California’s Prop 37 was just defeated. It was an initiative to require that all GMO foods be labelled as such. These are ‘natural food’ companies (many of them, incidentally, owned by General Mills, Coca-Cola, etc) who provided funding to *defeat* the proposition.

Yes, you read that right. You’d think self-proclaimed natural food companies would be in favor of such a proposition, but the truth is they’ve got stuff to hide just like the other guys. The big food manufacturers poured tons of money into getting this thing shot down, even though they swear that GMOs are safe and healthy. But if they’re so confident about these foods, why don’t they want them labelled?  

Don’t trust food manufacturers, y’all. No matter what kind of ‘natural’ ‘organic’ ‘earth-friendly’ rhetoric they use on you. Think for yourself, read labels, don’t be duped by packaging. Be smarter than their advertising department thinks you are. Avoid ‘natural’ products when you can and eat whole foods instead.

A good rule of thumb: if a food requires packaging, think twice. Obviously we have to eat things with packaging. Even local family farm honey has to be put in a bottle and labelled. What I mean by think twice is this: evaluate the rhetoric of the packaging. How much effort was put into it? What image is it trying to sell you of the food’s source and of yourself? How ‘slick’ and commercial is it? What is it trying to divert your attention away from? What is it trying to convince you of? In my experience, local, small-scale, family-farm type products have bare-bones packaging, and small, honest companies have only a little more. Fancy packaging comes from big corporations.