Community Corner
GMO-Free NJ Sends a Message on Independence Day
While Collingswood showed off its red, white and blue on the Fourth of July, community organizers took a stand for independence from GMO food products.
In terms of severity, it's a few degrees shy of filling up Boston Harbor with confiscated tea.
But the organizers of the Fourth of July Food Freedom March were about as colorfully costumed as their colonial ancestors, and no less serious about their message.
About 40-45 people joined the event, said organizer Barbara Thomas, all gathered to express their displeasure at the absence of stronger laws alerting shoppers to the presence of genetically modified organisms in their foods.
The march in Collingswood was one of nearly 170 Moms Across America Marches (MAAM) organized nationwide on the Fourth of July, seven of which took place in New Jersey.
"The main idea is that when enough Moms (or Dads, grads, students and others who shop to fill the pantry), become aware of the genetically engineered substances in our food supply, we will, with our buying power, push the market to the tipping point of consumer rejection," Thomas said.
"Of course without truthful labels that is an educational task in and of itself, but we feel that we are very close to the desired outcome," she said. "We have great hopes that NJ will have a labeling law by the end of the year."
Thomas said that protestors had to do "very little adaptation" to the U.S. Declaration of Independence to re-work the copy for its Unanimous Declaration of Independence from Biotech.
A sample of the language within it:
"Biotech has plundered our bountiful harvests, ravaged our waterways, destroyed our fertile soil, and threatens the health of our most innocent citizens...we are absolved from all allegiance to the mutated substances produced by biotech, and that all connection between us and the tyrant, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free people, we have full power to study, take action, and to do all other actions to spread this word of truth to others."
Thomas said the event was also punctuated by speech-making, rewritten protest music, and "an interactive puppet skit with our life-sized biotech scientist Dr. Nefarious."
For more information about the group, visit: http://gmofreenj.com/.
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