Renewable News Network wrote:
> Three Food Articles in Today's Boston Globe
> ===========================================
> 1. A trade body on hormones
> 2. Chefs cast a skeptical eye on altered food
> 3. Vitamin A derivative is added to rice
>
> 1. A trade body on hormones
> By Mark Weisbrot, 08/04/99
>
> WASHINGTON, D.C. Should countries have the right to set health and
> safety standards for the food their citizens eat? Should they be
> allowed to exclude foreign-produced foods that don't meet national
> standards? Or should these questions be decided by the World Trade
> Organization?
>
> Like it or not, these issues are being decided right now. In the
> latest trade dispute between the world's two largest trading
> partners, our government placed sanctions last week on $117 million
> worth on European goods. The purpose of the sanctions is to force
> the Europeans to import American beef raised with growth hormones.
> Ordinarily this decision to place 100 percent tariffs on French
> truffles, foie gras, and other delicacies most of us have never
> tasted would violate our international trade agreements. But in
> this case the United States has the backing of the World Trade
> Organization, a 134-nation body that was created four years ago to
> negotiate and govern world trade. The WTO has ruled that Europe's
> ban on hormone-treated beef is illegal, and it authorized the
> United States to impose retaliatory trade sanctions against the
> European Union.
>
> Consider the arguments: The Europeans don't allow beef treated with
> growth hormones to be sold in their markets, regardless of where it
> is produced. They just don't think it is all that safe to eat.
> But most US beef is, in fact, treated with these hormones. So our
> government, at the request of the beef industry, filed a complaint
> at the WTO, arguing that the ban was an unfair restriction on
> trade. The rules of the WTO say that any health or environmental
> standard that affects trade must be supported by scientific
> evidence. So the WTO appointed a three-judge panel, which decided
> in March 1997 that there was not enough scientific evidence to
> justify Europe's ban on hormone-treated beef. But two months ago
> an independent panel of scientists asked by the European Commission
> to consider these questions reached a different conclusion. The
> scientists found that one of the six hormones commonly found in
> beef is a ''complete carcinogen.'' The panel concluded that
> further study would be needed on the other five hormones, although
> anyone reading the 142-page report would undoubtedly wonder why we
> Americans allow these drugs to be pumped into our own livestock.
> We probably wouldn't, especially for consumption by those most
> susceptible to the effects of the hormones, such as children and
> pregnant women, if most people knew what they were eating. But
> there are no labeling requirements for these extra ingredients in
> your hamburger. Regardless of how one assesses the scientific
> evidence, shouldn't the Europeans be allowed to err on the side of
> caution if they so choose? Most people would say yes. This case
> is particularly worrisome because everyone agrees that the law
> against hormone-treated beef was designed to protect Europe's
> consumers, not its domestic cattle industry. And the law applies
> without discrimination to both domestic and foreign producers. Yet
> the WTO insists that an unaccountable, three-judge panel meeting in
> secret can overturn a European law simply because it has an adverse
> impact on trade. The tail (trade) is wagging the dog (public
> health) here, and this is exactly what environmental, consumer, and
> labor groups warned would happen when the WTO was created four
> years ago.
>
> If Americans think this is only Europe's problem, they should look
> at a few key WTO decisions in the last couple of years that have
> gone against Americans. In 1997 the US Environmental Protection
> Agency weakened its regulations on contaminants in imported
> gasoline in order to comply with a WTO ruling that found these
> rules to be an unfair trade barrier. The enforcement of our
> Endangered Species Act -specifically, the protection of sea turtles
> - has also been compromised by recent WTO rulings. From the point
> of view of big business, and especially large multinational
> corporations, these are not disturbing developments. For business
> interests it is only natural to see human beings and our
> environment as instruments of global trade and commerce. They are
> quite comfortable with having these decisions made by a tribunal of
> an international organization where they can have the dominant
> influence, unencumbered by any congress, parliament, or other
> elected officials that might have to care what ordinary citizens
> think. The WTO is their creature, and it has been pretty
> consistent in taking the side of business against the rights of
> citizens and the larger community. The dispute over
> hormone-treated beef is another round of the ongoing fight to
> assert these rights. It won't be the last. Mark Weisbrot is
> research director at the Preamble Center in Washington.
>
> This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> 2. Chefs cast a skeptical eye on altered food
> By Alison Arnett, Globe Staff, 08/04/99
>
> Our food and exactly what's in it is shaping up to be the burning
> issue of the next millennium. And chefs, the come-from-behind
> superstars of the end of this one, are poised to be our gurus. The
> storm clouds have been gathering for most of this decade, ever
> since scientists devised a tomato with a longer shelf life, called
> it Flavr Savr, and put it on the market. It flopped, but the
> battle lines, as muddled as in real warfare, began to be drawn. On
> one side, there is science and industry; on the other, the skeptics
> who worry about bioengineered vegetables, grains, and even fish.
> Now the United States and the European Union are locked in a fight
> over altered foods that threatens to explode into an international
> trade war. Meanwhile, scientists for Monsanto and other big seed
> and food companies are genetically engineering corn, soybeans, and
> other products. Some milk producers inject cows with a growth
> hormone to increase production. Genes from one species of fish are
> being spliced with other species to counteract cold water and speed
> production.
>
> Chefs, led by such young lions as Stan Frankenthaler, owner of
> Salamander in Cambridge, are stepping up, scrutinizing the
> rush,questioning the results.
>
> ''What I feed my customers, my friends, my family is definitely
> important to me,'' says Frankenthaler, who is the vice chairman of
> the national Chefs Collaborative 2000. The collaborative, an
> initiative of Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, seeks to
> promote sustainable cuisine and to encourage eating local and
> seasonal products. To Frankenthaler and Rick Bayless, chef-owner
> of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago and the
> collaborative's chairman, it makes perfect sense for restaurateurs
> to be as concerned with what's in food as with how to be creative
> and make money from serving it.
>
> ''We buy a lot of food,'' says Bayless, and biogenetic engineering
> ''is definitely going to affect our food supply.'' He adds:
> ''Chefs are becoming more articulate and more savvy. I don't know
> all the scientific things, but I can choose whether or not to serve
> my customers genetically altered food. Right now, there are a lot
> of questions floating around that we don't have answers for.''
>
> The past decade has seen an upsurge not only in fine dining but in
> listing the sources of food. Even at fairly modest restaurants,
> menus now are likely to tout the farms where the green beans were
> raised, give the provenance of the beef, reveal the source of the
> strawberries. Chefs have proudly proclaimed relationships with
> small growers and farmers, many of them organic, and made it a
> selling point of their food. Their concern about biogenetics is a
> natural outgrowth.
>
> ''I'm bothered by the idea that I don't know the origins of
> ingredients in my food,''says Frankenthaler. By working with
> farmers in season, knowing his suppliers, and using as many organic
> products as he can, Frankenthaler feels he's fairly knowledgeable
> about origins. But some ingredients, such as soy oil used in
> frying, would cost three times as much as nonorganic, he says.
>
> ''Customers are only willing to bear so much,''he says, adding with
> a smile, ''It would be difficult to get customers to pay $38 for
> chicken.'' He buys organic flour, eggs, and canned tomatoes, plus
> milk produced without growth hormones. The milk issue crystallized
> his views early in the '90s.
>
> ''I became more deeply aware, because of the controversy around the
> bovine growth hormone, of the seriousness of science being involved
> in the foodstream.'' Milk - and whether it is affected by the
> hormone called rBST, used to increase production - has created
> stronger comment, Frankenthaler thinks, because ''it struck home.
> Milk is nurturing; it's what you give children. It's supposed to
> come straight from the cow'' without tampering. Both Frankenthaler
> and Bayless emphasize that the Chefs Collaborative is not saying
> that genetic engineering is inherently bad for the food supply.
> After all, as Frankenthaler says, farmers have crossed seeds and
> manipulated agriculture for centuries, but ''within the laws of
> nature.'' Now scientists are able to do amazing things, Bayless
> says, but some in the agricultural industry and the federal Food
> and Drug Administration are taking the position that the public
> should not be worried unless there's proof of damage. Because corn
> and soybeans, so far the most likely crops to have been genetically
> altered, are in many processed foods, consumers aren't likely to
> know or be able to make decisions. On the milk issue, in contrast,
> there was enough outcry that supermarkets began refusing to stock
> milk containing rBST.
>
> ''Let's just put some brakes on all of this,'' says Bayless. His
> question: ''Do we want the companies like Monsanto'' making these
> decisions for us?
>
> ''We want labeling, so that people can make their own decisions,''
> he adds. And the recent case of monarch butterflies dying after
> feeding on the pollen of genetically altered corn was a wakeup
> call, he says, indicating that the seed companies hadn't thought
> through all the possible results. The question of labeling is
> under review by the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture
> Secretary Dan Glickman has said he is reconsidering the labeling
> issue after the outcry over bovine growth hormones in milk. And
> the monarch butterfly incident has caused more discussion among the
> science and industry components.
>
> One restaurateur who has chosen to take the purist's approach is
> Nora Pouillon, owner of the elegant Nora and Asia Nora in
> Washington, D.C. A national organic commission recently certified
> her restaurants 95 percent organic, with ingredients ranging from
> vegetables, milk,cheeses, and meats to items such as salt from
> Brittany and spices.
>
> ''I've been in business 20 years,'' Pouillon says, ''and so it's
> maybe more economical for me,'' because of rents and long
> associations with organic suppliers. ''I wouldn't do it any other
> way,'' she says, adding that one person on her staff is employed
> only to source organic products. Why chefs, one might ask.
>
> ''The answer is, chefs have always been authority figures about
> food,'' says K. Dun Gifford, whose Oldways organization spawned the
> collaborative, ''but only in the last decade have they been taken
> seriously. We pay a lot of money to go eat their food. If food is
> dangerous, they care deeply.''
>
> As for the premise that the issue is important only to an elite
> group of chefs and those who pay more for organic products, Gifford
> angrily replies:
>
> ''The people who speak that way about the public are really the
> snobs. They treat food as a subject important to only rich
> people.'' Bayless brings the argument back to the consumer. He
> scoffs at the idea that Americans prefer not knowing about their
> food sources if that saves them money.
>
> ''The US pays less for its food than anywhere else,'' Bayless says.
> ''Europeans pay a lot more for food, and they won't accept''
> hormones or genetic engineering. ''We're on the wrong road'' on
> prices, Bayless thinks. As a nation of consumers, we need to make
> sure our food is safe, rather than worrying so much about cost and
> demanding giant amounts of food. And all consumers, as well as
> restaurateurs, should have the right to know what's in their food,
> the chefs agree.
>
> For more information, write to Chefs Collaborative 2000, 25 First
> St., Cambridge, MA 02141, or telephone 617-621-3000, or e-mail:
> <oldways@tiac.net> The local chapter president is Ana Sortun, chef
> of Casablanca in Harvard Square.
>
> This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> 3. Vitamin A derivative is added to rice
> By Karen Hsu, Globe Correspondent, 08/04/99
>
> Developing world seen as beneficiary
>
> ST. LOUIS - A bright, yellow-tinted rice genetically engineered to
> have a vitamin A derivative, with two genes from a daffodil and one
> from a bacterium, may help reduce vitamin A deficiency, Swiss and
> German researcher said yesterday. The problem, they said, is
> particularly severe in developing countries where the major staple
> food is rice. While vitamin A deficiency is virtually unheard of
> in the United States and other industrialized countries, 1 to 3
> million children die each year from a lack of the vitamin, which is
> essential for proper functioning of the immune system. Vitamin A
> deficiency, linked to a variety of infectious diseases, is also the
> leading cause of blindness in children in the developing world.
> According to UNICEF, supplementation with vitamin A is estimated to
> lower a child's risk of dying from several diseases by about 23
> percent. More than 100 million pre-school-age children suffer from
> vitamin A deficiency. After seven years of work, Ingo Potrykus of
> the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Institute for Plant
> Sciences in Zurich, and his colleagues in Freiburg, Germany,
> achieved production of beta-carotene, which converts to vitamin A
> in the body, in rice grain by adding three genes to rice plants.
> The results were announced at the International Botanical Congress
> in St. Louis, where more than 4,000 scientists are meeting this
> week to discuss the latest results of plant research. Rice plants
> normally produce beta carotene, but only in the green parts of the
> plant, not in the component of rice grain eaten by humans. Beta
> carotene is found in dark green, leafy vegetables, and is
> responsible for the yellow and orange color in fruits and
> vegetables. Although the first successful beta carotene rice
> grains have not gone through animal or human testing, scientists
> and public health expert say they believe the results will be
> ''encouraging.'' Potrykus predicts that the yellow rice should be
> in the hands of farmers in the next two to four years.
>
> ''If the rice is acceptable to the children, it could immediately
> begin to make a difference.... This is a tremendously important
> advancement and an extremely valuable tool,'' said Dr. Alfred
> Sommer, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public
> Health, who led the research that linked vitamin A to higher death
> rates in children. The most common sources of vitamin A are meat,
> eggs, and dairy products - foods that are too expensive or
> unavailable to most people in developing countries. Following
> environmental and food safety tests, the new varieties of rice are
> expected to be distributed free of charge by the Philippines-based
> International Rice Research Institute and various agricultural
> research centers in developing countries. Local rice growers,
> using traditional breeding techniques, will transfer the
> characteristics of the beta-carotene rice into varieties adapted to
> local conditions. To battle vitamin A deficiency, UNICEF gives out
> vitamin A capsules when parents bring their children for
> immunizations. In addition, some countries have fortified staple
> ingredients with vitamin A. In Latin America, sugar has been
> fortified, and in the Philippines, wheat is fortified with vitamin
> A. But since the results are only proven in the laboratory at this
> point, UNICEF does not plan to change its focus on supplementation
> and fortification, a UNICEF official said.
>
> But Potrykus' results may force UNICEF to further look into a
> broader issue: genetically engineered food in general, which has
> provoked a lot of controversy in Europe and some in the United
> States. Most genetically altered products are benefiting farmers
> in the developed world, helping them increase yield, but the
> practice has not trickled down to developing nations. Schultink
> said that UNICEF currently does not have an official stand on
> genetically altered food.
>
> On the horizon, said Potrykus, is genetically modified rice with
> twice the amount of iron. Iron deficiency anemia, the most common
> nutritional disorder in the world, affects nearly 2 billion people,
> impairs immunity, and reduces people's mental and physical
> capabilities. Between 40 and 50 percent of children under 5 in
> developing countries are iron deficient. To double the iron
> content in the rice, researchers added a ferritin gene derived from
> a French bean. Ferritin is an iron storage protein found in many
> animals and plants.
>
> This story ran on page A4 of the Boston Globe on 08/04/99.
>
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