MAIN » ARTICLESDr. Greenpeace or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GM Food
The most recent letter to end up on my kitchen table is all about GM foods and begins with the horrifically startling headline 'How much do you know about the food in your fridge?'. Well I admit I'm not on first name terms with most of my food, nor do I know what hobbies they enjoy outside of being eaten, but I think I know it pretty well. I know that the government wants to start growing GM crops in this country which will ultimately lead to more of it in our daily intake, and do I give a shit? Fuck no.
Go back to GCSE English lessons, look at persuasive writing techniques and you'll be able to see nearly all of them in this letter. I'm surprised, and frankly disappointed they didn't go all the way with these techniques to make us fully aware of the danger, danger, danger we're in. And believe me, if this letter is to believed, we're only DAYS AWAY from BEING DESTROYED by the MUTATED CONTENTS OF OUR KITCHENS which has developed a life of its own and a fiendish form of artificial intelligence to boot. Soon they will discover the wheel and then it's only a matter of time until we face the threat of nuclear war in our own homes.
For every paragraph there is another shocking warning that genetically modified food is all around us, and will soon end up in our kitchens and even onto our plates! If this letter had been written fifty years ago then I might be listening, but they seem to have missed the fact we've been consuming GM through imports and the products of animals fed on GM food for years now. If they really were on nature's side surely the letter would've been hand written on recycled paper with a recycled pencil and no pictures. But it's not is it, and they expect me to take them seriously? I bet they don't live in mud huts in the rainforest living off the land and planting one tree for every tree they cut down to make paper to write letters to people like me on.
The letter ends on one 'last' (hah) begging statement "We need your help to do this - please send us £15, or whatever you can afford" - a plee which has already featured in the letter in 18 different places, as well as being scrawled on the outside of the envelope in blood. As you cast your eyes over Sarah North's signiture (GM 'Campaigner') you begin to relax - but wait! What's this?
"P.S. Help give us the freedom to act and stop GM sneaking into our foods. Support us with a donation for whatever you can spare. Thank You."
Didn't they just say that? Last time I checked this was a word-processed letter, not a hand-written one where you forget to mention something and can just slip it on the end. If a cripple asked a Greenpeace campaigner for a single bit of paper to write a letter to his wife (who is in hospital dying of cancer) on, they'd give it to him, but not before writing 'Please donate £15 or whatever you can spare to Freeing Willy' in bold capital letters. Saving a whale that spends every day eating the entire fishing haul of a small south american island isn't going to seem more important than researching treatment of terminal illness THEN is it YOU BASTARDS.
I've seen that film too.
On the back of the donation slip (which includes a tickbox for donating £250 - enough to save 250 african children suffering with polio from permenant blindness) are the ways in which "your donation will help to keep GM out of your fridge". These include "500 stickers that will be turning up on milk cartons", "campaigners travel costs" and "a volunteer's campaigning outfit". So not only are we giving them money to buy STICKERS of all things, but we're also giving these people clothes and money for the train. For all we know they could be on a trip to Bluewater or the Science Museum.
Donating to Greenpeace won't keep GM out of my fridge, it's already there and it's been there for years. The ONLY thing that will stop GM food getting into my fridge is if I don't buy it. And last time I checked I didn't need to donate to Greenpeace to do that.
Written by Jay
Go back to GCSE English lessons, look at persuasive writing techniques and you'll be able to see nearly all of them in this letter. I'm surprised, and frankly disappointed they didn't go all the way with these techniques to make us fully aware of the danger, danger, danger we're in. And believe me, if this letter is to believed, we're only DAYS AWAY from BEING DESTROYED by the MUTATED CONTENTS OF OUR KITCHENS which has developed a life of its own and a fiendish form of artificial intelligence to boot. Soon they will discover the wheel and then it's only a matter of time until we face the threat of nuclear war in our own homes.
For every paragraph there is another shocking warning that genetically modified food is all around us, and will soon end up in our kitchens and even onto our plates! If this letter had been written fifty years ago then I might be listening, but they seem to have missed the fact we've been consuming GM through imports and the products of animals fed on GM food for years now. If they really were on nature's side surely the letter would've been hand written on recycled paper with a recycled pencil and no pictures. But it's not is it, and they expect me to take them seriously? I bet they don't live in mud huts in the rainforest living off the land and planting one tree for every tree they cut down to make paper to write letters to people like me on.
The letter ends on one 'last' (hah) begging statement "We need your help to do this - please send us £15, or whatever you can afford" - a plee which has already featured in the letter in 18 different places, as well as being scrawled on the outside of the envelope in blood. As you cast your eyes over Sarah North's signiture (GM 'Campaigner') you begin to relax - but wait! What's this?
"P.S. Help give us the freedom to act and stop GM sneaking into our foods. Support us with a donation for whatever you can spare. Thank You."
Didn't they just say that? Last time I checked this was a word-processed letter, not a hand-written one where you forget to mention something and can just slip it on the end. If a cripple asked a Greenpeace campaigner for a single bit of paper to write a letter to his wife (who is in hospital dying of cancer) on, they'd give it to him, but not before writing 'Please donate £15 or whatever you can spare to Freeing Willy' in bold capital letters. Saving a whale that spends every day eating the entire fishing haul of a small south american island isn't going to seem more important than researching treatment of terminal illness THEN is it YOU BASTARDS.
I've seen that film too.
On the back of the donation slip (which includes a tickbox for donating £250 - enough to save 250 african children suffering with polio from permenant blindness) are the ways in which "your donation will help to keep GM out of your fridge". These include "500 stickers that will be turning up on milk cartons", "campaigners travel costs" and "a volunteer's campaigning outfit". So not only are we giving them money to buy STICKERS of all things, but we're also giving these people clothes and money for the train. For all we know they could be on a trip to Bluewater or the Science Museum.
Donating to Greenpeace won't keep GM out of my fridge, it's already there and it's been there for years. The ONLY thing that will stop GM food getting into my fridge is if I don't buy it. And last time I checked I didn't need to donate to Greenpeace to do that.
Written by Jay