In the article we talk about GMO foods and big business....I'm NOT going to talk about whether GMO foods are okay for you or not. (spoiler I don't think they are good) This is more about big business and the GMO industry.
Charts are always better.....unless they scare the shit out of you, like this one does for me. What's scary about this? Well if it's not obvious (I'm hoping that it is) let me point towards Kellogg's to give an example of why charts like this are scary....wait the whole food industry is scary. Kellogg's owns some of the most trusted brands in the almost Bio but not, branded empire. I'm going to single out Kashi in particular for this "rant" but they are the only ones guilty of this and maybe Kashi isn't even the worst. Though they aren't the only ones engaging in a confusing campaign against against the GMO industry?!? They are the ones that most surprised me the most by their rather mixture of not for GMO but not really against it message. Kellogg's (Kashi's parent company) has been linked with Monsanto but Kellogg's themselves paint themselves to be very earth and people friendly. On their website they talk about "science based climate goals" which on the surface sounds great. But Monsanto also claims to be fighting climate change and something called "sustainable agriculture"....wait what? Is it possible that Monsanto is in the business of looking after the environment? Looking through their website, you would think that this evil Monsanto was in fact the greatest solution for food security our world has ever seen. And the folks at Kellogg's have been linked to Monsanto, so you would think that Kashi (again owned by Kellogg's) would in fact embrace their link with the chemical giant. But Kashi seems to actually distancing themselves from from Monsanto Chemicals but working advertising their products as GMO free and good for the earth. Kashi have a lot of the cereals verified by the "non-gmo project" as gmo free, which would be a great but there is a big but...
On the non-gmo project website nongmoproject.org there is a paragraph that states
"Most developed nations do not consider GMOs to be safe. In more than 60 countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, and all of the countries in the European Union, there are significant restrictions or outright bans on the production and sale of GMOs. In the U.S., the government has approved GMOs based on studies conducted by the same corporations that created them and profit from their sale. Increasingly, Americans are taking matters into their own hands and choosing to opt out of the GMO experiment."
But on the Kashi website it has the following rebuttal.
"The scientific community has not established a causative link between GMOs and any impact on human health."
Now if you don't know what the Non-GMO-Project is, what the following.
So now we talk about trust. Does Kashi really believe that, "The scientific community has not established a causative link between GMOs and any impact on human health" or do they really believe in establishing themselves as supportive of Non GMO foods? If they believed that there is no causative link between GMO foods and impact on human health why go to the trouble to get your products tested to advertise that they are GMO free. Is this just a PR move by Kellogg's, as they try and establish Kashi as the super health, super good for the earth company that more and more people seem to be looking for? The problem for me is trust. Do any of us really believe that Kellogg's is really looking after our health and looking after the planet? Does Kashi have the freedom to go against the company that bought them? Can I really trust that Kashi cares about the earth? Does it matter? Is it fair to criticize them?
I believe that the answer is yes, not only does it matter but also it should be fair to criticize all compaines that try and make claims of their products being healthy. But year after year companies like Monsanto and others work for hard to ensure that critical voices aren't heard through the use of bulling and misinformation. And sadly this works on both side of the debate. Non GMO believers are just as guilty of having biased research and we as a community need to know which voices are true and which have agendas or sooner rather than later we won't have any trust in any voice.