I am baffled because I have the opposite point of view entirely. Has anyone ever thought about what your ancestor Gunter in Germany was eating a thousand years ago? Probably cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, onions, garlic, barley, cabbage, pork, and turnips. How about Earnest in England?... pretty much the same. Far from food going extinct, I think there is tremendous diversity now in food production. Industrial production might require GM and capitalization of research through protection of intellectual property, but the fact remains that you are eating tomatoes, kohlrabi, six kinds of lettuce, two kinds of carrots, brussels sprouts, etc. All of those are robust and are grown as millions of mini varieties in gardens all over the world. I mean EVERYWHERE. Seed banks, seed companies, and people's dresser drawers hold huge stores of DNA, all slightly different. In five minutes, I could buy 100 different packets of seeds at the hardware store. Was that even possible in the 50s? And that is F1 or F2. Some okra farmer in Alabama has seeds produced through 50 crosses. People can and do create and study their own cultivars of darn near everything every season and then trade them internationally. How will that change? Activism is all well and good, but GM and Mxxxxxxo are small in the big picture and probably getting smaller. Remember that they have to invest millions in a cultivar just to get it to a commercial seed stage. How many cultivars can they do that with? And they and their timing are going to be wrong how often? Monsanto is not a juggernaut, it is a riverboat gambler. The bigger it gets, the bigger it bets. For better or worse, some gardener in China has a seed that is better than what Mxxxxxxo has got, and it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world finds out about it. In Japan, a single pumpkin seed can sell for hundreds of dollars. Mxxxxxxo has not moved in on that action, and it never will. The market is fuelled by enthusiasts and connisseurs. If the market gets cornered, people will immediately lose interest. Viewed in terms of sheer greed, it is in Mxxxxxxo's interest to maintain wild type specimens in environments all over the world. Even if Mxxxxxxo could sell one type of tomato seed that would make all others extinct, it would not do it. Has anyone considered that? Well, I guess that is enough. I could give 20 more examples. Viewed from a wider perspective, food diversity has never been better. And I will not be buying Mxxxxxxo stock. I should watch more TV, it sounds very entertaining.

READ! Adellabedella gave the answer just two posts above your post. Posted by adellabedella (My Page) on Tue, Mar 17, 09 at 16:08 I cut this from Moderator Deanne over at the Kraft food discussion. "Due to the timing of our lists you may receive an additional complimentary issue. You should be receiving an invoice, and won't have to pay for your extra issues." I guess those of you who received the bill are on the first lists.

In the past, I was a real magazine junkie. But over the past few years, I have really cut back. My daughter enjoys National Geographic so we still get that one and my son asked for Nat Geo Kids so we will subscribe to that one as well. I just got a really smashing great offer for Smithsonian and so will probably subscribe to it as well. Used to subscribe to Cottage Living but stopped when I realized that every "cottage" re-do was done by an architect and his artist wife, a lawyer and his antiques dealer wife, a doctor and his interior decorator wife and that the "cottages" were usually about 3000 to 5000 square feet in size. Not my idea of a "cottage". The magazine went under. I was not surprised. Although I will say that my most favorite part of that magazine was the back page where a reader sent in a photo of his or her home and an architect/designer did a lovely sketch of the home "cottage-d up". Wish I could get his name and send him a picture of my house. I love Bookmarks and must resubscribe but then I stop and look at the lists of titles I have written down from each issue of Bookmarks. I will never get through all of my TBR lists... let alone read magazines as well! How do you all find the time?! A note on the fundraising sales. My sister bought a mag from my daughter during a fundraising drive. The magazine title was switched on her from a travel magazine to a fishing magazine with no prior warning. And because she bought it through a clearing house, she had no recourse. The travel mag went under and the clearing house substituted something of similar value without consulting her. PAM

I'm going to stay out of this topic, other than to say that I think the issues involved are more nuanced as to be discussable in broad terms. What I will say is what's mentioned serves as an unnecessary reminder of how many loonies and losers we have in this county. An even more shocking and dangerous statistic that I heard this week (covering many who can be similarly described) is that something like one-third of all Americans own guns. Common sense among the citizenry and thoughtful/responsible action from governments at various levels seem to have left the American scene some time ago.