Check this websites!

http://www.govegan.com
http://www.peta.org

Do a search on the movie…after that, you may want to grow your own food :)

Melly

Read below article from FreshPlaza.com a food
agriculture newsletter:

US: be wary of biotech lettuce experiments

The Salinas Californian recently reported on a talk by
Professor Henry Daniell, who was here to promote
cultivation of drug-producing lettuce.

The biotechnology industry has long hoped to use
plants, including common food crops, to produce
high-profit new drugs. It is worth noting that Daniell
is not only an academic; he is also the founder of
Chlorogen, Inc., a company that hopes to profit from
these so-called ‘pharm’ crops.

Salinas farmers should be leery of lettuce pharming.
The California lettuce industry is still reeling from
consumer fears of E. coli contamination. Imagine the
uproar from healthy salad eaters when they learn that
California lettuce growers are planting untested,
experimental drugs near the lettuce that is destined
for our supermarkets.

Scientists say there is no way to keep untested drugs
produced in food crops out of the food supply. Even
the editors of the pro-biotechnology science journal
Nature Biotechnology warned: ‘Don’t use food plants
for producing drugs,’ because of the health risks.

Consumers, including our children, who may unknowingly
eat pharmed lettuce could get an uncontrolled dose of
an untested, biologically active drug - with unknown
consequences.

As reported in The Californian, Daniell claims that
farmers growing untested drugs in lettuce will face no
new regulations. This sounds frighteningly similar to
the promises made by the world’s leading pharm crop
company, ProdiGene, to Midwestern farmers.

Although the company promised farmers would face ‘no
new growing practices’ if they chose to plant
ProdiGene’s untested drugs in their corn, this lax
attitude cost some farmers more than they bargained
for. Half-a-million bushels of Nebraska soybeans were
ordered to be destroyed when the unapproved ProdiGene
drug-corn contaminated the soy crop.

Daniell claims that contamination would not be a
concern because his drug-producing lettuce can’t cross
with natural lettuce varieties.

But, ProdiGene’s corn did not cross-pollinate with
soybeans: It contaminated soybeans with volunteer
drug-corn from the previous season’s seed grown on the
same land. The drug corn went undetected in the
soybean field that was harvested the following season.

Cross-pollination is one of many potential routes of
contamination. Other unapproved biotech crops have
contaminated safe, natural varieties during every
stage of production. Contamination occurs through seed
mix-ups, wind or animal seed dispersal, not thoroughly
cleaned farm equipment and storage bins, improperly
labeled seeds, and numerous other unpredictable ways,
often from human error.

Danielle’s system for avoiding cross-pollination
relies on the hope that genes inserted into a plant’s
chloroplast cells will not be a contamination problem,
since they are a part of the plant’s DNA that does not
mix in pollination. But, a 2003 study found that genes
can move between the chloroplast and nuclei of plants,
and they did so more often than researchers expected.
This means that Danielle’s untested drug plants could
cross-pollinate with lettuce destined for our dinner
tables.

Given all the potential human errors that could lead
to contamination, and the biological reality that it
is impossible to fully contain these untested drug
plants, it is clear that lettuce pharming is a
dangerous idea for Salinas.

If growers in the Salinas Valley are looking for new
markets, they should look to safer, healthier, and
organic markets, not an untested, risky pharm crop
that will do more harm to the industry than good.

CHARLES MARGULIS is a spokesman for the Center for
Food Safety, a national advocacy organization
dedicated to challenging harmful food production
technologies and promoting sustainable alternatives.
He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and of the California
Culinary Academy.

Source: enn.com