We could not find an easy way to send an email to Agropur Cooperative regarding a citizen’s nationwide plan to test ourselves, our environment and our food, for presence of Glyphosate, in Monsanto’s weed killer RoundUp. In that effort we wished to include various brands of milk products, such as the Dairyland, Silk and Natrel group.
We prefer to have a name, a rank and an email address of firms that sell us food, so citizens can directly send them messages of public concern. However, there seem to be a serious effort by these firms to hide behind a wall of secrecy, and make it really hard for people to find contact details of relevant persons to write to with either a complaint or a suggestion. Agropur Cooperative was found even worse than the others, because their online complaint box allows only short messages, too short for us to send the attached email.
So, we said we wished to test their milk for Glyphosate and since we could not find an easy way to send them this letter electronically and directly, we are putting it up on the web, and sending them the link. We are still hoping that the firm will cooperate with our effort, especially if their milk is free of Glyphosate while competitors might not be.
Agropur Cooperative, Consumer Response
Subject: Testing for presence of Glyphosate in milk products
Goo
d day,
We, Canadians For Testing Glyphosate, a citizen’s grassroots body, are planning to engage in a large scale citizen driven nationwide program to test if Glyphosate is present in our water and soil, in our body, and in the food we buy in our stores.
In case you are wondering what Glyphosate might be – it is the active ingredient (poison that kills organisms) in Monsanto’s ‘RoundUp’ herbicide weed killer, and what is suspected to be linked to rise of a multitude of illnesses, deaths, and possible species extinctions in the past 20 years.
In that respect, we are planning to be checking a few brands of milk including milk from Natrel. The range of products we might test, could include the fine filtered, lactose free, organic, flavoured, enriched and cafe versions etc.
Our legal team is advising that we do not really need to either inform you or take your permission to test these products, if we buy these items, taken them home and draw the sample from there to send to the labs, and that we have the right, as citizens living in a free country, to test the food that we buy to eat or drink from any store that are open to public.
We have identified labs, in the US, that can test for Glyphosate in milk. This test is considered vital for us. Monsanto claims that the toxin does not accumulate mammals even if ingested, and that it gets flushed out through urine. Therefore, any presence in milk would be proof that the claim may be false and that if it can accumulate in cows, it can also accumulate in humans that drink this milk. On the other hand, if some of your milk products prove to be Glyphosate free, in other words if Glyphosate was not present in the food cycle of the dairy cattle that provided the base stock, then the people can list out those products as safe to drink with regard to this pesticide.
This note is sent to seek your opinion on our plan to test your products, and to check if you might like to join us in this initiative. Good quality tests involving, say the ELISA method (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) costs around $150 or so per test in an accredited lab in the US. We shall be glad if your organization decides to join us by funding some of these “independent” tests on your own products. It might look good if your firm was perceived to be cooperating.
Please note, we are only focussing on Glyphosate for now, and we plan on a wide ranging scheme that will test many items which are not your products at all.
Should you have an objection to testing your milk products, i.e. if your position is that we may drink your milk and feed our family with it, but we may not test it, we shall appreciate if you will validate that with a proper statement.
We aim to be a transparent organization that let the public know of our involvements in this regard, so this letter, and others like it, may be circulated among members and in social media and internet, for others to either write similar letters, or compose their own.
Absence of a response may be taken as you do not feel comfortable discussing this matter with us.
Please also note, we failed to locate a proper name of a contact person with an email for your parent company in Canada. Even the prime ministers office has an accessible address and email contact for the people. We find this lack of easy access with a credible name, rank and contact email from vendors that demand such details from people writing to them through a heavily restricted on line comment section to be anti-people, poor in quality control tools and not too transparent.
We shall be more than happy to meet with you or speak on phone about our effort, and shall be looking forward to any response you might have.
Some of our friends in USA, also engaging in similar activity, might also approach you regarding products sold in American stores.
Thanking you