by Ray, Janisse
Jeremiah Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds offers for sale the seed of the Ali Baba watermelon, an Iraqi fruit collected in the 1990s by Aziz Nail. As Gettle says in his description of the melon: “It is now nearly impossible to get seeds from this ancient country whose people have lost much of their genetic heritage in the long, bloody war. Now our corporate agriculture has been kindly suggested to native farmers who are losing thousands of years of plant breeding work; I guess they have gained the freedom to sign a patent waiver and support our genetically engineered greed.” Baker Creek also offers four Iraqi tomatoes: Basrawya, Ninevah, Al-Kuffa, and Tartar of Mongolistan.
What happened in Iraq was part of an extremely well-funded, politically savvy, militarily connected, corporate-minded gambit to control the world’s food supply. That’s your food, too.
How the American Food System Is Broken
1. OUR FOOD IS GOING EXTINCT.
In the last century, 94 percent of vintage, open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties vanished. By 2005, the United Nations reported, 75 percent of the world’s garden vegetables had been lost. We’re hemorrhaging old varieties, despite the productivity, adaptation, and delicious taste of many heirloom strains.
2. OUR FOOD SUPPLY IS BEING STOLEN FROM US.
I blame the shrinking of our food choices on corporations. I almost never blame anything—save perhaps a willingness to believe lies and be cheated—on people. At the expense of our soil, our health, our culinary traditions, our environment, and our communities, traditional ways of growing food have been stolen by corporations and replaced with chemicals and radicalized seed.
Two concepts are important to this conversation. One is the idea of vertical versus horizontal production. Vertical production of food means control from the top down. Horizontal production means the control is at the level of the producer or eater. When I bike past a cornfield with a little sign that says P1376XR, which is a DuPont GM corn, I feel crushed. But when I think about the organic or biodynamic or naturally certified farmers who sell at our farmers market, on their little farms toiling in their human-scale fields, I stand shoulder to shoulder with them.
In my mind I see a map of our coastal plains region, stretching from the geologic fall line toward the coast. Within a morning’s bike ride I can reach Debra and Del Ferguson in their grassy pastures (Hunter Cattle Company), Relinda Walker with her acres of purple and orange carrots and canary melons (Walker Farms), Jimmy and Connie Hayes with organic peanuts (Healthy Hollow Farm), and Cindy and Larry Kopczak with their pecan orchard (Snug Hill Farm). I could put on my boots, start walking, and get to them.
On the contrary, I could walk for years and never find Monsanto in his field or standing in front of his tailgate at the Saturday market. Monsanto is in the sky.
The second concept is the idea of one large entity versus many smaller ones. Farmers have been told for three decades now: get big or get out. The new adage, in direct opposition to the industrialization of agriculture, is get small or get out.
3. OUR FOOD SUPPLY IS BEING BOUGHT OUT FROM UNDER US.
The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat.
—Wendell Berry
In the 1980s and 1990s, chemical companies aggressively moved to purchase privately held seed companies in order to capitalize on the profits that genetic engineering promised. The modus operandi was to buy a company, retire the seed stock, and offer their own seeds. Monsanto went on a shopping spree.
As Bill Kte’pi explains in Green Food: An A-to-Z Guide, there are two kinds of expansion. One is horizontal, the consolidation of smaller companies that operate within the same sector in order to decrease competition. In vertical expansion, a corporation dominates all aspects of production. The corporate giants were practicing both types of integration; Monsanto moved vertically from chemicals to seeds, then horizontally through seed companies.
For a while it was dizzying. Under the header American Seeds Inc. (ASI), in November 2004 Monsanto acquired three Iowa seed companies—Crows, Wilson, and Midwest. In 2005, Monsanto announced that it intended to expand and spent $1 billion for Seminis, the world’s largest producer of fruit and vegetable seed. In one fell swoop, Monsanto was the largest seed and biotech company in the world. It surpassed DuPont. On the heels of this purchase, Monsanto purchased NC+ Hybrids (supplier of corn and soybean seed, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska) and Emergent Genetics Inc. (cotton seed). Fifty-two million dollars later, in the fall of 2005, Monsanto owned Fontanelle Hybrids (Fontanelle, Nebraska), Stewart Seeds (Greensburg, Indiana), Trelay Seeds (Livingston, Wisconsin), Stone Seeds (Pleasant Plains, Illinois), and Specialty Hybrids. The purchases continued.
By 2006, ten companies controlled half the globe’s commercial seed sales. Monsanto (United States), Dupont (United States), and Syngenta (Switzerland) led the vanguard. In 2007, the top ten seed companies accounted for 67 percent of the market. In 2009 Monsanto’s market share for seed corn was 36 percent.
Monopoly is not a game.
A 2005 report detailed that the biotech industry as a whole lost $6.4 billion in one year. Since the mid-1970s it has lost more than $45 billion. So what’s the reward for all this maneuvering? In many ways, the biotech industry in general (and Monsanto in particular) is like a giant start-up company. The corporate hope is that investors will, in the long run, see their efforts at conquest come to fruition. They hope to hit the jackpot sooner rather than later—and they may, as soon as enough of the world is conquered, enough farmers are disenfranchised, and enough of our food supply is lost forever.
And they may not.
That’s what I’m voting on. That’s what I’m praying for. That’s the world I’m working toward—that every Frankenseed investor loses her ass and my neighbor farmers keep growing the seeds on which they’ve always fed themselves, their families, and their livestock.
4. BAD FOOD HAS BEEN FORCED DOWN OUR THROATS.
By now some of us know the dangers of toxic agriculture and the hazards of processed food, especially sugars, carbohydrates, fats, and high-fructose corn syrup. But another danger lurks.
The introduction of GM food has been a nightmare and folly. Without adequate or honest study, it has been approved by the FDA behind the smokescreen of one small but important phrase—“substantial equivalence”—which assumes that a novel food is as safe as the conventional food it replaces. The FDA website outlines the procedure for their approval of a bioengineered foodstuff. Developers submit a “summary of safety and nutritional assessment” 120 days before the GM food is marketed. The companies then compare a few key components, such as toxicity and allergenicity, against safe plants. “We monitor the levels of nutrients, proteins, and other components to see that the transgenic plants are substantially equivalent to traditional foods,” said Monsanto’s Eric Sachs. “If the levels are similar, then the GM experimental food is deemed identical for all practical purposes and no further testing is necessary.”
Before the introduction of any new medicine or other powerful technology, long-term and thorough testing would seem to be in order: toxicology assessments, tissue cultures, multigenerational studies, allergy testing. Superficial testing does not account for the myriad possibilities of plant transformation and its potential to damage human health. In effect, the FDA’s position is that there is no problem until a problem is identified.
Dr. David Schubert, a medical researcher at the Salk Institute in California, and William Freese of the Friends of the Earth published a paper in 2005 called Safety Testing and Regulation of Genetically Engineered Foods. “The picture that emerges from our study of US regulation of GM foods,” said Schubert and Freese, “is a rubber-stamp ‘approval process’ designed to increase public confidence in, but not ensure the safety of, genetically engineered foods.”
Nor have any labels been required by the US government—despite “right-to-know” campaigns by con
sumer groups and overwhelming support nationally for the labeling of transgenic products. Corporations prefer to avoid labeling since they understand that sales of GM foods would decrease if consumers knew what they were buying. By not requiring corporations to identify GM products, the FDA (more interested in the business of moneymaking than in the health of citizens) robs citizens of the right to know what’s in their food. “Labeling is a situation where the FDA is officially charged with promoting biotechnology,” said Jeffrey Smith, a visionary activist who has worked for years to bring attention to the menace of GM products and who is the author of the best-selling Seeds of Deception.
There is one way an eater can avoid GM food and that is to eat organic products. The National Organics Program, which writes the guidelines for inputs and systems that organic farmers may employ, prohibits the use of GM seeds. As Dave Hensen, director of the Arts and Ecology Center in Occidental, California, said, “Organics is one of the last lines of defense for all time.” However, there is no way to avoid eating GM foods entirely because of contamination. Acres USA, a sustainable agriculture magazine, reports that genetic drift has resulted in the contamination of all US corn, for example.
5. OUR FOOD IS HAZARDOUS TO OUR HEALTH.
Actually we don’t know this yet. The story of the perils of GM foods has not been told, in part because the mouths of the storytellers have been duct-taped shut and in part because the story is not yet known. The need for scientific studies has been ignored; those conducted have been suppressed.
The evidence of hazards in GM foods, however, is mounting. As Dr. Michael Hansen, senior scientist for Consumers Union, said in his 2002 lecture in Mexico entitled “Bt Crops: Inadequate Testing,” “There is increasing evidence—from both epidemiological studies and lab studies—that the various Bt endotoxins (including those from maize, cotton, and potatoes) may have adverse effects on the immune system and/or may be human allergens.”
Some of the adverse evidence comes from Australia, where a pea weevil threatens the field pea industry. Common beans, on the other hand, carry a gene capable of killing the pea weevil. When researchers in a ten-year project to develop a GM field pea tested this gene, it did not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people. However, when the gene was transferred to the pea, the new GM peas caused allergic lung damage in mice. What is significant about this study is that it indicates that a transformation happening during the transfer process may make GM food hazardous.
A variety of experiments have suggested caution is warranted on multiple fronts. For example, in spite of biotech’s arguments that genetic transfer from crops to humans is unlikely, a study at Newcastle University in Britain found that DNA from GM crops could be transferred to bacteria in the human gut. Other experiments have intimated connections between GM foods and significant medical conditions. In rats fed GM corn and potatoes, scientists observed abnormal white and red blood cell counts, inflammation of the liver, and unexplained growths in stomachs and small intestines. In 1998, a scientist at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, found that GM potatoes caused tumors and inflammation in the stomach lining of laboratory animals. The real world has even provided evidence of possible problems with GM foods. After Great Britain introduced GM soy, soy allergies rose 50 percent. Some Iowa farmers reported infertility (as much as 80 percent) in hogs fed GM corn.
In addition, the harmful effects of glyphosate (Roundup) are now rising in the American consciousness. Glyphosate kills weeds by shutting down their defense mechanisms, weakening them, and inviting infections by soil-borne pathogens; it is also linked to nutritional deficiencies in plants. It kills soil microbes, even the advantageous ones. Further, it does not break down quickly in the soil, taking anywhere from a few months to up to forty years. Clinical data implicates that glyphosate is, at “quite low levels,” according to Don Huber, plant pathologist and professor emeritus at Purdue University, “very toxic to liver cells, kidney cells, testicular cells, and the endocrine hormone system.” Additionally, the herbicide has been linked to miscarriages and premature births; it is implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and even autism.
Once a friend said to us, “If you analyze food too much, you kill it.” My outspoken husband had a quick reply: “Yes, if you analyze food too much, you kill it, but if you don’t analyze it enough, it kills you.”
6. OUR FOOD IS HARMING THE EARTH.
Not only is GM food probably unsound for the body, it leaves in its wake a host of other problems. The first is that insects and weeds evolve quickly to become superpests resistant to chemical controls. By 2006, eighty million acres were being planted with Roundup-Ready crops and being sprayed with Roundup. Then farmers began to notice that certain weeds were not killed by Roundup. Mare’s tail—a tall weed with 200,000 seeds per plant—was the first I heard of. It became resistant to Roundup in only eight years.
During the past few years I’ve watched pigweed become resistant. At first only a weed or two would be left standing after a spraying, then the entire field would be dotted with pigweed. The solution, of course, is to spray even-more-potent herbicides, rocketing the farmers as well as the eaters ever further along a destructive path.
A 2009 study by The Organic Center concluded that “the most striking finding is that GE [genetically engineered] crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the US over the first 13 years of commercial use of GE crops.”
Besides the increase of resistance to the herbicides, tolerance to herbicides may be transferred to weedy relatives of GM crops through cross-pollination. Canola is a brassica, a member of the mustard family. Many wild brassicas will cross with canola, even Roundup-Ready canola; when they do, the wild brassica, like the Roundup-Ready canola, will no longer be killed by Roundup. Again, more powerful herbicides will be used, turning most farms into greater and greater point-sources for pollution.
7. OUR FOOD ANNIHILATES POLLINATORS.
“Where bees can live, so can man.”
—Juliette de Biaracli Levy
The plight of our pollinators was outlined ingeniously by Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan in The Forgotten Pollinators. Farmer Frank Morton of Shoulder to Shoulder Farm in Philomath, Oregon, talks about the degree to which one attracts pollinators by seed saving. Morton’s approach is to return as many processes as possible to the wild, looking to the garden as an ecosystem. Bolting and flowering plants, for instance, furnish continuous nectar, pollen, shelter, and prey for beneficial species.
8. OUR FOOD IS NUTRITIONALLY IMPOTENT.
The USDA identifies certain nutrients as vital: protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, vitamins (A, B-6, B-12, C, D, and E), as well as amino acids and minerals (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper). If every citizen followed the USDA’s dietary guidelines, it promises, the United States would see a 20 percent decline in cancer, respiratory, and infectious diseases; 25 percent less heart and vascular diseases; and 50 percent less arthritis, infant death, and maternal death.
Corporate lackies will proclaim that a broccoli grown chemically (lifeless soil, drenched with cancer agents and endocrine disruptors) is essentially no different than one grown using organic practices (crop rotation, manures, legumes, compost, mineralization, microbialization). The studies beg to differ. Not only is there a difference, there’s a big difference—up to a 100 percent difference.
A 2004 study of forty-three garden crops conducted by Dr. Donald Davis of the University of Texas–Austin found during the past fifty years reliable declines in six nutrients: protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C. These drops ranged from 6 percent to as much as 38 percent (for riboflavin). Meanwhile, a review of USDA nutrient data on a dozen veggies by writer Alex Jack shows that since 1975 vitamin A has dropped 21.4 percent, calcium 26.5 percent, vitamin C 29.9 percent, and iron 36.5 percent. A study fro
m Great Britain by Dr. Anne-Marie Mayer, looking at the concentrations of eight essential minerals in twenty fruits and vegetables, found consistent declines over the past fifty years—iron was down an average of 22 percent; calcium, 19 percent; and potassium, 14 percent.
Nutrients contained in a particular vegetable or fruit can be affected by many factors, including variety, maturity at harvest, and time from earth to table. A significant factor, however, turns out to be agricultural practices. New research is proving that food grown organically is more nutrient-dense.
High levels of nitrogen in chemical fertilizers stimulate quick growth and encourage a plant to take up more water. That results in higher yields, but less dry matter (the nonwater component of food) and consequently less nutrition and flavor per calorie consumed. Elevated levels of nitrogen reduce concentrations of vitamin C in vegetables like lettuce, endive, and kale, as well as in fruits like oranges and cantaloupe. Study results range from 6–100 percent increases in vitamin C in organic foods. Many inquiries demonstrate higher dry matter in organically grown crops, averaging 20 percent higher. In addition, analysis reveals higher mineral content in organic crops. Apparently compost delivers more nutrients than chemical fertilizers.
Bob Quinn, an organic wheat farmer from Montana, is growing kamut, the trademark (as well as ancient Egyptian) name of khorasan wheat, a variety supposedly found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. His kamut boasts a higher nutritional profile than chemically grown wheat, including antioxidants, vitamins, and essential amino acids. It is mineral-rich, especially in selenium, zinc, and magnesium. “We’ve made these huge changes to make food cheap with no regard to nutrition,” Quinn told Acres USA. “People say it’s a great advantage having cheap food in this country, but if we take into account the cost of medicine from poor health, which is a direct result of our inferior and often toxic diet, it’s not cheap at all.”