American Green : Dismantle Global, Restore Local

Welcome. This has been in the works for quite some time, and the goal is to discuss current issues regarding the food system, diet, and lifestyle of the average American, as well as provide recipes, ideas, and links to great resources and fun sites.

I thought I'd start by discussing something recently brought to my attention--Monsanto and it's perversion of, well, essentially the entire natural order of things. For those of you who are new to this particular issue, Monsanto is an agricorporation that initially produced saccharin and DDT, then Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide used to poison plants and animals (including human animals) alike during the Vietnam War. More recently, the company developed the RoundUp pesticide used on most nonorganic crops in the United States. In the 1980s, the company brought a claim to the Supreme Court suggesting that, due to a genetically modified gene developed by Monsanto to resist RoundUp, plant genes could be patented; incredibly, the Supreme Court, likely lobbied heavily, agreed, and Monsanto developed many many genetically modified "RoundUp Ready" seeds, which resisted the pesticide.

Though this was certainly unbelievable at the time, the ramifications of this ruling would not play out until the '90s and '00s, during which time the company sent 75 or more paid representatives to farms nationwide to ensure that their patents were not being infringed upon, even coincidentally (in case you haven't heard, seeds blow away in the wind, so their modified ones some how ended up on non-modified crop land, as well). There were, initially, a few million-dollar lawsuits against small farmers in Canada and the United States for alleged copyright infringement, and, by 2005, the company had brought a bill before the Supreme Court yet again asking that farmers who save and reuse, or farmers that illegally grow--even accidentally--the patented seeds be prosecuted.

The question, then, becomes, should this have ever happened to begin with? The idea that seed genetics can be patented shows how far in the wrong direction this country (sorry, non-USers, though this applies to you, as well) has developed over the past 50 years, does it not? Life as it is known has been reliant upon plants for some 2.5 plus billion of the 4.5 billion years since the formation of Earth, let alone Human life, at least since the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago. In this time, seeds have adapted, some plants have died-off, and others have thrived, and those that have become known for their products (foodstuffs) have been handed down from generation to generation. So, when a few scientists in a lab manipulated a seed and called it "RoundUp Ready", apparently, not only was nature now inadequate on its own, but, apparently, another commodity to be messed with and sold for profit. Baffling, isn't it? I want to know how old those Court Justices are, I swear they need props to stay upright...