Month: December 2016

Date bars: rich holiday treats

Date bars: rich holiday treats

Date bars and cookies are always part of the holiday season, perhaps because of their Middle Eastern origins. Soft flavorful date bars take about a hour to make, and keep very well. This recipe is an old family one, adapted from an old Betty Crocker recipe. (Note that date bars are very different from Singles’ Bars.)

For the filling

  • 1 ½ cups pitted dates, cut up
  • 1 ½ cups raisins
  • ¼ cup sugar
  • 1 ½ cups water

Mix the above ingredients in a saucepan and cook with occasional stirring for 10 minutes, until smooth and thickened.

For the cookies

  • ½ cup butter (1 stick)
  • ¼ cup shortening (Crisco)
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 ½ cups flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ½ tsp baking soda
  • 1 cup quick cooking oats
  • ½ cup chopped nuts
  1. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
  2. Cream the butter and shortening in a mixer and add the brown sugar. Mix until smooth.
  3. Stir in the flour, salt, and soda and mix until uniform. Stir in the oats and mix thoroughly.
  4. Press about half of the crumbly mixture into the bottom of a greased 13 “x 9” baking pan.

spread-dates

  1. Mix the chopped nuts into the date mixture and spread over the bottom layer.
  2. Sprinkle the remaining crumbly mixture on top and press down slightly.
  3. Bake until light brown, about 25-30 minutes.
  4. While warm, cut diagonally from corner to corner and then  in parallel to the first cut about an inch apart. Repeat between the other two corners, making diamond shaped bars.
  5. Remove when cool. Makes about 2 dozen.
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Easy breakfast scones

Easy breakfast scones

Scones are little more that sweetened biscuits, and just as easy to make. Usually people add some fruit, such as raisins or dried cranberries, but you don’t have to. These are an easy weekend breakfast you can make in less than half an hour. This recipe is adapted from one by Steven Valenti who adapted his from Martha Stewart.

  • 2 cups flour
  • 5 Tb sugar
  • 1 Tb baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 6 Tb chilled, unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
  • 2/3 cup milk
  • ½ cup raisins or other dried fruit
  1. Preheat the oven to 425° F.
  2. Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, using a whisk.
  3. Cut the butter into the flour mixture using a pastry blender.
  4. Add the milk, and stir in with a fork until just moistened.
  5. Knead the dough together on a lightly floured surface.
  6. Pat the dough into a 1 inch thick round and cut it into 8 wedges.
  7. Place the wedges on a baking sheet, covered with baking parchment.
  8. Brush the tops with milk and sugar.
  9. Bake until golden brown, about 12-15 minutes.

Cool briefly on a wire rack, but serve while still warm, with plenty of butter.

Seven layer cookies

Seven layer cookies

You make these really simple cookies by just pouring 7 things into a baking pan and baking them for half an hour. For the butterscotch chips, see if you can avoid the Nestle ones that have a sort of artificial taste to them. The organic and trendy section of your grocer may have other kinds. You can also use Reese’s peanut butter chips instead.

  • 1/4 lb butter (1 stick)
  • 1 cup graham cracker crumbs
  • 1 cup coconut
  • 1 cup butterscotch chips (6 oz pkg)
  • 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (6 oz pkg)
  • 1 14 oz can Eagle brand (sweetened) condensed milk
  • 1 cup nuts, chopped
  1. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
  2. Melt the butter in a microwave, 2 minutes at 50% power works well.
  3. Pour the butter into the bottom of a 10 x 13 baking pan.
  1. Add the graham cracker crumbs, followed by the coconut, butterscotch chips, and chocolate chips.
  2. Pour the Eagle brand milk over the chip mixture.
  1. Top with the chopped nuts.
  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

Cool and cut out squares to cool further on a wire rack. When completely cool, cut the squares into smaller cookies.

Sour cream Christmas cut-out cookies

Sour cream Christmas cut-out cookies

Christmas cut-out cookies are a holiday tradition in many families. These delicious, but simple, cookies have been part of our family tradition for at least 3 generations. The sour cream keeps the cookies moist, and the icing helps them stay that way. They don’t last long in most families!

If you have sour cream, butter, sugar and some cookie cutters, these aren’t very hard to make. And you can ice them with your whole family.

  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened (preferably unsalted)
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 31/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • Butter cream icing(below)
  • Colored sugars
  1. Combine the butter and sugar together and cream using an electric mixer.
  2. Add the sour cream, baking powder, soda, salt and vanilla.
  3. Add the eggs and mix well.
  4. Add the flour to make a soft dough.

batter

  1. Cover the mixer bowl with foil and chill in the refrigerator or freezer for an hour or so.
  2. Preheat the oven to 325 F.
  3. Take out only about a quarter of the dough at a time, and roll it out on a floured board, keeping the rest chilled.
  4. Cut out the cookies and place on baking parchment on a cookie sheet, or directly on a greased cookie sheet.
  1. Bake for 7-9 minutes until the edges have only just started to brown.
  2. Cool the cookies on a wire rack and ice with butter cream icing and decorate with colored sugars.

Butter cream icing

  • 1/4 lb (one stick) butter
  • 1 lb confectioners’ sugar
  • About 1/4 cup milk
  • Soften the butter by pressing the wrapped stick with your hand or a rolling pin. Cut into pieces and place in a food processor. Add the confectioners’ sugar and pulse until uniform,
  1. Add the milk, a little at a time until the icing is smooth and spreadable. Mix food coloring into portions of the icing so you have several colors available.

Ice the cookies and decorate with colored sugars. Let them dry for an hour or so before boxing them up.

Superior Mac and Cheese with little effort

Superior Mac and Cheese with little effort

This recipe is based on one we have been making  for many years, and was based on one my mother made years ago. We never used boxed mac & cheese because this is so much better and takes not much longer.And the ingredients are very simple!

ingredients

You can use one cheese (say, cheddar) or a mixture of cheese, but you want to avoid much Parmesan or aged Swiss-type cheese like Emmenthaler,  because they are really too salty for the cheese sauce. Probably most important for simplification is that you don’t have to grate the cheeses: just cut them into small cubes. They’ll all melt fine. Some people like to add some American cheese. It doesn’t have a lot of taste, but it does impart some smoothness.

  • 1 cup cheddar cheese, cubed
  • ½ cup young Swiss cheese, like Boar’s Head
  • ½ cup any other cheese you like, even American
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 1 green pepper or 1 red  sweet pepper or both, cut up
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 1 Tb Worcestershire sauce
  • Salt and pepper
  • Olive oil
  • 1 lb wieners, slit open
  • 1 lb box of macaroni shells
  • Bread crumbs
  1. Preheat the oven to 375° F.
  2. Slice the wieners lengthwise so they will heat through, and place them in the bottom of a casserole.

4. Bring 3 quarts of salted water to a boil, and cook the macaroni about a minute past the al dente stage. Make sure the macaroni is fairly well cooked, so it doesn’t absorb the cheese sauce.

5. Drain the macaroni and pour over the wieners in the casserole.

6. Saute the onion and peppers in olive oil in a saucepan until soft.

7. Add the cream and heat slowly. When warm, add the cubed cheese and stir while heating until the cheese is mostly melted in.

8. Pour the cheese sauce over the macaroni and sprinkle with bread crumbs.

9. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, until bubbly and starting to brown. Serve at once.

bubbling

Allegiance- George Takei’s musical in HD

Allegiance- George Takei’s musical in HD

The short-lived Broadway musical Allegiance was screened in HD in some 600 theaters throughout the country yesterday. The show, inspired by Takei’s experiences in a Japanese-American internment camp had music and lyrics by Jay Kuo, and a book by Marc Acito, Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. It follows the experiences of the fictional Kimura family who were forcibly relocated to internment camps far from their west coast homes after the attack on Pearl Harbor, along with about 120,000 other Japanese-Americans.

Generally, HD rebroadcasts of plays, and musical works come with at least a single sheet program listing all the actors and production credits, but the neither Fathom Events organization nor the Trumbull Conn Post 14 theaters bothered with this nicety. Having only a brief glance at the closing credits, most of the cast information came from online sources.

George Takei, the beloved actor who started his career as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu, and has become an activist and comic commentator led the bill, playing the avuncular grandfather of the Kimura clan, and in a present-day scene the aged version of young Sam from that clan.

salonga-takei

While Takei headed the playbill, the real stars were Lea Salonga, playing Sam’s older sister Kei, and Telly Leung ,a fantastic actor with a gorgeous tenor voice who plays Sam Kimura as a young man. Salonga began her Broadway career in  Miss Saigon and played roles in Les Miz and voiced the lead in the cartoon Mulan.

leung-clarke

Equally important are the excellent Michael K Lee, playing Frankie Suzuki, a young man who becomes Kei’s suitor and eventually husband, and the charming Katie Rose Clark who plays the (white) camp nurse Hannah Campbell and Sam’s love interest.

This show provided an excellent opportunity for a nearly all-Asian cast to shine and they proved themselves incredibly talented again and again in song and dance numbers, where the entire cast performed beautifully.

With such a talented cast, it is a shame that Allegiance never caught hold, running only about 4 months, and the fear that this was a just a history lesson about a shameful period of U.S. history might have kept audiences away.  Much of the show, however, is quite entertaining, with the developing relationships and family conflicts making up much of the story.

The central crisis of the first act is the idea that the Japanese-American men should be allowed to enlist to fight the enemy if they would swear allegiance to the U.S. and renounce and allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. This led to principled conflicts both ways, with Sam signing the paper and enlisting, while Frankie refuses and is imprisoned until the end of the war. The second act seems longer than the first and has fewer compelling scenes to keep it moving. The show ran 2:15 without intermission.

Jay Kuo’s music might have been part of the problem, with much of it the sort of full-throated poperetta ballads full of quarter-note triplets that infested much of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s music as well as much of Les Miz. On the other hand the upbeat songs, written in a 1940s swing style are utterly charming, beginning with Sam and Hannah’s duet, “I Oughta Go,” which you can hear on the Amazon site. Unfortunately, all of Lea Salonga’s songs (and there are too many) are in that overblown poperetta style and basically all sound alike. The award-winning orchestrations by Lynne Shankel for a 13-piece orchestra, is wind-instrument heavy with only 3 strings and the wind harmonies are lush and lovely.

Interestingly, the only character based on a real person is the controversial Mike Masauoka (played by Greg Watanabe), a Japanese American functionary in Washington, who became the face of the JACL (Japanese American Citizen’s League) and worked to try to improve life in the camps, primarily by cooperating. He is shown as somewhat of a wheeler-dealer and was not well liked.

This is an important piece of Broadway history that was worth seeing even with its flaws, and it is a shame it never found much of an audience. Now that the HD showing is over, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a DVD version some time in the future. Look for it.

Easy cheesecake in a pressure cooker

Easy cheesecake in a pressure cooker

If you follow the world of electric pressure cookers, like the Instant Pot and similar devices, you will perhaps have heard of the idea of making cheesecake in your pot. While this sounds a bit crazy, there is a really good reason to give it a try: uniformity. Cheesecakes can be difficult to make without over-baking them, leading to cracked, dry cake that people leave on their plate.

Making a smooth, creamy cheesecake is not just the province of expert bakers: you just need clear, repeatable instructions. There is an AllRecipes.com page on the details of making cheesecake, suggesting a water bath for uniform heating and cautioning you not to succumb to lower-fat cream cheese, that doesn’t have sufficient fat to set up properly.

You can also find a very nice cheesecake recipe here, but it requires that you leave the cake in the closed oven for 6 hours after baking at low temperature, followed by chilling in the refrigerator.

We decided to try out making a cheese cake following the fairly standard recipe and procedures given by Jill Selkowitz, who writes an excellent, if somewhat prolix, blog under the name ThisOldGal. So, this is her New York Cheesecake recipe with reduced discussion (but not reduced fat). This recipe is quite simple and you can do it in about 45 minutes. You still have to chill the cheesecake for several hours or overnight, though, so it is firm enough to cut.

To bake a cheesecake in the InstantPot or any of its cousins, you need a small spring form or drop bottom cake pan. We bought a Kaiser Noblesse 7” springform pan at our local kitchen store, so we could make sure it fits. The actual pan base is about 7”, but the interior of the pan only 6 ½ “.

For the crust, we used Nilla wafers, but you could use graham crackers or any kind of cookies you like.

The Crust

  • 24 Nilla wafer cookies (about ¾ cup when crushed)
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 2 ½  Tb butter, melted

The Filling

  • 16 oz full fat cream cheese (2 8 oz packages)at room temperature
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 2 tsp flour
  • ½ tsp vanilla extract
  • ½ tsp grated lemon peel
  • ½ tsp grated orange peel
  • 2 eggs, at room  temperature
  • 1 egg yolk at room temperature
  • ¼ cup heavy cream

Top Layer

  • ½ cup sour cream
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 2 tsp sugar
  1. Melt the butter in a microwave for a minute at 50% power.
  2. Chop up the Nilla wafers in a food processor or blender. Add the butter, and process until smooth.

3. Butter the inside of the spring form pan and press the crumbs to the bottom and sides of the pan so they go up the sides and inch or even two. Put the pan in the freezer for 15 minutes to solidify the crust.

4. Wipe out the food processor, and add the cream cheese, cut into 1-2” pieces. Add the sugar, flour and vanilla.

5. Grate the lemon and orange peel into the processor bowl using a microplane grater (or any other sort of grater). Pulse until smooth.

6. Add the eggs and egg yolk and pulse until again smooth.

7. Add the cream and fold in with a rubber spatula.

8. Remove the pan from the freezer and pour in the filling.

9. Cover the pan with a layer of paper towel to prevent water from soaking in, and then with aluminum foil.

10. Put the trivet in the bottom of the Instant Pot and pour 1 ½ cups water.

11. Make a sling of some aluminum foil (we used heavy duty foil) so you can lift the hot pan out after cooking. Put  the sling in the pot and put the cheesecake pan on top of it.

12. Close the pot and cook at high pressure for 37 minutes. Allow the pressure to subside for about 15 minutes (normal release) and open the pot.

13. Lift out the baked cheesecake and unwrap it. If there is any water on the cheesecake surface, dab If dry with a paper towel.

14. Immediately spread the sour cream topping over the hot cheesecake, so it incorporates itself into the cheesecake. The cake may still be jiggly in the middle but will set up on standing and cooling. Let the cake cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

15. Chill for 4-5 hours or overnight.

Serve with berries dotted with whipped cream.

 

 

Are GMO producers covering up ‘just like’ Big Tobacco?

corntassels2016One of the popular slogans of anti-GMO protesters has been that there is a “cover-up” going on by GMO seed companies about the actual harm of GMO crops, just like the kind of cover-up that Big Tobacco carried out for 40 years on the dangers of smoking. You will hear this sort of talk from Dave Murphy from Food Democracy Now, who can sound pretty extreme in print (see this article in the Huffington Post) but when interviewed on MSNBC sounds somewhat more reasonable, even while talking through his hat. (Recently the Huffington Post was rated the worst anti-science web site by Skeptoid.)

However, in that interview, the best e cigarette companies are engaged in “cigarette science,” and not telling the “real truth.” The trope that a science cover-up on GMO crops is going on just like Big Tobacco carried out is common in anti-GMO protest signs and literature.

Tobacco history

We went back and looked at some of the history of the science on tobacco smoking and lung and heart disease. As more states decide to legalize hitman glass or medical marijuana, cannabis is becoming more accessible to a broader range of people, and gaining mainstream appeal. For new patients or novice users who can’t roll a joint, don’t want the mess of grinding up bud, or would rather not smell like weed, vaping offers a convenient, discreet, and tidy alternative. Most people who have tried vaping they stick to it because its healthier and tastes better, I recommend you to try out best selling e juice. Surprisingly, the research goes back to at least 1950 (1), where the authors found that smokers were substantially more likely to develop lung carcinoma. This was one of only two papers on this subject in PubMed in 1950, but the number grew in subsequent years to hundreds and then thousands of papers per year, all pointing to the same conclusions. Visit Medpot for the most reliable resource of medical plants.

So, in fact, the carcinogenicity of cigarettes was well known over 60 years ago, while it may have been discounted publicly by tobacco companies, there was no cover-up at that time. What is in e juice products? E-juice is the liquid put in vaporizers that creates the vapor itself. It can be made with nicotine, and it can be made without nicotine, but it really depends on the preference of the person.

However, when people began to ask questions about the dangers of second hand smoke (“passive smoking”), tobacco companies took an aggressive approach to neutralize the impact of this research. While Schmidt (2) indicated that the carcinogens in passive smoke were a serious problem, Grandjean et. al. suggested that there was unlikely to be a problem, but by 1981 researchers were pointing towards benzo(a)pyrene as a prime culprit in tobacco smoke. (4)

In 1998, as part of the resolution of a lawsuit by various attorneys-general against tobacco companies, the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement resulted in significant funds being transferred to the states and the tobacco companies ceasing various marketing practices (check another kind of health-related lawsuit at http://sideeffectsofxarelto.org/current-xarelto-lawsuits/). At the time, the entire archives of the Tobacco Institute and related front organizations became available to researchers.

Because of these documents and the many papers that have been published about them, we now know that the tobacco companies conspired to cover up the harm they knew was being caused by second hand smoke. They also used their law firms and advertising agencies to recruit apparently unbiased scientists to tout their points of view expressing skepticism about the dangers of second hand smoke.

In 2000, Ong and Glanz (5) described the tobacco industry’s efforts to discredit second hand smoke studies, and Drope and Chapman(6) described how this was done by reviewing tobacco industry documents. And the tobacco companies’ law firms and agencies constructed the term “junk science” to try to refute some of these studies as Ong and Glanz noted in 2001 (7).

Perhaps most disturbing was the industry’s attempts to recruit (and pay) independent scientists to repeat industry talking points. The scientists’ papers would still indicate that they were being supported by tobacco industry groups, but as Bero, Glanz and Hong revealed, this wasn’t that hard to get around, as they show by detailing payments to one scientist who published such papers. (8)

A complete history of the tobacco industry’s second hand smoke cove-up was published online by PR Watch.

Development of GM Crops

There are two major types of GM crops in wide use in the US and other countries: Bt maize (corn), cotton, potatoes and tobacco and Roundup resistant soy, corn, sorghum, canola, squash, alfalfa and sugar beets. Roundup-resistant wheat has been developed and found to be safe, but is not being marketed.

In addition, there are ringspot-resistant GM papayas, non-browning Arctic apples and the non-browning Simplot potato, as well as Golden Rice with Vitamin A bred into the plant to combat blindness in vulnerable populations.

Bt insecticides

The bacillus we now know as Bacillus thuringiensis was, according to a review by Je et. al. (9) discovered originally in Japan in 1901 by Ishiwati and rediscovered in Germany by Berliner in 1911 (10), when he isolated it from flour moths.

Bt was found to be toxic to various Lepidoptera that were known to be crop pests and it began to be used in France in 1938, (11) and interest in its use as an insecticide more broadly was due primarily to Steinhaus.(12). There are now a large number of varieties of the Bt, specific to a number of different insect pests. It was found by Angus (13) that during sporulation, it forms a crystalline protein that creates the toxicity.

The important breakthrough in Bt research was when Gonzalez (14) reported that the genes that coded for the crystal proteins were located on separate cell sections called plasmids, paving the way for the cloning of these genes and eventually for insertion of these genes into plant material. The first genes isolated coded Bt toxic to the tobacco hornworm (15), and soon several groups began creating transgenic plants with various Cry genes inserted. The first to reach the market was Bt cotton (16).

Koziel (17) and a dozen coworkers from Ciba-Geigy described the field performance of transgenic maize in 1993, and commercial Bt corn followed soon after the cotton.

Once the Cry genes which coded for various strains of Bt were inserted into foodstuffs, concern was expressed regarding their safety. Numerous independent short and long term studies have shown these foods to be completely safe, however (18, 19).

Roundup

Roundup or glyphosate herbicide was discovered and patented by Monsanto chemist John E Franz in 1970 (20). It’s effectively made by combination of glycine and phosphonic acid, hence the name shortened from glycine phosphonate. It is a contact herbicide, used to kill emerging weeds and is not used as a pre-emergent weed killer. Duke and Powles, in a mini-review (21) have called it a “once in a lifetime herbicide.” Franz received the National Medal of Technology (1987) and the Perkin Medal (1990) for this work.

Even before the development of Roundup resistant plants, Roundup was used by farmers to clear the fields before planting, obviating the necessity of tilling. Glyphosate is of extremely low human toxicity, comparable to aspirin or baking soda, and binds to the soil while it decomposes, so water supplies are not at risk. All the commercial patents have now expired, and it is made by a large number of companies.

Steinrucken and Amrhein (22) reported in 1980 that glyphosate killed plants by inhibiting synthesis of the enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimic acid-3-phosphate synthase, (ESPS) which is critical for the synthesis of the  aromatic amino acids phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan. If researchers could interfere with this process, they could create plants that could resist glyphosate.

After several years of experimentation in a number of groups, Klee, Muskopf and Gasser at Monsanto reported the creation of a glyphosate resistant petunia (23). This technique resulted in a general method for creating glyphosate resistant plants by cloning a gene that encodes ESPS and inserting it to various plants. Patents on this were filed in 1990 by Shah, Rogers, Horsch and Fraley (24). Fraley recently received the World Food Prize for leading this work.

Related approaches continued for some years and the first glyphosate tolerant soybeans were introduced to the market in 1996.

Research on Safety of Transgenic Plants

Substantial research on the safety of each of the genetically modified plants has been conducted and published by research groups inside and outside the various seed companies. A complete list of nearly 6oo peer-reviewed papers attesting to the safety of transgenic crops has been compiled and published by the Biofortified web site (25).

All of these papers are published in major peer-reviewed journals and thus as an aggregate represent the best scientific knowledge on these systems. Among these hundreds of papers representing thousands of experiments, there are really only two papers reporting health problems from genetically modified crops.

One of these, the paper by Giles-Eric Seralini (26) is the paper most frequently referenced in this regard. While Seralini and coworkers claimed to find that rats fed transgenic maize developed tumors, the Sprague-Dawley rats they used all develop tumors at the same rate as they observed. The paper has been denounced by dozens of scientists for poor experimental design and statistics. The European Food Safety Authority (27) published a final assessment, calling the study of “insufficient scientific quality for a safety assessment.”

Forbes contributor and molecular biologist Henry Miller and biochemist Bruce Chassey published a critical article of Seralini’s work as well (28).

The other recent paper purporting to find dangers in feeding transgenic crops to animals was published by Judy Carman, et. al, (29). Published in a low level on-line journal supported by the Organic Federation of Australia, and not even indexed in PubMed, it is of little scientific validity, and was immediately criticized by scores of scientists.

Carman’s study fed pigs either transgenic or conventional maize for 23 months and then examined their stomachs after slaughter. They claimed that GM-fed pigs had more inflammation, but their own tables show the opposite. Critics (30) also noted the visual inspection of stomachs is not the same as an actual histology study, and probably was meaningless. If you want to read the full info via this guide, visit Kratom News. But most significant, FSANZ, the Food Standards Agency of Australia and New Zealand concluded (31) that the data “are not convincing of adverse effects due to the GM diet and provide no grounds for revising FSANZ’s conclusions.”

Comparison with Tobacco Cover-ups

In the case of tobacco companies, the cover-up was clear, because independent research had established and continued to establish the dangers of smoking and of second hand smoke, while at the same time, tobacco sponsored research was attempting to suggest alternate explanations for the observed diseases associated with such smoke.

By contrast, there are not really any credible studies from any source showing any damage to animals (or people) from any current transgenic crop. There is no sign of any coverup of evidence or papers adopting alternate hypotheses, because no negative results have been found. Nor are there conflicting conclusions presented by independent studies versus industry funded studies.

Consequently, there is no analogy between the near-criminal behavior of the tobacco companies and the relatively open research environment in which transgenic crops have been developed. There just doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a conspiracy.

The only evidence we find of mendacity and conspiracy is in Seralini’s and Carman’s papers, which have been found to be wanting of solid, believable science. And strangely enough, the web site gmoseralini.org and gmojudycarman.org have an identical design and style. And as Byrne and Miller noted (32), the organic industry is spending upwards of $2 1/2 billion opposing transgenic crops.

References

  1. Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung, R. Doll and A. Bradford Hill, British Medical Journal, 739, Sept 30, 1950
  2. Health Damage by Means of Forced Smoking, F. Schmidt, Med, 1979, 97(42) 1920.
  3. Passive Smoking, E. Grandjean, A Weber, T. Fischer, Schweiz. Akad. Med. Wiss. 1979 Mar;35(1-3):99-109.
  4. Carcinogenicity of airborne fine particulate benzo(a)pyrene: an appraisal of the evidence and the need for control. F Perera, Environ Health Perspect. 1981 Dec;42:163-85.
  5. Tobacco industry efforts subverting International Agency for Research on Cancer’s second-hand smoke study, Elisa K Ong, Stanton A Glantz, The Lancet, 355 , April 8, 2000.
  6. Tobacco industry efforts at discrediting scientific knowledge of environmental tobacco smoke: a review of internal industry documents, J Drope and S Chapman, J Epidemiol Community Health 2001;55:588-594.
  7. Constructing “Sound Science” and “Good Epidemiology”: Tobacco, Lawyers, and Public Relations Firms. E. Ong and S. Glanz, Am J Public Health.2001 November; 91(11): 1749–1757.
  8. The limits of competing interest disclosures, L.A. Bero, S. Glanz and M-K Hong, Tob Control2005;14:118-126
  9. Bacillus Thuringiensis as a Specific, Safe, and Effective Tool for Insect Pest Control. Yeo Ho Je al. J. Microbiol. Biotechnol. (2007), 17(4), 547–559.
  10. Berliner, E. 1911. Uber de schlaffsucht der Mehlmottenraupe. Zeitschrift fur das Gesamstadt 252: 3160-3162
  11. Lambert, B. and M. Peferoen. 1992. Insecticidal promise of Bacillus thuringiensis. Facts and mysteries about a successful biopesticide. BioScience 42: 112-122.
  12. Steinhaus, E. A. 1951. Possible use of B. t. berliner as an aid in the control of alfalfa caterpillar. Hilgardia 20: 359-381.
  13. Angus, T. A. 1956. Association of toxicity with proteincrystalline inclusions of Bacillus sotto Ishiwata. J. Microbiol. 2: 122-131.
  14. Gonzalez, J. M. Jr., B. J. Brown, and B. C. Carlton. 1982. Transfer of Bacillus thuringiensis plasmids coding for δ-endotoxin among strains of B. thuringiensis and B. cereus. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 79: 6951-6955.
  15. Schnepf, H. E. and H. R. Whiteley. 1981. Cloning and expression of the Bacillus thuringiensis crystal protein gene in Escherichia coli. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78: 2893-2897.
  16. Shelton, A. M., J. Z. Zhao, and R. T. Roush. 2002. Economic, ecological, food safety, and social consequences of the deployment of Bt transgenic plants. Rev. Entomol. 47: 845-881
  17. Koziel, al. Field Performance of Elite Transgenic Maize Plants Expressing an Insecticidal Protein Derived from Bacillus thuringiensis. Nature Biotechnology11, 194 – 200 (1993).
  18. G Flachowsky, K Aulrich, H. Bohme , I. Halle. Studies on feeds from Genetically Modified Plants (GMP), Contributions to nutritional and safety assessment. Animal Feed and Science Technology, 133 (2007) 2-30.
  19. G Flachowsky, K Aulrich, Halle. Long-term feeding of Bt-corn– a ten generation study with quails. Arch Anim Nutr. 2005 Dec;59(6):449-51.
  20. US Patent 3799758.
  21. O. Duke and S.B. Powles, Glyphosate: a once in a lifetime herbicide. Pest Manag Sci 64:319–325 (2008).
  22. Steinrücken, H.C.; Amrhein, N. (1980). “The herbicide glyphosate is a potent inhibitor of 5-enolpyruvylshikimic acid-3-phosphate synthase”.Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications94 (4): 1207–12.
  23. J. Klee, Y.M. Mushopf and C.S. Gasser, Cloning of an Arabidopsis thaliana gene encoding 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase: sequence analysis and manipulation to obtainglyphosate-tolerant plants. Mol Gen Genet. 1987 Dec;210(3):437-42.
  24. US Patent 4940835.
  25. See http://biofortified.org/genera/studies-for-genera/
  26. G-E Seralini al., Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize, Food Chem Toxic., 50(11), 2012, 4221-4231.
  27. European Commission, Final Review of Seralini al…, EFSA Journal 2012,10(100, 2985.
  28. Henry Miller and Bruce Chassey, Scientists Smell a Rat in Fraudulent Genetic Engineering Study, Forbes 8/25/12.
  29. J Carman, al, A long term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined GM soy and GM maize diet, J Organic Systems, 8(1) 2013, 38-54.
  30. David Gorski, More bad science in the service of anti-GMO activism, Science Based Medicine, June 17, 2013.
  31. Response to a feeding study by Carman et. al., FSANZ, July, 2013.
  32. Byrne and Henry Miller, The roots of the anti-genetic engineering movement: Follow the money, Forbes, 1022/2012