Sans Mansanto
Now that I’ve shared the backstory and reasoning as to how all of this came to a head… it’s time to get into the real meat of the issues that I have grown so passionate about. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, building the temple of all tummies through her diet, it exemplified the idea that such a cognition might be bigger than one’s self; something of a greater purpose. The obvious residual effect of such a change is one’s own good health; but in her case, she wasn’t doing this for her, she was doing it for our daughter. This opened my eyes to a wider perspective.
When you start thinking about food without single-minded goggles, and through a big picture lens, things get out of hand rather quickly. The rest of these blog posts will not be full of popular ideas, and I will share opinions that might not sit well with some, but when you get to the crux of the matters laid out here, you might find yourself thinking the same thing I am, and making a change for yourself.
As I said in my previous post, Farm Aid 29, in September of 2014, really changed the dynamic of the way this has all played out. A few weeks after the event, it was made known that Neil Young was working on a new album with Willie’s son, Lukas Nelson. They had grown close at Farm Aid, and Neil was a fan of Lukas’ work with his own band called the Promise of the Real. In fact, when we attended, we first found Neil off to the side of the stage gyrating back and forth to the sounds of Lukas’ band before returning to his motor coach.
Sharing the same conviction’s about America’s agricultural crisis, they set out to make a statement album called ‘The Monsanto Years’. When I first heard the album title, I was admittedly clueless.
“Monsanto,” I thought, “sounds like a little-known Latin-American town that would be an intriguing place to visit someday.”
Further research, and the eventual release of said album, would provide the beginnings of my grand awakening. I would soon understand what Neil and Co were talking about with their lyrics suggesting that I should hate Starbucks, or that no politician should be trusted. Monsanto is the name of a company, which history will show, started out as a chemical company that produced Agent Orange back in wartime America, and would later reach commercial success when it developed the popular weed-killing product known as Round-Up.
You may be thinking the same thing I did… What the heck does that have to do with Neil Young and America’s agricultural problems? Well, the answer to that question, with a pang, is … ‘EVERYTHING!’
Back in the ‘80s, our government passed a bill that allowed companies to own patents on genetically modified organisms. Essentially, for the first time, companies could technically own a living organism. Ownership of life. Crazy right? This would mark the beginning of the ‘Monsanto Years.’
Monsanto, then, would rebrand itself in the latter part of the 20th century by producing a soy bean seed that was resistant to its very own Round-Up weed killer. A standard form of capitalism; product pushing another one of the company’s own products. The idea is simple, farmers that don’t have to battle weeds are more prone to success and greater efficiency. Some may argue that this is a genius move that is born out of the capitalist society that we find ourselves in, but I am not here to argue the politics of that ideal [later I intend to prove that it doesn’t matter which way you lean politically].
This is the birth of the GMO, as it stands today. This is when things run rampantly downhill. Monsanto began producing these seeds at an incredible pace. Field by field, their soybean began taking over the market. Here’s the problem though; its not natural. These seeds contain such hazardous chemicals that not even Round-Up can take down their budding roots… and eventually this is what makes its way into our sons’ and daughters’ mouths, and likely effects their health. In the early ‘90s, only 2% of the harvested soy in America was cultivated using Monsanto’s seeds. Today, over 92% of our soy crop is owned by Monsanto. Yes, owned. Monsanto has since introduced seeds for many row crops, such as: alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, sorghum, and wheat. The resulting effect these seeds have had on nature is also scary, as new breeds of ‘superbugs’ and ‘superweeds’ have evolved to be resistant, thus requiring even harsher chemicals be used. Thus, the cycle is constantly getting worse. There’s a reason why so many countries around the world are banning the import of genetically modified American seeds, Russia being the latest.
Take a walk through the aisles of your grocery store and you will find just about every boxed or packaged food contains a product using these crops… all that high fructose corn syrup and the like. The stuff that you can barely read because its name is not familiar, because it’s the furthest thing from natural that you can get. When you start tracing your food’s heritage, most of it leads back to something that Monsanto grasps in its control.
Making matters worse, the political ramifications of such a large corporation quickly made its mark on the American farm. Because Monsanto owns the patent for each of their chemically based organisms, they then own every seed of theirs that is planted in this country [and some that aren’t], which strips the rights of a farmer on his own land. In order to keep this notion under their control, they started dispatching a vast team of lawyers that lurk through America’s farmlands preying on those very individuals that make them rich. These lawyers tighten Monsanto’s vice by suing everyone in the agriculture industry.
The spreading of seeds is a process that is as natural as the pure and untarnished seed. Whether blown through the wind, or transported over many miles as the bird flies; you cannot control what God has intended as natural order. So, for the farmers that don’t sign death knell contracts with Monsanto and try to maintain natural order in their agricultural practices [of which there exists a ‘blacklist’ put out by Monsanto], these lawyers find ways of taking them down. If any seed from these farmers’ land has a trace of Monsanto’s franken-seed origin [which is spread from a neighboring farm that DOES use Monsanto’s product], they are sued for copyright infringement. Of course, these are farmers going up against one of the largest corporations in the world, so they are doomed to lose in court.
What about farmers that are under contract with Monsanto? Yup, they sue their own farmers too. The precedent of which is seed-saving.
Saving seeds is something that has gone on for more generations than Ancestry.com has a record of; it is the ULTIMATE in the world’s sustainable future, and the history of civilization. Seeds were, at one time, seen as a gift from God. So naturally, farmers want to save seeds that aren’t tainted with poisonous chemicals. The problem here is two-fold. First, if you plant chemically altered seeds, the earth under your feet is forever tainted with said chemicals, and there is no restoring it to its original unadultured state. Secondly, and for Monsanto’s ammunition, if you are a farmer raising Monsanto’s crops, you are thereby engaging in farming practices against your contractual agreement and Monsanto sues you for everything, even if that results in loss of property.
What this does then, is allow for farmlands to be stripped from farmers that can’t put up a fair fight, and a family’s heirloom is lost. It also makes the startup farmer an immediate failure unless he signs a contract to grow Monsanto’s crops. These lawyers march through the countryside just as Sherman did through the South, marking fear in the small farmer’s eyes by going after the most respected farmers in each county and ‘teaching them a lesson.’
Here’s where my political neutrality argument comes into play. It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you are on to see that this is completely wrong. This is pure oppression. This is Hitler in horticulture form. This is not freedom. So, why has it gone on for some 30 years now, even though our world’s history has, for thousands of years, defended the cultivation of natural crops as God intended?
Our government.
Like I said, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, because every president that we’ve had since the inception of Monsanto’s earthly rape has housed a Monsanto suit in their cabinet. These lawyers make their way into the political arena because every candidate needs corporate backing, and Monsanto gives it to them while also grooming the most brass-balled lawyers in the country. So naturally, these men and women make their way onto presidential administrations by way of heading up government agencies like the EPA and the FDA. That’s right, the decisions that affect our country’s food and environment are left in the hands of those that have been routinely destroying it and squashing the small farmer in their wake.
“Wait Kyle…. You mentioned Starbucks earlier… what’s going on with that cup of coffee that I so desperately need at $6.00 an ounce? “
Oh yeah, glad you mentioned that. Being that there might not be enough traction in the American public for this to change anytime soon, Americans that ARE paying attention are starting to demand something that could end up being the beginning of the end for this era that Neil Young calls the ‘Monsanto Years.’ That demand comes in the form of food labeling. And for obvious reasons, the companies bringing all of these products to our grocers’ shelves are fighting against this. The American public has the right to know what’s in their food, as we’ve already seen with so many other labelling wars over the years involving cholesterol, calorie counting, etc. Isn’t that the American way of things anyway? The freedom to choose. Therefore, more and more people are wanting labels that make it known whether a product contains GMOs. In fact, the good people of Vermont voted in favor of such a law.
BUT, along comes Monsanto to quell the strong tides of change. And guess what? They have a partner, a partner named Starbucks. So here you have a company like Monsanto teaming up with our friendly neighborhood coffee-maker to reverse said vote in Vermont. Clearly this is an indictment of Starbucks and its use of genetically modified $10.00 scones. Seems to me that they fear business might suffer a little bit if the display of a bright red warning sign reading ‘Our Stuff is Made with GMOs’ hanging over their drive-thru lane is a requirement. But then, those things would be everywhere. Food packaging plants would run out of ink due to over-labelling, every fast food giant in the country would have to find a way of to make those dollar menu items look like a good idea, and every grocery store would have to give up the fallacy that their produce was grown from ‘only the best farms’ just miles down highway 95.
ALL of this to say… we are supporting these people, these mad scientists and repugnant courtroom snakes, every day when we shop for our 10-minute dinners or drive-thru breakfasts.
With the current political landscape starting to take form, I urge you to dig a little deeper and find out what’s going into your food. You only get one vote in November. But every day for the rest of your life, you get 3 votes each day; your choices in what you eat. It’s not just for your health, or your children’s; its for the health of the land we walk on and the air we breathe in. No, it might not be convenient, but then, convenience is nothing more than a product of the ‘American way’ that allows these corporations to rule with an iron fist. Stop being so American, our government sure isn’t returning the favor.
Start a garden. Shop at your local farmer’s market. Buy fruits and vegetables that are IN SEASON. And for our children’s sake, start demanding to know what’s in your food. We millennials have never known a food industry without altered foods.
In my next post I will try to shed some light on the meat industry without getting too graphic. Stay tuned…
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