Indie Retailer Causes Kashi to Announce Move to Non-GMO

Well it is about frickin’ time that Kashi got their act together. Only under extreme duress from con­sumers have they finally switched to dump­ing GMO’s from their prod­uct line. Insofar as the claim their new prod­ucts will be “70% organic” I have a wait and see atti­tude. Kashi is owned by General Mills – a trans-national cor­po­rate agribusi­ness car­tel. General Mills is embed­ded with Cargill, Archer-Daniel Midlands, Monsanto and the 1%.

The ONLY rea­son General Mills bought Kashi from the husband-wife team who started the com­pany was because nat­ural foods mar­ket share rep­re­sents BILLIONS of dol­lars in prof­its. I per­son­ally knew the founders of Kashi – they were not inter­ested in organic ingre­di­ents – they told me “oh it is too dif­fi­cult, too expen­sive” that was baloney and it was way back in the mid-1980s when PLENTY of fam­ily owned national man­u­fac­tur­ers were 100% organic. The peo­ple who founded Kashi were not inter­ested in organic food – they were inter­ested in “cheap” food with trendy pack­ag­ing and hip adver­tis­ing cam­paign. The orig­i­nal own­ers of Kashi offered me a great job in 1987, but I turned it down since they said they had NO inter­est in using any organic ingre­di­ents in their prod­ucts since they wanted to man­u­fac­ture “cheap” food. Then they sold out to General Mills – tan­ta­mount to when Dragon Lady sold Burt’s Bees to CLOROX, the worst envi­ron­men­tal pol­luter of all time.

Me per­son­ally, I stick to the organic FARMERS MARKET, the indie coop, grow a lot of food in my com­mu­nity gar­den and stay OUT of Whole Paycheck-Whole Foods which quite frankly – sells a LOT of crap. I make my own pasta sauce from scratch, I make my own pick­les, fer­mented veg­gies and Kombucha at home. I take whole nuts and seeds and make my own p-nut but­ters. I save a HUGE amount of money and it is a fun hobby – I mean, really – who wants to waste time watch­ing trash real­ity tv or read­ing celebrity gos­sip? Instead, I use my time cook­ing 90% of my food from scratch. I have a busy, busy, life, work, col­lege, vol­un­teer duties – there is no excuse not to cook from scratch. Plus I’m only on $14,000 a year income -but still man­age to eat 100% organic.

I try to buy as much food as pos­si­ble that is NOT canned, wrapped, frozen or in a box. Stick to the bulk bins, try to buy as local as pos­si­ble and source out food you can get direct from the folks who grew it. Not just to be trendy “loca­vore” but if you can look the per­son in the face – and talk to the per­son who grew it – there is more lik­liehood it is actu­ally organic – and not “fake cor­po­rate organic”. I mean really, do you trust that Safeway “O Brand? Who knows what the heck is in it. Safeway is the worlds #1 seller of alleged organic food inter­na­tion­ally – Safeway sells more organic food than Whole Paycheck. It is pri­vate label from BIG huge organic farms – Safeway “O” brand is not sup­port­ing small indie organic farm­ers on 5 acres – 10 acres and nei­ther is Kashi. I don’t care if they are switch­ing to alleged “70% organic ingre­di­ents” – I don’t trust General Mills who owns Kashi. I don’t drink Odwalla Juice – it is owned by Coca Cola. I don’t drink Naked Juice – owned by Pepsi. I don’t eat Horizion Dairy – owned by Dean Foods – which is Factory Farmed feed­lot crap dairy = although it does have USDA organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion seal. Check out http://www.cornucopia.org “Who Owns Organic”. There are two flow charts – one chart shows how 90% of national organic food is made by cor­po­rate agribusi­ness car­tels – the other chart proves about 8-9 fam­i­lies still own their organic food man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness – Eden Foods, Lundberg Rice, Turtle Mountain, Newman’s Own – and a cou­ple of oth­ers I can’t remem­ber right now (oops)