dioxin in B&J's

["Sarah " <sarah@vpirg.org>]

It seems to me that the real issue raised with the Ben and Jerry's 
study for activists is how do we address the whole question of food 
contamination with dioxin meaningfully, without falling into the kind of 
breathless excitement of the original activist posting.  This 
information (about dioxin in fatty foods and particularly fatty dairy 
foods) should not come as a shock to us, but it should come as an 
incentive to think about how to use the issue of food safety to help  
move the issue of dioxin exposure forward.

As someone from a dairy state, in fact the Ben and Jerry state, I am 
very interested in strategizing around this whole issue in a way that 
can help us to bring food producers to join or support our efforts.  
After all, they stand to lose hugely if people decide it's just too 
dangerous to buy and eat the food s they produce. Thus far, 
environmentalists have been pretty circumspect about not whipping 
up panic over this issue, and I think from my limited viewpoint that 
that has probably been wise.  But if denial is constant among 
regulators and polluters and contamination is constant in the food 
supply, can't we use the one to get at the other?

It seems to me that there must be ways for those of us in rural states 
with dairy and meat producers in particular to try to engage in 
discussions with those food producers that go beyond USDA's wish 
to hush the whole issue up and move towards joint efforts to 
eliminate dioxin because its a general good, but also because it can 
protect these folks' bottom line.

Obviously, as B&J's have discovered, being out there on the issue is 
going to get you attacked. But is there a way for us to clearly put 
that threat in the context of the long term danger that people will 
simply abandon all meat and dairy products and communicate the 
tradeoff better to food biz types?  (I'm not suggesting that we 
shouldn't limit our diets as a protective personal choice when faced 
with the realities of dioxin contamination, but I refuse to support all 
people having to make such a choice because forced to by 
industrial polluters.)

 Often dioxin/food crises, as in Belgium, are the result of crude, 
corrupt practices that dump toxics directlyinto the food supply in one 
way or another. But the everyday issue of dioxin contamination is 
that its in all our meat all our dairy, etc etc and as far as I can see 
no one is offering much direction for those producing those foods to 
work with activists reduce or eliminate that everyday contamination. 

I may, of course, be totally wrong about that, so let me know if 
there's some great effort I just dont know about and I won't try to 
reinvent any wheels! But if not, maybe we could individually and 
jointly try to cook up such an effort and learn from each other as we 
do?

Thanks for any thoughts --

Sarah 
Sarah O'Brien
Environmental Health Advocate
Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG)
64 Main Street
Montpelier, VT 05602
(802) 223 6383
(802) 223 6855 fax
sarah@vpirg.org

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