Blog Posts: Food

By Tim Schwab

On Halloween, AquaBounty, the company that wants to feed you genetically engineered (GE) salmon, saw its fortunes change. A well-connected biotech company called Intrexon swooped in to buy around half the stock of the near-bankrupt AquaBounty.

Intrexon is run by the former head of Monsanto and a former vice-president from Pfizer and McDonalds. Intrexon’s senior vice president and animal science head is Thomas Kasser, a 20-year veteran from Monsanto, where he worked on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). This highly controversial drug was eventually used to increase milk production, mostly by factory farms. Kasser boasts his experience guiding Monsanto products through the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, the same agency reviewing GE salmon.

Like rBGH, GE salmon exhibits high levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (or IGF), a hormone that has been linked to a variety of cancers in humans. GE salmon express 40 percent higher rates of the hormone than non-GE salmon, suggesting a significant risk to consumers. The American Cancer Society acknowledges the link between IGF-1 and cancer, but has stated that more independent science is needed before any conclusions can be made about the safety of products like rBGH. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Listen to Wenonah’s post-election town hall meeting

Last night, voters rejected a vision for our country that would have taken our economy, environmental regulations and consumer protections back decades. If there is one overarching lesson this election taught us, it’s that political organizing CAN overcome industry money in elections. But we can’t sit back and assume protections for our essential resources will improve; instead, we need to take lessons from the last four years and redouble our organizing efforts to press the Obama administration, Congress, and state legislatures across the country to keep our food and water safe and keep our essential resources in public hands. 



Two ballot measures Food & Water Watch worked on this cycle illustrate the need and power of organizing, even in the face of entrenched and powerful interests. 



One of the most exciting victories from election night was in Longmont, Colorado where voters passed an historic and precedent setting ballot initiative to ban fracking. We were up against incredible odds in Longmont, with the oil and gas industry spending over half-a-million dollars for TV commercials, full-page ads and multiple mailers to try to scare Longmont citizens. Governor Hickenlooper sued the citizens of Longmont to slow down our efforts and the Denver Post editorialized against this vote to ban fracking, but we were on the ground, knocking on doors, talking to voters and doing the hard work to support a citizen-led effort to protect our health, safety and property, and the citizens of Longmont spoke loud and clear. We won with nearly 60% of the vote!  

We also worked hard in California with many of our allies to pass Proposition 37, which would require labeling for all genetically engineered foods. This popular measure was only narrowly defeated at the polls, due in large part to the massive spending by large chemical and junk food companies (which outspent our side by over $40 million.) Despite this loss, support for GE food labels has never been stronger, and we will continue to build a robust national grassroots campaign to push for mandatory labeling across the country.



These measures prove what we already know: An educated and mobilized citizenry can fight back against the corporate control of our common resources, but our work is far from over. 



If you aren’t already on our mailing list, please join it now to remain informed on an ongoing basis about actions you can take to help build power to protect our food and water. We need your support to keep growing the movement! As the election demonstrated, together we can fight for the food and water protections we all want and deserve.

Think you have the right to know what’s in your food? So do Danny DeVito, Bill Maher, Jillian Michaels and other celebrities who think GE food should be labeled

By Eric Anderson

The No on 37 campaign has been carpet-bombing the airwaves with misleading ads, hoping to pummel people with enough misinformation to defeat the measure. Their spending has increased to more than $40 million, more than all donations for and against Props 31, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 40 combined. This has definitely taken on a toll on the poll numbers, which show the Yes side down for the first time.

Since the campaign in support of Prop 37 is being primarily funded by average Californians who can’t compete with the $1 million-a-day that the pesticide and junk food companies are spending to mislead undecided voters, we’ve had to take a more creative approach. Using a combination of new media and on-the-ground organizing, a grassroots campaign has taken shape to fight for our right to know what’s in our food.

Prop 37’s for luddites? WRONG

One of the arguments Prop 37’s opponents use is that the people fighting for their right to know what’s in their food hate technology. Really? Then how to you explain tech entrepreneur Ali Partovi who launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo driven by an irreverent video about GE foods. His strategy primarily consists of using Facebook ads to draw in more supporters and spread the word about Prop 37. Partovi says that enacting Prop 37 would “return us to a baseline of basic transparency from which a free market can thrive.”  

Or how to you explain this poignant op-ed by the molecular geneticist who helped commercialize the world’s first GE whole food?

Prop 37’s bad for business? Don’t tell these chefs for successful restaurants

With California being the premiere “foodie” state, it’s not surprising that an army of renown celebrity chefs – 1,200 so far – have joined godmother of California cuisine Alice Waters in pledging their support for Prop 37. So far, it has received over 1,200 signatures. Overall, more than 2,000 businesses have spoken out in support of Prop 37.

Prop 37 will cause family farmers to go out of business? Fact check please!

Over 2,000 farmers have endorsed Prop 37, undermining the narrative that the initiative will hurt farmers. The No on 37 campaign has used cotton farmer Ted Sheely in their advertisements. Sheely is a longtime ally of big agribusinesses having previously served on the board of the Westlands Water District, one of the most powerful water districts in the state. He hardly represents that average farmer.

Here at Food & Water Watch, we’ve released several videos featuring Danny DeVito, Bill Maher, Dave Matthews and Jillian Michaels as well as adorable kids. The overwhelming positive response led to a generous outpouring of individual donors, helping us catapult these ads on the airwaves.

Illustrating the power of on-the-ground grassroots organizing, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting Prop 37. “It’s not often that the LA City Council votes unanimously to support a measure, but Prop 37 was a no-brainer. We have the right to know what’s in the food we’re eating and feeding our families,” said Councilmember Paul Koretz, the resolution’s author. “I’m proud to be a part of this true grassroots campaign in our struggle against the biggest pesticide and junk food companies in the world.” The LA City Council joins countless other local governments and politicians including the City of Long Beach and Senator Barbara Boxer in supporting Prop 37.

There’s no doubt that the odds and the money are stacked against Prop 37, but we have truth and people power on our side. That said, for the next 6 days, everyone who believes in their basic right to know whether or not their food is genetically engineered needs to be working to counteract the opposition’s expensive disinformation campaign. The California Right to Know campaign has set up an easy phone banking system so that anyone can help get out the vote for Prop 37 from their own couches – even people from out of state. So make a call and take on Big Food head on by helping Prop 37 to pass.

Eric is the California Communications and Outreach Assistant in Food & Water Watch’s San Francisco office.

official White House photo

By Tony Corbo

There has been a lot of tough talk about China in this presidential campaign. Both major party candidates promise to make China a fair trading partner. Frankly, we are skeptical of both candidates because, according to their records, both Democratic and Republican administrations have let China run over the rights of American consumers.

Food imports from China have skyrocketed in recent years despite China’s sketchy food safety track record. Most of the food imports fall within the purview of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and each year, FDA inspectors halt the importation of hundreds of Chinese food items that come to our ports-of-entry for major food safety violations such as microbiological and chemical contamination, filth, and mislabeling. However, the FDA only has the capacity to inspection about 2 percent of imported human food and around 1 percent of animal food, so thousands of Chinese food items come through U.S. borders unchecked. Read the full article…

By Michele Merkel

There was some pretty stunning testimony in the Perdue trial this week that is just now winding down in federal court in Baltimore. This testimony implicates, not only the defendants, but also our entire broken system of controlling pollution pouring from the many industrial agriculture operations that are destroying the Bay and other waterways across the country.

By way of background, the Perdue case involves a claim made by environmentalists that Perdue and one of its contract growers, Hudson Farm, is responsible for high levels of pollution — nutrients and fecal bacteria — coming off of the chicken growing operation located on the Hudson’s property. At issue in the case is whether the pollutants found in the ditches running on and from the farm is caused, even in part, by the emissions of dust, feather, litter and manure blown out of the giant chicken exhaust fans, in addition to manure left on the ground outside of the houses during flock maintenance. Defendants, in their everything-but-the-chickens-did-it defense, claim that there is no evidence that the chicken growing operation contributed anything to the undeniable pollutant loads found in these nearby ditches, instead pointing to cows and wildlife.

During last week’s cross examination of Alan Hudson, an owner of the farm, the issue of his Comprehensive Nutrient Management Plan, or CNMP, came up. CNMPs are a farm’s waste management plan. It’s an examination of sources of pollution on the farm and a prescription for eliminating, or at least reducing, the flow of pollution from the farm into ditches and waterways. CNMP’s are critical documents; they are supposed to be prepared by objective professionals and driven by sound science and “best management practices,” in the ongoing effort to reduce the impact of operations like the Hudson Farm are having on the Bay, where agriculture remains the largest source of nutrients and sediments to this dying watershed. Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

If you’ve been paying attention to the news about food lately, you’ve probably read about the now infamous “Seralini study,” in which University of Caen (France) molecular biologist Gilles-Eric Seralini demonstrated major health issues associated with eating Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) corn and the herbicide used in conjunction with it, RoundUp.

Widely covered by the media, most reports have tried to portray Seralini as a strident, ideologically driven researcher who willfully designed a study to produce a result showing that GE food is bad. Many science journalists criticized Seralini for having an anti-GE bias, for taking research money from a foundation that is anti-GE, and for not disclosing every piece of data to the public.

But this attack coverage seems grossly disproportionate given the realities around funding and bias in agricultural research. Science journalists seldom, if ever, cover the opposite angle: that industry has funded much of the scientific literature we have about the safety of GE foods. These industry-funded studies aren’t science as much as they are public relations, always concluding that GE is safe and good. And in our broken regulatory system for these controversial new foods, these industry studies are also what regulators use to approve new genetically engineered crops for our food supply. Read the full article…

By Anna Ghosh

By Khalil Bendib, courtesy of OtherWords. Shared under Creative Commons

For the past 10 days or so, the anti-Prop 37 henchmen funded by Monsanto, Dow and their agribusiness cronies have been blanketing California with advertisements full of confusion and outright lies. So, it’s not terribly surprising that a Pepperdine Poll released yesterday shows that support for Prop 37 has taken a hit.

The good news is, Prop 37 is still leading in the polls with nearly 50 percent of respondents planning to vote yes, and we still have a few weeks to reach Californians who may not even know what genetically engineered food is or how pervasive it already is in our food supply. In addition to the truth and the power of information, we also have some pretty great celebrities on our side. And, while we’ll never match our opponents’ campaign coffers, Food & Water Watch and our allies have been busy getting the word out and we wanted to share some of the highlights with you.

Here’s an op-ed by our Executive Director Wenonah Hauter, syndicated by the Institute for Policy Studies OtherWords Project: Consumer Choice: As American as Apple Pie

And another great OtherWords op-ed by Jill Richardson: Big Food Fight

Wenonah’s Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Tribune was published on Oct. 10:

Genetically modified

Your Sept. 29 editorial “Corny scare tactics; New study attacking genetically modified crops falls flat” sings the praises of genetically modified corn, calling Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready corn a “boon” and questioning the validity of a study that recently linked consumption of genetically engineered corn to cancer in lab rats.

If the Chicago Tribune editorial board is so excited by the “contributions” of biotechnology to the food system and so sure that the research showing it’s unsafe is bunk, wouldn’t you advocate for making sure people could choose such a wonderful product in the supermarket? If GE foods are so great, why is the food industry fighting tooth and nail to stop labeling efforts around the country, like the more than $30 million being spent to stop a GE labeling ballot measure in California, Prop 37?

Let’s not let the food industry or editorial boards decide whether or not GE foods are desirable. Let’s let consumers decide. Let’s make GE labels the law.

And don’t miss Michael Pollan’s piece in this weekend’s upcoming New York Times Magazine or Dan Imhoff and Michael Dimock in the LA Times.

Good stuff! But we’re not out of the woods yet. Much more needs to be done to make sure California voters understand that a vote for Prop 37 is a vote for our health, our environment, consumer choice and information. The best way to chip away at the confusion and misinformation being strewn across California’s airwaves is to hit the airwaves ourselves. Are you with us? Please donate what you can to help us air a version of this excellent public service announcement featuring Danny DeVito, Bill Maher, Jillian Michaels and several other stars. With your help, we just might make history by making GE labeling the law in California.

They all support California Prop 37, and they made a video about it. Click below to watch it now.

If you’ve been following this blog, you already know that GE ingredients are already in the majority of food sold in grocery stores across the country and, because there are no labels required, we have no idea when we’re eating them. Nutrition labeling tells us the amount of calories, fat and sugar we’re consuming, shouldn’t we also know if we’re eating GE food? Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Kathy Phillips, Assateague Coastkeeper and Executive Director, Assateague Coastal Trust. Photo by Meaghan Morgan-Puglisi.

Kathy Phillips is a real heroine. She’s standing up to Perdue, a company responsible for a large percentage of the pollution pouring into the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding waterways. Kathy is braving the anger and malice of a powerful corporation that wields power in her community. While all Maryland agriculture combined contributes only 0.35% to the state’s Gross Domestic Product, with chicken contributing only a fraction of that number, the poultry industry in particular wreaks havoc not only on the environment, but also on its contract growers. Contract growers earn on average less than $20,000 a year.

A single Perdue farm generates hundreds of tons of animal manure a year, far beyond what can ever be properly and responsibly used by contract growers to fertilize crops. As a result of all this excess waste, damaging amounts of nutrients and other pollutants are impacting the Bay and other waterways around the country.

Enter Kathy Philips. Kathy and her husband, Jeff, who has taught in Worcester County Maryland for more than 30 years, moved to the Eastern Shore from Silver Spring, Maryland in the late 1970’s. They were both surfers and wanted to spend their lives near the ocean that they love.  Kathy directed the Eastern Surfing Association for 15 years. During this time she and Jeff, who is still an enthusiastic surfer, saw the Bay, as well as their local waterways, continue to deteriorate. As watersport enthusiasts, they spend much of their free time on waterways in Maryland, and they have seen first hand how the Chesapeake Bay, the largest and most productive estuary in the United States, is impacted by the onslaught of factory farm waste. Kathy’s particular focus has been on the Pocomoke River and water quality there. She’s worked tirelessly with the Assateague Coastal Trust (ACT) to protect the Coastal Bays and the Pocomoke from agricultural pollution.  

In 2010, Kathy stepped forward to be a plaintiff in the case brought by Waterkeeper Alliance against Perdue and one of its contract growers, Alan and Kristin Hudson. The suit seeks to put a stop to the pollution found pouring off the farm and hold Perdue liable for the discharges. For several decades, Perdue and other poultry industry integrators have been hiding behind the men and women who accept all of the risk for growing chickens, while Perdue sucks up the profits.

Unfortunately, throughout the nearly three years of litigation, Perdue has been using the contract grower involved in the suit as a “human shield.” Rather than taking responsibility for the chicken waste their business produces, they suck up the profits and hide behind their contract growers. Poultry-processing companies, known as integrators, ruthlessly control every step of chicken production from providing the chicks and feed to monitoring them on an almost daily basis. Contract abuses abound for the growers—Perdue, Tyson and the other integrators use production contracts to keep the cost of raising chickens low and to manage the supply of birds needed in the slaughter plants they own. The integrators don’t invest any capital in the factory farm facilities or equipment necessary for growing birds. Growers assume all of the debt and financial risk for building the warehouse-like barns, while Perdue walks away with the profits.

Perdue’s abuse of contract farmers goes beyond their refusal to take responsibility for their own waste. It goes to unconscionable contracts, economic inequity, inappropriate uses of drugs and horrendous working conditions. Perdue, and the other mega-meat companies like it, is the biggest threat to family farming in the United States and around the world.

When this case was filed in 2010 Perdue was enjoying $4.6 billion in sales while Alan Hudson, the contract grower involved in the litigation, was driving a school bus to make ends meet. If Perdue really cared about contract growers like the Hudsons, they’ve had the opportunity for almost three years now to stand up and say, “This is our waste and our problem.” Instead, they’ve chosen to once more hide behind the false guise of the family farmer and hold the Hudsons out as the only ones responsible for the mess created by Perdue’s own industrial chicken empire. Perdue owns the chickens, the feed, and the profits. The Hudsons, apparently, own Perdue’s waste—and Perdue is fighting hard to keep it that way.

We should all thank Kathy Philips for being brave enough to call Perdue out for their pollution of our waterways.

Food & Water Watch Volunteer Adam Hofbauer, in San Francisco

Breaking News:The No on 37 Campaign, financed by Monsanto, Dow, Coke, and the like, was forced to yank their TV ad that featured their “top scientist” who misrepresented himself as being affiliated with Stanford University. Click here to learn more.

By Adam Hofbauer

This past Wednesday, while most of America was focused on the scuffle taking place between the presidential candidates, there was another debate raging in San Francisco. This debate focused on California Proposition 37, which would require California to label all of its genetically engineered food products. Hosted by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), the debate featured Stacey Malkan of the California Right to Know Campaign arguing for the proposition against “No on 37” spokesperson Brandon Castillo.  The event demonstrated how multinational corporations have been able to take sound legislation with majority support and engineer around it an artificial debate based on junk science and disinformation.     Read the full article…