Organic Consumers Association call to action: Stop Bayer's "Food as Software" plot.
From today's newsletter:
There’s one thing as bad as keeping cows in factory farm feedlots, standing knee deep in their own excrement, as they eat corn that turns their stomachs into E. coli factories:
Forcing people to subsist on synthetic Frankenfoods!
That’s the future of food and agriculture unless we move in another direction by voting with our food dollars and demanding action from politicians to save family farms and help them go organic and grass-fed, while meeting high standards for animal welfare and regenerative planned grazing.
The synthetic biology industry is targeting dairy farmers for destruction. They say that by 2030, their “Food-as-Software” model will have collapsed demand for dairy in the U.S. by 90 percent and the dairy industry will be all but bankrupt.
This is not a new plan. Winston Churchill wrote about it in 1931 (quoted in Pharma Food):
“Microbes …will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions, just as yeast is now. New strains of microbes will be developed and made to do a great deal of our chemistry for us. … We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. … The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.”
Today this is called “synthetic biology” and “precision fermentation.”
One of the products of this technology is an unlabeled Frankenfood that is, just as Churchill predicted, being snuck into our food supply gradually so as to escape observation. It appears on ingredient lists as “non-animal whey protein.” It is a wholly synthetic substance spit out of genetically engineered fungus.
The manufacturer of “non-animal whey protein,” Perfect Day, started by marketing vegan dairy products, but most of its consumer brands failed and it is now slipping its “non-animal whey protein” into multi-ingredient products that contain animal ingredients. For example, Unicon Apollo protein powder contains Perfect Day’s “non-animal whey protein,” but also real egg and milk ingredients that are advertised on the front of the package as "grass-fed."
“Non-animal whey protein” is made in a process similar to the production of corn ethanol. Corn is grown, processed into sugar and then fed to a microorganism programmed to eat the sugar and secrete a protein. Then, the protein is chemically separated from the microbe, likely with toxins like hexane.
Not only is this an energy-intensive, hyper-industrial process likely to result in a highly contaminated, toxic end-product, it is also grossly inefficient. To make a gallon of ethanol, it takes more than 26 pounds of corn!
If the production of “non-animal whey protein” is as efficient, it is a poor substitute for cow’s milk, which takes no more than 3 pounds of corn per gallon of milk. (Plus, milk is a superfood, while the digestibility and nutritional benefits of “non-animal whey protein” have yet to be determined.)
Scientist John Fagan of the Health Research Institute used a mass spectrometer to analyze what’s in “milk” made from “non-animal whey protein.”
What he found is shocking. A “milk” product marketed as “dairy-identical” contained fungicide, quinic acid, normorphine, hesperidin, convallatoxin, and a huge array of additional small molecules literally unknown to science.
Dr. Fagan is a vegetarian, so he has nothing against foods that don’t come from factory farms, but he cautions against eating synbio GMOs until they’re regulated. Currently, they’re being slipped into the food system through the “Generally Recognized as Safe” or GRAS loophole.
Even at that, the GRAS submission Perfect Day sent to the Food and Drug Administration is full of worrisome information:
ALLERGENS - The level of the genetically engineered Trichoderma reesei fungus strain that produces the synthetic protein in the final product is at 6.7 percent. Three T. reesei proteins showed similarities to known allergens (Cryptomeria, Juniperus; Penicillium chrysogenum; and House dust mites).
HEAVY METALS - “Non-dairy whey protein” contains arsenic at 16.8 ppb. (There is no safe level of arsenic. The Environmental Protection Agency takes action when water samples are over 10 ppb.) It contains lead at 59.3 ppb. (There is no safe level of lead. The EPA takes action when water samples are over 15 ppb.)
That’s what happens when real farms get replaced with “Food-as-Software.”
This idea, promoted by NASA and the Pentagon, is that single-celled (and maybe even more complex) organisms can be engineered, as easily as computer software is coded, into Living Foundries to manufacture food, fuel, plastic and pharmaceuticals.
We can stop factory farming without eating toxic Frankenfoods or ceding our food sovereignty to chemical and pharmaceutical companies like Bayer.
Protecting yourself and your loved ones by securing your own food supply is the easy part: Buy direct from regenerative organic farmers.
The challenge is to build the political power and popular education to wake everyone up from this nightmare before it’s too late.
-end
Link to take action:
It’s about time someone stood up to Monsanto (now Bayer’s) plot to replace real farms with genetically engineered synthetic Frankenfoods! TAKE ACTION: Tell your lawmakers to ban genetically engineered Frankenfoods made with synthetic biology (so-called “precision fermentation”)!
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