Sainsburys demo- moosletter from parents
milk monitor | 17.06.2005 15:26 | Bio-technology | Ecology | Health | London
Text for the leaflet distributed to Sainsbury's staff outside their HQ this morning. Over 400 were handed out by parents and kids.
Parents and kids
We have children, a lot of your customers do. You might even have some. It's easy to sound trite about how we feel about their future and about the problems of keeping them safe as they grow up. But we think we have good reason to be worried, and we need your help to make the world a bit safer for them.
Every day for a week a different group of people, expressing a different concern about GM crops, has been protesting here. We want Sainsbury's to stop selling milk, meat and dairy products from animals fed GM.
We need Sainsbury's policy to change because of the health risks to our kids and ourselves. Contamination of approved GM varieties by the new toxic varieties of 'pharmacutical' GM crops means that a technology whose safety is already in question is now becoming even more dangerous. The hope that these risks do not pass from the animal into its milk is illogical to any mother. Doctors give clear guidelines on avoiding excessive alcohol when breastfeeding because milk is known to take on the flavour and characteristics of that which produced it. Without rigorous testing we think it's reckless to assume otherwise.
We need Sainsbury's policy to change because we want the choice of GM free food ingredients. Without the support of a GM free animal feed market in Brazil, the last country to supply uncontaminated soya will fall to the biotech companies. Then there will be no source for the soya used in chocolate, cakes and other processed food. This would be a betrayal of your customers clear demand for non-GM food.
We also need Sainsbury's policy to change because we don't want them to live in a world where life is patented, where a small cartel of Biotech companies control food from the seed to the plate. We don't want them to face a future where the poor are forced from their land to make way for industrial agriculture. Where families in places like Argentina loose their crops because planes from neighbouring soya plantations� spray herbicide on their fields, wiping out their livelihoods and makeing their children sick.
We want a just food system, where buying a yogurt doesn't inadvertenetly support ecological damage and social hardship.
If you really want to make life taste better, please get the GM out of animal feed.
We have children, a lot of your customers do. You might even have some. It's easy to sound trite about how we feel about their future and about the problems of keeping them safe as they grow up. But we think we have good reason to be worried, and we need your help to make the world a bit safer for them.
Every day for a week a different group of people, expressing a different concern about GM crops, has been protesting here. We want Sainsbury's to stop selling milk, meat and dairy products from animals fed GM.
We need Sainsbury's policy to change because of the health risks to our kids and ourselves. Contamination of approved GM varieties by the new toxic varieties of 'pharmacutical' GM crops means that a technology whose safety is already in question is now becoming even more dangerous. The hope that these risks do not pass from the animal into its milk is illogical to any mother. Doctors give clear guidelines on avoiding excessive alcohol when breastfeeding because milk is known to take on the flavour and characteristics of that which produced it. Without rigorous testing we think it's reckless to assume otherwise.
We need Sainsbury's policy to change because we want the choice of GM free food ingredients. Without the support of a GM free animal feed market in Brazil, the last country to supply uncontaminated soya will fall to the biotech companies. Then there will be no source for the soya used in chocolate, cakes and other processed food. This would be a betrayal of your customers clear demand for non-GM food.
We also need Sainsbury's policy to change because we don't want them to live in a world where life is patented, where a small cartel of Biotech companies control food from the seed to the plate. We don't want them to face a future where the poor are forced from their land to make way for industrial agriculture. Where families in places like Argentina loose their crops because planes from neighbouring soya plantations� spray herbicide on their fields, wiping out their livelihoods and makeing their children sick.
We want a just food system, where buying a yogurt doesn't inadvertenetly support ecological damage and social hardship.
If you really want to make life taste better, please get the GM out of animal feed.
milk monitor