Food Crisis on the Thom Hartman Show
Apr 16th, 2008 | By Lene Johansen | Category: Media
Thom Hartman is a liberal talk show host, and he usually puts up a good fight, today’s show was not different. We had a 10 minute show down over globalization, free trade, food prices, and biotechnology this afternoon.
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Dear Ms. Johansen,
I heard you speaking on the Thom Hartmann show the other day, and the longer you spoke the more you convinced me of the inadvisability of proceeding along the path of making genetic modification of foods a standard practice worldwide.
What came through loud and clear in your presentation were your insistence on hastily adopting the genetic modification protocols worldwide, with absolutely no requirement for prior research, such as longitudinal studies, to determine whether or not the resulting foods would indeed be safe, or whether they might provoke serious allergic reactions in some people or metabolic consequences that might lead to death or gross impairment of the body’s vital functions or systems, either immediately or over a longer arc of time.
The approach of the multinational corporations you advocate for seems incredibly shortsighted, not to mention biologically ignorant: if a person eats food from a plant that’s been genetically modified to produce a toxin to kill pests, or to produce a pharmaceutical drug, don’t you realize that when that food gets digested and the proteins and DNA in the plant cell nuclei are assimilated into your body, the genetically modified genes contained in the food you’ve eaten will then become part of *your own* DNA and *your* body will start making those toxins and pharmaceutical drugs too?!!
And, you say, we shouldn’t be conducting thorough and detailed longitudinal studies before allowing these potential time bombs to be released, unlabeled, into the general food supply of the world?
I’d rather not think that you, and the multinationals you represent, might be intent on murdering 7/8ths of the world’s population, with your uncontrolled experimentation, with zero accountability!
And, speaking of accountability, it seems that, in your insistence upon haste in the worldwide adoption of genetic modification of food, you are more than willing to dispense with any reasonable safeguards, such as labeling and tracing the source point of the food in question (evidently, to eliminate any problems of accountability that Monsanto and its friends might have, should their global genetic engineering projects turn disastrous).
The positions you support just make one wonder what your deeper motives might be, given the potential dangers I’ve enumerated above… that is, unless you’re just an “air head” who’s never even thought about the possible global consequences of this matter.
Sincerely (alarmed by your cavalier attitude),
Monty J. Renov