Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Canadians' Role as Global Guinea Pigs


An article by Scott Wallace caught my eye in the National Observer. Scott bemoans the fact that seafood labeling in Canada is a joke. I concur, but it is much worse than Scott notes in his article. Wallace tells us that not only are seafood producers allowed to mislead customers by labeling countries where “Product of” means the place of last transformation (e.g. filleting, packaging)-but not where the seafood was caught or farmed. As Scott advised “ …if you bought sockeye salmon in Canada recently, it’s more likely from Russian waters-even if labeled “Product of Canada”. But because we don’t have a real informative labeling system for seafood in Canada, your sockeye salmon many not even be salmon at all, much less the prized “Sockeye”. It may very well be an artificial salmon called “Genetically Modified Salmon”.
Yes, it is perfectly legal to sell Genetically Modified salmon is Canada without telling the consumers of this gross infringement on nature, this thing that is not a real salmon, not even a real fish that has known qualities of evolution, but a monster that grows three times as large three times as fast as a real salmon does, and is infertile (supposedly) . This man made monster is composed of regular Pacific salmon that has had its genes spliced with those of Atlantic salmon, eels, pouts and growth hormones. And yes, this oversized monster masquerading as a real fish is being sold as we speak in the Canadian market, unlabeled and untested for human consumption over any significant period of time. Nobody, absolutely nobody, knows what eating this monstrous conglomeration in any significant amounts over any significant period of time will do to children, pregnant women, or elderly, or the broad range of human consumers. How can this be?
Alex Gillis in the McLeans article (June 2018) headlined that Canadians ate 4.5 tonnes of unlabelled GM salmon without knowing it this past year. Fancy that. We ate all that monster flesh without having the faintest idea what we were eating. And Canada is the only nation in the whole world who is putting GM salmon on the market. And that 4.5 tons of GM monster flesh was for 2018. What will this year be like? We are serving as Guinea pigs for the US Company named AquaBounty. They want to know how the dear, docile Canadians will react to eating these tons of monster flesh, which of course AquaBounty can’t label as most Canadians, no matter how nice and polite, might recoil in horror. And our Canadian watch dogs, the ones that are supposed to protect us from such dangerous company activities? Oh, dear. Gillis tells us that the Canadian government gets a ten percent cut on the sales. The more monster flesh sold to unwitting Canadians the better our government likes it. More on this.