#1332 Hidden in the School Lunch

Food Chain Radio Podcast with Michael Olson

Zen Honneycutt, Founder & Executive Director of Moms Across America, Author of Author of Unstoppable

Are school lunches destroying our nation’s future?

School meals are the only meals many of the nation’s children get to eat. As those meals are purchased, prepared and presented by institutions, they are most likely made up of the least expensive ingredients, including genetically modified corn and soy that have been processed with genetically modified oils from canola and soybeans.

Most genetically modified food crops have been re-engineered to withstand weed-killing chemicals like glyphosate and dicamba, or to be infused with pest-killing bacterium like bacillus thuringiensis.

Additionally, most of the grain ingredients in school meals– the wheat, peas, beans, oats found in breads, buns and crumbs– have been derived from crops that were desiccated at harvest with the weedkiller glyphosate.

Glyphosate was originally patented as a chelator of minerals, and as such, traps essential mineral nutrients in the soil, making them unavailable to food crops. Furthermore, glyphosate has been shown to kill the microorganisms in the soil that make essential nutrients available to food crops. Consequently, GMO crops require the use of more synthetically-derived fertilizers, some of which contain toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, barium and cadmium. These heavy metals leach into the soil and are then taken up into the food crops, and are now found in wheat, corn, soy and other food crops.

The re-engineering of food crops has made it possible for one farmer to grow thousands of acres of crops without weeds or pests, and so the technology has been welcomed as money-making miracle by those in industrial agriculture. However, the technology has left school children to eat lunches derived from crops drenched in weed-killers and infused with pest-killers. That so many of the nation’s school children now eat these foods every day leads us to ask Moms Across America:

Are school lunches destroying our nation’s future?

(Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, school lunch, genetically modified crops, gmos, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, dicamba, heavy metals, veterinary medications, hormones)