A 5: OK here the are in red: Corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, beet sugar and Hawaiian papaya plus a small amount of zucchini and yellow crookneck squash are the modified organisms. And imported anything. Foreign food is a losing gamble because other countries allow additional foods, they are not tracked, nor do we test when we import! So this red list is just for the USA, plus the colossal red item of "imported anything!" The big 4 is now big 5 with sugar beets -and was almost the big 6 with alfalfa. It is also a question of what the animals that give us meat and animal products eat- or what they are injected with, and there are artificial sweeteners and the newest hidden mystery ingredients. Farmed GMO fish may come to the table- although consumers, congresspeople, advocates, scientists and we consumers stuck our foot in the nearly closed-door and made ourselves heard so there's hope.
And cloned livestockmay be in our non-organic beef already. This article I just linked to has so much of the story on why cloned animals aren't believed by any majority of scientists to be safe to eat. But this update on our food was widely reported- you have your choice of web articles because it made top news when Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was asked if "cloned cows or their offspring have made it into the North American food supply," and he replied, "I can't say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don’t know." Then he assured that all the research says its perfectly safe. If anyone ever says "all the research says..." followed by some simple sentence, whatever they say is almost certainly untrue. Anyway, thank you Calgary Herald for letting us know in this great news story what our Secretary of Agriculture said about the food to Canadians that he never told the citizens of the US. More and more Americans are turning to newspapers of other countries to find out our own news. To be clear, US has not approved cloned GMO animals for the food supply- but the animals exist because the industry is preparing to get it approved by the FDA approval process. Based on what I've read, I am not confident that cloned animals, their offspring, and their products are not currently in our food except when it comes to the safe Organic, and pasture-raised/grass-fed animals. (And by Organic, I mean actually- not Horizon or Stremick's or Aurora or any other factory farm being investigated for Organic fraud.) You're only going to see this stuff in the big factory farms that think livestock animals are just meat on 4 sticks. If you eat non-GMO, you're safe from cloned animal meat and products- just like you were safe from the lettuce and egg salmonella, the spinich E. coli and everything else. Hey that is actually pretty neat, isn't it? Yay, That.
Ernie made a non-GMO shopping guide for Portland, Oregon that pulls from multiple sources including our own product research that is a double sided sheet of paper you can fold and keep in your wallet. We're updating it so check for revision dates at the bottom from time to time.
Look at the resources page to locate some of the websites that keep us all up-to-date. You may know that in 1999 Europeans took a stand against GMO's calling them Frankenfoods. But GMO's are being released or escaping from 'tests' everywhere in the world. When our FDA or USDA says no to a test GMO, the makers go elsewhere. You may know one company or two, but there are American biotech (pharm) companies making different GMO's around the globe and what laws apply to them then? The reason you can't trust foreign food is that no one is testing the foods for GMOs on the US side as we import, and the labels that say Made in Country X do not tell you where the ingredients came from even if you knew the current status of a country and its contamination level and its regulation efficiency. For example, Ireland you may have heard is GMO-free. Yes they don't grow GMO grain, but Ireland's livestock eat GMOs by the ton. So much for trusting Irish cheese just because its Irish. There's really no such thing as positively non-GMO foreign food- not even if it is labeled Organic or doesn't have typical GMO ingredients because of the longer list of GMOs than the ones we know of in the US. We can't trust food from Europe or any other continent unless we know the products/manufacturers personally. It is a joke that we let other countries tell us that their foods met their standards for acceptable miscellaneous ingredients like GMOs and they get the USDA stamp from a certifier like QAI. There's no such thing by the very Organic Principles as importing Chinese Organics! Besides- there is no way we can trust the Chinese with product let alone food safety ever again. USDA Organic does mean non-GMO in what ingredients are used but we recommend buying from non-GMO brands, companies you know are savvy, and looking for the non-GMO project seal showing the food was tested. If you want to know what illegal crops are planted in the world, check out GMContaminationRegister.org. For GMO world news, with a caveat, we like the GMO Compass. They used to be commissioned by the European Union but are now independent fact-driven science journalists (many different contributors) that report on GMO information globally. The caveat is that they look biased in favor of the GMO industry in the journalism- but its a good place to find out what is out there. I believe the bias comes from the deep- all the spin and money involved- after all, there has been only one human clinical study on GMO's ever done. Why is that? Scientists are under wraps. Public opinion does affect investigative, non-persuasive scientific, or news-oriented sites that are getting information from many sources- because it is the sources available that have a bias in number and effort. Currently more money and effort exists behind GMOs than against. That may change however. Some believe we in the USA are on the verge of a big change where people will suddenly be saying 'I don't want GMO's- if I can have food without them, that is what I will buy.' That is a trend and it can appear overnight. Look at GMO Compass' updates and you will see the world is full of GMO's and there is no reason to think that Europe is anti-GMO. Its as if they all gave up or thought they won and could stop fighting. In reality there are a zillion different weirdo genes floating around Europe. But if we lead in our way and have an effect on our nation, Europeans will fight again.
We just got our updated 'non-GMO shopping guide' and had to add beet sugar to the list officially of GMO's in our food supply. Any generic sugar or sweetener may be GMO beet or corn. If you want us to send you the guide in the mail, please email us with an address. Otherwise, download (free) or order yours directly from www.responsibletechnology.org. We supplement the guide from the Institute for Responsible Technology with additional information here on this site - but it is indispensable.