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Letters
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- Written by: Roberta Actor
The Lake County Chamber’s recent call for “caution” regarding Proposition 37 ( Fulton and Magliulo: Food labeling – a cautionary approach ) is completely off-target.
The FDA does not test GE foods for safety – they rely strictly upon the testing that the companies choose to do and merely “evaluate” the carefully selected information that the companies choose to submit regarding the results of safety testing.
FDA whistle-blowers have been complaining for years that it’s more like a rubber stamp process and that evidence of harmful effects has been routinely covered up or ignored.
The FDA requires no long-term safety studies and none are done by the companies requesting approvals. After all, they want to get their product onto the market as quickly as possible, let’s not let caution get in the way of profits!
The FDA believes that GE foods are safe until they are found to be harmful. That means that instead of actually being cautious, doing independent research that will really show whether these product s are safe, caution has been thrown to the wind and all of us are the biotech industry’s unwitting experimental subjects.
When Proposition 37 passes, the law allows manufacturers to add the information about GE ingredients when they make other routine changes to listed ingredients on their labels.
So as far as the hair-on-fire claims that this will make food unaffordable and the poor will starve, anyone who reads labels knows that food producers reprint and redesign labels regularly, and changes to ingredients and formulations occur fairly regularly.
Complaints that the law doesn’t cover this or that are intentional distractions from the real issue, the right to know.
The law was intentionally designed to have a limited scope. This is a good thing! In fact, if the exemptions didn’t exist, the same parties who are complaining about them now would be complaining that there are no exceptions and how that’s unfair to this or that food industry or agricultural sector.
The argument that shoppers should just buy Certified Organic products if they want to avoid GE food is also defective. Many times there is no organic version of a product available, yet there may be a conventionally-produced product with no GE ingredients sitting next to a similar item that contains GE ingredients.
With labeling we’d have that information, and more than 90 percent of consumers believe that we should have that knowledge available to us when we buy groceries.
The only opponents to labeling are those who profit from GE products and their promoters in the FDA and USDA.
Those big players in the national chamber are telling the local chamber to get with the program. Ironically, these biotech insiders in the national chamber are accustomed to tax subsidies and preferential treatment by regulatory agencies – they don’t want a fair free market full of buyers who have the same information as sellers – they don’t really believe that a truly the free market will work out for them!
The issue of labeling and choice is not complex at all. It’s obvious that we Americans have the same right to know what we are eating as the citizens of the European countries, Japan, Malaysia and Australia.
Is the chamber really telling us that it’s so complicated and difficult for us ordinary American shoppers, voters and taxpayers to comprehend, that we should NOT be entitled to the same rights as the British or French people? That we should reject the right to know what we are eating and just listen to the experts who know best at the FDA?
Executive Committee of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, are you serious? I’m pretty sure that most of your local members would not want to argue that we Americans should have fewer rights than people in Europe or Malaysia.
Roberta Actor-Thomas is a software consultant in Lakeport.
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- Written by: Barbara Christwitz
I read food labels because I insist on knowing what I am feeding my body. I trust those companies such as our local Amy’s Kitchen Inc., which want me to know as much as possible about their ingredients.
Therefore I am going to vote “Yes” for Proposition 37.
Additionally, I cannot help but wonder why the following companies – based on the California Secretary of State’s records – give hundreds of thousands and yes, millions of dollars to oppose Proposition 37.
They surely are spending a wad of money to guarantee that we consumers remain ignorant of our foods’ ingredients.
What do they have to lose if people are fully informed? Apparently, a great deal.
Here is a sampling of some of the amounts of campaign contributions which oppose Proposition 37 as found by www.gmolabeling.org/who-to-boycott-that-are-against-gmo-labeling-and-prop-37/ .
Monsanto Co.: $4,208,000
Pepsico Inc.: $1,716,300
Nestle USA Inc.: $1,169,400
Kellogg Co.: $632,500
General Mills Inc.: $519,401.17
Hershey Co.: $498.006.72
J.M. Smucker: $388,000
Barbara Christwitz lives in Clearlake, Calif.
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- Written by: Bob Bridges
Time is running out to file your protest to protect yourself from Lakeport’s proposed 100-percent water and sewer rate increase.
It must be filed by Sept. 18, 2012.
The proposed rate increase will change Lakeport as you know it. Gone will be green lawns and backyard gardens. More businesses will have to fold up. We will become a brown and dying city with a huge debt.
Tell the City Council we cannot afford their big plans in these tough times.
File your protest now. Tell the city, “I protest the proposed water and sewer rate increase.” Don’t let the city’s misleading notice trick you into thinking you can’t protest both.
Thank you to everyone who has already protested. Together we can do this!
Bob Bridges lives in Lakeport, Calif.
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- Written by: Annelle Durham
It was when we started Clover Creek Family Farm that I learned firsthand the unifying effect of food.
Through our Community Supported Agriculture program we delivered farm fresh produce to over 90 households in Lake County for 10 years. These included people from all walks of life, the very religious to the not at all, the political right to the political left, the well to do and the barely making it, even to the communards and the survivalists.
The commonality was food, in this case, locally grown organic fruits and vegetables.
Prop 37, which will be on the ballot this November, is about food and labeling. It is not about good or bad, but just about transparency in labeling.
It is about you and me, our neighbors, our co-workers and our children all having the right to know what we are eating.
The opposition to Prop 37 has already collected more than $25 million in an attempt to keep us in the dark.
Let’s come together, and remember that we, the people, not the corporations, eat the food, and that we have the right to know if it is genetically engineered.
Vote yes on proposition 37 for the labeling of genetically engineered foods.
Annelle Durham lives in Upper Lake, Calif.