Bear with me here. First, read Phila's post (live links at his site) about more Frankenfood coming your way:

As a joint venture with Cargill, Monsanto has come up with a genetically engineered corn that contains elevated levels of the amino acid lysine. Apparently, when this corn is cooked, the lysine reacts with sugars to produce advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) that pose problems for diabetics and pre-diabetics, and are implicated in other serious diseases.

The corn is strictly intended as livestock feed (lysine increases the conversion of feed to meat, allowing farmers to reduce the protein level in feed). And by "strictly," of course, I mean "technically":

Even though Monsanto states that LY038 is intended only for animal feed, they made application for approval as a human food so they do not have to keep the altered corn separate from edible corn.

Also, it seems that no one has bothered to perform safety tests on the cooked corn, an oversight which is causing some alarm in New Zealand:

The Centre for Research in Biosafety (INBI) is urging the food standards agency to reconsider its draft recommendation to approve a new type of GM corn. INBI has recommended that Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) should not approve Monsanto’s genetically modified high-lysine LY038 corn until further safety studies have been conducted....INBI recommends that safety studies be conducted using GM corn that has been cooked and processed as it is in human food.
Sounds reasonable to me.

And as we so often hear these days, the innocent have nothing to fear.

Snark aside, if you're not a research scientist or reading science journals all the time, you probably have no idea just how much your food is "processed" and what potential impact that can have on your health.

Now, if you've got the time and inclination and cash, you can probably absorb the variously significant blows to your health with things like preventative medicine, vitamins, workout sessions at the gym, and drugs if the symptoms reach that point. But a lot of people can't. We're up to like 60 million people without effective health care and at least that number with "insurance" that does little beyond coverage of (not even all) catastrophic costs.

Having recently been forced to deal with the health care system as a Little Person, I feel very well qualified to bitch on this. It's clear to me now that the real costs of the system are being balanced on the backs of the poor. I'm having to reign in my impulse to rant, but the short version is that everything in our health care system is inverted and fucked, and the people with the greatest needs and least ability to care for themselves are being asked to do the most, and effectively pay the most at the same time.

What I'd like people to consider is that it's more than just crappy delivery and treatment placed out of reach due to cost. It's BS like this frankenfood story. I'm sure I don't have to tell you which groups in this country suffer the most from diseases like diabetes- in poor black communities it's sometimes endemic, even among children. The very people least able to research a food product or go to an organic market in the suburbs to replace it. It really pisses me off to realize that these people will most likely be blamed in the SCLM when next year's diabetes numbers come out. "If only black people would take their health more seriously."

I should probably cover more agricultural issues, because it feels to me an issue that slips under the radar a lot. It shouldn't. Understanding the corporatization of the food delivery system is an important part of understanding the battles we face. Not to mention the fact that none of us want diabetes just for eating a bowl of cornflakes every morning.