Yesterday, at ShiftCon in Los Angeles, I met some amazing women in the healthy food movement. They are Label GMOs, right to know, pesticide and herbicide free, earth-friendly women-influencers of activism and determination.
I was invited by an educator from LabelGMOs.org to answer questions at a table for the Institute of Responsible Technology. I was honored to be a representative for them, as I have been studying GMOs, the effects of seed patents, and Roundup for many years. All I knew about ShiftCon is that 250 “Mommy bloggers” were coming to the event. I had no idea it was going to be as impressive as it was.
First of all, the women came from all over the country. Colorado, Texas, Florida, New York, Canada, Oregon, Massachusetts! And each had a story that blew my mind. When I asked what brought them to this movement, each mother told me about a vaccine that landed her son in the hospital, or an allergic reaction that almost killed her daughter, or the lead poisoning that made two children mentally impaired. One woman cried as she told me that fifteen farmers out of 18 in her little town in Minnesota had developed cancer and died as a result of the toxins they use near their water source. When I asked her if their community ever got together to compare notes because it sounded like a cluster to me, she said that the folks are too small town to think that way, to do research, to take it to the level of activism.
But the Moms at this convention were different than the cancer victims’ families. They are inspired to make change happen. They’re teaching other women in their communities to make consumer choices based on good food. The organizers of this event went out of their way to bring in only GMO-free food, often vegan, often without gluten. The sponsors of the event were all organic. And you better believe that there were no dyes, no inks, no chemical-laden cotton tee-shirts.
And the swag; oh my! So much healthy swag! (But too much packaging, if you ask me!)
I asked one of the Mommies a question I’ve always wondered about. If you’re a shill for Monsanto, do you have any kids? If you were a mom, how could you possibly say that glyphosate is safe enough, and so you don’t care if farmers douse your food with it?* Why would you think it’s okay to injest when you wouldn’t even put a bottle of it under your kitchen sink, for fear your child would get into the bottle?
Because when you become a mother, and you have these perfect little babies who have such thin tender skin, would you let them roll in the grass after spraying Roundup on the lawn? When babies eat so much food proportional to their body weight, and drink so much liquid and absorb everything that goes into their bodies, would you want to feed them Roundup?
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t in good conscience tell another human being that it’s okay for them to eat the Roundup-sprayed food while I ate my organically grown food. Or, what’s even worse, I couldn’t go around hiding the fact that YOUR food is toxic while I buy something that I think is safer. And that’s exactly what these shills are doing. A lot of them KNOW how toxic Roundup is and avoid it. Or so, that’s what we think, my Mommy bloggers and I.
But we don’t want anyone to have to worry about her food. That’s our goal: to make sure all the food in the supply chain is safe. We should all have protection against snake oil salesmen.
So thank you, ShiftCon attendees, for making every effort to educate your readers and to get the word out about healthy choices that each of us can make to change the world. Keep up the inspirational work, mothers!
*Case in point: Anastasia Bodnar claims that glyphosate is safe.