Blog Posts: Consumers

By Walker Foley

The artwork for Last Call at the Oasis

Drought, famine, disease and war – are these the buzz words of our nightmares, distanced from public perception by vast oceans and foreign lands? Or are they the social products of the rapidly dwindling resource vital to life on Earth?

In many areas of the U.S., the concept of water shortages may seem as foreign as excavating icebergs for potable product. Turn on your tap after all, and the water gods will make it rain. But for those not so blessed, shrinking water supplies in the American Southwest and elsewhere on the globe serve a painful lesson: the tap is running dry.

Jessica Yu’s new film, Last Call at the Oasis, sounds the alarm on dwindling global water resources, and invites Americans to bridge the distance between them and their water.

Through the opening credits water waltzes seductively, teasing the audience with a glittering, circus-spectacle. The circus must end though, and the film must tell its dark tale.

When the Lights Go Out

“Water,” Erin Brockovich begins, “is everything. The single most necessary element for any of us to sustain, and live, and thrive is water.” Speaking of water’s importance, Brockovich draws from her father’s wisdom who warned her, “… in my lifetime that we would see water become more valuable than oil, he said, because there will be so little of it.”

There’s nothing fanciful about the predictions of Brockovich’s childhood memories – the evidence is everywhere. Last Call at the Oasis begins by examining the consequences for the Southwest as climate change, water mismanagement and population growth threaten the long-term viability of the entire region. Having over-tapped the Colorado River, farms are unable to get water for irrigation, while cities struggle to find an electrical alternative to the failing Hoover Dam. Despite the slowdown in agriculture and energy, development (and population) escalates. Read the full article…

By Lane Brooks

Food & Water Watch is rolling out its presence on Pinterest, and if you haven’t yet pinned something from us, then surf right over to our Pinterest boards and check out what we have in store for you.

If you are into Pinterest, you’ve probably already stopped reading and clicked the link. If you are still with me, you may wonder: What is Pinterest? It’s one of the fastest growing new sites on the web. It’s comprised of pictures you post about things that interest you, and lets you see what other people who share your interests are also looking at. Is it a place to connect with your friends and family? Not really—you already know what they are up to from other social media sites. This is a place to easily, quickly and simply discover new things that interest you—through the power of images.

Do you like to cook? Check out recipes from other cooks. Do you like to travel? Check out new spots or someone else’s take on one of your old favorites. Are your interests more specific like collecting thimbles or stitching needlepoint or watching birds? You will be surprised at how many people are doing the same things you are. As a friend of Food & Water Watch, we know that some of your interests can be found on Pinterest:

Ending fracking? Check.

Stopping GMO foods? Check.

Checking in on other activists are doing? Check.

Taking back the tap? Check.

You might be surprised by how many other people are pinning images related to these causes. Conveniently, you can find all of these passions on one Pinterest page. And, naturally, we have a section devoted to good food, too, because what’s a Pinterest page with out that? We hope you will check us out and follow us.

By Darcey Rakestraw

I am an avid tea drinker. Green tea, to be exact. Ever since I gave up coffee years ago, it’s been my go-to bitter hot cup of comfort in the morning. But recent events have made me think twice about my favorite beverage.

Last year’s Fukushima disaster may have more or less disappeared from the headlines, but its nuclear fallout remains, and people are rightly concerned about the state of affected crops. While food from Japan is not routinely a concern of Americans—foods imported from Japan made up less than 4% of all foods imported by the U.S. in 2010—green tea aficionados like myself have cause to wonder.

Some green tea is grown in Japan, and we already know that post-disaster tests have shown high levels of cesium in some tea crops there. The Japanese government had banned exports of green tea from several prefectures last June because of tests showing high levels of radiation. But according to Bloomberg News, citing a Japanese researcher, checks conducted in Japan have been only 1 percent of what Belarus checked in the past year—25 years after the Chernobyl disaster.

Now, to make matters worse for tea lovers, Greenpeace is reporting that a study it commissioned showed that 12 of 18 samples it obtained from stores in China contained banned pesticides. All 18 tea samples contained at least three pesticides, with 17 pesticides found in the worst sample. 14 samples were found to have pesticides that may affect fertility, harm an unborn child or cause genetic damage. As Greenpeace points out, China is the biggest producer of tea, but it’s also the biggest user of pesticides.

Some of the firms implicated in the Greenpeace study export their tea products abroad to Japan, the U.S., and Europe. But here in the U.S., don’t rely on the FDA to screen out the offending teas. The agency’s track record for checking imports for banned chemicals (either chemicals banned in the U.S. or in the country of origin) is weak, and the agency inspects less than 2 percent of the food imports it is responsible for.  

And, unlike Japan, a large and growing amount of the food we import comes from China. In 2009, 70 percent of the apple juice, 43 percent of the processed mushrooms, 22 percent of the frozen spinach and 78 percent of the tilapia Americans ate came from China, according to our report released last year, A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports from China.

Sticking to teas with organic labels makes good sense for minimizing your exposure to pesticides, but the label has not caught up to the realities of the nuclear disaster, even though the Japanese organic community says its committed to developing comprehensive post-disaster monitoring (check out this site from documentary filmmakers documenting the plight of Japan’s organic farmers). But whether it’s nuclear fallout or pesticides, one thing is certain: the FDA struggles to keep up with the food safety issues brought about by environmental disasters and the industrialized food system’s reliance on pesticides. My beloved beverage is a daily reminder of this.

by Patty Lovera

It’s been a busy week for the folks who work hard to put the green sheen on Walmart’s public image. To counter the spin, Food & Water Watch and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance have put together the Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability for a little reality check. Check out my blog on Grist for an explanation of why it’s important for all of us to let Walmart know we see through their green smokescreen.

By Walker Foley

The USDA wants to cut back on federal food inspectors and let company employees take responsibility for monitoring poultry slaughter lines at private plants. FSIS administrator Alfred Almanza talks a lot about how the plants should be modernized to increase safety standards, but when you read the affidavits released by actual plant inspectors  here, here, and here it’s hard to believe that this proposal will do anything to make our food supply safer. The affidavits are a clear warning to consumers of what is to come if the USDA extends the program to all poultry facilities nationwide. Many of the complaints in the affidavits stem from a lack of training, less thorough carcass examinations, and, among numerous other faults, increased line speeds. Imagine trying to carefully inspect 200 birds flying past you in a minute. 

If only Upton Sinclair were still around to weigh in. Fortunately media outlets like ABC, The New York Times and others have stepped up to report on consumer health and worker safety concerns. Here’s Jim Avila’s report.

Yes, you heard him right. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service extended the public comment period due to the public outrage. Tomorrow, Food & Water Watch will join inspectors, other consumer advocates and concerned citizens in delivering more than 150,000 signatures collected opposing the plan, but more are needed. The new comment period will close on May 26, so if you haven’t already, please take a moment and write. Because who wants to eat breast blisters, fecal matter, and cancerous tumors?

By Hugh MacMillan

If you won’t be getting a refund this year, like I won’t, you’ve probably just finalized your tax return and signed a sizable check. I don’t necessarily agree with many of the things that U.S. taxpayer funds support, but that’s democracy, and the benefits of our democracy are manifold.

But it is especially hard for me to stomach the enormous U.S. tax expenditures that pad the record-setting profits of the oil and gas industry. The tax breaks enjoyed by the industry do nothing to lower the price of gas, but we taxpayers are left to fill the gaping hole these tax breaks create in federal revenues.

The tax breaks are many. Here are several that make it cheaper for the oil and gas industry to frack:

• Expensing of intangible drilling costs: The oil and gas industry can deduct up to 100 percent of what they spend to make and haul fracking fluids, and can do so in the year they use the fluid (in other words, they don’t have to spread the deduction over the life of a new well.) By giving the oil and gas industry this deduction up front in the first year, and not making them spread it out over several years like all other businesses have to do, we taxpayers are essentially giving the industry an interest free loan to frack.
• Percentage depletion allowance: Alternatively, many oil and gas companies are allowed to recover the total cost of drilling and fracking a new well based on their revenues, not based on what they actually spent to prepare the well for production. This is called percentage depletion (as opposed to cost depletion), and it means that a company that drills and fracks a well that gushes with oil and/or gas could recover, as a percentage of revenues from the well, more than it actually cost to drill and frack the well.

These and other taxpayer giveaways to the oil and gas industry will likely add up to an estimated $11 billion in Fiscal Year 2013. Of course, this is in addition to the costs that drilling and fracking pose to public health and the environment.

By Tony Corbo

Late Friday afternoon, I heard a knock on my office door. As I opened the door, a courier handed me a lengthy letter from Mike Brown, the President of the National Chicken Council, denying my request to be a company chicken sorter in a plant operating under the privatized inspection model that USDA has been running since 1998.

Mr. Brown explained that not anyone can walk off the street to be a company chicken sorter. He claimed that company employees receive extensive training before they can be assigned to the slaughter line. The letter stated:

“Company sorters must learn not only the technical requirements of the job, but must also be trained to comply with all relevant USDA and other government agency regulations. Most company sorters will have spent considerable time in training to recognize defects and deficiencies on chicken carcasses, and companies will have made substantial investments to ensure each employee performs competently…In other words, what you are requesting – a quick assignment on the evisceration line of a chicken processing plant of your choosing – is simply unrealistic.”

Mr. Brown never offered to show me the training materials that company employees are given to make them proficient to work on the slaughter line or how the training compares with that required of USDA inspectors before they are assigned on the slaughter line.

This morning, I received an email from a USDA inspector who works in a poultry slaughter plant.  She made the following observation:

“By their own admissions, many (company employees) have stated that they don’t have a clue what they would be looking for if they had our job. They also have indicated that they do not believe they would receive the proper training to perform the duties of an inspector and, if the lines were sped up, there would be no way of keeping up. I have also heard (company employees) make comments to the extent that they don’t feel it would be right for them to do the job of an inspector without getting the same pay so ‘why should I care what goes down the line?’” Read the full article…

A display in the "slum" tent at the World Water Forum's Village of Solutions.

By Wenonah Hauter

Yesterday I walked around the “solution tents” at the 6^th World Water Forum, which is more clearly than ever a trade show for the water industry to sell expensive services and products. Arranged as a “village,” the exhibit offered no vision for a future that addresses the source of pollution or the reason that millions of people lack access to water. From the tents labeled “factory” and “slum” to the “bank” and “library” exhibits, the failure to address the real problems was Kafkaesque. 

Take the factory exhibit. In no place there was the cause of pollution mentioned. There was no suggestion that we should prevent pollution to begin with, or that waterways should not be the dumping ground for human waste or factory waste. In fact, pollution was never mentioned at all. The organizers of this corporate forum see pollution as a profit center to be cleaned by a range of technologies. So, instead of addressing water pollution issues, the exhibit featured an expensive machine that packages water in little plastic bags that are sold to people during disasters. It displayed the Hippo Roller, a nifty technology that is essentially a barrel on wheels that makes it easy for women to transport water. It featured a stand with two buckets, one above the other, that was for hand washing.

The slum tent, designed to mirror any of the millions of impoverished neighborhoods that have become the norm in urban areas, shows the real agenda at the forum—making money for the water industry. Most outrageous in the tent was Veolia’s water fountain with a coin slot and a place to use a smart card to access water. According to the provided literature, if the prepaid credit made available to a “target population” by authorities is depleted before the end of the month, users can recharge their card in commercial and mobile agencies at special prices. If this is the best the World Water Forum can do for the world’s poor—prepaid cards for water at a fountain—they should pack up today and go home. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Ruby Williams, a 78-year-old Aqua Pennsylvania customer, got stuck with a $40,000 water bill because of a serious leak in the pipes under her home in Bristol Township, Pennsylvania. After her situation garnered national media attention, the private company agreed to reduce her bill to a few hundred dollars.

Likewise, the Price family of Stallings, North Carolina recently had their sewage service cut off by Aqua North Carolina despite having paid an overdue bill. The company demanded $1,000 to restore it — hundreds of dollars more than the actual cost to do the work. Again, thanks to bad publicity and public outrage, Aqua backed down.

It’s not just American consumers that feel the pinch as our municipal water systems change from public to private hands — and it’s not just that Aqua America is one bad actor, either. Private interests worldwide increasingly control our water. Too often, customers are getting a raw deal.

Read the full article…

Frankencorn Says: "GE Food Good!"

By Darcey Rakestraw

This week Kellogg’s unveiled a new cereal named “Totes Amazeballs,” as recently suggested by a musician in a tweet to the company. Apparently, it’s just the latest in a trend of celebrity-inspired cereals in the UK.

This got us here at Food & Water Watch thinking about the fact that most people don’t realize their favorite breakfast cereals may contain potentially risky genetically engineered ingredients. So we jumped on the bandwagon and created our own cereal as well.

Genetically engineered (GE) corn and soy have been around for years in processed foods from cereals to cookies, candy bars, snack chips and beyond. And genetically engineered sugar beets now provide GE sugar used in some processed foods like cereal. Last year, the Cornucopia Institute tested several breakfast cereals—marketed as “natural,” no less—and found they contained high levels of GE ingredients. (Here’s a tip: one way to avoid GE cereals is to stick to those labeled certified organic —genetically engineered ingredients are not allowed under the certified organic label.) Read the full article…