"Sixty years of producing standardized fruits and vegetables and creating industrial hybrids have had a dramatic impact on their nutritional content. In the past 50 years, vegetables have lost 27% of their vitamin C and nearly half of their iron.
Take the tomato. Through multiple hybridizations, scientists are constantly producing redder, smoother, firmer fruit. But in the process, it has lost a quarter of its calcium and more than half of its vitamins. The seeds that produce the fruits and vegetables we consume are now the property of a handful of multinationals, like Bayer, and Dow-Dupont, who own them. These multinationals have their seeds produced predominantly in India, where workers are paid just a handful of rupees while the company has a turnover of more than 2 billion euros. A globalized business where the seed sells for more than gold.
According to FAO, worldwide, 75% of the cultivated varieties have disappeared in the past 100 years. Loss of nutrients, and privatization of life, reveal the industrialists’ great monopoly over our fruits and vegetables."
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable... The traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself... He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.” (Cicero)
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