Eat Your Corn, Eat Around the Chemicals

I am doing everything I can, and I am doing it the easy way–I don’t eat industrial meats or processed foods. Today there is an Op-Ed piece at CNN.com raising the author’s concerns about the rising level of allowable herbicide and pesticide residues in food crops.

To accommodate the fact that weeds are becoming glyphosate resistant, thereby requiring more herbicide use, the EPA has steadily increased its allowable concentration limit in food, and has essentially ignored our exposure to the other chemicals that are in its commercial formulation.

As a result, the amount of glyphosate-based herbicide introduced into our foods has increased enormously since the introduction of GM crops. Multiple studies have shown that glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and likely public health hazards.

The EPA is willing to allow more and more pesticides and herbicides into our foods. The good news is that the ‘foods’ that are affected are the ones we don’t eat, field corn and soy. These foods are fed as forage to confined animals for about six months before they are sold into the food supply system. These chemicals will get into your food supply if you were to buy meat at the grocer’s meat case, but if you get your meats from a local supply, like say at your local meat processing locker, you will not be getting very much chemical residue from your meats.

If you eat mostly truck vegetables, the kind that are found in the produce section of your grocery store, likewise you are not getting a significant dose of these chemicals, because they are only used on Monsanto’s genetically modified crops. These crops can tolerate herbicide that is sprayed right on the plant all year long, it only affects the weeks and non-GM crops. As weeds develop their own natural tolerance after year and year of exposure to Monsanto herbicides, the dose must rise year over year. Thus, the need to raise the allowable limits for residues in our foods. As the farmer uses more to compensate for hardier weeds, we must therefore raise our own tolerance for these chemicals.

The fact that these chemicals are risk factors for nervous disorders, cancers and birth defects have gotten them banned in the European Union. Of course the fact that not using these chemicals would make growing corn and soy ever so slightly more expensive is a good reason to look the other way for the potential harm to consumers. Nobody wants to spend an extra penny for a hamburger if the only benefit to that is a slightly lower risk for developing cancer in the future. Obviously the EPA has taken all of this into consideration, since the decision has been made to not only not ban the use, but to increase the amount of it that is passed on to us and to our food animals.

Go ahead and write to the EPA and complain, if that is your wish. Perhaps instead of writing to the EPA you will write to the FDA and demand some way you could tell that there are genetically modified components in your foods, or some label on foods saying how much poison it contains. I have a far easier way to make sure you don’t eat any poison in your food. Don’t eat foods that are labeled. Don’t eat foods from boxes or bags. Eat meats that you got from a local trusted source.

I am aware of the argument that this won’t work for everybody. We all can’t eat local meats. Somebody just has to eat out of boxes because of their busy life. Well, all I can say to that is I am not talking to everybody. I am talking to you. There is certainly enough locally produced meats and produce to feed me and you and your family and mine. If the disgust with our national food production system slowly grows, and if we all slowly migrate to real food, produced the natural way, then the system changes–just not overnight.

It’s kind of like minimum wage. Not very many people actually work for minimum wage, it’s kind of irrelevant to most of us. Employers pay what they can get away with, but most can’t get away with that low number any more. When a butcher can’t sell the meat he has because it comes from a confinement operation, because it is laced with the maximum allowable poison in it that has been deemed ‘safe’ by the EPA, that store will find meat that it can sell. People and businesses not buying ‘safely poisoned’ meats will end the process of poisoning our foods on purpose. The government can then do the right thing and ban the chemicals that are no longer used.

If that sounds good to you, then your part is stop buying meats at the meat counter at your local Hy Vee or Price Chopper. Pay more for pure foods. Pay more for real foods, or pay later in lost years of health. Nobody else is looking after you, unless you want to move to Europe, where the socialist nations are actually looking out for the entire population right now. Here, it is already every man for himself on food and wages. Soon it will probably be every man for himself on health care.

Go buy real food.