Skip to content
Grist home
Support nonprofit news today

Articles by Lisa J. Bunin

Featured Article

The scariest thing next Halloween might not be the monsters, zombies or witches trolling our streets — it might be the candy. Those colorful, tin-foil-wrapped Hershey’s kisses and dark chocolate pumpkins could contain sugar extracted and processed from the roots of genetically modified sugar beets.

Sugar in Halloween candy comes from several sources, including sugar beets. But this year, farmers are planting Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready GM sugar beets for sale to food producers for the first time. This beet is genetically engineered to survive multiple, direct applications of the weed killer, Roundup, and its active ingredient, glyphosate. What’s particularly appalling about the approval of this GM sugar beet is that at the time of its approval, Monsanto convinced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to increase the glyphosate residues allowed on sugar beetroots by an astounding 5,000 percent. This opens up the possibility for excessive pesticide spraying on GM sugar beets. Now that’s scary news for our precious ghosts and goblins!

So how would you know if the treats you bought contained GM sugar? The short answer: You wouldn’t... Read more

All Articles

  • Non-GM seed and feed make a comeback

    I recently met with members of Japan’s Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative (SCCC) in my office in San Francisco to discuss how to overcome the difficulties of obtaining certain non-GM products for its 1 million members. The 14-person delegation — comprised of pig, chicken, cattle, and dairy producers for the co-op — came to the U.S. […]

  • Consumers demand market rejection of food from cloned animals

    Consumer market rejection seems to be the ongoing theme of U.S. food politics in the waning days of Bush’s inept Food and Drug Administration. Given FDA’s repeated failure to protect our nation’s food supply or to respond quickly and appropriately to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, consumers have turned to food companies and demanded that they […]

  • As GMO sugar beets sneak into the food supply, citizens fight back

    “Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Anthropologist Margaret Mead Even if you’ve heard the above quote many times before, the sentiment expressed is so powerful that I think it’s worth repeating. All around the world, small groups of […]