Aug 29 2006
The Battle against Science
I just stumbled across a truly bizarre blog called cfact. There, Dennis T. Avery (author of the wacko Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic) counters a report on the dangers of fast food with the suggestion that we “chew on some real danger foods.” Avery writes, with seeming ignorance of basic nutrition science, “There’s a new children’s book out [Avery does not name the book, always a good tactic when you want to create a diversion], telling kids that vicious food-mongers are trying to make them obese with fast food. That’s such a pathetic scare! Any food can make you fat if you eat too much.” It’s hard to imagine getting fat on lettuce, say, which requires more energy to digest than it contains, but let it go. Here’s the real nutso suggestion by Mr. Avery: eat ergot fungus! Now there’s a real “danger food”! This isn’t even comparing apples to oranges, which are both foods. Ergot, need I remind you, is not a food. Talk about a diversionary tactic: spew out a long, misinformed “history” of St. Anthony’s Fire and avoid talking about killer transfats in Micky D’s poisonous offerings. He goes on to talk about botulism, as if fast food were somehow contaminated: it sometimes is, and is sometimes poorly prepared; either of those factors will make food, any food, unfit to eat, but neither deals with the basic nutritional science: fast food is poison. Botulism and ergot are not foods; and it’s truly bizarre that Avery, “a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and [the] director of the Center for Global Food Issues,” would need to be reminded of this. The Center for Global Food Issues (CGFI) is a right-wing group that fronts for agribiz and, for some reason, is doing battle with organic farming. Why might that be? Perhaps because organic production, although growing by 15-20%/year and adding nearly US$15 billion to the economy in 2005, is done on a (mostly) small scale. The whole idea of organic threatens companies like Monsanto and Dow, which pump toxins (e.g., 2,4-D, a known teratogen, and the most widely used herbicide on the planet) and genetically-modified organisms into the ecosystem. CGFI is also behind the “milk is milk” advertising campaign that seeks to erase the difference between milk that contains Bovine Growth Hormone (a Monsanto product) and milk that really is milk. Avery is a shill for pesticides, plastics and all things petroleum–but he’s a lousy writer and his diversionary tactics are transparent to anyone with a bit of education. But that’s the problem, isn’t it?
