Or am I missing something? S. 510: Ensuring the nation’s food safety. Riiiiiight.
Yum! (Is that an eyeball he's missing?) Those of you who are into this kind of thing, get to planning your gardens next year so that you’ll let some of your best plants go to seed for collection…because by that time, Monsanto is going to be running things, and you might be forced to purchased genetically-modified seed for your 2012 garden. That is, if the government lets you have a garden at all that year. Or next year, for that matter. As noted in this link: http://www.foodproductdesign.com/news/2010/11/senate-passes-historic-food-safety-reform-bill.aspx Quote: “The Senate passed the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S.510) by a 73 to 25 vote today,” (11.30.10) “The $1.4 billion bill is the first major overhaul of food safety law for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 70 years and gives FDA enhanced responsibility to ensure the nation’s food safety.” To the mainstream media, it’s all about “food recalls, and safety.” The FDA is going to be given the power to double the number of foreign food facility inspections (you know, those places that use dead chickens culled from the barn lots of some third-world countries, all for use in our McNuggets…we’ve all seen THAT email, right?) and increased inspections for ‘domestic facilities.’ There’ll be all kinds of ‘hazard prevention plans’ for food producers (complete with new job titles funded by our tax dollars), with FDA inspectors being given increased access to sites and records. All in the name of keeping our food supply good and healthy, right? But let’s read between the lines a little bit. You know those Farmer’s Markets that pop up all over southern Illinois in the spring and summer? Well, some of our legislators are trying to fix an exemption from overzealous inspectors of these: http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/09/tester-offers-positive-outlook-on-s510-amendment/, you know, to keep them from being shut down. There’s not much talk in mainstream media as regards this bil, however, about regulating “very small farms” that are basically self-sustaining. There’s online chatter that self-sustaining home farms might be regulated out of business: http://agriculturesociety.com/?p=6781 http://agriculturesociety.com/?p=6781, but that’s just chatter. No one seems to be addressing it at length…no one that matters, anyway, in the scheme of things…like the people who are making the laws. In truth, this bill is an atrocity on several levels. Between the lines, there’s every reason to believe that this bill can be read that anyone who grows food for themselves or their immediate (or even extended, like someone who lives 400 miles or more away) families will need to cease and desist. There’s every reason to believe that those who have large gardens, orchards, a collection of laying/frying hens, or a small pen of goats for milk or pigs/cows for butchering, will be subject to inspection. And then told “you can’t do that.” More yum!...uh, sort of... There’s also every reason to believe that such monstrous companies as Monsanto—who “makes” all the seeds for our nation’s largest cash crops, corn and soybeans by genetically modifying them so they won’t reproduce—will then get into having the upper hand of ensuring that anyone growing fruit or vegetables buys only THEIR sterilized seeds…so you can plant one year’s crops, but forget about letting them ‘go to seed’…if they do, the seed will be sterile. And how nutritious these foods grown from genetically modified material are is up for some debate. After all, what happens when an organism consumes only genetically modified organisms? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that that organism might somehow become modified? That’s what’s happening to heirloom crops—those that aren’t sterile. Pollen from the GMO is making its way to the heirlooms…thus sterilizing them, too. He who controls the food controls the populace…right? Keep an eye on this scary development…and watch for people watching YOU as you plant and tend to your garden and animals over the next year or so. Some good Obamaite out there might turn you in. |