I have been reading Foodopoly (New
Press: 2012), Wenonah Hauter’s (head of Food and Water Watch) new study of the
consolidation of food power, and though it can be a difficult read at times—mainly
because of the thoroughness of Hauter’s research—it is critical material for
all Americans. Its main thrust is this: the corporate food industry in America
has been working diligently for years to achieve the level of dominance they
now have: Monsanto, for instance, has bought up virtually every seed company in
the world and now controls most seeds necessary for agricultural plant life,
upon which human life depends; many supposedly organic products are now owned
by the likes of Nestle, General Mills and Coca Cola. The corporate food giants
have been able to do this because of the intimate collusion between them and
the regulatory agencies (including presidents of both parties) charged with
controlling them. American corporate food has become as much a part of American
hegemony as the Department of “Defense,” and the ability of these international
outlaws to promote (force) the planting of American-designed crops (GMOs) in
foreign nations—like Mexico, like India, like Argentina and Paraguay—is
interconnected with American military power. The American Empire is an empire
of designer crops and the chemicals that enable them as much as it is an empire
of military hardware.
It is impossible to go through Hauter’s entire
book here; I heartily recommend it to everyone. To give some idea of the
collusion between government and corporate food giants in Foodopoly, however, the case of one individual, Michael Taylor, can
be taken as emblematic. The material on Taylor comes not only from Hauter’s
book, but also from several videos and articles devoted to him by the likes of
Jeffrey Smith (see his numerous pieces at Huffington
Post about Monsanto and Taylor, specifically “You’re Appointing Who?” Huff Post July 23, 2009) and a video
available on Top Documentary Films, “The World According to Monsanto” http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/).
So who is Michael Taylor? At this writing, he’s the
Deputy Commissioner for Foods in Barack Obama’s FDA (Food and Drug
Administration.) Like at least one of his other posts (Deputy Commissioner for Policy,
also at the FDA, in 1991), this one was newly created, tailored, as it were, to
Taylor himself. He has been said to epitomize the “revolving door” in
Washington, wherein government officials trade on their government experience
to obtain lucrative positions in industry and/or lobbying. His brief vita will
explain why. Taylor began as a staff attorney at the FDA in 1976. He stayed
there for a few years until 1981, when he left government to become an attorney
with the Washington law firm of King & Spaulding, a major legal player in
DC specializing in regulatory law. One of King & Spaulding’s clients was
Monsanto, and Taylor is said to have “established and led the firm’s food and
drug law practice.” Not surprising, since he had just come from the FDA. One of
his notable achievements while at King & Spaulding, was an article, “The De
Minimis Interpretation of the Delaney Clause.” The Delaney Clause of 1958 had
for years prohibited any chemical additive
found to be carcinogenic in any amount
from entering foods. And for years this seemed a reasonable precaution: why
would anyone want to eat cancer-causing material? Taylor thought otherwise,
however, especially because, with modern methods, more and more food additives
were being found to be carcinogenic. In his article, Taylor argued for a less
stringent approach—one which stated that if a carcinogen was present at levels
below 1 part in 1 million, the risk was minimal and so the carcinogenic product
could be allowed on the market. This
was said by Taylor and his supporters to be “reasonable” regulation; organic
food advocates argued that this rule was promoted by Taylor to benefit his
client, Monsanto, and other large food corporations, with consumers, as usual,
taking the risks.
Whatever the conclusion, Taylor thereby became a
poster boy for the “de-regulation” movement. He had already proven his worth to
both Monsanto and the Reagan Administration in 1984 with his strategy of coming
up with an industry-friendly framework for the regulation of the biotech
industry. Titled the ‘Coordinate Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology,’ it
remains the basis of regulation today, and was designed to head off Congressional
rules or statutes that could cause problems for the industry. Even according to
Wikipedia, it was developed “to ensure the safety of the public and to ensure
the continuing development of the fledgling biotechnology industry without overly burdensome regulation.”
The framework policy had three basic parts—1) focus on the product of genetic modification techniques, not the process itself; 2) only regulate based on verifiable scientific risks; 3) GM
products are on a continuum with existing products, and therefore, existing statutes are sufficient to
review the products. Again, this framework invented by Taylor became the basis
for all subsequent rules governing (or not governing) biotechnology today, and
contrasted sharply with regulations in Europe and elsewhere demanding that GM
foods be labeled. This contrast came into sharp focus in 1992, when Taylor,
again passed through the revolving door, left King & Spalding to take a
position created for him by President George H.W. Bush as Deputy Commissioner of
Policy at the FDA. Here Taylor had a hand in the new FDA policy statement on
genetically-engineered plant foods, which policy treats “transferred genetic
material and the intended expression product or products” in food derived from
GM crops as “food additives” subject
to existing food additive regulation. This means that the new genetic material—creating a
plant entirely new in genetic history—conveniently slips under the GRAS
(generally recognized as safe) rule—whereby the producer, say Monsanto,
declares that according to its tests, the material is safe. Well, sure, why not
trust old Monsanto? The makers of Agent Orange and PCBs would never lie, now
would they?
These two policies, both invented by Michael
Taylor (or perhaps by the policy wonks at Monsanto and promoted vigorously by
Taylor), have had fundamental and long-lasting consequences. First, the foreign
genes used to genetically modify basic life forms were treated as simply
another additive, like yellow coloring. And second, and critically, genetically
modified foods created in the laboratory were treated the same as—with no substantial difference from—foods produced by
nature. Hence, anyone can invent a new genetically modified product (spider
genes in pigs, say) and put it out there, without having to notify consumers.
It’s all biology, after all.
Taylor was not done, however. Monsanto, his
former client, was having trouble with its bovine growth hormone, rBGH,
marketed as Posilac. This monster hormone had been created by Monsanto in the
1980s to increase milk production in dairy cows. Monsanto submitted its
materials allegedly indicating rBGH safety to the FDA, and amidst growing
public concern, the FDA looked briefly at the health impacts (all provided by
Monsanto and other biotech companies) of drinking milk produced this way, and
concluded there were none. In 1987, Monsanto officially applied
for FDA approval; and despite new data suggesting that drinking GMO milk caused
increased exposure to the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1; which has been
found to increase the risk of breast, colon, prostate and other cancers ), the
FDA in 1989 gave rBGH its approval. Just another additive. The problem was,
some milk companies were labeling their milk “rBHG-free,” and Monsanto didn’t
like that at all. The label implied that something was wrong with milk
containing its rBHG (which was true). Again, Michael Taylor, still at the FDA,
came through for his client by writing new regulations governing milk labeling.
Arguing that the “rBGH-free” label was unfairly misleading, his regulations
mandated that the FDA conclusion had to also be included to “balance” the
label. The required FDA statement was: “No significant difference has been
shown between milk derived from rbST-treated and non rbST-treated cows” (rbST
is the industry’s name for rBGH). And in days, Monsanto sued two dairy farms
that had labeled their milk only “rBGH-free,” with King & Spalding weighing
in with warning letters to other “non-compliant” dairies.
Most countries, including Australia and Canada, banned
the use of rBGH in light of many studies proving that rBGH causes lower birth
rates and weights of calves, and diseases such as mastitis (infection of the
udders), cystic ovaries, and hoof and leg problems in cows treated with it.
Indeed, ‘The World According to Monsanto,’ noted above, reports that milk from
such cows is contaminated with pus (from mastitis) and the GMO hormone itself. Tiring
of the problems, Monsanto in August 2008 got out of the artificial hormone
business, and sold its rBGH operations to the giant pharmaceutical company, Eli
Lilly. Lilly has now focused its sales efforts on the developing world where
there is less publicity about the side effects, and more pressure to
industrialize traditional agriculture.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall before his
client did, Michael Taylor shifted jobs once again in 1994, wangling an
appointment with the Clinton administration as the Administrator of the USDA’s
Food Safety and Inspection Service. Maintaining his old bag of tricks (to come
up with toothless regulations before Congress or nosey regulators get the
chance to come up with real ones), Taylor at USDA invented and implemented the
rules known as HAACP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system) for
meat and poultry production. Wenonah Hauter has a great deal to say about this
too, and it’s mostly bad. Basically, what HAACP does is provide meat and
poultry producers with relief from those pesky meat inspectors—the ones who,
since 1906 when the Food and Drug Administration was created in response to
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, had
inspected animals before they were
cut up and passed through the line. This kept diseased and sick cattle from
being slaughtered and entering the food supply. But it also wasted a lot of
“perfectly good cows,” slowed down the slaughtering line, and required numerous
inspectors. Taylor came up with the “post”-slaughter inspection-and-remediation
system: under HAACP, meat was treated at the end of the line with disinfectant
chemicals like ammonia, and (possibly) radiation. Thus, animals that had visibly
obvious cancerous growths and sores and feces and other gross stuff on them
could be simply passed through, and disinfected at the end. Much more
scientific, said Taylor. And efficient.
Taylor still hadn’t finished with the revolving
door, though. In 1996, he was back at King & Spalding for a couple of
years, and then, really cashing in, took a position at his old client Monsanto
as Vice President for Public Policy. Whatever that means; propaganda probably.
No matter. His move indicated, as nothing else could, his true colors as a
creature of corporate America. What’s astonishing is that this blatantly
self-serving move did not diminish his credibility in Washington, in
government, one bit. It may have enhanced it, in fact. Because in July 2009, to
his everlasting shame, President Barack Obama, over howls of protest from the
healthy food movement, appointed Michael Taylor as Senior Advisor to the FDA
Commissioner. And in January 2013, yet another new post was created for this
corporate hack, once again at the FDA, this time as Obama’s Deputy Commissioner
for Foods. As Jeffrey Smith said about Taylor after his initial selection by
Obama: “The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and
death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar.”
Now you know what Wenonah Hauter’s book is about,
and it isn’t pretty. Government agencies are so thoroughly polluted with
corporate money and corporate insiders that the boast of Americans about the
purity of their food system has become a hollow joke. Unless and until an
enraged public rises up to demand some accounting of just who gets appointed
and how, and some way of getting rid of the revolving door that puts foxes in
charge of the hen houses—Hauter’s material on industrial chicken farms is
enough to have me reaching for a weapon—the same cozy relationships will
continue to compromise and poison our food supply. Individuals buying organics are
no help either. Most organic producers, as I noted at the beginning, have
already been bought up by the bigs. And besides, carving out a safe haven at
your local Whole Foods Market (another farce; an amazing percentage of products
sold there are not even organic) only emboldens the sharks to make a killing off
the desire of those who can afford it to eat healthy. No, something fundamental
needs to be done, and it needs to get at the root. Organic food was introduced
as a concept fifty years ago as a part of restoring a sustainable system of
farming, food production and the entire relationship of consumers to food, not
as a way to market boutique products to the wealthy. Until that original
purpose is revitalized, foodopolies and their corporate revolvers will continue
to grow, like the cancers that are their emblem.
Lawrence DiStasi
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