For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page, Millions Against Monsanto page and our California News page.

California’s Proposition 37 enshrines the idea that we have a right to know what we eat. Most Californians favor this directive, while corporations spend millions to defeat it. The consequences will affect the lifelong health of every person who eats.

Every four years, we hear the hackneyed rhetoric that this election is “the most important of our time.” One of the reasons that may actually be true this year has nothing to do with the presidential race. It has to do with the outcome of Proposition 37 on the California ballot. Americans throughout the country need to get involved in California’s food fight by contacting their friends and family in California and encouraging them to vote in favor. Here’s why.

Proposition 37 requires that most foods that are genetically modified (GMOs) be labeled as such. People should have a right to know what they are eating. It’s a simple, reasonable directive, and most Californians are in favor. But the downstream consequences are profound, and the ripple effect will reach every dinner table in the country and affect the lifelong health of every person who eats. And powerful corporations who stand to lose financially are desperately spending millions to defeat it.

Most of our food comes from huge monocultures of staple crops – corn, soybeans, wheat – and enormous confined feed lots of livestock. Fresh fruits and vegetables, a far healthier dietary emphasis, are merely an afterthought in the marriage of government and agribusiness – a k a Big Ag – that dominates the food chain ending up on our plates.

Big Ag’s modus operandi depends on heavy use of fossil-fuel fertilizers, massive amounts of antibiotics fed to livestock, and staple crops that are now genetically modified to withstand repeated pesticide applications and/or have pesticides directly inserted into the plant’s DNA, which then ends up in your digestive tract [1]. The end result is meat and grains literally bathed, inside and out, in antibiotics, hormones, toxic chemicals and heavy metals. You’re even getting drugs like Prozac in your McNuggets because it is fed to chickens so they can tolerate their cramped, putrid and pathetic lives as future Happy Meals. Seriously.