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The aptly named Killer Tomatoes, a Bay Area advocacy/watchgroup, will take to the streets Friday to protest the appearance of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman at the City Club in Berkeley, where UC Berkeley’s Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy will honor her as the 2003 Alumnus of the year. 

Tomato member Mary Bull said she finds Veneman’s honor quite ironic, since she represents what Bull calls the most important flaw in American public policy: Corporate influence. 

Before her appointment to the Bush cabinet, Veneman was a member of the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council, which Bull said is funded by food and agribusiness giants Cargill, Nestle, Kraft, and Archer Daniels Midland. She was also a director of Calgene, a subsidiary of Monsanto, one of the leading developers of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).  

Calgene, coincidentally, is the company who developed the ill-fated frost-resistant Flavr-Savr tomato made from spliced fish and tomato genes that the killer tomatoes took their name from. 

“It’s so ironic that they would honor her with a public policy award, when she used to serve all these multinational corporations,” said Bull. 

The Killer Tomatoes say the international food production and processing conglomerates Veneman formerly represented are responsible for a host of problems including promotion of free trade agreements such as NAFTA and GATT which they say are destroying regional economies and the global environment. 

“If the U.S. cannot continue to strong arm the Third World into opening their fields, and Europe into opening their markets, companies like Monsanto are going to lose their shirts,” said Bull. “We’ve sold out souls, and we want to say ‘wake up America.’ The Killer Tomatoes are out to loosen the stranglehold.” 

The event starts at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. and the group promises that all attendees are in for a show which will include free cherry “killer tomatoes” and possibly “Killer Bloody Marys,” made from GMO tomatoes. 

For more information on the Killer Tomatoes, 415-509-1188.