Soda

TheNewLanguage.org
TheNewLanguage.org


Soda is the product of industrial-scale corn monocultures which rely on pesticides and herbicides and that destroy habits and food sources for a variety of insects and animals. If the soda is in a can, the aluminum of the can involves intensive mining which too harms or destroys habits and ecosystem by stripping the surface earth but also through runoff of the extracted materials into streams and lakes. If the soda is in a bottle, the plastic contains BPA, an endocrine disruptor founds in drinking water, lakes and streams. BPA finds its way into ecosystems and is toxic to animals and water organisms.

 

What Are My Choices?

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you.

1) Share this definition with others.

2) Drink water instead of soda. Drink less soda, drink only soda that is in a glass bottle and made with organic sugar, or make soda at home.

3) Support legislation or sign petitions that seek to ban the use of glyphosate on corn and other crops.

4) Support legislation that requires companies to label GMO food products and support efforts designed to push our government representatives to write such legislation.

5) Ask our representatives to increase restrictions on pollution from BPA plants and from mining operations, with severe penalties on pollution that ends up in bodies of water.

GMO (Genetically Modified Organism)

1) A ploy by companies to intervene in a process (the act of growing food) so that they can extract rents from those dependent on that process; a way to own a patent on what currently (and for over a billion years) occurs naturally and without the company’s involvement.

2) A device certain companies use to establish a market for its pesticides and herbicides.

3) An excuse for growing of monocultures and for the use of herbicides and pesticides; the seed being the first in a chain of harmful actions that destroy habitats and ecosystems.

Organisms are constantly changing through evolutionary processes. So modification is not, on its own, contrary to the planet’s ecosystems. However, when people alter an organism a number of questions must be asked before the alteration is deemed to be beneficial or hostile to humans and other living things:

What is the plant being engineered to do? Is the plant being engineered to taste better or be more nutritious? Is it being engineered to survive a drought or to be more beneficial to the complex web of insects and microorganisms in the soil? Or is it being engineered so company can sell more ecosystem destroying herbicides and pesticides? Is it being developed so that industrial agricultural companies can consume more land with monocultures that deprive some species of habitat and kill others? Or is the plant being engineered so a company and its shareholders can hold a patent and thereby intervene in the process of growing food so they can set its rules?

A company with a patent on a GMO seed achieves, by the imperatives of the accounting statement, one of the most desirable conditions: it becomes a rent-seeker, year after year collecting a fee on an existing properties with negligible competition and without the need to make further investments to improve the product. (What advocate of GMOs is proposing that the patent for the seed be publicly owned or in the intellectual commons?)

GMO seeds are currently used in corn, soy, wheat monocultures that rely heavily on pesticides, herbicides and industrial scale fertilizers. These pesticides and herbicides are often found in lakes, streams, water supplies and many of them have been found in honey, birds, fish, and the blood streams of people.

There may be, in the future, GMO seeds that are beneficial. But, currently, most prevalent GMO seeds are a Trojan Horse for pesticide and herbicide sales or for patent ownership.

Eating products made with GMO corn, for instance, or beef from cattle fed with GMO corn, benefits the chemical companies that sell the pesticides and herbicides used on those crops and whose products are now pervasive in ecosystems.