by Nick Pirog
For the longest time, I had my heart set on the fourth Thomas Prescott book being titled Walking in Memphis, in which Thomas would reinvestigate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. If you know anything about the event, James Earl Ray was the killer, but there are so many different conspiracy theories out there about who really killed him that there was room for a good story. (Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s son said that he didn’t think JER was the killer.)
Anyhow, I ordered a half dozen books about the assassination, about Memphis, and about all the conspiracy theories. I had the entire story outlined but...I couldn’t get it to work. Thomas’ personality wasn’t going to mesh with the subject matter.
So I scrapped it.
Fast forward to my Las Vegas hotel room, and between getting sick, taking my dogs out, and convincing myself I wasn’t going to die (I’m kind of a hypochondriac), I had this epiphany: Thomas needs to inherit the farm that Harold grew up on in Missouri.
It was perfect.
But that’s all I had. Sure, throwing Thomas into this small town would be great, making him learn how to farm would be great, but I needed a story.
I still liked the idea of Thomas reinvestigating an actual crime as he would have done in Walking in Memphis, and I started searching up “small town murder in Missouri” on the internet.
There were a few things that came up in Missouri, but the crime that really interested me was “The Be-Lo murders.” It happened in North Carolina in 1993. The Be-Lo was a small grocery store. After closing one night, the store was robbed and three people were killed. The murders were never solved.
Initially, I had planned to base the crime that Thomas reinvestigates directly on the Be-Lo murders, but in the end, the only part I used was that the crime occurred at a grocery store.
So I had the setting, a small farming town in Missouri. And I had the basis for the cold case that Thomas would need to investigate. But I still needed IT. That big thing that brought it all together.
I had recently watched the movie Spotlight and I was enthralled by the slow burn of bringing down this corrupt institution of the archdiocese. I wanted to write something similar. At first, I planned on just having the “grocery-store murders” tied to small-town corruption. But this seemed boring. Overdone.
(Though, while searching “small town corruption” on the internet, I did stumble across an article about Rita Crundwell who, as appointed comptroller of the town of Dixon, Illinois, embezzled $53 million from the town budget to help finance her quarter horse breeding program. She would become the basis for Victoria Page.)
For a couple days, I kept waiting for that “magic” moment that happens when you are coming up with a great book idea. For Gray Matter, it was when I read about all the anti-wolf legislation that was out there. For The Afrikaans, it was the AIDS epidemic still plaguing the small villages of South Africa.
Then it happened.
And it was so obvious.
It needed to have something to do with farming!
From there, the logical next step was GMOs.
And when you think GMOs, the first word that comes to mind is…Monsanto.
And here is where the magic comes in. I had already figured out where the farm that Thomas inherits would be located. From Gray Matter, I’d established that it was somewhere in Missouri. And while sitting sick in my hotel room, I’d narrowed it down to an exact county. Audrain County, located in north-central Missouri.
On a whim, I searched, “Monsanto headquarters.”
And wouldn’t you know it?
Monsanto headquarters was located just on the outskirts of St. Louis, about a hundred miles from where I’d decided my fictitious town would be.
Even on my deathbed, I remember letting out a little “whoop, whoop!”
A few days later, I finally made it back to South Lake Tahoe. (I’d lost close to ten pounds.)
But there was one last thing: the book needed a title.
I’m not sure where I first saw it, but the moment I read that Missouri was the Show-Me state, I knew I had it. (I mean, the golden rule in writing is to show not tell.)
And Show Me was born.
Show Me is a work of fiction.
I took MANY MANY creative liberties in regards to small towns, farming, piglets, weight gain, weight loss, Missouri as a whole, embezzlement, horse breeding, hot air balloons, not to mention a hundred other things, as well as everything that has to do with Big Biotech.
But if I had just read this book, I would want to know what was actually true. So here we go. (Some of this stuff I’ve taken from Wikipedia.)
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Tarrin
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Tarrin is a fictitious farming town located in Audrain County, Missouri. Tarrin is loosely based on a number of different small towns all over Missouri as well as my experiences visiting small towns throughout my life. The county seat of Audrain is, in fact, named Mexico, which has a population of right around 16,000.
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Lunhill
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Lunhill is a fictitious corporation based on a number of different Big Biotech firms. Though the location of its headquarters and some of its history are based loosely on Monsanto, Lunhill is equally based on DuPont (US), Bayer Crop Science (Germany), Syngenta (Switzerland), Groupe Limagrain (France), and the Delta and Pine Land Company (US), among several others.
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rBGH
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Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), also known as Bovine somatotropin, is a peptide hormone produced by cows' pituitary glands. Four large pharmaceutical companies, Monsanto, American Cyanamid, Eli Lilly, and Upjohn, developed commercial rBGH products and submitted them to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval. Monsanto was the first firm to receive approval in 1993.
The FDA, World Health Organization, and National Institutes of Health have each independently stated that dairy products and meat from rBGH-treated cows are safe for human consumption.
In the United States, public opinion led some manufacturers and retailers to market only milk that is rBGH-free.
A European Union report on the animal welfare effects of rBGH states that its use often results in "severe and unnecessary pain, suffering and distress" for cows,” including “serious mastitis, foot disorders and some reproductive problems."
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Glyphosate (Spectrum-H)
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Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide. It is used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with crops. It was discovered to be an herbicide by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970. Monsanto brought it to market in 1974 under the trade name Roundup.
Farmers quickly adopted glyphosate, especially after Monsanto introduced glyphosate-resistant Roundup Ready crops, enabling farmers to kill weeds without killing their crops. In 2007, glyphosate was the most used herbicide in the United States' agricultural sector and the second-most used in home and garden, government and industry, and commerce.
An increasing number of crops have been genetically engineered to be tolerant of glyphosate (e.g. Roundup Ready soybean, the first Roundup Ready crop, also created by Monsanto) which allows farmers to use glyphosate as an herbicide against weeds. The development of glyphosate resistance in weed species is emerging as a costly problem. While glyphosate and formulations such as Roundup have been approved by regulatory bodies worldwide, concerns about their effects on humans and the environment persist.
Many regulatory agencies and scholarly reviews have evaluated the relative toxicity of glyphosate as an herbicide. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment toxicology review in 2013 found that "the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing" with regard to correlations between exposure to glyphosate formulations and risk of various cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In March 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate a
s "probably carcinogenic in humans" based on epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in-vitro studies.
In November 2015, the European Food Safety Authority published an updated assessment report on glyphosate, concluding that "the substance is unlikely to be genotoxic (i.e. damaging to DNA) or to pose a carcinogenic threat to humans."
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Terminator Seeds
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Genetic use restriction technology, colloquially known as Terminator technology or suicide seeds, is the name given to proposed methods for restricting the use of genetically modified plants by causing second-generation seeds to be sterile. The technology was developed under a cooperative research and development agreement between the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land Company in the 1990s, but it is not yet commercially available.
From Monsanto’s website: Monsanto has never commercialized a biotech trait that resulted in sterile – or “Terminator” – seeds. Sharing the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops. We stand firmly by this commitment, with no plans or research that would violate this commitment.
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Golden Rice
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Golden rice is produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A, a deficiency which is estimated to kill 670,000 children under the age of five each year.
Golden rice has met significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalization activists who claim there are sustainable, long-lasting, and more efficient ways to solve vitamin A deficiency that do not compromise food, nutrition, and financial security.
Golden Rice was one of seven winners of the 2015 Patents for Humanity Awards by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
As of 2016, it was still in development.
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Times Beach (Simon Beach)
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Times Beach is a ghost town in St. Louis County, Missouri. Once home to more than two thousand people, the town was completely evacuated early in 1983 due to a dioxin contamination that made national headlines. It was the largest civilian exposure to dioxin in the country's history. In 1985, the State of Missouri officially disincorporated the city of Times Beach.
I stole bits and pieces from what actually happened. You can read the entire saga here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri.
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Farmer Assurance Provision (Lunhill Protection Act)
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The Farmer Assurance Provision refers to a bill that was passed by the Senate on March 20, 2013 and then signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 26, 2013. The bill is commonly referred to as the “Monsanto Protection Act” by its critics.
Legal effect - if a biotech crop had already been approved by the USDA and a court reversed that approval, the provision directed the Secretary of Agriculture to grant temporary deregulation status at the request of a grower or seed producer, to allow growers to continue the cultivation of the crop while legal challenges to the safety of those crops would still be underway.
Support – the provision was a response to frivolous procedural lawsuits against the USDA which were attempting to "disrupt the regulatory process and undermine the science-based regulation of [agricultural biotechnology].
Criticism - those who opposed the provision referred to it as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” on the premise that it "effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future."
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Monsanto and Blackwater
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From Newstarget.com:
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Millions of Americans remember the private mercenary force known as Blackwater for its involvement in an unprovoked attack that left scores of Iraqi civilians dead in 2007, but most have no idea that the firm had a business relationship as well with Monsanto.
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As we reported in May 2013, the relationship between the world’s largest bio-ag company and producer of genetically modified foods and seeds and Blackwater was described by blogger Randy Ananda as “a death-tech firm weds a hit squad.”
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As further reported by The Nation magazine, it appears that Monsanto hired Blackwater shortly after the Iraq incident to “protect the Monsanto brand,” which meant essential [sic] conducting intelligence operations against anti-Monsanto activists and their allies.
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Read the full article here: http://www.newstarget.com/2016-04-28-monsanto-hired-the-infamous-mercenary-firm-blackwater-to-track-food-activists-around-the-world.html.
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Monsanto/FDA/EPA
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This is from a post on Rense.com:
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The "revolving door" - the interplay of personnel that assists the industrial alignment of public service and regulatory authorities - has led to key figures at both the US's FDA and EPA having held important positions at Monsanto, or else doing so shortly after their biotech-related regulatory work for the government agency.
An article in The Ecologist's famous 'Monsanto Files' by Jennifer Ferrara, 'Revolving Doors: Monsanto and the Regulators,’ looked in detail at this issue. As an instance, Ferrara noted the FDA's approval of Monsanto's genetically engineered cattle drug rBGH which failed to gain approval in either Europe or Canada despite intense lobbying and accusations of malpractice.
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You can read the rest of the post here: http://rense.com/general33/fd.htm.
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FDA and testing of new drugs
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From the FDA website:
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Drug companies seeking to sell a drug in the United States must first test it. The company then sends CDER (FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) the evidence from these tests to prove the drug is safe and effective for its intended use. A team of CDER physicians, statisticians, chemists, pharmacologists, and other scientists reviews the company's data and proposed labeling. If this independent and unbiased review establishes that a drug's health benefits outweigh its known risks, the drug is approved for sale. The center doesn't actually test drugs itself, although it does conduct limited research in the areas of drug quality, safety, and effectiveness standards.
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Suing farmers
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Since 1997, Monsanto has filed 147 lawsuits against farmers who have “improperly reused their patented seeds.” This includes when farmers tried to sue Monsanto over cross-pollination of their organic crops with GMO seed. For example, a federal court dismissed one of those cases, saying that it couldn’t protect Monsanto against unfair lawsuits should they side in the farmers’ favor.
According to Monsanto’s website, they have only proceeded through trial with nine farmers.
They have won all nine cases.
You are probably curious about where I stand when it comes to this whole GMO controversy.
It may come as a shock, but I don’t have a firm stance one way or another. And that’s how I wanted Thomas to come across in the book. It is definitely a hot-button issue for some people, on both sides of the equation, but I wanted Thomas to have more of a problem with the institution (Lunhill) than the science (biotechnology).
Which is how I feel.
Sure, Monsanto and friends have done some really shady things, but to blame biotechnology and GMOs as a whole just doesn’t seem fair.
While doing research for this book, I was inundated with books, studies, blog posts, news articles, left-wing rhetoric, right-wing rhetoric, a shit storm really of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it came to Big Biotech.
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After sorting through it all, I could only chose a limited amount of this material to bring into the book. I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with science and I could only have so many plot points. In an attempt not to alienate anyone, one way or another, I wanted to showcase the bad, but also the good. That being said, I did cast Lunhill as the villain, so I did have to lean more toward the bad.
This was a tough book to write. I hadn’t written a full-length novel in close to five years and I forgot how big the scope of the project was. Now, at the finish line, it seems almost impossible that this seed of an idea I had a year earlier (between visits to the bathroom) has come full circle and is now a book.
Thank you so much for reading. And if you enjoyed the book, please tell a couple people and/or write a review.
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Jungle Up (Thomas Prescott #5) comes out April 27, 2021. You can pre-order it now >>>PRE-ORDER JUNGLE UP
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You can buy all my other books directly from me and download the books directly to your preferred ereader at www.nickpirogbookstore.com.