Month Without Monsanto Tips
March 10, 2011 | Alexis Baden-Mayer and Ronnie Cummins
Organic Consumers Association
Eat Organic, Not Franken-foods
- Buy organic food at your grocery store and local farmers' market.
- Eat only organic and pasture-raised animal products or go vegan — non-organic animal products come from factory farms where the intensively confined, horribly-abused animals are force-fed GMO grains, animal drugs, and growth hormones.
- Avoid greasy and unhealthy fried Franken-foods — non-organic vegetable oils are made from GMO canola, soy, corn & cotton.
- Skip non-organic baked goods (crackers, cookies, pastries) — if they aren't organic, they're probably made with GMO trans fats (hydrogenated vegetable oils) and genetically engineered soy lecithin.
- Boycott non-organic margarine and salad dressings — GMO vegetable oils again.
- Cut out non-organic sweets, including soda, candy & breakfast cereals — here's where the GMO high fructose corn syrup and sugar (50% of sugar comes from Monsanto's sugar beets) hides out.
No non-organic condiments (ketchup, jelly, maple syrup) — GMO high fructose corn syrup again.
- Quit buying Monsanto's Franken-soy — health food consumers would probably never dream of drinking a Coke; our GMO weakness is soy, ubiquitous in the non-organic "energy" snacks and vegetarian foods that are often misleadingly referred to as "natural".
- Use the Non-GMO Shopping Guide.
Wear Organic, Not Franken-threads
- As original Month Without Monsanto blogger April Dávila found, Monsanto's tentacles reach far beyond the grocery aisles.
- Our non-organic, often sweatshop cotton clothing has sprouted from Monsanto's seeds, too.
- For a discussion of organic, Fair Trade, and recycled clothing alternatives see OCA's Clothes for a Change campaign:
http://organicconsumers.org/clothes/index.cfm
Drive Less, Use Waste Veggie Oil, Not Franken-fuels
- Even the gas is our cars is Monsanto-made! About 35% of the U.S. corn crop is made into ethanol.
It's tough to choose between supporting Monsanto and Exxon Mobil or BP. Fact is, we need to drive less and carpool more–better yet walk, bike, and use public transportation whenever possible.
As an alternative to Monsanto's ethanol, waste vegetable oil from restaurants seems to be a possible option for people driving cars retrofitted for veggie diesel fuel.
- OCA's Washington, DC political director Alexis Baden-Mayer fuels her chartreuse 1985 Mercedes station wagon with waste vegetable oil from an Asian diner in her neighborhood. Trouble is, this diner's grease is straight GMO soy oil! What can a Month Without Monsanto activist consumer do? The waste oil would end up in the landfill if Alexis didn't pick it up. At least Alexis maintains her Month Without Monsanto pledge by refraining from ordering the restaurant's (non-organic) veggie tempura she secretly craves. Better to make your own organic veggie tempura at home.
Here's something we can all do: speak out against the federal government using billions of our tax dollars to subsidize GMO crops such as corn for ethanol, factory farms, and climate-destabilizing chemical farming. Tell everyone you know that ethanol is a scam, that it uses just as much fossil fuel as it supposedly saves, that it raises world food prices and starves the poor, and that it pumps dangerous greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that have already destabilized global climate patterns. If we're going to grow corn, it needs to be organic corn, and it needs to be corn that fed to people, not factory-farmed animals or cars.
The Obama Administration's USDA recently approved a new corn variety genetically engineered by Syngenta to be easier to convert to ethanol. Like crops that are modified to produce pharmaceuticals, GMO ethanol crops present a huge contamination danger to our food supply.
The threat is not lost on the grain industry. On Valentine's Day, five major trade associations whose member companies store, process, and export corn products asked the USDA to reconsider its decision to deregulate Syngenta's Amylase Corn Trait without conditions.
You know Syngenta's new Frankencorn is bad when the the industry forces that are complaining about it are the same ones that have been force-feeding us unlabeled, factory-farmed, GMO unhappy meals: the Corn Refiners Association, National Grain and Feed Association, North American Millers' Association, Pet Food Institute and Snack Food Association. We know they don't care how obese or sick the U.S. public gets. They only get concerned when they see liability issues of their own and they've spotted a big one.
- Syngenta's ethanol corn has been dubbed the next StarLink, the GE corn that contaminated the U.S. food supply in 2000 and set off serious food allergies in thousands of Americans.
But, the junk food lobby has met its match. Swiss Syngenta spent $15 million lobbying to get their controversial GMO enzyme into America's corn crop.
Who's protecting consumers? The USDA's deregulation decision is final. The only thing we can do at this point is scream bloody murder at the politicians we elect to provide oversight on these issues. Time to write the president and your congressional representatives.