Bethany Davis, Director, Advocacy and Government Relations | August 2019

The world is watching glyphosate. By now you’ve heard all about the dangers of this herbicide (most commonly found in RoundUp!) and broad-spectrum antibiotic that is liberally sprayed in all corners of our country. Almost every single day there are new articles popping up on my social media feeds either citing new research that calls its safety into question or updates on the string of legal trials arguing that it causes cancer.

And what I still notice is some of the big-picture stuff that most of these articles are missing: We are spraying antibiotics all over our food. We are killing our soil with vast monocultures of chemically-treated crops. And that’s why we launched our #BanGlyphosate campaign last year.

Close to a year ago, in partnership with the Environmental Working Group, MegaFood filed a legal petition to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban glyphosate as a desiccant. We built a coalition of brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, Nature’s Path and others, and included organizations like Green America to support the initiative. We partnered with hundreds of retailers to help spread the word. As a whole food supplement maker, it’s important to us to keep harmful pesticides and herbicides out of our supply chain!

As a culmination to this petition effort, this May we rallied in Washington, D.C. and hand-delivered more than 100,000 signatures of support that we collected with our partners directly to the EPA.

In response to our petition, the EPA opened a comment period this spring. Thousands of organizations and individuals submitted comments letting them know what they think and how concerned they are about glyphosate being in and on our food.

And now we wait for an official response from the EPA. This could take weeks, months and possibly but hopefully not years. And in the meantime, we are going to keep the pressure on because we don’t want glyphosate anywhere near our food, families or supplements!

We know there are many unnecessary uses of glyphosate in our food and farming system, but most people don’t realize that there is also a lot of potential exposure to glyphosate in our schools, parks and playgrounds. This fall, we are out to expose all the glyphosate being used in our cities and towns and demand that we move away from it. The risk to our kids, our pets and our soil is too great.

We’ll continue to keep you updated with the latest news from our #BanGlyphosate campaign! To read some previous posts about our efforts and glyphosate residue free certification, check out What Is Glyphosate? And What Does Glyphosate Residue Free (GRF) Labeling Mean?

You can also learn more about our clean supplement process and eight other certifications.