I was never one to worry about what I ate. For years my principal food groups were Stouffer’s Lasagna and Doritos. Now I’m older, wiser and lacking health insurance. And I’ve just read David Kessler’s new book, The End of Overeating, and watched two amazing documentaries, Food, Inc., and The Future of Food. Now I see food as a rallying cry for a new political movement in America, with issues that transcend Democrat and Republican. Because all of a sudden I understand just how despicable and horrific the giant agribusinesses like Perdue, Tyson and above all, Monsanto are, and how they’re not only screwing the American food consumer, but they’re screwing farmers as well.
For those who have not had the leisure to engage with this tremendous new wealth of material about our food industry, I will give a few brief summaries and quotes. In The End of Overeating David Kessler, former FDA Commissioner, describes the sorry tale of how multinational agribusiness corporations have engineered a diabetes epidemic in America by such slick high tech "research" as using brain scanning equipment to determine just what additions of sugar, salt and fat will trigger the reward centers of the brain. Kessler, polite, judicious, wise, describes how America’s biggest food corporations have turned into drug dealers not only by tarting up almost all processed foods with this lethal cocktail of sugar, salt and fat, but by adding numerous other exotic sapient chemicals designed to bewitch our primitive food brains.
The documentary, Food, Inc., is not nearly as nice as Dr. Kessler. Here is where we learn how giant agribusiness is screwing farmers all over America (and indeed, all over the world). Screwing them how? Here’s one way: by preventing farmers from saving their seed corn for replanting the next season. Now that may sound ridiculous. How could a multinational agribusiness corporation stop an independent farmer in North Dakota from saving his crop’s seed for next year’s crop? That, after all, is a practice that precedes Sumerian civilization, a practice that has been at the heart of farming for perhaps 8,000 years. How in the world do you stop a farmer from saving his seed for the neat year’s crop? It's a revolting tale that begins with those corn-loving birds, chickens.
Food, Inc., takes a hard "look" at American chicken farming. I had to put the word "look" in quotes because while the film's producers contacted dozens of chicken farmers around the country, ONLY ONE would let them inside the shed to actually look at the chickens. After seeing the chickens, you can see why the chicken farmers won’t even let us peek. The chickens are deformed!!! All deformed. What can this mean? Producers have found a way to accelerate the growth of chickens to produce big plump-breasted chickens almost twice as fast as by ordinary "farming." But the problem is, the chickens’ bones and internal organs can’t keep up with this rate of growth of the "whit meat," so as the lady farmer says, "a lot of these chickens here, they can take a few steps, and then they plop down, because they can’t keep up with all the weight they’re carrying." And in the film we see these giant-breasted chickens toppling over like toddlers when they first try walking.
The film tells the story of how antibiotics are put in the feed of these chickens, and how this has led to the build up of bacterial resistance to these antibiotics with real and ominous implications for world health. But then the documentary turns to the really explosive scandal in the American food supply – the story of corn. If the public understood what was really happening with corn in America, it would be worse than the bank bailout. Because with corn, we have the biggest agribusiness multinationals in the world commiting disgusting repellant acts against Americans who really deserve our support and admiration, namely, farmers whose believe they have a commitment to produce healthy food.
Corn, the documentary cheerfully points out, has conquered the world. That is, corn with salt, sugar and fat added. The productivity of corn agriculture has transformed the world, going from 20 bushels an acre 100 years ago to 200 bushels an acre today. This is thanks to pesticides, growing techniques, et cetera. Today American corn growers are being paid to over-produce corn. Giant farm lobbies persuade Congress to subsidize corn. Because cheap corn is what literally feeds our chickens and cows. "We’re teaching fish how to eat corn."
Now a smart sixth grader might point out that cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn. They’re designed to eat grass. "The only reason why we feed them corn is because4 corn is really really cheap and it makes them fat quickly." However, here again the Peter Singers of this world may raise a few objections. After all, these cows stand all day long in knee-deep manure eating a high corn diet that is known to result in e. coli that are resistant to antibacterial agents.
The film hits hard at the pomposity and immorality of industry: "The industry blames obesity on a crisis of personal irresponsibility. But when you’re engineering foods you’re pressing our evolutionary buttons. The fact is we are hard-wired to go for three tastes: salt, fat and sugar. These things are very rare in nature. Now sugar is available 24/7 in tremendous quantities. We’re eating hundreds of pounds of the stuff a year. This diet of high fructose syrup and refined carbohydrates leads to these spikes of insulin and a gradual wearing down of the way our body metabolizes sugar."
But all this is just prelude to what has happened with genetically modified organisms beginning in the 1980s leading to the patenting of genes then leading to the weirdest and most revolting practice of any modern corporation. Now I realize that is an elite crowd of companies, like Philip Morris with its massive new advertising campaign in Indonesia, and American insurance companies who pride themselves on rescission research, but Monsanto seems to be in a class by itself as if it were determined to exploit its legal, financial and size advantage over America's independent corn farmers to muscle them all into accepting Monsanto's genetically modified corn seed. Amazingly enough, the great Monsanto Corporation is currently preventing farmers all over America (and beyond) from SAVING AND USING THEIR OWN SEED CORN.
How could Monsanto possibly prevent farmers from saving their own seed corn? Here it is in a nutshell. Monsanto patented a gene that made crops resistant to a highly effective pesticide. Farmers could kill everything but the crop with the gene. Thus Round Up Ready soybeans for example began to produce major yield increases. Monsanto is currently trying to engineer a gene so the seeds will actually die after one generation, that is, to produce sterile seed, requiring farmers to purchase more seed from Monsanto. One can see how farmers who agree to purchase Monsanto’s Round Up Ready seed might have to agree to whatever terms Monsanto decides to put on that purchase, but how can Monsanto stop farmers who DON’T buy Round Up Ready seeds from saving their own seed? Here’s how.
Monsanta has a staff of 75 people devoted to investigating and prosecuting farmers for "saving their seed," accordingj to the Center for Food Safety. You can’t save your seed if your fields have been contaminated by Round Up Ready soybeans. A farmer who did not plant Monsanto’s seed but was surrounded by farmers who did found his own cornfields contaminated by Monsanto’s seeds. "If Monsanto finds contamination, the farmer must prove he did not violate Monsanto’s patents." In case after case, the documentary shows how farmers cannot afford to fight the legal might of the company.
How could the law allow Monsanto to engage in such revolting bullying monopolistic practices? Ah, the unkindest cut of all: Justice Clarence Thomas was the Monsanto attorney from 1976 – 1979. Later on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a case which allowed multinational agribusiness companies to prevent farmers from saving their own seed.
And just to add one footnote to this fascinating documentary with its unsentimental look at the farmers and families who are being trashed by Monsanto, there another excellent documentary, "The Future of Food," which adds this quote from Monsanto:
"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job." (Phil Angell, Drector of Corporate Communication, Monsanto Corp, quoted in the New York Times of October 25, 1998.)
Since the FDA has completely abdicated its role in protecting the American food supply from predatory practices, perhaps this abusive high-handed treatment of American farmers, this really unbelievable Big Brother monopolistic move to monopolize world seed corn – I mean screw you, Monsanto, and all your patent attorneys too. These documentaries give us a shocking centerpiece for reform in America, reform that reaches across party lines and directly affects our food, our health, and our farmers.