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Sunday, March 3, 2013

Well, At Least It's Kosher

Most people who utter the word 'Monsanto' are likely to do so with scorn. This Al Jazeera article by Charlotte Silver, commenting on a case involving Monsanto currently before the Supreme Court, should provide a decent primer on why that is. The concerns are, basically, that Monsanto's increasing power and influence- and the capability of their crops to inadvertently cross-pollinate neighboring farms- combined with the fact that Monsanto, in addition to crops, also makes herbicides such as Roundup, creates a sense of unease in not only how much of our food supply Monsanto controls, but what chemicals are in the food that they supply and what kind of damage those chemicals might do.

People are worried about eating stray bits of Roundup that Monsanto got mixed in the food and not knowing about it until they get sick is really the thing here.

Important, to be sure. Especially because I live in a farm state. But that's not really the reason we're here today.

The concern with Monsanto is that people may not know what they're really eating, but... they have an idea what to look for. Not so the case in Iceland. Icelandic officials recently learned that it's not just the things you're looking for that you have to look for. They were looking for horsemeat that had been getting into various meat products around Europe (Taco Bell and Burger King are among the companies hit), as a precaution to see that it wasn't happening in Iceland too.

When they checked one brand of domestic meat pies from a company called Gaedakokkar, the good news is they didn't find horsemeat.

The bad news is they didn't find meat. They found what the AP described as "some kind of vegetable matter". And now a whole new investigation has been launched.

On the plus side, if you wanted meatless meat pies, well, you're in luck.

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