Applause Applause, A big company did it RIGHT!

Okay, I know that most of my posts on this blog are negative.  Most.  Or a few about cooking.  But I have to talk about Orville Redenbacher doing something right for a change.  I know, hard to believe isn't it?  I don't eat microwave popcorn because of the canola and artificial poisons in them.  And some of the stuff is very scary.  I love popcorn, it is one of the few things I will eat and put salt on it.  And real butter as well.  I pop my own in an old spin popper, a little peanut oil and some butter.  Then Sea salt, good healthy stuff.  Microwave popcorn is poisonous.  That is until I just found Orville Redenbacher's newest addition, natural popcorn with lime and salt.  No deadly chemicals and of all things they use tocopherols as preservatives.  Okay, I know it is hard to pronounce, but the reality is that new research is going on for the industry to use tocopherols instead of BHA, BHT, and some other more deadly preservatives.  Tocopherals are part of the Vitamin E group and are beneficial to us, and as they seem to do a better job than the toxic alternatives, I am hoping to see more and more of their use in prepared foods in the future.
It isn't hard to do the right thing in America today.  You just have to decide that is what you want to do, and do it.  If more companies did the right thing, then perhaps we, Americans, could bankrupt Monsanto and crush the stranglehold they have on the food industry in America today.

In other news, a consortium of rice farmers in Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana are suing Pfizer, Tyson and 3 other poultry producers for feeding their chickens arsenic laced feed.  The rice farmers buy the used straw bedding from the poultry producers and use it to fertilize their rice fields.  When the chickens are fed arsenic to kill intestinal parasites and make them grow faster, (a procedure only used when chickens are kept in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions) then the chicken waste contains arsenic and that seems to have destroyed the rice growing ability of large scale rice farmers.  When the arsenic gets into the ground, it then is taken up by the rice and now these guys are unable to grow rice that isn't contaminated with arsenic, and thus poisonous.  Makes me wonder if they test Colonel Sander's chicken for arsenic levels.  Scares me a bit.