Produce industry wants Americans to eat their pesticide-laden veggies

[n2doc]

BY SARAH LASKOW
16 MAY 2011 11:52 AM
For years, the Environmental Working Group has warned consumers away from "The Dirty Dozen," the 12 fruits and vegetables that contain the most trace pesticides. But the produce industry has had enough of this anti-vegetable propaganda! A consortium of food groups, from the American Mushroom Institute to the National Watermelon Association Inc., is mounting a campaign to reassure consumers that it's perfectly safe to eat pesticide-laden products.

Industry groups are writing to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to ask him to publish data about pesticide residue with context explaining that the amount of pesticides found on their products really isn't that big of a deal. They also have an interactive website that lets consumers find out how many servings of the maligned fruits and veggies one can eat each day without suffering adverse effects from pesticides.


To back up its claims, the group behind the website, The Alliance for Food and Farming, enlisted a group of scientists, who -- no surprise here -- have preexisting ties to industry. Dr. Penny Fenner-Crisp, for example, left the government in 2000 to work for the research branch of the International Life Sciences Institute, a group funded by corporations like ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland.

The industry's spin is that evil environmentalists are trying discourage Americans from eating their fruits and veggies, which they really should eat! And sure, in farm workers, exposure to pesticides can lead to arthritis, throat problems, birth defects, and a host of other problems. But the small amounts that get into food -- don't worry about those.

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-05-16-produce-industry-wants-americans-to-eat-their-pesticide-laden-ve

[Newest Reality]

1. Human cattle eat what they are supposed to!

You will most certainly get what you are told to expect and what you are wiling to pay for. Buyer beware!

If you imagine that it will, or could, be any other way, then you are on the verge of realizing that you
are a part of the problem that you now find yourself in, and nowhere near a solution.

You can accept or reject what is going on right now, but you can never avoid the outcome, be it good or incredibly bad. This is your own, organic place in the revolution, whether you know you can actually decide or not. This is you place in it, in the hear and now, despite what you have been taught or told to believe as true and factual from the day you were born. The point of decision and involvement is not necessarily based on what has come before, but is useful in how you decide.

You probably know where we are now are, as a people, and perhaps you only need a prod or a nudge to send you back into who and what you are as you decide you place in this revolution and begin to accept it for what it is, while you allow that to overthrow the assumptions and ideas that were inculcated to you from birth in a way that had you sacrificing what you really are in exchange for what your predominance culture had decided what you are and would be.

If freedom does come to us as a reality, it would be both an acknowledgment of what we have been and are, while it presents to us a serious and most pressing question of what we are now going to do with it and how we will allow it to be.

We are all at a very important part of life and history as we know it to be. We can either stand-up to the Challenger and respond in kind or we can bow-down and accept the Domitian paradigm of corporate monoculture as the way things are and will be forever. That is a sad amd sorry legacy tht anyone can leave, in perpetuity and I think we might all want to focus on that.