Welp, it’s happened: Your good ’ol safe, fun Quick Bites column—which you could always turn to for light news about new goodies on the menu at your fave café or the latest quirky downtown ice-cream shop opening—has turned political. (OK, we’ve always been a little political, considering we’re all about local, sustainable and healthy, right?)

But … just this week … don’t freak out … we want you to sign a petition. Next week, it’ll be back to your regularly scheduled local restaurant updates and fun-community-food-festivity news. But this week, we want you to be an online activist for the sake of our local food community.
Maybe you’re not surprised. If you’ve got an activist bone in your body (or even if you don’t), you’re probably seeing petitions popping up everywhere you look—your mailbox, your email inbox, social media, clipboard-wielding people on the street. Ever since the presidential election, there’s so much everyone wants you to do to help keep our country sane, and petitions have been shown to make an impact, even online ones.

On the food front, here in Tucson, Quick Bites wants you to help us protect local farming interests—which right now means doing all we can to keep out the infamous pesticide-peddling, GMO-happy mega-agribusiness Monsanto.

According to the Pima County Food Alliance—a network comprised of farmers, chefs, restaurants, schools, gardeners, health professionals, activists, consumers (and many more)—Monsanto is right now holding secret talks with Pima County about building a greenhouse just outside Tucson.
Says the Alliance’s petition, “Given Monsanto’s history of bullying small farmers, we believe this is a threat to our local food system and our recent designation as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy.”
We hope you agree that a Monsanto greenhouse will increase corporate control of our local food system and endanger all the things we love about it. ■

Sign the petition online and learn more about the Pima County Food Alliance at pimafoodalliance.org.