The documentary The World According to Monsanto, by French journalist Marie-Monique Robin has finally been subtitled in Portuguese on YouTube. It is divided into 12 chapters. If you are serious about finding out what is behind the genetic engineering applied to food you need to see this video.

Robin is now working on uncovering the relationship between agricultural industrialization and the rising number of cancer cases in the world, according to an interview she gave to Epoca magazine. We’ve known for a while that industrialized food is equal to packaged garbage. The issue now is the extent to which this is harming our health. For instance, a feature published by Estadão on Tuesday, reports that we are poisoning our kids with too much fat, salt and sugars.

Transgenics are just a part of the problem. The main issue is the carelessness of the industry - and of a good portion of consumers - about something as fundamental as the food we eat every day. We should always know what we are eating, what it can do to our bodies, the side effects, and so forth. But to do this, the food industry needs to be honest with us, which is something that doesn’t happen. They only act when pressured by consumers and/or by the Law - when they do act. But we are here to pester them until they get their act together and change their current business paradigm, aren’t we?

Anyway, on to the film. Click to watch on YouTube.

And, from Paris, Livia tells me that the former tennis player Yannick Noah is the hit of the moment around there with the song Aux Arbre Citoyens, from his new CD, Charango. “It plays in the taxi, in the supermarket, in our neighbors’ houses…” she says. It’s a committed music that talks about global warming, proliferation and nuclear garbage, deforestation of the Amazon. One of the characters is a Brazilian girl that lives in the forest. The sound, kinda like Manu Chao, is really cool, check it out:

I had the opportunity of meeting Noah in a tennis event, for veterans, in 1998, in the Club Med Itaparica. The tournament counted also with Luis Mattar, Cássio Motta and a whole legion of other names, less sought-after. It was a big party and so Noah got it as well. He had taken a few friends (I guess his band at the time, or part of it) and they played every night at the pool bar, until late hours – not rare, it only ended when the sun shone and all of us would go to the beach.

Guess who won the tournament?