Sour Milk Politics

The report last week about female Chinese infants growing breasts because of hormone-laden milk formula has gotten people’s attention. The same Chinese milk products are believed to have been sold into the US.

Meanwhile
Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland, continues to press his war against milk
producers who openly state that their milk has not been contaminated by
injection of bovine growth hormone (BGH) or other hormones into the
cows. Strickland originally wanted to forbid all such statements because
the largest dairy producers did not like them. He then decreed that such
statements could only be kept if accompanied by an FDA disclaimer that
milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone was identical to other
milk. Not only accompanied: the disclaimer had to be the same font
and the same size type, a requirement that the governor knew national
brands could not possibly comply with—it would force them to drop the
statements not only in Ohio, but everywhere.

Never mind
that the FDA disclaimer was factually false. Milk from cows treated with
bovine growth hormone is chemically different from other milk in a
variety of unattractive ways, including being higher in insulin-like
growth factor (IGF-1), which has been linked to cancer.

And who do you
think developed the false disclaimer at the FDA? An individual named
Michael Taylor who then joined Monsanto in a senior management position
and has now returned to the FDA as senior advisor to the Commissioner.
Note, however, that Monsanto sold its bovine growth hormone business to
Eli Lilly in 2008; it is no longer Monsanto whose corporate interests
are at stake; so Taylor no longer has any conflict in dealing with the
BGH issue—right?

The BGH label
issue in Ohio has gone to court. The judge ruled against our side, but
ordered mediation. A similar BGH gag rule was also attempted in
Pennsylvania by then-state Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff, but
was countermanded by Governor Ed Rendell. A similar bill was passed by
the Kansas legislature, then vetoed by Governor Kathleen Sebelius
shortly before she left to become Secretary of Health and Human Services
(and thus in charge of the FDA).

Governor
Strickland is locked in a tight re-election race in Ohio. We hope our
Ohio supporters will help spread the word about his sell-out to large
dairy interests at the expense of our children’s health.

Congress Tries to Improve School Lunches

Senate bill
S.3307 and House bill HR.5504 are stirring up a ruckus. The Senate bill
has passed; the House bill has not yet been voted upon. Their language
asks the US Department of Agriculture to develop better standards for
the National School Lunch Program and for school vending machines, a
favorite initiative of First Lady Michelle Obama. The ruckus is because
the Senate bill takes money away from food stamps to fund it, while the
House version is so far unfunded.

What no one
seems to be noticing is that the USDA is grossly unqualified to develop
school lunch standards. This is the agency, notoriously in bed with
large corporate interests, that brought us irradiated meat, often from
questionable sources, for school children, along with a refusal to let
beef producers test for Mad Cow Disease or reveal the results of such
tests.

We recently recounted how USDA mandates that irradiated almonds cannot be labeled as such
and must instead be labeled “raw.” And of course the Department is all
for GMO food, no matter the evidence that is produced against it, and
all for BGH-treated milk, even though Canada, Japan, and most of Europe
have banned it.

School lunches
certainly do need better standards, but if those standards are produced
by the USDA, will we get standards written, behind the scenes, by the
likes of Monsanto? Nothing is more important than our children’s diet,
or for that matter, our own. It is one of the most important elements of
natural health. But to get the right school lunch standards, the USDA,
like the FDA, needs a thorough-going reform.

Court Again Says No to Monsanto

A US district judge in California said that the USDA cannot wave through approval for Monsanto’s new genetically modified sugar beets
without a review of what they would do to the environment. The court
had previously canceled USDA’s earlier wave-through approval of genetically modified alfalfa, an issue that has gone to the Supreme Court but is still unresolved.

Harvard Researchers Create Frankenstein Machine

Harvard
researcher George Church and colleagues have announced the creation of a
new technology—Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, or MAGE—that
will, according to Bloomberg,
“induce 50 different gene [DNA] alterations in a population of bacteria
almost simultaneously, creating billions of cellular mutations in a
matter of days.” The researchers are elated by all the genetically
modified organisms they can now make in the blink of an eye.

Church did say
last July that the US should develop regulations to keep such
technology out of the hands of terrorists. We do not feel very reassured
to hear that government regulations will somehow protect us from the
massive bio-terrorism that could be unleashed by this MAGE technology.