Katherine's Blog
October 16 was World Food Day. So we thought it fitting to remind consumers why it’s critical to boycott industrially produced meat, and why we should never give up the battle to end factory farming, once and for all.
This week, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue threw small and mid-sized independent family farmers under the bus. Perdue and his U.S. Department of Agriculture want to support Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Farms, not Farmers like Phillip and Dorathy Barker who farmed for 40 years in North Carolina.
Think consumers don’t have much power? Think again.
It may have taken a few years, but consumers can take the lion’s share of credit for bringing down Big Food’s $2-billion lobbying group.
Back in the day before Congress killed consumers’ right to know about GMOs, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) spent millions of dollars in California to defeat a citizen ballot initiative in 2012 that would have required labels on GMO foods.
That made the GMA and its members—including organic and natural brands owned by Big Food corporations—favorite targets of pro-labeling consumers.
Brands weren’t too happy about that. So when a similar initiative came on the ballot in Washington, the GMA tried to protect Big Brands by illegally laundering donations to the anti-labeling campaign.
From then on, it was all downhill for Monsanto’s Evil Twin.
From the “Department of Here We Go Again,” the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) needs our help—again—to remind the Trump administration that all forms of genetic engineering must be excluded from organic production.
We have only until midnight EST October 3 to flood the NOSB with comments.
Last week, Organic Consumers Association (OCA), joined Regeneration International (an organization we helped co-found and continue to support) and the Sunrise Movement to officially launch the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal.
Five members of Congress joined us in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to call for a Green New Deal for farmers and ranchers.
Earlier in the day, we delivered a letter to every member of Congress, signed by more than 500 individual farms, and 50 organizations representing more than 10,000 farmers and ranchers, asking Congress to support the Green New Deal Resolution.
Representatives of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network, Indiana Farmers Union and American Sustainable Business Council joined in the press conference, which was covered by multiple media outlets, including Politico, The Hill, Civil Eats and FERN AgInsider.
Why is a consumer and environmental advocacy group like OCA so invested in this new coalition of farmers and ranchers—?
Because we’re facing a food crisis. A soil crisis. A water crisis. And a climate crisis. And there’s just no way we solve these interconnected issues without “linking arms” and working together.
Just when you thought you’d heard the worst about Monsanto, comes this: Monsanto executives and paid shills for the company argued “to beat the shit” out of moms who criticized Roundup weedkiller.
They also declared “organic” to be the “enemy.”
As Monsanto’s new owner, Bayer, gears up to face another round of trials from plaintiffs alleging that exposure to Roundup caused them to get non-Hodgkin lymphoma, more revealing and disturbing internal emails and other documents are surfacing.
They’re ugly. They shed more light on Monsanto’s sinister tactics. And they target you.
We’ve known since at least June that Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, compiled hit lists containing hundreds of names and other personal information about journalists, politicians and scientists, including their opinions about pesticides and genetic engineering.
But newly revealed court documents expose an even more calculated and sinister plan—a 130-page plan involving 11 staff members plus high-powered public relations firms—to "slime and slander" anyone who criticized their products or operations.
It may be true that you can take the boy out of the country, but it’s apparently not so easy to get the CEO out of Silicon Valley.
In mid-June, Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, publicly invited Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, to visit Harris’ ranch in Bluffton, Georgia. The invitation was prompted by a statement Harris got wind of, in the latest Impossible Foods Impact Report, which facetiously referred to regenerative grazing as the “clean coal” of meat.
The company has also claimed that grassfed beef “generates more GHGs than feedlot beef”—a claim that didn’t sit well with Harris, whose ranch in Bluffton, Georgia, stores “more carbon in the soil than our cows emit in a lifetime,” according the website.
Harris told a reporter for Civil Eats that he was “stunned” by the “clean coal” analogy. “I think there were many mistruths in that attack,” he said.
Should Vermont keep throwing money at cleaning up the state’s polluted waterways—without providing funding for preventing future pollution?
Vermont’s Clean Water Board is taking public comments through September 6, on the board’s priorities for funding the cleanup of Vermont’s waterways.
You can submit comments in writing here.
Better yet, deliver your comments in person at the board’s public hearing, 10 a.m. Thursday, August 22, at the National Life Building, Winooski Room, in Montpelier.
In a sit-down interview with Dr. Mark Hyman, food writer and guru Mark Bittman covers a wide range of issues—including this big question: If we had a food system in this country, what would it look like?
We think the Green New Deal is the best roadmap to come along since the original New Deal—and our best shot—for the kind of transformational change we need in order to have a real food system, based on what people really need and want, while at the same time addressing a host of other problems, including and especially, our current climate emergency.
TAKE ACTION: Sign the Green Consumers for a Green New Deal petition
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