Radiation in Our Food

Dees Illustration

Chris Kilham
Fox News

Though the horrendous tsunami that hit Japan on March 12, 2011 seems like old news in the midst of today’s headlines, the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukishima Daichi continue to spew radiation into water, air and soil, with no end in sight.

Even as thousands of Japanese workers struggle to contain the ongoing nuclear disaster, low levels of radiation from those power plants have been detected in foods in the United States. Milk, fruits and vegetables show trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daichi power plants, and the media appears to be paying scant attention, if any attention at all. It is as if the problem only involves Japan, not the vast Pacific Ocean, into which highly radioactive water has poured by the dozens of tons, and not into air currents and rainwater that carry radiation to U.S. soil and to the rest of the world. And while both Switzerland and Germany have come out against any further nuclear development, the U.S. the nuclear power industry continues as usual, with aging and crumbling power plants receiving extended operating licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as though it can’t happen here. But it is happening here, on your dinner plate.

Taking a page from the BP pubic relations handbook, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the Japanese government have downplayed the extent of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daichi, in which three of six nuclear reactors are in ongoing meltdown. According to Japanese nuclear engineer Naoto Sekimura, nuclear fuel rod meltdown at the damaged plants began only hours after the tsunami, and the situation has not been contained. There is still an ongoing threat of a total “China Syndrome” meltdown, and Japanese officials now say that the three damaged plants may possibly continue to emit uncontrolled radiation for another year.

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Controversial ag spending bill defunds local food systems, promotes meat monopoly

Capitol Building - Wiki Commons Image

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Plutocrats aimed another weapon at the nation’s poor and at small and midsized farmers, this time thru the 2012 agriculture appropriations bill, H.R. 2112, which the House passed on June 16. The 82-page bill returns some federal spending to 2006 levels and others to 2008 levels.

Now being reviewed by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, the final version of HR 2112 will lay the terrain on which the 2012 Farm Bill will be crafted. The House Agriculture Committee began preparatory hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, reports NSAC.

Key sections provide deep cuts to domestic food programs, threatening food banks, low-income seniors, women and children, and farmers markets supported by WIC vouchers issued thru the Women, Infants and Children program.

Building Community Food Security

Wiki Image

Mary Lou Shaw 
Mother Earth News 

My husband and I have been developing our central-Ohio homestead for the past 10 years, and it now produces most of the food we eat. Our Dutch Belted cows and Dorking chickens give us meat, milk products and eggs. The animals also contribute to the compost that creates our excellent garden soil, which grows our nutritious vegetables and fruits that, in winter, fill our root cellar and line the shelves of our basement pantry. Bees from our own hive sweeten our food and pollinate our crops.

We’re thankful that we have healthy food and that our farm can sustain itself largely without outside inputs. That said, we realize the majority of people in our community buy their food from grocery stores. The availability of such food is totally dependent on oil. It’s farmed with large tractors and petroleum-based chemicals, and it’s transported, processed, packaged and refrigerated using fossil fuels. As petroleum reserves dwindle and oil continues to become more expensive, food prices will go up, causing some people to go hungry.

If my family were hungry, I wouldn’t think twice about climbing over a neighbor’s fence to steal a chicken or two. If our neighbors were hungry, I would expect them to do the same. Given this, none of us can feel secure about our own food supply until the food supplies of our neighbors and communities are also secure. If we use what we learn while producing our own food to help our community members produce food of their own, we can take great strides toward reaching community food security.

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6 Ways Food Terror Warnings Distort Reality

Activist Post

The latest warning coming from British intelligence that al-Qaeda and other political organizations could contaminate the food supply is part of a continuing plot line that hides the obvious: our food already has been poisoned under the auspices of oversight agencies who have been complicit in the very real threats to the public food supply.  The following substances offered into the marketplace in corporate-government collusion already have contributed to far more sickness and death than E. coli or salad bar terrorists ever will . . . unless of course the terrorists have bioengineered the superbug, or it has escaped from a bioweapons lab like the one at Fort Detrick, Maryland. 

Pesticides: Aside from the fact that pesticides have been linked to lower IQ in children, thus altering the future potential of human society, DDT and the cocktail of other pollutants and synthetic chemicals now include those used in GM food production (Bt), such as glyphosate.  Even more alarming is that pollutants that have been banned for decades are still present in 100% of pregnant women, while those from GM food appear in 80% of unborn fetuses.  The presentation below offers additional analysis of the health effects, particularly on the immune system:

The NutriSmart system would put RFIDs into your food for enhanced information

Katie Gatto
PHYSORG

RFID, short for Radio Frequency ID, tags have found their way into a wide variety of applications. These pellets, which are often roughly the same size as a grain of rice, can help us to be reunited with our lost pets, keep towels inside the hotel, and keep big box stores shipping the right boxes to the right places at the right time.

In time you may even find them inside your own stomach. At least they will be there if Hannes Harms has anything to say about it. Mr. Harms, who is currently a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, has designed the NutriSmart system. The system is based on edible RFID tags that will tell you more about your food then you ever wanted to know.


NutriSmart from HannesRemote on Vimeo.

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How Safe Is Your Food? GMOs, Foodborne Illness and Trade Agreements

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

A research group that supports community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, GRAIN, has released a global report, Food Safety for Whom? Corporate Wealth vs. Peoples’ Health, showing how governments and corporations use “food safety” to manipulate market access and control. Rather than making food safer, domestic and trade rules “force open markets, or backdoor ways to limit market access.”

Highlighting aspects of the report, GRAIN states:

Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and corporations are responding with all kinds of rules and regulations, but few have anything to do with public health. The trade agreements, laws and private standards used to impose their version of ‘food safety’ only entrench corporate food systems that make us sick and devastate those that truly feed and care for people, those based on biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and local markets.

Monsanto Will Soon Be Allowed To Police Itself

Ariel Schwartz
Fast Company

Monsanto, enemy of organic farmers and anti-GMO advocates alike, will likely be allowed to conduct its own environmental studies as part of a two-year USDA experiment. But there is no good that can possibly come of an experiment where the company behind nearly every genetically modified crop in our daily diets is allowed to decide whether its products are causing any environmental harm. And Monsanto isn't the only biotech company that will be permitted to police itself.

As it stands, the USDA is responsible for assessing environmental impacts of new GMO crops. The agency has been lax about this, to say the least. In 2005, the USDA gave Monsanto the go-ahead to unleash its sugar beets before preparing an Environmental Impact Statement. This decision triggered a judge to rule that Monsanto sugar beet seedlings should be ripped from the ground.

Because the USDA is so bad at doing its job on time, the agency decided to see if anyone else was prepared to do its EIS work instead. And so it looks like the USDA will at least temporarily hand over environmental impact responsibilities to the biotech companies behind GMO crops. The pilot program will allow these companies to conduct their own environmental assessments of crops or outsource the work to contractors.

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America and EU Agree: Raise Radiation Levels for Food

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

On March 28, 2011, I wrote an article entitled EPA to Help Mainstream Media Obscure The Truth About Radiation Exposure to Americans, in which I discussed the changes to the PAGs (Protective Action Guides) being proposed by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) that would raise the acceptable levels of radiation allowed in the environment, food, and even the general public themselves in the event of a nuclear emergency.

Interestingly enough, an article was published on April 3, 2011, by Alexander Higgins citing Kopp Online and Xander News, stating that a similar rule change was occurring in the European Union.

PAGs are policies and guidelines established by the EPA that guide the agency’s response in the event of a radioactive emergency. Specifically, PAGs deal with how the EPA should enforce laws such as the Clean Air and Water Act in relation to the disaster. Although PAGs had already been established by the EPA in 1992, the agency now plans to amend these guidelines to much higher levels of acceptable radiation.

Food's Erin Brockovich: Robyn O'Brien (VIDEO)

YouTube-TEDxTalks


Robyn shares her personal story and how it inspired her current path as a "Real Food" evangelist. Grounded in a successful Wall Street career that was more interested in food as good business than good-for-you, this mother of four was shaken awake by the dangerous allergic reaction of one of her children to a "typical" breakfast. Her mission to unearth the cause revealed more about the food industry than she could stomach, and impelled her to share her findings with others. Informative and inspiring.

About this speaker

Robyn authored "The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It." A former Wall Street food industry analyst, Robyn brings insight, compassion and detailed analysis to her research into the impact that the global food system is having on the health of our children. She founded allergykidsfoundation.org and was named by Forbes as one of "20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter." The New York Times has passionately described her as "Food's Erin Brockovich."


http://allergykidsfoundation.org/


http://twitter.com/unhealthytruth


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The Codex Alimentarius Irradiated Food Cover-up

Radura symbol - Wiki Image

Updated excerpt from  
Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom

Brandon Turbeville

Activist Post 

In the last article, I briefly discussed a proposal made by the FDA which was very similar to one made by Congress five years earlier. This proposal would have allowed production companies to use terms such as “electronically pasteurized” instead of “irradiated” and, going further, simply allow the food to be categorized as “pasteurized” with no indication whatsoever that the food had been subject to radiation.

The proposal made by the FDA in April, 2007 is an interesting one indeed. In the opening summary of the text, the FDA states that one of the purposes of the proposal is to make it so that “only those irradiated foods in which the irradiation causes a material change in the food, or a material change in the consequences that may result from the use of the food, bear the radura logo and the term ‘irradiation,’ or a derivative thereof, in conjunction with explicit language describing the change in the food or its conditions of use.”[1] 

While this may seem like a strengthening of a rule, in reality it is not. This proposal is merely another cover mechanism for the pretense of protecting the consumer with strong regulation, while allowing industry to do just what it wants, i.e. produce high levels of irradiated food to cover up unsanitary manufacturing practices.

US bars some Japan foods over radiation fears

Shoppers check vegetables at a supermarket in Tokyo
© AFP/File Yoshikazu Tsuno

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States has announced it was barring some food imports from Japan due to fears of radiation and nuclear contamination in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami disaster.

The US Food and Drug Administration said it had placed an import alert on all milk, milk products, fresh vegetables and fruits from certain regions.

This means that no products of these types from the prefectures of Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma can enter the United States without first being shown to be safe.

"In addition, FDA will continue to flag all entries from Japan in order to determine whether they originated from the affected area. FDA will test all food and feed shipments from the affected area," an email statement said.

FDA shuts down sprout grower, processor for poor sanitary conditions

Wikimedia Commons image

Carrie Ann Knauer
Carroll County Times

A Mount Airy grower and processor of soybean sprouts has been ordered to shut down after federal agencies found the company was preparing, packing and holding the sprouts in unsanitary conditions.

The production of bean sprouts without adequate sanitation practices in place makes them susceptible to pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes, salmonella and E. coli, which can cause serious illness in humans, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA announced Monday that it had entered a consent decree with Vegi-Pak Farm LLC after the company violated the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act by introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce. The products had been sold to markets in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

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RELATED ARTICLE:
Raiding and Regulating New Target in War on Drugs: Foodies

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CDC revises estimates of foodborne illness; still an inflated scare tactic

Rady Ananda, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

After author Ben Hewitt revealed that the oft-quoted figure of 77 million foodborne illnesses a year came from a 1999 study based mostly on assumption, the Centers for Disease Control released a revised estimate of 48 million. The new revision still uses the assumption, which Hewitt clarifies:

It is less often stated that the 1999 study providing these numbers ends with a line that reads ‘unknown agents account for approximately 81% of foodborne illnesses and hospitalizations and 64% of deaths.’ In other words, a significant majority of assumed illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths are just that: Assumed. The numbers are merely extrapolated from estimates of all deaths by gastroenteritis of unknown cause.

The CDC assures us now that they have identified 31 foodborne pathogens responsible for 9.4 million illnesses annually, but:

The remaining 38 million illnesses result from unspecified agents, which include known agents without enough data to make specific estimates, agents not yet recognized as causing foodborne illness, and agents not yet discovered.

Unspecified agents? Not yet recognized? Not yet discovered?  Then how do they know these 38 million illnesses are a result of a foodborne pathogen?  This means that two-thirds of all foodborne illnesses supposedly suffered annually is based on CDC fantasy.

Paul Blake of The Herb Prof says, “They have now entered the world of the anecdotal — the very place that they accused the naturopaths of going.”


Instead of 5,000 annual deaths, now the CDC says 3,000 people die from foodborne pathogens a year. Instead of 325,000 annual hospitalizations, there are now 128,000. But don’t compare those numbers, they warn, because the data collection techniques are different.  They made fewer assumptions.

Frankly, I don’t believe 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from tainted food. We would hear about it; we would personally know people — probably within our own families — who become wedded to the toilet. The latest CDC revision on its face doesn’t comport with reality. It is merely a scare tactic used to support federal seizure of the food supply.

In the same press release, the CDC urges Congress to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) which will vastly expand the powers of the Food & Drug Administration, because, after all, every single foodborne pathogen related illness or death is preventable.  (Yeah, it’s called immunity, which humans develop after being exposed — no need for government interference in the laws of nature.)

As an update, the Food Safety Modernization Act was included in the Senate omnibus spending bill, which was rejected on Thursday without a vote, given vast opposition to the 2,000-page bill. This means the food bill will not likely be passed this year, unless the Senate includes it in the short term Continuing Resolution now being finalized. Folks are encouraged to call their Senators to oppose adding the food safety bill to the new CR, which will be passed by midnight Saturday.

Meanwhile, the CDC does not address the 106,000 deaths caused annually (as of 1998) by drugs approved by the FDA.  Neither the CDC nor the FDA want to discuss the number of “iatrogenic” deaths – those deaths caused by doctor error or by treatments prescribed by a doctor. In 1997, that amounted to 420,000 deaths, according to Dr. Lucian L. Leape (discussed by Dr Gary Null, et al.).
Can you imagine the hullabaloo if farmer “error” caused 420,000 deaths each year?

If the FDA were truly concerned with public safety, it would go after drugs and doctors. It would not be raiding natural food producers and distributors. It would have shut down Wright County Egg, which sickened over 1,600 people at last count, instead of shutting down Morningland Dairy, whose product sickened no one. FDA concerns could not be more transparent if they sported a Monsanto logo.

Likewise, the Food Safety Modernization Act is not about safety – it is intended to wipe out mid-size food producers thru overly burdensome regulations, excessive fees and fines, and by interfering with the normal conduct of business — all for the benefit of the multinational corporations whose former executives and lawyers sit at the federal government level.

During the Senate debate on S.510, we repeatedly heard from both sides that “the United States has the safest food supply in the world.”  Perhaps S.510 proponents never heard the folk wisdom, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

This food bill is about destroying competition of the food giants. It will expand monopoly control over our food supply. It extends federal reach beyond what is permitted under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution by seeking to regulate intrastate commerce.  It will destroy local food economies. It is an attack on the personal freedom of humanity to feed itself natural, unadulterated foods outside the irradiated, chlorinated, drugged and pesticide-laden food system that already dominates us.

Not only is the Food Safety Modernization Act unconstitutional, it is unconscionable.

Rady Ananda’s work has appeared in several online and print publications. She holds a B.S. in Natural Resources from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture. Using years of editorial experience and web publishing, Rady now promotes the ideas and work of a select group of quality writers and artists at Food Freedom and COTO Report. 

Related Article by Rady Ananda:
New Scientist Magazine Plants False Story That Pope Approves GM Crops
Leaked Cables Confirm Pope's Distance From GMO Debate 
  
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S. 510, Codex, and The One-World Government Agenda

Brandon Turbeville

Activist Post 

S.510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, has Codex Alimentarius written all over it. By now, this much should be apparent. Besides the cumbersome regulations accompanied with traceability provisions which are merely a cover for surveillance to prevent small or local farmers from providing food outside of the corporate system, the bill gives unprecedented power over food production to FDA, HHS, and DHS. 

Overbearing regulations aimed at small food producers that provide larger facilities with an unfair advantage are a hallmark of Codex guidelines. Likewise, the ability of the FDA, HHS, and DHS to implement various standards independently, or as a result of executive decrees, signals the coming Codex principles to the American food supply. This much has been well documented in recent publications. 

However, there is yet another aspect of S.510 that has yet to be discussed, which also relates to Codex guidelines. Section 113 , titled “New Dietary Ingredients.” It is unfortunately as much of a Codex wish list as the previous provisions. This section alone gives a great deal more discretionary power to the Secretary of the HHS and FDA regarding dietary supplements. Under the guise of an attempt to reduce the access to and usage of anabolic steroids, the result of section 113 would give the Secretary the authority to ban any “new” dietary supplement that he/she sees fit. 

This is not the first time that this has been attempted. In early 2010, John McCain and Byron Dorgan introduced the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010, which would have done essentially the same thing. This is a true signal that there is a higher force at work here. In fact, the DSSA of 2010 was submitted under the guise of preventing anabolic steroid use as well. This bill would have given the FDA the authority to establish a list of acceptable dietary supplements, without grandfathering in supplements from pre-1994 (the enactment of the famous Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), and subsequently remove those supplements if it saw fit in the future.

While not a carbon copy of the DSSA, the intent remains the same in section 113 of S.510. The bill states:

If the Secretary determines that the information in a new dietary ingredient notification submitted under this section for an article purported to be a new dietary ingredient is inadequate to establish that a dietary supplement containing such article will reasonably be expected to be safe because the article may, or may contain, an anabolic steroid, the Secretary shall notify the Drug Enforcement Administration of such determination.

Although the language of the bill at first seems to be specifically aimed at anabolic steroids, subsequent statements cloud the focus of the section and leave it more open to interpretation. This is because this section cleverly gives the HHS and FDA the responsibility of creating a mechanism to identify acceptable dietary ingredients from the unacceptable ones.

Although nowhere in S.510 are “positive and negative lists” discussed in those specific terms, it is nonetheless mandated in this section. Common sense mandates that this be the case since regulatory agencies would necessarily need some sort of standard to reference in future policy considerations and decisions. That being the case, the bill states: 

Not later than 180 days after date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall publish guidance that clarifies when a dietary supplement ingredient is a new dietary supplement ingredient, when the manufacturer or a distributor of a dietary ingredient or dietary supplement should provide the Secretary with information as described in section 413(a)(2) of the Federal, Food and Cosmetic Act, the evidence needed to document the safety of new dietary ingredients, and appropriate methods for establishing the identity of a new dietary ingredient.

There should be little doubt that the guidance specified here will eventually come in the form of a positive and negative list of vitamin and mineral supplements. Such a list would likely begin in the same manner as the positive and negative supplement lists currently existing in Europe with the passage of the European Union Food Supplements Directive.[1]  Of course, the EU Food Supplements Directive was merely the beginning of the implementation of Codex Alimentarius guidelines in Europe, specifically those dealing with vitamins and minerals. The EU Food Supplements Directive has and will continue to cause serious damage to the natural supplement industry as well as the health of millions of Europeans since its passage.

Codex has proven to be much more successful with their attack on vitamin and mineral supplements in Europe than in the United States. Likewise, it has been more successful in promoting the proliferation of genetically modified foods in the United States than in Europe. Because of this, it often appears that the Codex fight is isolated to one country, yet this idea is far from the truth. We are witnessing the implementation of Codex Alimentarius guidelines by stealth on a worldwide scale. It is a fact that whenever the same laws and policies are being enacted in very different places at the same time that there is another more hidden agenda behind the laws than the one being presented to the public.

Codex Alimentarius is a hydra with many different heads and it is important to view much of the domestic food- and supplement-related legislation with this in mind. Unfortunately, Codex is merely a symptom of the greater problem of an emerging world government and total domination of the individual through every means available – especially food. 

Notes:

 [1] Directive2002/46/EC Of The European Parliament And Of The Council Of 10 June 2002 of the approximation of the laws of the member states relating to food supplements. “Codex Alimentarius: Global Food Imperialism.” Ed. Scott Tips. FHR. 2007. Pp. 237-243. 

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Mullins, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University where he earned the Pee Dee Electric Scholar’s Award as an undergraduate. He has had numerous articles published dealing with a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, and civil liberties. He also the author of Codex Alimentarius - The End of Health Freedom 

Recently by Brandon Turbeville:

The History of Health Tyranny

The Health Tyrants
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S. 510 and Codex Alimentarius Link: Tracking, Tracing, and Monitoring Independent Food Production  

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