Monday, August 25, 2014

PESTICIDES, POISONS, GMOs, and YOUR HEALTH

It’s staggering: More than 1 billion pounds of dangerous pesticides are used in the production of agricultural crops in the U.S. annually,1 poisoning up to 20,000 farmworkers each year.2

Right now the Environmental Protection Agency is deciding whether to update rules that protect farmworkers from harmful pesticide exposure --

We know that big corporate agribusiness will be piling-on the pressure from the other side. We need to fight back and provide a strong showing of grassroots support for protecting farmworkers from dangerous pesticides.

On the other hand, of course, we have the GMOs where the poisons are part of the plant. Remember that old phrase “Pick your poison?” Eat the plant, fruit, veggie, eat the poison. Remember the news post I sent a week or 2 ago that China was refusing future shipments of GMO beans and wheat from the USA? Europe jumped on that bandwagon early on. Our exports of food are getting less and less – and, hey, what else do we have to export? China makes most everything else, or India or Japan… Meanwhile back here in the good old USA, people are developing allergies like no other time in history. We now see entire sections in the grocery store for gluten free products, for example. much of our wheat has been GMO for far longer than anyone will ever tell us, and they will lie to cover it up. We are becoming a nation of ailments seemingly without a cause… stomach problems, aches and pains, chronic headaches, backaches, kidney problems… the list goes on forever it seems. Do I even need to mention the high rate of all kinds of cancers? And I ask, why shouldn’t we have these problems when we eat so much poison? And the poisons that go down into the earth eventually make their way into our water supply, then we drink poisons.

Each day for over a couple months these huge vats of chemicals have rolled past my house, generally 4 at a time, sometimes several times a day. i have learned that some poisons are mixed into the water that is then piped out into the fields in drip irrigation – especially tomato plants. Some days Carter flies over the fields spraying with his plane. Other poisons are sprayed from the attachments to tractors going up and down the fields.

The argument FOR GMOs is that it reduces all the spraying. So My guess is that the fields that don’t get sprayed are GMOs?

Tell me, how does your food taste? If you are over 50, I bet you can tell the difference in the stuff we eat today and the food we ate as kids.

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One other dumb fact – did you know that the folks that drive this equipment do not have to have valid driver’s licenses? In fact, I have been told that there is no age limit, that 12 year olds can drive these tractors down our streets and highways. And you can bet none of them speak English.

1 comment:

Ginnie said...

On my daughters recent visit from NY she brought 6 smallish tomatoes that her friend picked for her from her organic garden & sent to me. OH MY GOSH ... I think I was 12 years old when I last tasted anything so good. It's criminal what has been done to our food. I'm drying the seeds and will try my luck growing these Heirloom tomatoes next year.