Welp, it’s happened: Your good ’ol safe, fun Quick Bites column—which you could always turn to for light news about new goodies on the menu at your fave café or the latest quirky downtown ice-cream shop opening—has turned political. (OK, we’ve always been a little political, considering we’re all about local, sustainable and healthy, right?)
But … just this week … don’t freak out … we want you to sign a petition. Next week, it’ll be back to your regularly scheduled local restaurant updates and fun-community-food-festivity news. But this week, we want you to be an online activist for the sake of our local food community.
Maybe you’re not surprised. If you’ve got an activist bone in your body (or even if you don’t), you’re probably seeing petitions popping up everywhere you look—your mailbox, your email inbox, social media, clipboard-wielding people on the street. Ever since the presidential election, there’s so much everyone wants you to do to help keep our country sane, and petitions have been shown to make an impact, even online ones.
On the food front, here in Tucson, Quick Bites wants you to help us protect local farming interests—which right now means doing all we can to keep out the infamous pesticide-peddling, GMO-happy mega-agribusiness Monsanto.
According to the Pima County Food Alliance—a network comprised of farmers, chefs, restaurants, schools, gardeners, health professionals, activists, consumers (and many more)—Monsanto is right now holding secret talks with Pima County about building a greenhouse just outside Tucson.
Says the Alliance’s petition, “Given Monsanto’s history of bullying small farmers, we believe this is a threat to our local food system and our recent designation as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy.”
We hope you agree that a Monsanto greenhouse will increase corporate control of our local food system and endanger all the things we love about it. ■
Sign the petition online and learn more about the Pima County Food Alliance at pimafoodalliance.org.
This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2016.
Oh yes. Let’s stop any chance of someone getting a new job. This is Pima County, we just increase property taxes, we don’t try to encourage business. I thought we just voted FOR the job expansion. Where is it a given that a GREENHOUSE will lead to Monsanto buying up small farms in our area? Get back to your Neil Young records and leave us alone.
Maybe it’s just me but wouldn’t it just be easier to not eat it? They will open in Casa Grande if not here.
UNESCO? They are anti semitic. What are you doing participating with that hate group?
http://conservativepapers.com/news/2016/04/26/say-yes-if-you-agree-the-us-is-giving-legitimacy-to-fraud-by-participating-in-the-unesco/
There are other reasons to oppose the Huckelberry-Monsanto giveaway. 1) The Avra Valley has been sprayed by Saguaro Park and Tucson Water aircraft with glyphosate, Monsanto’s number one product, to kill buffelgrass. The spraying has made neighbors and their pets sick, and killed ranchers’ cattle forage. The World Health Organization deemed glyphosate a “probable carcinogen” and its has been banned outright or heavily restricted in many countries. 2) The 40-50 jobs in Marana are half of the layoffs Monsanto just made at three other R&D facilities; they have announced plans to reduce their workforce by 11 percent, 2600 jobs. They’re really good at playing one community off against another! 3) Monsanto is in the process of being taken over by Bayer and will receive $66 billion, that’s Billion with a B — so why do they need our tax dollars….?
If UNESCO is for it, my instinct is to be very concerned. I have seen too much of their supposed “good works” in third-world countries, where I have worked for more than 30 years.
AVL the stae of CA has ruled cinnamon a known carcinogen. Don’t sprinkle that stuff on my buns.
Yes who needs a job?
“The company promises $95 million to $105 million in investments, 40 to 60 jobs paying an average of $44,000 a year and an emphasis on sustainability. It says the automated operation will use far less water and land and a fraction of the herbicides normally sprayed for an operation of this scale. The greenhouse will turn out a new generation of corn seed varieties, both conventional and genetically modified, that will help farmers around the world have more productive and resilient crops, Monsanto says.”
They will be the largest tax payer in Marana – twice the size of Ritz-Carlton.
Pest-resistant GMO crops use 90% less pesticides than others.