Genetic Roulette – $27.95
Retail Price: $37.95
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from: Chelsea Green Publishing

Eating genetically modified food is gambling with every bite.

The biotech industry’s claim that genetically modified (GM) foods are safe is shattered in this groundbreaking book. Nearly forty health risks of the foods that Americans eat every day are presented in easy-to-read two-page spreads. The left page is designed for the quick scanning reader; it includes bullets, illustrations, and quotes. The right side offers fully referenced text, describing both research studies and theoretical risks. It is presented in the clear, accessible style that made Jeffrey Smith’s Seeds of Deception the world’s best-selling book on genetically engineered foods.

The second half of Genetic Roulette explores why children are most at risk, how to avoid GM foods, false claims by biotech advocates, how industry research is rigged to avoid finding problems, why GM crops are not needed to feed the world, the economic losses associated with these crops, and more.

This book, prepared in collaboration with a team of international scientists, is for anyone wanting to understand GM technology, to learn how to protect themselves, or to share their concerns with others. As the world’s most complete reference on the health risks of GM foods, Genetic Roulette is also ideal for schools and libraries. Consider some findings:

• Animals fed genetically modified (GM) foods developed bleeding stomachs, potentially precancerous cell growth, damaged organs and immune systems, kidney inflammation, problems with blood and liver cells, and unexplained deaths.
• Soy allergies skyrocketed in the United Kingdom after GM soy was introduced.
• Genes from GM crops transfer to human gut bacteria. This might transform our intestinal flora into living pesticide factories.

BEYOND THE MONOCULTURE

Planting Seeds for Change

” he found in the rat feeding experiments that the brains shrank, the pancreas expanded, and the immunity collapsed “

From this video:

We are all mothers; and we have to all be mothers in order to lead a future!.. in having transformed some ideas of the creative potential, we’ve managed to reduce the world into a huge supermarket; highly impoverished supermarket. ..the seed is the embodiment of limitless potential; limitless both in terms of how rejuvinative seed can carry on forever, the seeds we have received from our ancestors we don’t know when…

..today a patent means (..) it is a new creation of property, a creation of property out of what has belonged to the common heritage, a shared heritage of nature and communities. Not until 1995 could humanity become so perverse that it could start to claim that we have invented the plants that feed us. … this is not acceptable: the idea that life can be treated as an invention, and farmers can be criminalized for performing their duty, saving seeds, is unacceptable….

.. the company that you are all familiar with in the area of Genetic Engineering is a company that didn’t even occur in the list of agricultural companies in the 80s..they weren’t in the seed business. Most seed industry of the 80s used to be small family firms, that had then decided to dedicate themselves to improving seed diversities, seed multiplication.. in the 80s these small seed firms started to get bought up by the big chemical giants. So the companies that used to be chemical companies, some of them also pharmaceutical companies, also sellers of agri-chemicals, bought up not just the seed industry but they bought up all the bio technology industry that had largely come out of university-based science. So within a period of about five years (..) the chemical industry, pharmaceutical industry, seed industry, bio-tech industry became one industry. If you look today at seed production and if you try and see who is selling the genetically engineered seed worldwide you will find 93 % of all genetically engineered seed sold anywhere in the world is sold by one company that knew nothing about seed in its history of evolution; it knew how to make toxic chemicals: it knew how to make agent orange, it knew how to make roundup. But I can tell you I’m sure even today they still don’t really know what a plant is. This company is Monsanto. …

… The common story about Genetic Engineering is it’s necessary because we need to produce more food and there are 800 million/ 1 billion people hungry – we won’t have more food unless we use GE. Well the first thing is those 800 million people who are permanently hungry today, are people who are growing food. Hunger earlier used to be a problem of urban areas, in rural areas you might have hunger when there was a bad drought, it was localized in space and time, you might have had a war>- some reason to block food production. But today you can have all the food in your field and you can die of hunger. ..it wasn’t lack of food, what collapsed were the entitlements..the hunger of the world is related to injustice in trade, it is not a problem of production, it never has been. … … our sources of freedom are being defined as slavery; our slavery has got a new name called free-trade.

38.50..these are crops which have a gene taken from a bacterium, turned into a high dose and in the bacteria it is a prototoxin, it is a toxin only in the gut of particular insects with a particular enzyme. This is not a ready made toxin but in the plant it becomes a ready made toxin, and it’s a high dose toxin: it has promoters, viral promoters to pump the expression up. Every GM crop, whether it’s herbicide resistant or the BT crop, has in addition to either the gene [that allows] more toxic spray or the gene to produce more toxins in plants, in addition every GM crop has a gene for antibiotic resistance because it’s used as a marker, because the technology is so crude and clumsy they have to put this marker to see whether the crop will survive at the cell level, whether it absorbed the particular trait. And the 3^rd inevitable element of any GM food and crop, which is never talked about, is the most dangerous – these are viral promoters, these are what are called the promoters but they are always very very virulent viruses. No studies have been done about what do they do when we eat these foods. Any scientist who’s ever done a study has been silenced or has been removed.

41.06 Arpad Pusztai was asked by the UK government to look at GM potatoes and their safety. AP did his work, for government as he was asked, and he found in the rat feeding experiments that the brains shrank, the pancreas expanded, and the immunity collapsed; and he said if this is happening to rats in three months of feeding, what’s going to happen to human beings through a lifetime of eating, we need to look more. He was removed.

Our Dwindling Food Variety by National Geographic

Trapped in the GM crop system

This is a little dry but worth the added informartion

From this video:

Time and time again I’ve heard American farmers tell me that they are trapped in this GM crop system; non-GM seeds are not readily available and the few that are old or low yielding varieties. There’s also the important fact that the genes that are modified in these crops are patented so you cannot save your own seeds! As a number of farmers have discovered: if you are found to have patented genes in your crop, regardless of how they got there [e.g. accidental cross-pollination], or even if you didn’t know they were there, if you have not paid the tech fee to the company who owns the patent, they can take legal action against you. So do the American farmers grow these millions of acres of crops because the system works, or because there is little or no other choice?!