once a food additive is approved, any manufacturer of food or food packaging may use the food additive in accordance with the regulation.  There is no requirement to notify FDA of that use. For example, today there exist hundreds of different formulations for BPA-containing epoxy linings, which have varying characteristics.  As currently regulated, manufacturers are not required to disclose to FDA the existence or nature of these formulations.  Furthermore, if FDA were to decide to revoke one or more approved uses, FDA would need to undertake what could be a lengthy process of rulemaking to accomplish this goal.

Rulemaking, remember, can take years to complete—even a ban wouldn’t be immediate, the agency claims. There’s a different, more appropriate, law with different requirements—the Food Contact Notification Program of 2000—that the FDA would like to use to regulate BPA. But to do so, companies would need to re-submit BPA for approval. The FDA “will encourage manufacturers to voluntarily submit a food contact notification” for BPA which would then give the agency more leeway to regulate it. Industry has been so helpful to this point what with their authoring of the 2008 safety statement and their attempt to recruit a pregnant woman as a spokesperson for their endocrine-disrupting product that I’m sure they’ll oblige. Further, the agency is concerned that a rush to replace BPA with another chemical might have unintended consequences. And if the history of BPA is any guide, the FDA is probably right that industry can’t exactly be trusted to get it right the second time.

Read a certain way, this report is a bureaucratic cry for help—Congress, after all, can solve this problem with a wave of the President’s pen by passing the Senate’s Feinstein-Schumer bill that would set a strict timeline for ending the use of BPA in food packaging. Alternately, someone could attach a rider to an unrelated bill requiring all companies using BPA to submit it for review under the 2000 food contact notification law.

The takeaway here is that the FDA doesn’t think they really have the authority to ban BPA or even to meaningfully restrict its use. This is another symptom of the attenuated, outdated legal regime that the government must use to protect us from the witch’s brew of industrial chemicals in which we bubble. It seems that only Congress can provide the antidote.

Originally published on Grist

One thing we know for sure is that we just don’t know enough about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biotechnology to know that in planting their seeds, we aren’t affecting future generations’ ability to feed themselves. For many people, the fact that they’re corporately controlled and thus make for bad social policy, or that they genetically contaminate other species and as such increase claims against farmers, while undermining a farmer’s ability to save seed and be self sufficient, are enough of an argument against their propagation. But in Claire Hope Cummings’ excellent book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, she weaves in the stories of the people and places behind a phenomenon that’s gotten a few rich, while farmers struggle with shrinking margins.

Almost all of the foods we eat — including rice, corn, wheat, soy, potatoes, cassava, taro, sugar, coffee, canola, sunflowers and many other fruits and vegetables — have been patented or genetically modified. The genetic modification of which Cummings writes is a novel act, and one that could never be replicated in nature. This is because while traditional breeding has crossed similar species to find the hardiest plants, genetically engineered foods today are jumping the species barrier, so that you might have fish genes in a tomatoes, for example. Unfortunately, this means that there is no precedent for how these novel species could act in our ecosystem in the long term. Cummings explains it this way:

In itself, gene flow is not necessarily harmful. What matters is the kind of molecule that is moving around, where it goes, and how it behaves once it gets there. When transgenes [or genetically modified genes] used to modifying one plant move into another plant, they can become unstable and behave unpredictably. When natural genes do this, they are governed by biological rules that organisms have developed over millennia to deal with gene flow and to keep species separate. When artificially engineered genes do this, however, different rules come into play. Genetic engineering by definition overcomes these rules in order to create new genes and organisms. Genetic engineering is the very essence of invasiveness, by design.

Cummings also looks at how GMOs came to be in regulatory purgatory, where a risk assessment — a concept which requires proof of harm, and was meant to be used for chemical pollution and devised long before the concept of genetic pollution  — has been used for a practice that involved a lot of uncertainty. A risk assessment is used in place of the “precautionary principle,” which argues that where there is uncertainty, government must act first to protect the public. This is the standard in most other countries. Meanwhile the FDA, USDA and EPA do not coordinate their oversight, and these agencies haven’t been taking into account newer science that questions the efficacy and long-term viability of biotechnology in agriculture. Case in point, no new laws regulating GMOs have been put in place since these seeds were given the green light for mass planting in the US. Cummings writes:

The regulatory system we have today is the same one, with some minor exceptions, that was adopted in the early 1990s. It effectively exempted this one industry from our most important environmental and consumer protection laws, which guarantee our right to know what is in the products we consume and our right to sue manufacturers when the government fails to protect our safety.

Increasingly, people want more information about the food they eat. While 80% of processed foods at the supermarket in the US contain GMOs, they are not required to be labeled. Yet public opinion polls regularly show that around 90% of Americans want these products labeled. Meanwhile, in Europe and Japan all GMOs are labeled, and companies have no issues with compliance. GMOs can only either produce pesticides, or express immunity to herbicide. In other words, they have so far had less luck fulfilling promises to add value for consumers, which might mean that adding these traits is harder to pull off than the corporations would like us to believe. Cummings summed up our regulatory failures this way:

The problem is, GMO manufacturers are a chemical industry posing as agriculture. They say they are about creating life. Their ads always show happy faces and healthy plants. But what they are really about is death, the poisoning of weeds and insects. Transgenic plants are created by agrochemical companies and used in the same way that those companies’ chemicals are used: as pest controls. If these plants were treated as chemicals, they might be handled more carefully.

To me, this chapter, “Trespass,” is the most compelling part of the book. Cummings discusses here how contamination is one of the biggest risks we take with the planting of GMOs. Contamination occurs through cross-pollination, but also when GMO seeds are mixed in with conventional seeds — and the wind, animals and human activity are all involved, adding a level of unpredictability. Co-existence of GMO and conventional species is a myth the industry is happy to propagate. This is because they know very well that as they hold patents to their seeds, and those seeds cross-pollinate, they also own the new contaminated seeds — thus it makes good business sense. But does it make ecological sense?

Uncertain Peril is a muckraking journalist’s take on biotechnology written like a thriller. It is also a look at seed-saving historically, along with the agro-ecological solutions arising to combat the so-called inevitability of genetically modified food. While many people have black and white opinions about GMOs, Cummings gives fuel to the fire of those who believe that perhaps this is just a flawed technology, and that there are better ways to combat hunger and to be food secure. Sustainable agriculture has been proven the antidote to corporately dominated and risk-laden food. Here is Cummings again:

It is essential that our solutions be place-based. The issue of place is often neglected in the search for sustainability. Placeless solutions become too focused on the technology and not enough on locality. Place is essential to the sustainability equasion because our solutions have to be locally adapted and locally accepted.

Too often we think the solutions to our problems can always come through technology. Hopefully this book, published in 2008, will be widely read and we can begin to have a more nuanced discussion about the technologies that truly benefit us as a species and those to which we should say “enough.”

Now, more than a half a century after that first declaration, that same date brought the movie Food, Inc. to theaters, a film that reveals the dysfunction of our food system. With obesity rates at the highest point in history, contaminated food regularly sickening thousands, and government estimating we will continue to spend 6.2% more on healthcare annually (this year, an additional $200 billion, more than our annual economic growth of 4.1%), it is clear that we have a problem as big as smoking: an addiction to cheap, unhealthy food perpetuated by an industry intent on maximizing profits at the expense of our health and our land. It is time to regulate Big Food by changing the culture in Washington that allowed it to proliferate.

According to a recent study [pdf] by Kelly D. Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner at Yale University, the food industry is using “similar legal, political, and business strategies” that were once employed in tobacco, including dismissing peer-reviewed studies that make a connection between their product and disease, paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies, denying the addictive nature of their products to create doubt in the minds of consumers, and advertising heavily to children. A powerful lobby also ensures that agribusiness as usual is maintained in Washington.

But we know the food system as it stands right now isn’t working, and that it isn’t sustainable. Cheap processed food requires commodities like corn, soy, wheat, and rice. The production of these crops currently depends on industrial-scale, acreage-intensive monoculture that is in turn not feasible without surplus water, cheap oil and fertilizer, and a stable climate, all of which are at risk for becoming scarce.

Instead of taking a seat at the table, Big Food has renounced as “junk science” peer-reviewed studies showing the correlation to obesity with the proximity to a fast food restaurant. It has actively denied the science proving the relationship between soda consumption and weight problems and diabetes. Big Tobacco spent years insisting that there wasn’t enough evidence that smoking caused lung cancer. The results were that millions of people had to die before the government acted.

Good health, food safety and sustainability will never exist in our current food system. Big Food is standing in the way of change with agribusiness campaign funding and corporate ties moving through the Washington revolving door that brings lobbyists, consultants and strategists to high level positions. Historically, thirty-two members of the Senate Agriculture Committee and fifty of the House Agriculture Committee have had these ties to industry.

We were able to rattle the grip of Big Tobacco loose and we can start to do so now with Big Food by tightening campaign finance reform. Agribusiness is one of the largest lobbying interests in the capital, spending nearly 140 million in 2008 according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In creating a system based on public financing, their power could be greatly diminished. Food production is controlled from seed to supermarket shelf by a handful of companies [pdf], who are in effect deciding what we can and cannot access to eat. 83.5% of all beef-packing was controlled by 4 companies in 2007, while the numbers for pork-packing (66%), chicken processing (58.5%) and turkey (55%) reflect the same lack of competition. This extends to soy bean crushing (80%) and wet corn processing (74%), both sectors producing many of the ingredients in the processed foods we consume. President Obama has promised to take a hard line on anti-trust regulations, including those impacting agricultural companies. This would be a great start to building a better food system.

In addition, our government should fully fund unbiased studies assessing the long term sustainability of our food system. Most food research is funded by industry, and therefore focuses on biotech and other subjects that favor its development, rather than forming true assessments of the safety of our food and the lasting health impacts of our current food system. We can also change the incentive structure by incentivizing better farming practices like crop rotation, intercropping, smaller-scale food and animal operations that improve the air, water and land quality of the local environment.

President Obama can also nominate a Surgeon General who could set the tone for a better food system. A strong Surgeon General should warn Americans about the longterm health effects of consuming fast foods, and educate and advise the public about the outcomes of unbiased government studies. He/she should also oversee the labeling of foods for their possible detrimental health effects. The tobacco industry no longer has the power to advertise wherever it pleases, nor can it advertise to children; cigarettes are properly labeled with health advisories. A similar tack needs to be taken with unhealthy food.

While millions still die of smoking related illness every year, it’s not too late to lift the veil from Big Food, and in doing so, save lives and public health for years to come.

h/t to Bonnie Powell and Naomi Starkman