Blog Posts

By: Alison K. Grass

Fracking causes many public health and environmental problems and the last thing that Pennsylvanians need is another way for the oil and gas industry to capitalize on the Marcellus Shale at the expense of their health and well-being. But Governor Corbett lured the multinational oil and gas giant, Shell Oil Company into the state to do just that. 

Corbett, who has received $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, forced through legislation in February 2012 that would exempt the company from property and corporate income taxes for 15 years if they build a petrochemical ethane cracker plant in the western part of the state.  A cracker plant creates chemicals like ethylene, in this case from Marcellus Shale gas, to manufacture plastics and fertilizer.  Read the full article…

herbicide-resistant weeds take over tractor

By Genna Reed

Last week, Dow announced that because the USDA has not yet approved its 2,4-D Corn “Enlist” variety yet, it will not be ready for planting until at least 2014. This is great news for all of the groups and individuals who have garnered over 400,000 petition signatures telling the USDA not to approve the toxic corn.

This delay is certainly worth celebrating, but the fight to stop the approval of this corn is not over. Dow has gained approval in Canada and Japan for its Enlist brand and is still ramping up production of its 2,4-D herbicide and 2,4-D-resistant corn seeds with every expectation that it will be approved in the U.S. Read the full article…

By Seth Gladstone

In our work to ban fracking across the United States, we talk quite a bit about the unacceptable dangers the extreme gas drilling process poses to our water. From toxic fracking chemicals leaching into underground drinking water sources to regular leaks and spills polluting surface lakes and streams, “Don’t frack our water” has become a primary rallying cry in the anti-fracking movement.

But an equally urgent plea has been gaining steam in places where fracking threatens to invade: “Don’t frack our food!” And in New York, where Governor Cuomo may decide in the next few weeks whether or not to open the state to fracking, the call to protect our food is coming most recently from a group of professionals who know as much about the subject as anyone: top chefs.

This week, more than 150 prominent New York chefs – including the culinary superstar Mario Batali – sent a letter to Cuomo urging him to ban fracking in their state. In the letter they state that “fracking leaks and spills have stunted and killed crops and livestock and sickened humans…. This is of great concern to our community because agriculture, food and beverage production, restaurants, and tourism are vital, growing, interdependent economic engines that rely on our famously pristine water and farmland for their success.”

Indeed, these top chefs have much to fear and much to lose from fracking in New York. But their letter also speaks to the long chain of food, agriculture and farming professionals throughout upstate New York who have everything to lose as well.

“Those of us who treasure and increasingly rely on locally sourced food and beverages are deeply concerned that fracking will destroy our state’s environment,” says Heather Carlucci, a chef and co-founder of Chefs for the Marcellus, a partner group that helped coordinate the letter delivery. “It could destroy upstate farms, which are celebrated around the world and contributes a huge amount to the state economy.”

Heather’s reading couldn’t be truer. In a new issue analysis from Food & Water Watch, the potential impacts of fracking on New York’s food, agriculture and farms are spelled out, and the facts aren’t pretty. As the report notes, New York is the third-largest dairy state in the nation and the second-largest producer of apples, maple syrup, cabbage and wine production, among many other crops. These products end up not just on the tables of fine restaurants in Manhattan, but in family kitchens across the northeast.

Tim Schwab

If the Food and Drug Administration is going to take the unprecedented action of approving the first ever genetically engineered (GE) food animal, GE salmon, shouldn’t the agency should have a pretty good idea of what this fish can and can’t do?

AquaBounty Technologies, the makers of GE salmon, have managed to convince everyone that GE salmon can grow two times faster than non-GE salmon, which is supposed to revolutionize aquaculture.

Unfortunately, AquaBounty can’t prove any of this. And independent salmon growers and scientists have called these purported growth rates misleading.

The data AquaBounty submitted to the FDA indeed shows that GE salmon can grow faster than non-GE salmon—but only up to size of 100 grams, which is one-fortieth of the typical 4 kilogram market weight for Atlantic salmon. And this growth advantage only exists in comparison to what appears to be a particularly slow-growing non-GE salmon, which makes GE salmon’s growth rates look phenomenally fast.

Source: AquaBounty

Source: SalmoBreed

Infuriated with AquaBounty’s hype, and in response to a graph the company promoted on their website (top, right), the salmon industry has fought back, with one company, SalmoBreed, releasing the devastating graph (bottom, right), showing that GE salmon actually grow SLOWER than non-GE salmon. Compare these growth rates to AquaBounty’s public-relations graph at top, which compares GE salmon to an unidentified (but apparently slow-growing) “standard salmon.”

Salmon growers have spent decades selectively breeding salmon for faster growth rates (and a host of other commercially relevant characteristics, like disease resistance), coaxing fast growth rates out of farmed Atlantic salmon. A public-private research institute in Norway says that the years of breeding work have produced growth rates twice as fast as wild salmon, reaching market weight in as little as 20 months. Read the full article…

By Hugh MacMillan

Today, Food & Water Watch joined with the Sierra Club, numerous other organizations, and more than 200,000 Americans in opposition to the oil and gas industry’s plans to export liquefied natural gas, which would make more profitable and thus intensify destructive drilling and fracking all across the country. Tomorrow, thousands of Americans will call the White House with this same message for President Obama to reject policies that promote fracking or the export of natural gas.

We submitted our own brief comments and signed on to additional comments identifying flaws in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) approach to looking at the cumulative economic impacts of expanded LNG exports.

As I blogged in November of last year, the headlines from the economic impacts report gave the oil and gas industry, and its financial backers on Wall Street, a huge gift. Selective reading of the study led many to conclude that LNG exports would be unequivocally good for the U.S. economy. A representative of Dominion Resources, for example, a company which seeks authority to export LNG from a facility in Cove Point, Maryland, was interviewed on E&E’s OnPoint on December 12, 2012 and said: “I told a friend of mine at DOE that there were babies conceived and birthed in the time that it took to get the report out, it’s a beautiful baby. That’s the thing. The delivery was successful and we’re happy with it….the net economics impacts are positive across the economic spectrum in the United States.”

But this could not be further from the truth. The report specifically states that those Americans who rely on income from wages “might not participate in these benefits.” That says it all—how many people do you know that don’t make a living working for wages, but who instead live off of their oil and gas industry investments? Not many? I didn’t think so.

The U.S. DOE will be making an enormous mistake if it allows the oil and gas industry, and its Wall Street backers, to make enormous profits from exporting gas at the public’s expense. LNG exports will intensify drilling and fracking, leaving communities across the country to bear the costs, but these costs are completely neglected in the agency’s assessment of the cumulative economic impacts.

Last week, a condensed version of Andy Bellatti’s interview with Wenonah Hauter on her new book Foodopoly ran on Grist: Aisle be damned: How Big Food dominates your supermarket choices. We thought our blog readers would appreciate seeing the entire interview, which goes into the specifics on how fractured our food system really is,  how it got that way and what we can do about it.

1. In Foodopoly, you make a very convincing argument that, unlike what many in the “good food” movement think, crop subsidies are not the problem to solve, but rather the symptom of a much larger problem. Can you expand on that concept? Read the full article…

By Meredith Moore

A recent blog at Mother Jones asks the question, “Can a fish-sharing program save the oceans?” Since the program in question is catch shares, the answer is, “No.” You’re probably asking the next obvious question: why? Catch shares really do look artificially positive until you look at the whole picture.

Catch shares programs privatize our nation’s fisheries, divvying out the privilege of catching fish to a limited number of individuals, and letting them trade, sell, and lease these rights in unregulated, closed markets. In the process, hundreds to thousands of smaller-scale fishermen are cut out of the industry entirely.

What we end up with is a sharecropper system, which was well-described in a Seattle Weekly feature on one of the halibut and sablefish catch shares programs in the North Pacific. This catch shares program, which has been in place since 1995, has devolved into a system where boat captains compete against each other to offer the latest in at-sea entertainment and luxury to the wealthy owners of those catch shares, just so they can get some fraction of the profits for themselves and their crew. Many of those catch shares owners have never baited a hook in their lives.

Read the full article…

By Tim Schwab

The FDA took a final step toward approving the first genetically engineered animal for your dinner plate. Are you okay with this decision? If not, click on this image.

In September 2010, the FDA appeared primed to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered (GE) salmon, the hormone-enhanced fish that, nevertheless, can’t live up to its fast-growth hype. Trumpeting unprecedented transparency, the FDA released to the public hundreds of pages of the agency’s favorable risk assessment, along with an announcement of a days-away public meeting in Rockville, Maryland. The extremely short timeline seemed designed to limit public participation and independent criticisms of the FDA’s scientific work, as few people could drop everything and rush to Maryland.

On the Friday before Christmas 2012, the agency that protects 80 percent of our food supply gave us an encore performance. On a day when few people are at work and many are making plans for extended vacations, the FDA issued its environmental assessment, a 160-page document that basically regurgitates verbatim the agency’s weak 2010 assessment. This moves AquaBounty’s GE salmon within one step of full approval.

The FDA’s risk assessments are noteworthy, not for what they do tell us, but for what they don’t. Instead of scrutinizing the flawed science, limited data, examples of bias and lingering safety concerns that independent scientists have highlighted, the FDA continues to treat its risk assessment as an exercise in churning out the Frankenstein refrain: GE salmon. Safe. Good.

Read the full article…

By Darcey Rakestraw

Corinne Rosen, a Food & Water Watch organizer in New York, serves up corn syrup in test tubes at the Foodopoly book launch. Staff and volunteer “waiters” engaged in performance art to depict the decaying diet of Americans and broken food system addressed in the book.

The Foodopoly invaded the James Beard House yesterday, replete with spray cheese, candy antibiotics and shot glasses full of corn syrup — all served with a side of snark.

What brought this motley crew of processed food products to the Beard House, a haven for foodies? It was the launch of Wenonah Hauter’s new book, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.

In this photo, our New York organizer Corinne Rosen suited up to offer guests test tube shot glasses filled with corn syrup. In a display of performance art, she was joined by other staff and volunteer “waiters” offering guests “trisodium phosphate cheese product on partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil crackers” and candy tetracycline (guests were asked, “Have you had your daily dose of subtherapeutic antibiotics yet today?”) There was sustainable, local food featured as well to juxtapose the offerings served up by the Foodopoly.

See our Facebook page for more photos from the event. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Foodopoly yet, you can watch it here.

Click here to take action.

By Sarah Borron

In the quiet days leading up to Christmas, the Federal Trade Commission released an important new report updating figures on how much money food companies spend marketing food to children and teens. While companies have made a few modest improvements in marketing less unhealthy—hard to call much of it “healthy”—foods to youth, the overall findings are disappointing. Though the numbers are new, our conclusions are the same: industry self-regulation is not accomplishing enough to protect children’s health from junk food marketing.

As a mother, I don’t trust that food companies making unhealthy foods are on my side. Food companies submitted their own in-house research demonstrating how food marketing drives children’s requests. The goal of advertising aimed at children is to make them whine, pester and beg until they get what they want—exactly the kind of behavior that leads to an unpleasant experience at the grocery store. The bottom line is, food companies want to train my kid to beg me for foods that aren’t good for him.

Let’s look at cereal, the category where most money was spent on marketing to children ages 2-11. Thanks to the food industry’s self-regulatory efforts, cereals with 13 or more grams of added sugar are for the most part no longer marketed to children. Yet, many sugary children’s cereals fall just below 13 grams of sugar per serving (Check out this list), and the food industry spent 63 percent of its cereal advertising dollars on cereals with 10 to 12 grams of sugar. Cereals with licensed characters on the packaging contained fewer whole grains than those that didn’t. That cartoon character may make a child smile, but the negative digestive effects thanks to lack of fiber sure won’t.  Read the full article…