Those Bright Oranges and Neon Pink Salmon Are Not What They Seem

More and Less Than Meets The Eye: Those Bright Oranges And Pink Salmon Are Not What They Seem

By Kurtis Bright

Tricks of the Food Trade: From Oranges to Chicken to Salmon, How Food Manufacturers Are Fooling You

If you needed any more proof that food manufacturers don’t want us to know what they’re putting in their products--that is, into our food--the ugliness over Vermont’s failed GMO labeling bill should tell you all you need to know.

Just when it seemed like the White Hats in Bernie Sanders country were going to succeed in taking control of GMO labeling so their citizens could know what they were eating, the bill was scuttled. Big grocery manufacturers and Big Agriculture went crying to their lackeys in Congress and got a new version of the DARK Act passed--so dubbed by opponents as the Denying Americans the Right to Know Act--a bill that actually prevents states from passing labeling laws. (Here's a good explanation of what the SAFE Act--its official name--entails, despite the article having been written before passage.)

So they’ve got secrets. Indeed, never before has an industry fought so hard to obscure its actual product and keep it hidden; selling GMOs requires a weird jujutsu that is essentially the opposite of advertising.

But as with anyone who has secrets and is trying to fool you, its good to know what they are, even if you don’t know exactly what they are hiding. But with these GMO guys there are some things we do know, some tricks of their trade that you can look out for when you’re shopping. Here are a few examples.

• Neon pink salmon - That neon bright pink-orange color you often find in the salmon at the fish counter in your grocery store is usually not natural. Wild-caught salmon has a healthy pinkish red hue, due to the krill they eat. However, since farmed salmon eat chemical-laden food pellets and never encounter krill in at any point in their short, miserable lives crammed into off-shore pens by the thousands, their color would normally be a dull gray. But as any parent of a toddler knows, bright colors catch the eye. Shoppers unfortunately have been conditioned to expect that unnaturally bright pink-orange color in salmon. Thus, fish farms give the animals pigment pellets to give their meat that color. The practice is so ingrained that food pellet manufacturers have swatches of pinks and oranges and reds for industrial salmon farmers to choose from when ordering their fish feed.
  
  Pick your poison: It's called a Salmo-Fan and it is appalling. 
   
• Oranges that are too orange - Have you ever wondered how those oranges you see in northern stores in winter can possibly all come with such a uniformly bright, vivid color? Well, if you know anything about the trickery of food manufacturers, it is of course no mystery: many Florida oranges are treated with a dye called Citrus Red No. 2 early on in the season to give them a brighter color. Of course, being firmly in the pocket of Big Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration has approved its use. However, despite this, you should know that the Center for Science in the Public Interest has issued multiple warnings over the dye. The non-profit group cites studies demonstrating that the dye can cause cancer in lab animals, among other problems. It is, however, banned in California. So oranges from that state should be free of the chemical. If you do end up buying bags of the Florida oranges, the label should say whether they have been dyed or not. However, buying loose oranges from a bin in a non-organic section of the store, you will never know what you’re getting--or rather, you probably will: dyed, chemically-treated oranges.
• Other dyed foods - So now it has come down to this: even bread is getting the dye treatment. Often a loaf of supposedly wheat bread has been treated with caramel coloring to make it look...well, wheatier. It is a way in which manufacturers are able to fool us yet again, palming off refined grain breads as the healthier, and more sought-after whole wheat type. Other victims of industry dye jobs are pickles, which are given a shot of yellow coloring to make them look more vibrant and eye-catching, as well as deli meats. As we have witnessed repeatedly, the FDA has rolled over for Big Food (and of course their Big Money) and approved the use of these dyes. Indeed, is there anything they won’t approve, when it comes to pleasing food manufacturers and stuffing consumers full of chemicals and additives? At any rate, be on the lookout for dyes on food labels, as they often indicate a food that is highly processed and loaded with unnecessary and sometimes dangerous additives.
• That ain’t no chicken soup I’ve ever heard of - Prepare yourself for a really nasty one: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has regulations in place that allow manufacturers to sell chicken that is up to 11 percent water. That doesn’t sound so horrible on the face of it. However what that means in practice this: after the chickens are slaughtered and had their feathers boiled off, they are cooled in a bath that contains bleach or another disinfectant. The reason they have to use bleach is because there is so much chicken feces spraying out of the birds following their gruesome deaths. Thus, up to 11 percent of your “healthy,” boneless, skinless chicken breast is bleach-poop water. Bon appetit!

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Halo Foods: What Healthy-Sounding Buzz Words Actually Mean--And That They Don’t

Halo Foods: What Healthy-Sounding Buzz Words Actually Mean--And That They Don’t

By Kurtis Bright

Watching Out For Tricky Labels That Make Food Sound Healthy, And What They Really Mean

In these weird times when White House officials identify what has hitherto been known as “utter bullshit” by the much nicer but less descriptive moniker “alternative facts,” and when everyone has their own definition of the phrase “fake news” (generally this seems to mean "anything I disagree with") perhaps it is time to identify some ongoing cases of alternative facts when it comes to food labeling.

There are a number of terms manufacturers employ in order to create a health “halo effect” and fool unsuspecting--and let’s face it, naïve--consumers into thinking they are actually eating healthy.

Of course, there is sometimes truth in labeling, but in these times, it is more often a cruel sham. For example, the Senate bill known as the DARK Act by opponents (Denying Americans the Right to Know) that was hastily cobbled together as a fig leaf for big food manufacturers and agrichem businesses that think they should be able to sell the public foods that contain GMOs without telling us, despite the clear evidence that we don’t want them.

It is a bill that allows food manufacturers to “identify” GMO-containing foods by forcing consumers to scan a QR code, visit a website, or call a 1-800 number to find out what’s inside--all this runaround in order to avoid simply putting a label on the package identifying it as something that contains GMOs--again, because consumers don’t want them and the carcinogenic chemicals such crops contain, and to manufacturers, our lack of desire for their products should be no barrier to their ability to sell them.

So with an understanding of the depth of bullshit the food industry will sink to in order to sell us their shitty, unhealthy products that we don't want, here are a few other alternatively factual ways food manufacturers try to con health-conscious consumers.

• Natural - When I see this word I think of John Denver, playing guitar in a Colorado mountain meadow, sunshine streaming down on the golden grasses blowing gently in the wind. Maybe that’s a bit over the top, but at the very least most of us would probably assume that foods that have this word on their label would have some relation to foods that are, well, natural--that is to say, not synthesized in a lab. The sad truth is that the Food and Drug Administration is as culpable for allowing the level of bullshit that food manufacturers favor: the word “natural” has no formal definition for the FDA. So it can mean whatever manufacturers want it to mean. In other words, don’t stop reading when you hit the word natural. Be sure to read the fine print, keeping an eye out for things like high-fructose corn syrup and other added sugars, as well as chemical preservatives.
• Organic - Yet another term that on the face of it might appear to be pretty self-explanatory. However, big food equals big money, and manufacturers and their marketers are nothing if not wily creatures--and their pet politicians who make the rules for consumers are nothing if not greedy. So let’s start with the clear-cut: the USDA organic seal signifies that the food in question was produced without using synthetic pesticides, GMOs, petroleum or sewage sludge fertilizers. When it comes to dairy or meat products, it means that the animals in question were fed organic, vegetarian feed and had “access to the outdoors.” (This phrase is especially interesting: for example a tiny one-foot by one-foot doorway for tens of thousands of chickens leading to a three-foot square concrete pad located at one end of a massive factory farming facility qualifies under the USDA definition.)
  However as we’ve seen with other examples of truth-challenged claims, the devil is in the details. The USDA organic definition only applies to foods labeled “100% Organic.” So if a food label says merely “Organic,” it only needs to contain 95 percent organic ingredients. And “Made With Organic Ingredients” means only 70 percent needs to be organic. But hey, what’s five or 30 percent ingredients grown using glyphosate or human waste among friends, right? "Alternative organic,” that’s what.
• Local - Once again, we see a seemingly straightforward word that has no actual definition from the FDA. Indeed, adding to the deliberate confusion sown by food manufacturers with the aid of the FDA, a recent survey showed that 23 percent of respondents thought that local also meant “organic.” It does not, not even by the weak-ass USDA definition outlined above. Keep in mind too that mom and pop operations such as you might find at farmer’s markets employing a “local” label are often legally able to skirt nutrition facts labeling, so be sure to ask for ingredients when buying jam or pie is unlabeled.
• Gluten-free - Oh, the popular label du jour for faux-health-conscious hipsters in need of some attention. What with consumers mistakenly thinking that cutting out gluten alone will help them lose weight and get a ripped body just like their favorite TV or movie star, gluten-free nonsense probably still hasn’t peaked. One positive: the FDA actually has a definition for this. Products must have a limit of gluten that is less than 20 parts per million. However, this doesn’t meant that a gluten-free label indicates a bullshit-free label. They also may label a whole raft of foods as gluten-free even if they don’t and never have contained any type of wheat, rye, barley or crossbreeds of these grains. That’s why we see ridiculously absurd things like gluten-free tonic water and gluten-free shampoo. Aside from the less than one percent of people who actually suffer from Celiac disease, this label is expressly designed for people with too much money and too little sense.
• Grass-fed - Yet another deliberately obtuse label designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten. The “grass-fed” label is often taken to mean organic, though it does not. What it does mean is that the cattle whose meat is so labeled were fed only mother’s milk and forage. However, the cattle’s feed has no requirement to be organic, nor does it mean that the animal is free from antibiotics or hormones.

So good luck avoiding stepping in the fully organic bullshit that seems to be everywhere these days! Hope this helps.

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Killing In The Name: How Agri-Business Makes Its Own Rules--And How Thousands Die As A Result

Killing In The Name: How Agri-Business Makes Its Own Rules--And How Thousands Die As A Result

By Kurtis Bright

Death By Big Agriculture

Following yet another salmonella outbreak in the U.S., and in the wake of the Centers for Disease Control’s weirdly heartbreaking warning that people need to stop kissing their chickens, it is high time we take another look at the way we do big agriculture in the U.S. versus how it is done elsewhere.

For one thing, according to CDC estimates, there are around 1.2 million reported illnesses from salmonella every year in the U.S.

Some 450 of those result in death. And of those cases, around 79,000 are caused by salmonella-infected eggs, which alone account for 30 deaths.

But if we take a look at the U.K., we find a very different story: there were almost no illnesses reported associated with salmonella, and zero deaths.

How is that possible? Even if you take into account the U.K.’s population differential with the U.S., statistically you would expect more than a handful of egg-related salmonella cases.

If it weren’t for one thing: in 1997, faced with its own salmonella crisis, the U.K. government ordered that egg farmers must begin inoculating their laying hens with a salmonella vaccine. That year there some 15,000 cases of salmonella related to eggs; by 2010 that number had dropped to around 500.

So, you ask, in a country as populous and wealthy as the U.S. which faces multiple annual salmonella outbreaks, why do we not adopt the U.K.’s model and vaccinate chickens against this potentially deadly disease?

Because big agri-business doesn’t want it that way, and they make the rules now.

Case in point: in 2010 when researchers at the Food and Drug Administration saw the results of the vaccination program in the U.K., they were of course encouraged and excited. The agency was on the verge of mandating a similar program in the U.S.

However, they ran into a massive roadblock: chicken farmers.

The thing is, chicken mega-farmers like Tyson just aren’t that into you. That is to say, they're not into spending money on saving people from contracting salmonella. They would rather pay lobbyists to get them out of such trifling annoyances like preventing disease and death caused by their products and practices.

And people die as a result. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people who could just as well be your neighbors and friends lost their lives between 2010 and today due to this lack of regulation and the FDA’s deference to big agriculture business interests.

All because big agri-business has such a tight grip on our elected “representatives” and the regulations they control. When Tyson and its ilk says jump, Congress and Federal agencies say “how high?”

The example of the chicken farmers and their salmonella-tainted products is just a drop in the bucket. Look at how Monsanto and Bayer and Syngenta have managed to blanket the entire nation and a great deal of the rest of the planet in a multi-billion-ton cloud of carcinogenic glyphosate for the past 20 years. Consider the number of lives and healthy bodies that have been sacrificed, all because big agri-business controls the rules and is constantly seeking to increase its profits uber alles.

So the next time someone wants to spout the tired old line about how “government regulation is always bad,” point out that when government isn’t regulating on behalf of the people, it will by regulate on behalf of big business--often with deadly results.

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Pesticide Manufacturers Knew All Along About Honeybee Harm

Recently Unearthed Documents Reveal Pesticide Manufacturers Knew All Along About Honeybee Harm

By Kurtis Bright

They’ve Known About Neonicotinoids’ Harmfulness to Bees for Years

When a person you have known to be a liar all along is finally revealed to all the world for what he or she really is, it is so very satisfying. However it often turns out to be something of a hollow victory: when a liar has already reaped the benefits of lying for so long, it almost doesn’t matter once they are finally caught. Extracting revenge is likely impossible as a practical matter--the damage lies and liars do goes far beyond that which can be repaired solely by public exposure.

That is the way many in the sustainable community are no doubt feeling in the wake of the revelation that newly released secret documents obtained from pesticide manufacturers shows their own tests revealed that they knew all along about the harm their neonicotinoids could do to honeybees.

Greenpeace conducted the investigation, using documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and it has revealed a trove of unpublished field trials that were conducted by pesticide manufacturers. These studies clearly demonstrated that manufacturers knew all along that their neonicotinoid products were indeed capable of causing serious harm to honeybees. 

The original studies were conducted by Syngenta and Bayer during the period when they were developing their neonicotinoid pesticides, and were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. Thus they are part of the public record, and subject to the scrutiny of anyone who wished to file an FOIA request.

We live in a very different world now: neonicotinoids are the world’s most heavily used pesticide, and have earned the aforementioned companies billions of dollars.

At the same time, they have decimated the global honeybee population, jeopardizing the future of food and our ability to feed ourselves outside the purview of agrichem companies’ control.

The data obtained in the recently released studies had to do with examining a couple of neonicotinoid chemicals: Bayer’s clothianidin and Syngenta’s thiamethoxam. The effects they had on honeybees when applied at varying concentrations were the focus of much of the work, and the tests showed conclusively that at high concentrations, both chemicals could cause serious harm to the pollinators.

Now that it is known that honeybees are indeed being harmed by their products, senior researchers in government, universities, NGOs and in the private sector are calling for the companies to release all their data, and stop playing coy. They reason that, since the genie is already out of the bottle and we know the truth about neonicotinoids, the least these companies can do is assist researchers who are trying to understand the mechanisms of how the bee colonies are affected, and perhaps what can be done about it.

“Bayer and Syngenta’s commitment to pollinator health should include publishing these data or otherwise making them public,” said Christian Krupke, an entomologist at Purdue University. “This work presents a rich dataset that could greatly benefit the many publicly-funded scientists examining the issue worldwide, including avoiding costly and unnecessary duplication of research.”

Perhaps researchers like Krupke are more forgiving than some: there are also calls for severe penalties for Syngenta and Bayer for covering up the truth all these years.

Indeed it might be fair to say that their greed-based obfuscation was not only criminal, but genocidal, especially when you consider how reliant humankind is on pollinators being able to do their job.

We eagerly await the hammer of justice to be come down swinging from the EPA.

But don’t hold your breath; they've been working for Monsanto and Bayer et al for years now.

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When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

When Even Neoliberal Capitalists Sour On Factory Farming, You Know It’s Bad

By Kurtis Bright

Investors Worth Trillions Call For Divestment From Factory Farms

A classic joke told by comedian and actor Larry Miller follows a guy as he progresses through “just having one quick drink with the boys” after work, through stages of just one more beer, to a quick shot, and finally to margaritas being mixed by a laughing Satan at a bar across the state line, asking a waitress with fresh stitches in her head to be his wife.

The final scene has the brutal sunlight of dawn streaming in “...like God’s own flashlight,” and Satan tells the hapless drunk, “Ooh, buddy you’re on your own. I gotta get some sleep before work.”

You can get something of the sense of that from a recent announcement issued by a group of 16 investment groups representing over $1.25 trillion in funds. Turns out they want to talk about divesting from the factory farm model of agriculture.

Which is something like Satan’s final parting shot to the drunk who has gone too far even for the Prince of Darkness: it’s like they’re saying, “Guys, this shit is just too evil, even for us.”

The group is organized under the name Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return and includes some 40 investors who are campaigning to raise awareness about the environmental and health risks that come with factory farming, especially animal agriculture.

Envisioned by Jeremy Coller, founder and chief investment officer of Coller Capital, the group was founded based on the fact that “...a worrying knowledge gap has emerged among investors in relation to the material investment risks and opportunities connected with intensive livestock farming and poor animal welfare standards,” according to the group’s website.

Coller has enlisted investors who collectively manage over $1.25 trillion in funds, so you can be certain that with that kind of money at stake, the rest of the investment world--as well as players in the world of agriculture--are sitting up and taking notice.

“Backed by a new briefing entitled The Future Of Food--The Investment Case For A Protein Shake Up, produced by the FAIRR Initiative and ShareAction, the investors warn of the risks associated with the growing global demand for protein and an over reliance on the unsustainable factory farming of livestock for its supply,” reads a press release from the group. “The briefing highlights the environmental, social and public health risks inherent in this model, which financial markets are not currently valuing appropriately.”

What FAIRR has accomplished as a first step toward initiating divestment in the factory model of agriculture is to contact 16 global-scale food producers, requesting that they acknowledge the risks of continuing on the current path, and calling on them to focus on investing in plant-based protein sources.

Some of the corporations they reached out to include General Mills, Nestlé, Sainsbury’s, Walmart, Kraft, Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods and Mondelez International (which is the parent company of Triscuit, Ritz, Cadbury and host of other foods).

According to the initiative’s site, “...factory farming is emerging as a high-risk production method linked with significant environmental damage and major public health issues, such as the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and outbreaks of pandemics such as avian flu.”

If even the Devil thinks it’s getting late, maybe it’s time to pay the tab and cash out your chips.

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Poisonous Fields Forever: Why You Should Always Buy Organic When It Comes To This Fruit

Poisonous Fields Forever: Why You Should Always Buy Organic When It Comes To This Fruit

By Kurtis Bright

Delicious But Deadly, This Fruit Is Almost Certainly Loaded With Deadly Chemicals

With each passing day it becomes ever more clear that the agencies purportedly regulating the food market are firmly in the pocket of Big Agriculture. Neither lawsuits, pleading, marches, nor any other kind of citizen action is going to make them pull their heads out of the toxic sand and actually do the job of protecting consumers from dangerous chemicals.

However, the flipside of this is that more and more people are coming to realize that we’re essentially all alone out there when it comes to making healthy decisions on the food we eat and provide for our families. You just cannot trust what they tell you anymore, it’s as simple as that.

And if you look at this the right way, there is a certain freedom in being on your own when it comes to making healthy food choices--more on that later.

One prominent case in point illustrating the utter failure of the regulators to regulate the poisons that go into our food comes in the form of one of Americans’ favorite fruits, the humble strawberry. Recently a loophole was pried open--following several intense rounds of lobbying by the Dow Chemical corporation--allowing California strawberry growers to double the amount of cancer-causing pesticide Telone they may legally spray on their fields.

You may think, so what? What difference can one more chemical make in a land that is already awash in them?

The thing about strawberries is, much like certain recently elected neo-politicians, they are notoriously thin-skinned.

Which is to say that strawberries literally have a very thin outer covering. What this means in terms of your health is that anything they are sprayed with is almost impossible to wash off. In fact, they actually absorb the chemicals with which they are treated, so no amount of washing can make a chemically-treated strawberry clean.

And here’s another fun fact, but one most of us already realize about strawberries: they are delicious. The consequence of this is that not only do humans love to spend time in strawberry fields nibbling on them, so do bugs of all kinds--not only Beatles.

(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

So strawberry producers who use conventional growing methods--which means heavy, multiple treatments with harsh and toxic chemicals--are among the worst for chemical contamination of their product.

And strawberry manufacturers not only douse their fields before planting--using gasses that were developed for chemical warfare but have since been banned from combat (pity the soldiers that eat strawberries; there’s no Geneva Convention protecting them against U.S. agriculture). They use up to 60 different kinds of pesticides on their crops.

One USDA study in 2014 found that 98 percent of all strawberries sampled came back with pesticide residues, and 40 percent of them had residues resulting from 10 or more pesticides. So keep in mind, if you buy non-organic strawberries, here’s what you are getting as a garnish:

• Carbendazim - This fungicide disrupts the male reproductive system and was found on 30 percent of the strawberry samples tested in the aforementioned USDA study. Banned in the E.U.
• Bifenthrin - 40 percent of the samples tested turned out to have traces of this chemical, which is identified in California as a possible carcinogen.
• Malathion - Most of us have probably heard of this neurotoxin and probable human carcinogen, which is used to kill mosquitoes. However it is especially dangerous to humans because when it breaks down into its core components it becomes malaoxon, an even more toxic chemical.

The real takeaway here should be an awareness that any and all of these chemicals are going to be on--and importantly, in--your strawberries. It doesn’t matter how well you scrub and soak and clean them: if you buy conventionally-grown strawberries they will have absorbed some or all of these deadly toxins.

The pain of paying through the nose for organic foods is real, especially in the deadly stagnant economy the neoliberal elites have seen fit to impose on us in order to the stock market and unemployment high and job security low, thus protecting their own fortunes. And in all honesty there are some foods you can take a chance on buying non-organic, thick-skinned fruit and veg like bananas, pineapples and avocados.

But non-organic strawberries--at least those grown in the U.S.--simply aren’t safe.

But don’t expect any agency to tell you that--in this age of misinformation serving money uber alles, we have no one to watch out for us except ourselves.

We are truly on our own.

But while this might sound like a rather doom-filled concept on the face of it, it doesn’t have to be disheartening.

There is something compellingly liberating, something that feels like a weight being taken off your chest about finally, once and for all understanding that there is no one looking out for you, at least not in the halls of government. When we finally realize we can no longer rely on our elites to defend our interests, and that we must fend for ourselves, we become truly free.
 
But just because the government has been fully assimilated by the businesses it is supposed to regulate doesn't mean you are alone. There are resources out there for finding out the truth about the unhealthy foods Big Ag is trying to foist off on us. There are communities of like-minded people to be found on the internet and in real life, places to commiserate, trade recipes and tips, and gain support. There are tons of resources on how to start your own organic garden.

But what we must realize is that we can no longer trust the food that corporations--with the assistance of complicit, compromised government regulators--want to sell us.

The moment you fully understand you are truly alone is the moment you become free.

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