<b>By Danette Vernon</b>

There will be a “March on Monsanto” on six continents, in 33 countries, and in more than 250 cities worldwide. In the US, events are slated to occur simultaneously at 11 a.m. Pacific time on May 25 in 47 states, with four events in South Carolina.

Who the heck is Monsanto, you wonder?

They are the people who put the “extra stuff” in the milk your children drink every day, and the people who fill your corn on the cob, kernel by kernel, with “extra stuff,” such as “a pesticide that breaks open the stomach of certain insects and kills them,” according to nationofchange.org.

Is that important?  You’ll have to decide for yourself, but let me tell you the story of the “food version” of Erin Brockovich — Robyn O’Brien.

One morning at breakfast, after years as a high-level food industry analyst, Robyn sat down with her four children at breakfast. Suddenly, Robyn’s youngest child’s face began to swell to dangerous proportions. After anxious moments at the pediatrician, Robyn found out it was a food allergy. Stymied, she couldn’t understand how a child could be allergic to food! She dug in with all of the intensity that she had once devoted to global finance, and found some startling truths.

One, food allergies occur when the body responds to food proteins as if they were a foreign element. The body’s response is an inflammatory reaction meant to rout the enemy.  But what is it about our food that is inciting the body? And why are food allergies on the rise in recent years?

For answers, Robyn turned to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and found that new proteins have been engineered into our milk, corn and soybeans. Soybeans are predominantly raised to feed animals, which we, in turn, eat.

Robyn uncovered that the governments of Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan, New Zealand, and all 27 European countries, decided to error on the side of precaution as these new genetically products were released into the markets in the 1990’s. Robyn reports that all of these countries wanted to wait till these products had been researched, and found to be safe, before introducing them into their food supply.

She goes on to relate that the U.S. “took a different approach.”

Robyn divulges that here in the U.S., a product can be released into the market under certain conditions — until proven dangerous. The U.S. took this path when it was suggested that our milk cows be injected with a combination of growth hormones and a genetically engineered protein. The U.S. took the same course with genetically modified soybeans and corn.

Robyn makes some compelling arguments in her presentations, and in her book “The Unhealthy Truth,” for how the injection of hormones and foreign proteins into our food supply can be connected to the increase of allergies…and cancer.

The United States is the number one country in the world for cancer, and the American Cancer Society has linked migration to the U.S. with a four-fold increase in your chances of developing cancer. So no matter how you view the world and what goes on in it, that is a statistic that cannot, or should not be ignored.

So join the “March on Monsanto May 25th”, in Columbia, or Charleston, Myrtle Beach or Greenville. Or just eat an organic apple.