The FDA in their infinite wisdom ignorance, has declared BPA safe. They always put special interests like plastic companies and product manufacturing corporations before the health of people. Lucky for us, many consumers have spoken out so loudly against BPA that many companies have started labeling their products BPA Free so that consumers can decide. At the very least we can exercise our right to choose healthier products, despite rulings such as these. For BPA free products check out these resources.
Now the FDA has recently announced that it will allow food producers to start irradiating fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce in an attempt to kill E. coli O157:H7 and other bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses, despite health, safety, and nutritional loss concerns. Because a few shoddy farms with dirty practices resulted in some food born illness they want to irradiate our food. What the freakin heck is wrong with these people????
Instead of pulling up their big boy pants and taking dirty industrial agriculture to task for making us sick they decide we need to have our food sterilized. This is exactly what they did to raw almonds a few months back. One bad company caused some illness and then they passed a law that required all almonds to be pasteurized. When these companies do this to us we are the ones punished not them. First we get sick when they run their business in a manner that is dirty and unethical and then we get punished by having our food choices taken away. I guess taking these companies to task for their actions is too much to hope for.
Not only is irradiation not safe for us, it takes away our right to choose fresh foods that don’t glow from irradiation. We should be able to choose raw almonds instead of pasteurized and fresh spinach instead of nuked spinach shouldn’t we? This is truly alarming to raw food eaters everywhere because they are blocking access to the very foods that can make us healthy and heal us from the disease and sickness caused by the corporations they are protecting.
I say NO THANKS FDA! I am a big girl and I can make my own decisions and I want to be able to buy fresh spinach. Tell the FDA no thanks courtesy of this petition from The True Food Network.
Just a wee bit frightening isn’t it! Thanks for the action post – even though I’m in Canada and not ruled byt the FDA we often follwo along way to quickly! Let’s all stand up and stop this baloney!
Excellent post. I knew about the irradiation, but not the BPA.
I agree completely. We have been increasing our raw eating in the past year or so. I used to eat a lot of steamed foods, but I have discovered that raw is great, and now that the boy can eat/chew raw veggies, etc, it saves a lot of cooking time!
The FDA is an agency of inanity these days. On top of BPA and irradiation, they are also creating new genetically engineered food regulations that do not require labeling. Check out coverage of the story at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/devouringseattle/archives/149092.asp?from=blog_last3.
Aarrrgh!!
It makes me so mad when government takes away our choices. Can you explain the problem with irradiating food? What does that mean and what harm does it do?
Among other things, irradiation reduces the nutritional content/value of foods.
Kristen,
Irradiation changes the chemicl stucture of the food and creates free radicals which can damage our bodies. It kills many of the micro-organisms in the food too and renders it pretty much nutritionally dead. The concern is that if it can kill cells in the food why do we assume it won’t kill cells in our body after we eat it.
Read more here:
http://www.truehealth.org/nukedfood.html