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

Dr. Don Huber was hit by a car last night. He is a whistle blower in the food world and someone I have had the honor of knowing.

Dr. Huber is Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology at Purdue University, a land grant institution, and has been studying plants for 55 years. He has received various awards for his scientific accomplishments and contributions to government.

He was Cereal Pathologist at the University of Idaho for 8 years before joining the Department of Botany & Plant Pathology at Purdue University in 1971.

His agricultural research the past 50 years has focused on the epidemiology and control of soil borne plant pathogens with emphasis on microbial ecology, cultural and biological controls, and physiology of host parasite relationships.

He’s in his 80s, and he is also a father, a grandfather and has had a 41-year military career as a retired Colonel.

He is someone I have turned to in this work when I read,”Pesticides may be putting young children at risk of cancer.”  Other headlines have suggested that pesticides are linked to Parkinson’s, autism and other conditions.

That can be tough to hear for anyone who has put regular, non-organic groceries into her shopping cart and on her dinner table.  So when a headline hit last year that the EPA was seeking to increase the allowable levels of a controversial chemical used on our food crops, it was enough to make me wonder if anyone is watching out for the health of our children or if it is just about the financial health of corporations.

Now some in the industry will argue that we need these chemicals to feed the world.  The USDA reports that we throw away 30% of the food that we produce, so this is a hard conversation to have as it is so loaded with emotion not to mention shareholder demands.

When I worked as a financial analyst, I dismissed any concern around environmental toxins as some sort of hobby for people that had the time to worry about it.  I didn’t want to hear that the foods I’d been feeding my family might cause harm.  I wanted to believe that the studies that had been conducted on these products weren’t influenced by industry.  In other words, this  was something that I didn’t want to learn then, and something that is still hard to process now.