Friday, February 14, 2014

DO YOU WANT GMO LABELS ON YOUR FOOD? Part 2.

Valentine Summer Squash, Tomato and Pepper from My Backyard Garden.


Environmental Action volunteers demonstrated at the JM Smucker headquarters in Orville Ohio this month. Smucker’s apparently knew of the plan beforehand and met the team at the door, delivering their petition  signatures telling the food manufacturer to lable the GMOs in their products, and to stop blocking GMO labeling laws. At the same time, Environmental Action members showed up at their local supermarkets and told the managers to relay our demand to Smucker's that they label GMOs in their products. 

Within seconds of showing up at Smucker's headquarters, six security guards asked that volunteers hand over the petition signatures at the entrance and not enter the premises. But  the activists saw this as good news because, those security guards knew they were coming, which means they know about the campaign - and were worried enough about what we might say and do to send a detail of security to deal with us.

Protestors were too concerned about Smucker's concealing GMOs in their products to be thwarted. 

The following quotation was published by the Environmental Action Team, a group protesting GMOs.  “GMOs put our entire planet's future at risk and every single student at Wooster College (or anywhere) who eats Smucker's products is unwittingly supporting an enormous threat posed by GMO foods.” Rita Frost and the rest of the Environmental Action team were planning additional actions at Smucker’s in the coming weeks.

Reasons to genetically modify foods is to increase yields, to alter foods to taste more pleasant and to make some kinds of foods more resistant to cold or other weather conditions. Tomatoes for instance might be more immune to cold if genes from other organisms are put into the reproduction cells, such as genes from, a strain of fish that is cold resistant.

Dr.Oz also said on Thursday that crops are altered so they will be able to tolerate stronger insecticides. Then the spray volume can be increased. Pesticide use has escalated to millions of pounds per year, and the side effect is that pesticides may affect our food as well as the animals we also end up eating as meat. We just don’t know the full effects of insecticide use, of genetic modification on human or animal digestion. And ironically, a side effect of this practice has resulted in more resistant bugs and insects. 

© by Ruth Zachary

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