GMOs in the US and Obama

Grist has another great article dealing with the Obama administration and food / agriculture in the United States, particulary with respect to the United States' legacy of agricultural deregulation and how it's led to the proliferation of GMOs within its borders.

Monsanto's Experimental Cotton Ends Up Fed To Cattle

WASHINGTON (AP) — An unauthorized strain of genetically modified cotton was accidentally mixed in with other harvested cotton in Texas last month, but government officials on Wednesday played down any safety concerns.

About a quarter ton of the experimental cotton seed engineered to contain a protein that produces a pesticide was combined with about 60 tons of commercial cotton growing nearby, said Eric Flamm, a senior adviser at the Food and Drug Administration.

The mixture, grown near Lamesa in West Texas, about 300 miles west of Fort Worth, was then stored along with 20,000 tons of commercial cotton seed in a warehouse. Nearly half the crop was processed into cottonseed oil and cotton meal to use as animal feed before officials at Monsanto Co., which grows the experimental cotton on a test plot, realized the mistake.

[...]

The FDA, Environmental Protection Agency and Agriculture Department are investigating to determine what enforcement action is warranted against Monsanto.

Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles said the crop was mistakenly harvested on Oct. 31, and the company learned about it eight days later when field researchers went to check on it and discovered it was not there. It is grown in a research plot adjacent to other cotton and separated by border rows.

[...]

"This incident and a string of others that have come to light over the past two years show that the USDA is fundamentally incapable of protecting our food," said Karen Perry Stillerman, a food analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Read the full article here.

Monsanto, Monsanto, Monsanto

This weekend I attended a Friday Night Docs screening of The World According to Monsanto with my friend D. I'd seen it before, but it was a first screening for him. I've written about the documentary here before; it covers a lot of the same ground that Vanity Fair did in its own Monsanto exposé back in May. It's about as must-see as any documentary gets for a) anyone who eats, and b) anyone who's not entirely familiar with the issues concerning genetically modified organisms.

It's all over the internet and response to it seems to range from mild shock to outrage.