March, 2019
Berlin -- Yesterday, doing my grocery shopping at The Bio Company in Kreuzberg, I ran across an ad campaign for organic food:
Ackergifte? Nein Danke! (Agricultural Pesticides? No thanks!) It's a clever take on the old and successful campaign Atomkraft? Nein Danke!
I'll try to get an Ackergifte lapel button. It features a healthy honey bee.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue is calling on Americans (and the world) to reject the "fear your food movement." He does not name anyone in particular behind the movement but ascribes it to Internet-fueled hysteria.
I am one who fears my food with a rational, scientific basis for the fear. There is a worldwide diabetes and obesity epidemic, well investigated and reported, which we ignore at our peril. Its cause is ever-increasing processed foods and added sugars in our diets.
Our pollinators are also disappearing. In fact, the whole insect world is threatened. A primary cause is agricultural chemicals.
In Sonny Perdue's world, we should cast aside concerns about unhealthy food and agricultural practices that are destroying the very basis of our agriculture. He promotes GMO technology that makes crops immune from the herbicides that kill other plants on which pollinators and the larger insect world depend.
Here is a proposition for Secretary Perdue: put GMO and nutrition science in service to the cause of helping farmers produce healthy food with which to feed the world, not unhealthy food that is the cause of the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Help create demand for locally produced, pesticide-free food that will create urban and rural jobs and provide livelihoods for farmers who practice diversified agriculture and are not contracted slaves to monopolies. Help repair our broken food system, not break it further.
And don't try to tell the EU that it must import unhealthy food. Ackergifte? Nein Danke.
