It took me a while to figure out what the next piece on this blog would be.  Food came to mind in particular today, as I read an article that was shared on Facebook by the group ‘Millions Against Monsanto’.  The author was Don Huber, an USDA scientist.  He talks about the ongoing detrimental effects of playing around with our edible plants.  He discussed glyphosate, basically what Round Up is made up of.  Anyone who has read about the history of Monsanto knows that they have been involved in several noxious substances.  One that has been particular to me is saccharin.  My grandmother was diabetic and so used saccharin as a substitute for sugar.

Where I wanted to begin with in this first piece of our food chain and the importance of it, is agriculture itself.  To be fair, Monsanto and their forays into genetically modified organisms, is that they have claimed many times that their reason for their exploration into GMO’s is for the benefit of mankind (and womankind).  We need more food than we can produce, and so on and so forth.  The thing (which is very well highlighted in the Don Huber article) is that what Monsanto and other chemical companies are doing is incredibly destructive to the whole food chain.

Before I get into the history of agriculture, I’d like to mention something that I would think that few people think about, or so it seems, since few actually speak up.  So here we go.  So you go to the supermarket and buy shrimp wraps, or better yet, chicken wraps for lunch.  It all looks so clean (clean in appearance), but in reality it is not so clean.  That’s the world that most people are used to – going to the supermarket – but there’s also produce, or as they say in Great Britain, the green grocer which is basically plant-based.  Now, one thing that is very important in that there would be no animals and their by-products to eat (including fish) if there was no plant life.  If we think about things that we can see with our eyes, life forms, all of them depend on edible plants.  Edible plants are the bedrock of the whole food chain.  Without them in sufficient quantities and quality we have a big problem on our hands.  I’ll finish this part by saying that what people at Monsanto and other chemical companies (they are all chemical, not food, companies) are doing is making matters much worse.  As a quick example, those chemicals that are being developed are doing tremendous damage, not making the food chain more secure; in fact they are making it less secure.  Even worse than that, we are contaminating the actual soil that the plants depend on to grow.  At the time of this blog, 63% of the world’s genetically modified crops are being grown in the US, with the second largest producer being Argentina at 21%. Only a small percentage is grown on the eastern continents, and Europe has gone as far as to ban them completely.  I think that as more information is spread the more action will be taken – this article by Don Huber in particular, once peer-reviewed will make a heightening in the push against GMO’s.

(to be continued)