Ah, not again.

Yesterday I read about flour - especially bleached flour. Which was sorta new to me, bleached flour, erm - that stuff is almost white anyways?

Turns out that flour is actually getting bleached at least in the US, with stuff that I would not necessarily want close to my food thankyouverymuch. (In Germany, bleaching flour was banned in the 1950s. Thank you, Germany. Sometimes your rules are nice.)

With that still freshly in the back of my mind, I was not happy about hearing of TTIP this morning, brought to me by an email about a petition against it. Similarly to the ACTA thing of a while ago, now corporations and politicians want to make a secret trade agreement thingie that will allow them to do wild things to "non-tariff barriers to trade". Which is, basically, the rules about things like which food is ok to sell and which is not, thankyouverymuch. Or data security stuff.

The US folks, it seems, are afraid that such an agreement will make them have stricter rules for their markets. Others are more forthrightly declaring it's a bad idea - a betrayal of the public. It would also give companies the possibility to sue against laws that cut their profit due to some insignificant things such as, for example, banning the bleaching of flour. (Lawsuits like that have actually already happened. This is... wow.) Democracy, who needs that?

So, I don't care on which side you are standing - US or EU, I think it's not a good thing for those who don't happen to be in the saddle of one of the huge companies. If you agree (which I hope you do), please sign one of the petitions against it:
this one at Sum of Us or this one from Campact (German-Language, but you will manage, I'm sure).
Or both, for good measure.

Since it looks like there will be a meeting concerning the agreement on Monday, there's not so much time left - so if you can, please spread the word about it, too!