Back to Basics

PHOTOS.COM

The European Union is considering a law that regulates all plants by placing immediate restrictions on vegetables and woodland trees and laying the groundwork to restrict all other plant species in the future.

The psychopathic elites at the EU understand that if they control the food supply, they control the population. The Plant Reproductive Material Law makes it illegal to grow, reproduce or trade any vegetable seed or tree that has not been tested by the newly created EU Plant Variety Agency, which will be tasked with making a listing of “approved plants.”

Following an upheaval by hundreds of thousands of people protesting the possibility of such an Orwellian control agency deciding what foods are approved and making criminals out of farmers who want to use their own seed, the law was amended to:

• “Permit” home gardeners to swap “unapproved seed” without breaking the law.
• Allow individuals and small organizations (with fewer than 10 employees) to grow and sell “unapproved seeds.”
• Establish seedbanks that can grow “unapproved seeds” without breaking the law.

Even with these minor changes it’s still an egregious assault on liberty. Under a similar law, rather than being considered one of the United States’ greatest scientists, George Washington Carver would have been a common criminal and enemy of the state.

The law is designed to give Big Farm organizations like Monsanto, DuPont and and Archer Daniels Midland absolute authority over seeds, limiting the availability of sustainable heirloom seeds and forcing consumers to use genetically modified seeds. I have pointed out how well that is working here, here, here and here.

Understand that if this becomes law in the EU, it’s only a matter of time before the collectivists in the United States begin a similar move here.

The Ag Department first announced it as “exciting changes” to school lunches. Then a student tried the new menu and was admitted to the vomitorium for evaluation. Then another. Then several more. Before too long there was lost appetite pandemic. In response to the criticism, the caloric regs were loosened a little — which brings us to some good news, and some bad news. The good news: Michelle Obama says they’re working to make school lunches more “delicious.” The bad news: She’s referring to the same administration that said they were going to make health care more affordable.

From The Hill:

First lady Michelle Obama said Friday that the Department of Agriculture (USDA) was working on making school lunches “delicious” after the implementation of new school meal regulations that have drawn fire from some conservative critics.

“I believe that that legislation is truly one of the greatest legacies that we can leave our children. Because of this act … 32 million American children are getting more of the nutrition they need to learn and grow and be successful,” Obama told workers at the USDA.

“And I do hope that it’s delicious,” she added, to laughter. “We’re working on that, yes indeed.”

Last autumn, conservative critics of the new standards — which cap meal calories at 650 for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, at 700 calories for middle school students and 850 calories for high school students — charged that the restrictions made meals unappetizing to children.

And by “conservative critics” they mean “anybody who tried eating the stuff”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IB7NDUSBOo

Have any of these supposed attempts to get kids to eat better ever included calling on parents not to rely on the school for everything and instead pack their own brown bag lunches? Sorry, silly question.

PHOTOS.COM

America was once the breadbasket for the world. Produce grown in the U.S. fed people across the globe. No longer.

Now countries are banning U.S. foods in an effort to spare their citizens from the health hazards of genetically modified foods, also known as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Monsanto leads the way in GMO foods. About 90 percent of all corn, soybeans and cotton are grown from genetically engineered seeds. The genetically modified products are now found in about 70 percent of all American processed food. And Monsanto controls about 90 percent of all genetically engineered seeds.

In other words, Monsanto has almost a complete monopoly on the U.S. food supply. It accomplished this by becoming the fourth branch of government. There is a revolving door between government regulatory agencies, Congressional staffs and Big Agriculture companies Monsanto, Dow and Bayer. Michael Taylor is a perfect example.

Taylor is the Deputy Commission for Foods for the Food and Drug Administration. Over his career he has jumped from the FDA to a law firm representing Monsanto (where he worked specifically for Monsanto), back to the FDA, over to the United States Department of Agriculture, back to the law firm, over to Monsanto, to a think tank, to a university and back to the FDA.

During his second tenure at the FDA the agency’s policies regarding GMOs were changed to allow them pass without scrutiny.

GMOs are hazardous to the people and animals exposed to them, as I wrote here. Unfortunately, avoiding GMOs is becoming an impossible task.

GMOs got their start at a Monsanto plant in the backwaters of Louisiana. During the 1970s, Monsanto was one of the nation’s largest chemical companies. It has a patent on a product named glyphosate, which it markets as Roundup. Roundup is a weed killer, and since its weed-killing properties broke down quickly in the soil, farmers could coat the ground with it to kill the vegetation and then plant crops a short time later.

At the Louisiana plant, organisms that could withstand glyphosate were found growing in waste ponds. Scientists isolated and extracted the gene that gave them tolerance to the chemical and began placing that gene into soybeans and corn. The result is what is known as Roundup Ready crops: crops that can withstand repeated sprayings of Roundup during the growing season.

But glyphosate is now showing up in ground water in unhealthy levels miles removed from the farms at which it is used. Traces are even being found in the urine of city dwellers. It also crosses the placental barrier and is found in the blood of unborn children.

The technology used to make crops Roundup Ready has evolved to where pesticides are now also placed within seeds, making them resistant to the pests.

But these “advances” are having deleterious effects on nature. Just as increased use of antibiotics have begun creating antibiotic resistant “superbugs,” use of Roundup Ready crops is creating “frankenweeds” that are impervious to herbicides and use of seeds containing pesticides are creating “frankenbugs” that withstand and even thrive on the plants. But it’s decimating the populations of the pollinators.

The Wall Street Journal in its December, 12, 2012, online edition reports:

“Sales of land used to grow crops are surging, with owners capitalizing on a sustained rise in real-estate values driven by low interest rates and historically high prices for corn and soybeans.”

This is a repeat of the phenomenon that occurred during the destructive stagflation of the 1970s, when money was channelled into fixed assets such as farmland as an inflation shield.  Farm prices, by 1982, collapsed, leaving farmers bankrupted by unsustainable debt, when the Fed under Paul Volcker stopped creating fiat money and stopped inflation.

The farmland price picture today is further distorted by Congress’s ill-advised mandate for use of ever-increasing amounts of ethanol as a gasoline additive.  Not only does that not reduce so-called greenhouse gas production, it also diverts large acreage from production of other foods, driving up their prices. People around the world have to reduce their food consumption, while farmers in the United States are hit with higher feed costs.

Michele Obama’s ruthless attempt to seize fascist control over the menus and dietary habits of American school children took a severe hit when the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) heeded the pleas of starving students who protested the anti-meat malarkey pushed by the other communist occupying the White House.

As reported at the reference:

U.S. regulators dealt a blow to First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity campaign by announcing they are relaxing school meal rules.

Mrs. Obama had supported new rules that would restrict calories and limit portion sizes in school meals but some students, parents and lawmakers complained that new stricter policies left many children hungry.

Under the adjustment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would suspend daily and weekly maximum amounts for grains and meat or meat alternatives. That means school districts this year can serve larger portions of those items without penalty.

USDA officials said late on Friday they were loosening the regulations after some schools found it difficult to buy alternative portion sizes of such foods from suppliers. Some also said they had inventory to use up that does not meet the new guidelines.”

Most of all, food experts found that growing children NEED meat and should not be starved just to inflate the out-of-control ego of an unelected leftist with way too much time on her chubby hands!

So, bring on the beef, and to heck with commie schemes pushed by Barack and Michelle Obama!

John W. Lillpop
San Jose, California

John W. Lillpop is a recovering liberal. “Clean and sober” since 1992 when last he voted for a Democrat. Pray for John: He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where people like Nancy Pelosi are actually considered normal!.

In early September, “Let’s Move” released a back-to-school message featuring Michelle Obama announcing “exciting changes” to the lunch menus of public schools:

“And today I want to tell you about some exciting changes that you’ll be seeing in your school cafeterias,” she said. “Starting this year, the talented people who cook the food at your school will be offering all kinds of healthy, delicious new choices. Foods that are good for you and that taste good, too.”

“These healthy foods are good for your body, they’ll give you energy and make you stronger and they’re also good for your mind,” Mrs. Obama said.

“Studies show that when you eat healthy foods like fruits and vegetables that can actually help you pay attention in class and do a better job on your homework and tests.”

“And that’s really what this is all about,” she said.

I have two kids in high school and one in junior high, and though they take their own lunches on most days, I’ve heard stories from their friends about the quantity and quality of the new menu (the biggest complaint being that the new pizza with the whole wheat crust isn’t served with an antiemetic on the side). As it turned out, there was a national backlash over the new lunch menu.

The complaints have reverberated all the way back to Washington, and now the Ag Department is beating a quick retreat:

The Agriculture Department is responding to criticism over new school lunch rules by allowing more grains and meat in kids’ meals.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of Congress in a letter Friday that the department will do away with daily and weekly limits of meats and grains. Several lawmakers wrote the department after the new rules went into effect in September saying kids aren’t getting enough to eat.

School administrators also complained, saying set maximums on grains and meats are too limiting as they try to plan daily meals.

“This flexibility is being provided to allow more time for the development of products that fit within the new standards while granting schools additional weekly menu planning options to help ensure that children receive a wholesome, nutritious meal every day of the week,” Vilsack said in a letter to Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D.

It only took a few months for the food cops and nutrition nannies in DC to come to a collective epiphany: By the time these kids grow up they may well have forgotten who exactly stuck them with trillions and trillions worth of debt, but they will always remember who made them eat s#*tty pizza.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IB7NDUSBOo

The one thing you can count on during the Christmas season is an avalanche of media-driven scare campaigns by environmental and self-appointed consumer protection groups that are intended to ruin it with claims that everything you eat or do has the potential of killing you and your loved ones.

Here’s an example; in December 2011 GreenLivingIdeas.com posted an article by Sanya Kanelstran to let everyone know that, during the Christmas season, “A heart attack can strike at any time in a person with coronary artery disease, but heart attacks are more likely during the festive season and especially between the Christmas and New Year period because of the change in diet and lifestyle around the holidays.” So, happy holidays and try not to die.

The folks at Naturalnews.com posted an item on December 17, 2010 that warned that “Those Christmas-colored snack chips and store-bought cookies, but watch out. Eating them may cause side effects such as hyperactivity, especially in children. That’s because nearly all Christmas-colored foods achieve their colors through the use of artificial coloring chemicals, including Red #40.”

ItsMyHealth.com issued a warning in November by Julie Robotham. “Traditionalists love their roast turkey with all the trimmings on Christmas day, but with food poisoning from poultry more prevalent than ever, it pays to take care with the preparation of raw meat.” Properly cooking turkey or any other meat is sufficient to kill most, if not all, bacteria.

The Internet is filled with these posts and, during the holiday season, you can count on the media to repeat them because scaring people is the stock-in-trade of most reporting. A welcome change from this is Fox News channel’s John Stossel who has devoted his career to debunking food and other claims that do not stand up to the scrutiny of fact-checking.

On a November 29, 2012 program, aired on Fox Business and Fox News, Stossel revisited the lies about finely textured, 95% lean beef. As I wrote in a commentary debunking the lies about “pink slime”, a term applied to this, “This lean beef is routinely added to lower quality hamburger to increase its protein content and its production has long been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It actually improves the nutritional quality of a lot of cheaper hamburger.”

Stossel reported that “What some media outlets call ‘pink slime’ is perfectly safe because it’s just meat. It’s made from the meat that clings to the bones—the parts that the meat cutters missed. An added safety factor to kill any bacteria is its treatment with a tiny ammonium hydroxide gas.” There have been no reports of illness from the consumption of finely textured lean beef. Moreover, the process is also used to protect processed cheese, chocolate, and soda. And it exists naturally in beef!

In May, the Washington Times published a commentary by J. Justin Wilson, a senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group devoted to debunking food and other product scares. In “Funny Food Hypocrisy” Wilson examined the ‘pink slime” campaign waged against finely textured lean meet.

If you’re in Chicago and the tragically high number of shootings have you living in fear of getting killed by a vending machine, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s got your back:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday he’s cracking down on the caloric content of vending machines in city buildings and plans to replace them all with healthy vending by next year.

A proposed ordinance, to be introduced this week, will lay out plans for the new machines and detail guidelines on fat, sugar and calorie content starting in January 2013.

“These new vending machines will make it easier than ever before for city employees and the public to make healthy lifestyle decisions,” Emanuel said. “When city employees take their wellness into their own hands, we can reduce health care costs and also serve as a model for the residents of Chicago when it comes to making healthy choices.”

Emanuel’s guidelines dictate that only 25 percent of the new machines’ cold beverages can be “high calorie,” or contain 25 calories or more per eight ounces. All hot drinks must not be high-calorie, and all vended drinks must be limited to 12 ounces.

According to the plan, at least 75 percent of food offerings should contain 250 calories or less and at least five items should contain 250mg or less of sodium per serving. A gluten- and nut-free option also must be provided.

Apparently Emanuel’s applying the Remington-Flockhart Theory of Public Safety, which posits that stray bullets are slightly less likely to strike thin people.

Does it strike you as ironic that, along with all the advertisements for programs and pills that allegedly can help you lose weight, that there are also just as many urging you to eat all manner of tempting foods or dine out at America’s fast-food chains and restaurants?

In Lisa Tillinger Johansen’s new book, “Fast Food Vindication”, the dietician-author says, “Recently, several overweight/obese people have sued fast food chains for damages related to their weight gains, These people held the restaurants, not themselves, responsible for their excess pounds,” noting that “Congress eventually passed legislation to prevent frivolous lawsuits of this type from clogging the judicial system.”

Ms. Johansen is well aware that “There’s a serious obesity epidemic in the United States and it’s a growing problem throughout the world.”  I can remember was widespread famine and food scarcity. “Clean your plate,” mothers in the 1940s would tell their children, “there are children starving in China.”  Not anymore. The same American fast-food chains are busy these days in a China that has embraced capitalism while retaining a one-party system of government.

Ms. Johansen draws on her training as a registered dietician and her research, saying that one is more likely to over-eat in a sit-down restaurant and grow fat from “decreased or non-existent physical activity; increased caloric intake from snacks, sodas and energy drinks; and the content and size of foods prepared at home.

So, it’s your fault if you’re fat or your kids are fat.

The government is now engaging in all manner of advertising and other efforts to advise and keep people from getting fat, but the recent efforts of Michelle Obama regarding school lunch programs have backfired because the kids say they’re still hungry from the reduced portion sizes and the choices of food.

All this is of interest to me because my late Mother, Rebecca, wrote two cookbooks and taught gourmet cooking for some three decades in the adult schools of the community in which we lived or that were nearby our town. When soldiers returned from service in World War II, lots of them had been introduced to French and other cuisines, and they wanted their wives to learn how to prepare it. Television shows featured early teachers like Dionne Lucas and Julia Childs. Today, one can select from a dozen such programs.

One might think that I grew fat at my Mother’s dinner table, both neither she, my Dad, nor myself were fat because of the size of the portions and the wine that was served that helped metabolize what we ate. Age alone gifted my Dad and I with the familiar “belly” that men develop at the same time that fat goes to women’s buttocks.

In 2008, Dr. Connie Mann, M.D., wrote “Fat: It’s Not What You Think” (Prometheus Books) in which she said, “While experts purport to know how much fat is healthy and unhealthy, the truth is nobody really knows. People are different.” We know, however, if we’re fat. We need only look in the mirror. And too much weight does pose health risks.

“You need to take into consideration,” wrote Dr. Mann, “factors such as age, gender, physical activity, race, and where on your body the fat accumulates.”

Fat, however, has many positive factors for your health.

If you say “genetically modified food” to most people they will swear to you they would never eat it, but Americans have been eating biotech crops for years and they are not dying in the streets.

They are, in fact, getting fatter from eating too much of the abundance of foods that fill our supermarkets. Want to lose weight? Eat less, exercise more. We have a lot of fat kids in America because too many sit on their bottoms for hours every day either watching television or playing with the various wonders of technology they prefer rather than getting out and playing basketball, baseball, soccer, riding a bike, or any other activity that isn’t restricted to using their thumbs to “text” one another.

Every so often I am driven to a state of rage over the stupidity of people who are utterly clueless regarding biotech crops, but who insist that eating “organic” foods grown with no protection against insect and weed predation is safe. I most certainly do not want to eat anything that involves using manure to aid its growth.

The latest example of gross stupidity comes, of course, from California which has Proposition 37 on its November ballot. Its official name is the “Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.” It would require labeling of anything involving GM foods. No foods would be allowed to be marketed as “natural”, “naturally made”, “naturally grown” or “all natural.”

Meanwhile, one third of all the corn grown in America has been genetically modified even as the federal government insanely demands that billions of bushels be turned into fuel substitute—ethanol—that corrodes auto engines and decreases the mileage gasoline provides.

The modifications that have been developed over the years ensure larger crop yields because they are able to resist drought, their natural pesticides have been enhanced to fend off the countless species of insects that would destroy them or permit the use of herbicides that kill the weeds that would choke their growth if not eliminated without having any effect on the crops they protect.

Why is it that humans are always thrilled to learn that some new pharmaceutical discovery will cure a disease that would otherwise kill them, but the blood drains from their face if you tell them that the food they eat has been produced from genetically modified seeds?

The fact is that biotech food crops have survived rigorous regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that demonstrates they are any different from foods that are not grown from GM seeds. Despite the claims that there have been “studies” that “suggest”, “indicate”, or otherwise infer a health problem, the bottom line is that there is zero proof of this.

Last year I wrote a five-part series on Bisphenol A, a chemical in use safely for decades and that continues to protect plastic and other containers of food against spoilage and has the added advantage of keeping plastic bottles from breaking. Thousands of studies attest to its safety, but the Internet is filled with articles claiming it is a threat to health.