A bitter taste

Campaigning against GM-food toting multinational food companies such as Monsanto and Novartis can be thirsty work. So Friends of the Earth activists were happy to celebrate the end of Real Food Week at the United Kingdom's first organic beer festival in Birmingham last weekend. It was an opportunity, they proclaimed, to promote products the multinational food companies did not want us to consume. Curious, then, that the organic beers picked out by FoE, even the comfortingly named "Eco Warrior", used traditional varieties of barley owned by, erm, Monsanto and Novartis.