Sunday, August 14, 2011

Guest Blog: Food And Water Watch

A few weeks ago, the folks at Food and Water Watch emailed us with some information about their events near Charlotte.  I asked them if they wanted to write a blog post about the work that they are doing right now.

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Cargill made big news this week. On Thursday the company announced that it was recalling 36 million pounds of turkey meat. Already, at least 76 people have gotten sick from salmonella poisoning and 1 person has died from the outbreak. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a recall like this. Think back to the spinach recall on spinach, Skippy Peanut Butter recall, Smithfield Pork , and others– all in one year! .And what about all the pesticides on our food, GMO produce, and factory farms? These scares are getting a lot of people to question what we are eating and where our food comes from. Shouldn’t our food system allow us to make safe and healthy choices?


A lot of these problems come down to policy and the way our food system is structured. The structure is no accident – it has been shaped by years of policies designed to bring down the price of U.S. farm products, with the hope that lower prices will mean that U.S. exporters will be able to increase sales to other countries. The U.S. Farm Bill sets up the funding structure for agriculture, food stamps, rural development and agricultural research in the United States. The Farm Bill is up for review in the next year, and we believe there need to be some major changes in order to ensure the food you eat is safe, accessible, and sustainably produced.

This summer Food and Water Watch will be going on a road trip across the country to build a movement for a fair farm bill. We’ll be meeting with community activists, social justice groups, restaurant owners, and farmers to learn about what they are doing to change North Carolina’s food system on a grassroots level. We’ll also be delivering comments and petitions from activists across the country to our elected officials to pressure them to take action in support of a fair farm bill.

Next week, we will be hosting film screenings, farm tours, local food dinners, and more in the North Carolina region and around the United States. We’d love to meet you and get your input on how we can repair our broken food system. For more information about the farm tour visit this link.

For more information on the Cargill recall see this article.

For more information on the farm bill visit this link.

Food and Water Watch is a nonprofit organization that works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainably produced.  So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from; keep clean, affordable public tap water flowing freely to our homes; protect the environmental quality of oceans; force government to do its job protecting citizens; and educate about the importance of keeping the global commons - our shared resources - under public control.


** Do you have anything food related you would like to write about?  Contact us about writing a guest blog!**

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