The Organic-Natural Industrial Complex.

Adam Smith, the eighteenth century economist and philosopher, offered insights into human nature and economics that seem particularly relevant today. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.
We’re seeing evidence of that in the current effort to discredit and diminish genetically engineered foods and to attack their defenders in the scientific community. The chief perpetrators of this black marketing campaign are lobbyists for the organic agriculture and “natural products” industries and their enablers.

A large long-term study on the use of the big-selling weedkiller glyphosate by agricultural workers in the United States has found no firm link between exposure to the pesticide and cancer, scientists said on Thursday.
Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), the study found there was no association between glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular herbicide RoundUp, “and any solid tumors or lymphoid malignancies overall, including non-Hogkin Lymphoma (NHL) and its subtypes”.

NRO;

A blistering report issued this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture exposes the failure of government officials to ensure the integrity and safety of organic-food imports. Over the past several years, there has been a huge spike in organic imports — particularly corn and soybeans — to keep pace with consumer demand; more than 100 countries now ship organic products here. The USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) is tasked with making sure those countries meet our rigorous organic standards, but it is a dubious system based largely on reciprocity and good faith, not tight controls and federal enforcement.

Oh… dear.

Right click to enlarge.

Deweese says she hates the term clean eating. “It’s a social status thing. It’s more about ‘I’m better because I eat clean,'” she says. Adds Scott-Dixon, “‘Clean eating’ is a preoccupation of people who, in socioeconomic terms, really don’t have any real, legitimate worries. It’s a first-world problem.”
Indeed, labeling some foods as clean frames the rest as dirty, setting up a binary, us-vs-them, self-righteous world view. “It’s using food as propaganda. There’s a moral component,” says Trevor Kashey, a nutrition consultant for Complete Human Performance, who holds a PhD in biochemistry.

A new study reports…

…that even though organic farms have the eco-friendly benefit of using fewer pesticides, they also use more land, which is harmful to the planet.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia analyzed organic crop farming across 17 criteria — such as yield, impact on climate change, farmer livelihood and consumer health — by looking at the existing scientific literature on its results.
For one, they found the environmental benefits of organic farming can be offset by the lower yields of such crops (typically 19 to 25 percent lower than conventional farming).

So you don’t like GMO? Let’s look at a mutation breeding!

Mutation breeding is the process of inducing genetic variation in a crop through use of chemical treatment or radioactivity. Chemicals like ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS), sodium azide (SA), N-nitroso-N-methylurea (NMU) are used to soak seeds or treat tissue or pollen in culture. They induce random changes in DNA, usually single bases or small deletions. These changes alter the encoded protein, forming new proteins that may be more or less functional, or perhaps truncated or even not made at all.
For radiation, fast neutrons, x-rays or gamma rays bombard seeds causing double-strand breaks in chromosomes. These lead to larger deletions of genetic material and sometimes rearrangements. These changes are essentially random. They are induced by short-term exposure (seconds to hours) to a powerful radioactive source, usually Cobalt-60. Sometimes whole plants are grown in high radioactive fields to generate these genetic errors. The Institute for Mutation Breeding in Japan has generated a number of cultivars using these techniques.

No labels required, which might explain things.

Fear Marketing: I haven’t set foot in an A&W in over two years.

They’ve begun to eat their own:

Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company has been hit with another lawsuit that criticizes the brand’s claims.
The nonprofit, politically active group Organic Consumers Association filed a lawsuit earlier this month with the Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that Honest violates the Organic Food Production Act of 1990 and the California Organic Products Act of 2003 by claiming its Premium Infant Formula is organic.