Ronnie Cummins, Scourge of Genetically Modified Food, Dies at 76

Ronnie Cummins, a ponytailed activist who turned one of many nation’s main advocates for natural meals and a number one critic of genetically modified meals, died on April 26 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the place he lived and labored part-time. He was 76.

Rose Welch, his spouse and associate in beginning the Organic Consumers Association, an advocacy and informational group, mentioned his loss of life, which was not extensively reported on the time, was attributable to bone and lymph most cancers.

Mr. Cummins was a lifelong activist and protester, starting along with his opposing the Vietnam War and nuclear energy. He settled on natural meals activism within the Nineties after he was employed as a director of the Pure Food Campaign, a lobbying group that sought to broaden consciousness of the hazards of genetically engineered meals whereas pushing for accountable labeling and authorities testing.

Mr. Cummins labored within the subject for the marketing campaign, elevating alarm at rallies and supermarkets in regards to the perils of meals utilizing genetically modified elements. He handed out leaflets, wrote opinion articles and answered customers’ questions as a marketing campaign spokesman.

He additionally labored for the Beyond Beef marketing campaign, geared toward decreasing beef consumption and selling safer strategies of cattle manufacturing. Both campaigns have been based by the environmental activist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin.

Mr. Cummins “was a tough guy who could be an activist and also step back and do the intellectual homework behind what we were doing,” Mr. Rifkin mentioned in a cellphone interview.

“Too often activists burn out after starting out with high expectations,” he added. “But Ronnie could write, research, reflect and be open to all points of view.”

One of Mr. Cummins’s frequent targets was recombinant bovine somatotropin, or bovine progress hormone, a genetically engineered hormone, produced by Monsanto, that stimulates milk manufacturing in cows.

On the primary day that farmers have been allowed to promote milk from cows injected with the hormone, in 1994, Mr. Cummins informed The Associated Press that “if we don’t slow down the technology of change with genetically engineered additives, we will be making a very major mistake in terms of human health, animal health and the survival of family farms.”

He continued to rail about milk produced by hormone-treated cows after he and Ms. Welch began the Organic Consumers Association, primarily based in Finland, Minn., in 1998.

“Recombinant bovine growth hormone is bad for dairy cows, literally burning them out in three or four years, causing terrible physical stress and a long list of medical problems including reproductive complications,” Mr. Cummins wrote in The Fresno Bee in 2008.

He relished battling with main manufacturers. In 2001, he raised doubt about Starbucks’s promise to not use milk merchandise with the hormone by asking to see its promise in writing. (The firm finally complied in 2007.) He warned a couple of “sneak attack engineered by the likes of Kraft, Dean Foods and Smucker’s.” To stress firms utilizing modified beet sugar, he threatened a protest towards Hershey.

Though there are unresolved questions in regards to the impact of genetically modified organisms on biodiversity, there’s a near-universal consensus amongst scientists that genetically modified meals are suitable for eating.

Most customers don’t share that view, nevertheless, a skepticism due largely to the efforts of activists like Mr. Cummins.

The security of genetically modified meals “is like global climate change, where 99 percent of scientists believe in it,” Pamela Ronald, a plant pathology professor on the University of California, Davis, informed The Roanoke Times in 2013.

She added, “You have scientists around the world who say genetically engineered crops are safe to eat — and then you have Ronnie Cummins.”

Mr. Cummins was born Adrian Alton Abel on Oct. 28, 1946, in Jefferson, Tex., about 20 miles from the Louisiana border. His father, Jack, was an accountant for Gulf Oil in Port Arthur, Texas, within the coronary heart of the state’s oil business. His mom, Elise (Stout) Abel, was a homemaker who died by suicide in 1951.

In his 20s, Adrian modified his title to Ronnie Cummins, the title of a boy who was additionally born in 1946 and who died in 1954. Ms. Welch mentioned he modified his title as a result of he feared reprisals from the Ku Klux Klan for his antiwar actions at Rice University in Houston, the place he had majored in English and philosophy and graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in 1969.

Ms. Welch mentioned she didn’t know why her husband took the Cummins boy’s title specifically. She mentioned he informed her that he didn’t have a legal document that he was searching for to cover with a brand new id. His brother, Jack Abel Jr., mentioned by cellphone that the story behind the title change “is so personal I can’t share it.”

In addition to his spouse and brother, Mr. Cummins is survived by his son, Adrian Cummins Welch; and his sisters, Molly Travis and Bonnie Abel.

Adrian grew up amongst refineries and later recalled catching fish polluted by oil. But he additionally spent idyllic summers on his maternal grandparents’ farm, the place he took care of animals and gathered eggs.

“My life experience has taught me that money rules and power corrupts, and that putting profits before people and environmental health is not only wrong but deadly,” he wrote in his guide “Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food and Green New Deal” (2020). “Organized grass-roots power can make a big difference,” he added, “whether we’re talking about public consciousness, marketplace pressure or politics and public policy.”

As a profession, activism didn’t pay the payments, so he earned a dwelling through the years as a newsstand proprietor on the University of Minnesota, the director of a meals co-op in Burnsdale, Minn., exterior Minneapolis, and a home painter. Ms. Welch waited tables.

“He was pretty much a hippie,” she mentioned in a cellphone interview.

Both went to work for Mr. Rifkin within the Nineties, Mr. Cummins as a director, Ms. Welch as a marketing campaign supervisor. They left to start out the Organic Consumers Association, which helps enforcement of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s natural meals requirements, produces instructional materials for natural customers and companies, and encourages public stress campaigns on natural meals points.

The “hippie” was lastly incomes an actual wage — $112,900 in 2021.

The O.C.A. has spun off two organizations: the Mexico-based Via Orgánica, an agroecology farm college and analysis middle, in 2009, and, in 2014, Regeneration International, which advances methods to develop farming practices that rebuild degraded soil.

In the view of André Leu, the worldwide director of Regeneration International, Mr. Cummins had stood as much as “the powerful elite who were monopolizing power and wealth” and have been “undermining democracy, fair wages, healthy food, peace, the climate, and the environment.”

A longtime objective of Mr. Cummins’s was for the federal government to require labeling on genetically modified meals. He fought for poll initiatives in a number of states and gained his first main victory in Vermont, in 2014, when it turned the primary state to move a labeling regulation.

Faced with the prospect of a patchwork of state legal guidelines, Congress handed a sweeping federal labeling regulation in 2016.

But Mr. Cummins didn’t contemplate it a victory.

The regulation, which outmoded the more durable Vermont laws, gave firms the choice of utilizing an icon or a scannable QR code that may direct customers to a web site, as an alternative of getting to spell out the knowledge on the package deal. And some meals, like extremely refined sugars and oils, have been exempt from the labeling requirement.

Mr. Cummins, in an article on his web site, referred to as manufacturers like Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farms “organic traitors” and accused the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Whole Foods grocery store chain “and a cabal of sellout, nonprofit organizations” of surrendering “to Monsanto and a corporate agribusiness” by backing the laws.

“In other words business as usual,” he added, then used a buzzword for genetically modified merchandise — “Shut up and eat your Frankenfoods.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.