Food Rights Network

Looking for Kids’ Books? Avoid This Propaganda

- by Rebekah Wilce

Did you know that genetic engineering (GE) “is helping to improve the health of the Earth and the people who call it home”? A trade group funded by Monsanto wants your kids to believe it.

The Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has published a kids’ book on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that purports to give kids “a closer look at biotechnology. You will see that biotechnology is being used to figure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the environment; and 3) grow more nutritious food that improves our health.”

If that book doesn’t appeal to you, you could try a nanotechnology coloring book made by a company that produces such things as “colloidal silver nanoparticles” used in antibacterial products that find their way into the water supply and can be poisonous to the human system. It compares nanotechnologies like these silvers to “the smell of baking cookies.”

Or perhaps a “biosolids” workbook made by wastewater treatment facilities? It directs kids to grow sunflowers in toxic sewage sludge to see how they grow. (more…)

2 Comments August 22, 2012

Food News You Can Use

• Tom Philpott Exposes Sara Lee Marketing Professionals’ Attempt to Put Lipstick on Pigs: (Mother Jones, 11/28)
• Rep. Pingree (D-ME) Questions the FDA’s Commitment of Scarce Resources to Small Farm Raids: Read her 11/18 letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, posted by Local Food, Local Rules, here.
• Fair Trade USA Drops Commitment to Small Coffee Farmers: According to the New York Times (11/23), the group said it would “make far-reaching changes in the sorts of products that get its seal of approval. The changes include giving the fair trade designation to coffee from large plantations, which were previously barred in favor of small farms.”
• “Research Proves Equal Yields, Higher Profits from Organic Farming”: According to Fresh Plaza (11/21), “Organic crop systems can provide similar yields and much higher economic returns than a conventional corn-soybean rotation, according to thirteen years of data from a side-by-side comparison at Iowa State University’s Neely-Kinyon Research and Demonstration Farm.” As Barbara Damrosch writes for the Washington Post, other studies have offered similar results, including, perhaps most persuasively, the World Bank’s “International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development.” (more…)

Leave a Comment November 29, 2011