White House Garden VideoThe White House has posted a new 7-minute video telling the story of planting the new garden. The link will take you to the video. http://www.whitehouse.gov/video/ First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass tell the story of the first garden on White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during World War II. This new garden was planted in the Spring of 2009 with the help of local elementary school children and has yielded a constant supply fresh produce for the First Family and White House events. |
OCA on New Food Safety Bill-HR 2749There's been a lot of buzz on the web about the new Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (HR-2749). Many of our supporters have called or emailed us to find our stance on the issue. Although the Organic Consumers Association is fairly satisfied that the bill is intended to protect organic farmers from being negatively impacted by new food safety regulations, the bill does not address the underlying causes of America's persistent and evermore serious food safety crisis: factory farms and chemical-intensive agriculture. When addressing the concerns of E.coli or salmonella, the bill focuses on fresh vegetables and fruits rather than CAFOs or intensive confinement factory farms, in effect treating the symptom and not the disease. A close look at the nation's food poisoning epidemics over the past decade reveal that the overwhelming majority of fruit and vegetable contamination incidents are a direct result of water and soil pollution from large factory farms. The OCA believes that HR-2749 should be amended to address factory farming: 1) Animals should never be fed blood, manure or slaughterhouse waste. 2) Cows need to eat grass. 3) Animals need to be spread out on enough land to absorb their waste. 4) CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) pose unacceptable risks to human health such as antibiotic resistance, incubate dangerous viruses and pathogens such as the Swine Flu and Bird Flu, contaminate the environment, institutionalize animal cruelty, and need to be phased out and shut down. Reprinted with Permission from The Organic Consumers Association http://www.organicconsumers.org/ |
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