Toxic Sewage Sludge in Your (Non-Organic) Food?

Even though USDA Organic standards prohibit the spreading of toxic sewage sludge on certified organic farms, something OCA and the organic community fought hard for from 1997-2002, it is routine practice for America’s “conventional” (chemical-intensive, energy-intensive, GMO, factory-style) farmers to allow sewage sludge to be sprayed on their fields as a low-cost or no-cost “fertilizer.” But as our fellow activists in the Alliance for Natural Health point out, we’re not just talking about human and animal excrement on the fields of non-organic farms, but deadly PFAS “Forever Chemicals” as well:

“Your food and drinking water could be contaminated with PFAS ‘forever chemicals,’ at levels that are hundreds of times higher than what is considered safe, but the EPA is too busy looking out for industry to care.

PFAS contamination threatens the integrity of our food supply and is upending the lives of farmers. This is the latest outrage in what is quickly becoming a national crisis in which PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals, linked to a variety of diseases, are polluting our waterways and our food—and regulators have just admitted that these chemicals are more dangerous than previously thought. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seems determined to protect industry rather than enact meaningful standards to protect us from these dangerous chemicals. This has to stop.

Our food is contaminated with PFAS via the use of biosolids on farmland. Biosolids are a euphemism for sewage sludge, municipal sewage that has been processed to obtain clean water, leaving behind a concentrated sludge full of contaminants. This used to be dumped into the ocean until the practice was banned in 1988 because it was too toxic.

Biosolids are contaminated extensively with PFAS and are used extensively in agriculture. In fact, some estimate that as many as 5 percent of all crop fields could be using biosolids contaminated with PFAS. Low levels of PFAS have already been detected in vegetables, honey, dairy products, eggs, various meat products, and both bottled and tap water.

Even low-level exposures are dangerous because PFAS accumulate and persist in the body. In fact, the EPA just released new health advisories regarding PFAS in drinking water. The EPA previously suggested PFOA, a common PFAS chemical, be limited to 70 parts per trillion in drinking water; the new suggestion is 0.004 parts per trillion. We use the term ‘suggestion’ because these levels are non-enforceable, and the EPA is still allowing companies to dump these chemicals in our water.”

REGENERATIVE AG

Rules for Regenerators: Connect the Dots

In last week’s Organic Bytes, I wrote about the importance of constantly seeking out today’s positive solutions or best practices (food and farming, land use, energy, politics) if we wish to motivate and inspire grassroots allies or potential allies to take regenerative action in a time of profound crisis. It’s not enough to simply tell the truth in order to effect change, our truth-telling must connect up with people’s most passionate concerns.

A second rule for Regenerators as I lay out in my 2020 book Grassroots Rising, is to “connect the dots,” to understand and start off with the most pressing or important issues for an individual, constituency, or community and link these concerns to the action, strategy, or campaign we are trying to get them to understand and take action on.

As I point out in Chapter 2: “In addition to highlighting positive solutions, it is important to keep in mind that people’s situations and perspectives are different. We all have different passions or priorities. One size or one approach does not fit all. Therefore, we need to integrate our motivating or Regeneration messages with the specific issues and concerns that are most important to grassroots constituencies, and then lay out, in everyday language, a strategy that makes people understand that we can actually solve the problems they care about the most, while also solving a host of other pressing problems at the same time. Only by starting from where people are at, and then connecting the dots, can we capture the attention and imagination of a critical mass of the global grassroots and get them to start thinking about how they can participate in our new Regeneration Movement and alternative economy.

Objective and subjective conditions for change are different in every country in the world, and to some extent differ as well in the sub-regions and local communities of these 195 countries. Everyday people everywhere, including the most impoverished and vulnerable communities, have their burning issues as well as their secondary issues, and an inherent desire to alleviate and, if possible, solve the problems that are pressing down on them, in many cases threatening their very survival. In the activist community, major focus areas, in most cases reflecting the concerns of everyday people, include inflation and the high cost of living, freedom of choice and constitutional liberties, the climate crisis, environmental pollution, health, social justice, jobs and economic justice, peace, and democracy. Unfortunately, campaigners, both on the local and national/international levels, often work in isolation from other sectors, each in their own separate silos. This perpetuates tunnel vision in the body politic, parochial or sectarian attitudes, political polarization, and an overall weakness in global civil society.”

GENETIC ENGINEERING

Vandana Shiva on Corporate Propaganda for SynFoods

Vandana Shiva writes:

“Fully artificial food is an increasingly popular trend focused on developing a new line of synthetically produced, ultra-processed food products by using recent advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. These new products seek to imitate and replace animal products, food additives, and expensive, rare, or socially conflictive ingredients (such as palm oil). Biotech companies and agribusiness giants are seeing the opportunity to move into this promising market of ‘green’ consumption and hence these products are marketed to a new generation of environmentally conscious consumers who are growing critical of the grim realities of industrial food production. As a result, meatless burgers and sausages, as well as imitations of cheese, dairy products, seafood, and others, have begun to flood the market, being found anywhere from fast food chains to local grocery stores.

Although these products market themselves as ‘eco-friendly’, ‘healthy’, and ‘sustainable’, they are no such thing as they do little to truly address the root problems of industrial agriculture and its environmental, and health consequences. Consequences that can be largely blamed on the same circle of businessmen who today finance the development of this biotech industry. These products instead represent the next generation of ultra-processed junk foods that work to further entrench industrial agriculture models due to their direct dependence on globalized commodity chains, agrochemicals, GMOs, monocultures, and even conventional animal production. In other words, synthetic foods are quickly becoming a next means to consolidate even more power and profit into the hands of a few food giants without facing the implications of ecological devastation, worsening human health, and exacerbated climate change…”

Learn More: The Corporate Push for Synthetic Foods