About novel food

Novel food is a collective name for all attempts of the genetech industry to enrich our menus, perhaps even unnoticed, because these guys refuse to want any mandatory labelling for their creations. If you are from the USA, you will probably have already experienced novel food. In this "democratic" country is no mandatory labelling and the genetech mafia is already softening the laws in the other countries. Watch out!

There are three different categories of manipulated food:

  1. Food with components which are created with gene technology. Examples are cakes with sugar or cheese with chymosin (an encyme) which is made via gene technology. (Note that the first example involves a release.)

  2. Food which contains gene manipulated organism or parts from them. Examples are the "Flavr Savr" tomato which is already available in the USA (undeclared, as I said!) as well as numerous mutated fishes and farm animals which will have foreign genes built in for faster growth.

  3. Food which contains living gene-manipulated micro-organisms. The typical example is yogurt which creates his own strawberry flavour. When you eat this food, you may speak of a "release" in your own body...
The european parlament has decided that food of the category 1 can be sold unlabelled, while food of the second and third category can't. Some may consider this decision insufficient, some others say a more stringent law would be not feasible, but at least it is much better than the situation in the USA. Now watch out for GATT (see last page).

Genetechnology in the agriculture appears a little useless if you regard the facts that many farmers do already produce a surplus. Plants that are resistent against diseases leads to even more of these boring monocultures and resistance against herbicides tempts the farmers to throw even more poison onto your soil. Furthermore, the plants need "their" specific herbicide for maximum effect, so the farmers will become dependent from the transnational chemical companies.

In the animal farms, gene technology will lead to even more cruel scenes. The hormone BST which increases the milk production of cows leads to udder inflammations (and pus in your breakfast milk), infertility and miscarriages. Gene-manipulated sheep which shall drop their wool, drop their unborn children, too. (It seems that there still waits a little work for the gene scramblers :)

Gene technology will lead to more and more dependent farmers who will have to pay license fees in order to grow the new plants or animals. The rights of the farmers to grow new animals or plants will be lost - the business for the transnational companies has to be lucrative! Obvious trends in the last Years have been an immense concentration in the seed producer market and an extention of the patent laws to high-developed organisms. The farmers who follow this trend are cutting off the branch upon which they sit!

Last, but not least, it has yet to be proved that the novel food is harmless for the human health. Thus, not only the people who suffer from allergic reactions have to demand a mandatory labelling of "novel food". And because trusting is good, controlling is better, the built-in genes must be known and accessible in public databases, so that consumer organisations and food supervisors can search for them! The decision how much "rest risk" the consumer can accept must be made by the consumer himself!

With gene-manipulated soya beans and gene-manipulated corn have genemanipulated organisms been introduced in Germany. Labelling is mandatory only if the new food is 'different' from the original. Watch out and avoid products with soya beans or soya oil (may be disguised as 'vegetable' oil or fat..) or corn if you are not sure about their origins.

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