(To Satupo, parent company behind the Dairyland milk products)
July 16, 2014
Dear Ms Elke,
Thank you for your response today July 16th, to my message dated June 20th.
I have the following for your record:
- My question was not if your milk product satisfied existing standards, but more specifically, if you would like to join us in testing your milk for presence of Glyphosate. By your below answer, your firm appears to be unwilling join us in this test. In such a case we shall proceed to test it ourselves.
- Your message seems to imply that you expect Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and Health Canada to enforce science based standards such as Glyphosate in food. But you did not clarify who enforces it, and what the standards with regard to Glyphosate in milk might be. Appreciate if you can advise us what limit is set for Glyphosate in milk, who is doing the testing, and what the results are.
- We believe no one has ever tested any milk in Canada for Glyphosate, because we cannot find a single lab in this country that is prepared, or set up, to test Glyphosate in milk, or in fact any other food. I would request you to name us a single lab inside Canada that you know will test milk for Glyphosate. We are consequently sending your milk samples to USA for testing.
- We have no desire to speak with Canadian Dairy Farmers, whose contact you did not include, nor did you copy us in when you sent our email to them. We believe it should be your responsibility to check if Dairyland milk products contain the largest selling week killer in the planet as a response from our query, irrespective of what Health Canada, Canadian Food Inspection Agency or Canadian Dairy Farmers think about it. Since cost of a mere couple of hundred dollars for each test should not break your bank, we had expected you to readily join this exercise to prove that your milk is clean, or learn if there is a cause for concern. However, you must have your good reason to be reluctant to test it, while falling back on existing regulations, or as in this case, a lack of it.
- We also note you did not respond to the comment that it is very hard for a consumer to find a contact details of a real person in your organization
- Further, since we are a grassroots, and we follow people’s wishes and concerns, and since people are concerned about Glyphosate and are getting engaged in testing it at their own cost, we shall be putting up your response as well as this note, as a follow up to my earlier message to you, which is already on the web, at : http://www.tonu.org/2014/06/23/dairyland/
- When we test your milk products in a certified lab in the US, we shall be disclosing the results too on the web for all to see. We hope the results would turn out clean without trace of Glyphosate. We have raised crowd funding efforts and private donations to collect funds to pay for testing urine, breast milk of nursing mothers as well as some food items, such as your milk. A lot of people have contributed, including Mr. Alex Atamanenko, Member of Parliament, House of Commons, Ottawa.
I am copying this message to Mr. Alex Atamanenko, MP, who is very keen on the topic of testing humans and food for traces of Glyphosate, which is suspected to have links with a series of diseases and who has been writing to the minister of Health in Ottawa to look into this matter.
Thanking you
With best wishes
Tony Mitra
(Address and contact)
(Dated July 16, 2014)
Dear Mr. Mitra:
Thank you for contacting Saputo regarding glyphosate in milk products. Please accept our apology for the lengthy delay in responding to your e-mail.
We would like to assure you that we take food safety and quality assurance very seriously and comply with all standards and regulations applicable to our operations. In addition, we rely upon Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, respectively, to set standards for residue limits of compounds such as glyphosate in food products and to ensure that these science-based standards are applied and enforced. We have also referred your letter to the Dairy Farmers of Canada, the national organization representing Canadian dairy farmers that ship quality milk from their farms to our company and all of the other dairy processors in the country.
We appreciate you taking the time to contact us in this regard and would suggest contacting the Dairy Farmers of Canada directly if you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
Deborah
Consumer Relations Coordinator
Marketing Department
Saputo
Saputo Dairy Products Canada G.P.
6800 Lougheed Highway
Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1W2
Tel: 1-800-672-8866 / Fax: 604-588-1284
www.saputo.com
Dairyland
June 20, 2014,
Subject: Testing for Dairyland brand of milk sold in local stores, for presence of Glyphosate
Good day,
We, Canadians For Testing Glyphosate, a citizen’s grassroots body, are engaging in a massive citizen driven nationwide program to test if Glyphosate is present in our water and soil, in our body, and in the food sold in our stores, such as in Safeway, 7450 120th St in Surrey, BC.
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 serious illnesses and deaths, and possible species extinctions in the last 20 years.
In that respect, we intend the following items that may contain Dairlyland brand of products such as:
- Regular milk
- Organic Milk
- Chocolate milk
- Strawbery milk
- Egnog
- Buttermilk
- Cream
- Lactose Free Products
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 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.
However, this note is sent to seek your opinion on this, and to check if you might like to join us in this test. Good quality tests involving, say the ELISA method (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) costs around $150 or so per test in an accredited lab and possibly less in batch processing in other labs.
We shall be glad if your organization decides to join us by funding some of these “independent” tests on your own products, or shares data with us about your own third party testing results. We are planning to conduct them any way, but thought it might look better if your store were perceived to be cooperating.
Please note, we are only focussing on Glyphosate for now, and we are also checking many many items that are not your products.
Also, should you have an objection to the testing, i.e. if your position is that we may drink your product and feed our family with it, but we may not test it, I shall appreciate if you shall validate that with a proper statement.
Lastly, 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 wished to send an email to your parent corporation Saputo, but could not locate their email address. Please also note, we failed to find even your email address and the mechanism you provided to send you any suggestion or comment to be very restrictive through this on line form. Here in Canada, even the prime ministers office has an accessible email for the people.
I shall be more than happy to meet you or speak with you about our effort, and shall be looking forward to any response from you.
Thanking you
On behalf of Canadians for Testing Glyphosate
Tony Mitra
(contact)