Bliss is Rapidly Leaving

It's nice to see something about the horrors of the food we eat that does NOT have to do with meat. Now that I have plenty to be guilty about every time I buy a hamburger, I can now also feel terrified when I order a taco.

Unfortunately, this system where everyone in the food chain except the farmer is making money is not actually a new phenomena. It's actually been the case, even back to the "good old" turn of the century that The Future of Food seemed to feel was better. My grandfather was a long distance trucker and school bus driver while he owned his dairy cows and then his beef cattle. Despite growing up in the 1950s, my mom did not have a stay-at-home mom; Grandma worked in the post office in town. Farming is a terrible business, because it is terribly unpredictable. You can't know if a frost will wipe out your orange crop, or if some bug will eat your product out from under you. Thus the attraction to plants that can be easily and effectively be sprayed and the crop be more likely to survive and flourish until it can be harvested and sold. If you want to be rich, you don't own a family farm. Grandpa raised his cows because he loved farming, not because he wanted to be fabulously wealthy. Banking may be a lucrative profession, but you can't really yodel to your paperwork. Grandpa could and did yodel to his cows.

While I knew about "sucide seeds" I didn't really think it through. When I first heard about it, I was pretty peeved. My sisters and I loved to try to grow avocados from the pits of the ones we bought at the store. I assumed that they never grew into trees because my sisters and I didn't grow them properly, nor is the Pacific Northwest an ideal climate in which to grow avocados. But I was pissed to think that my kids or even just kids younger than me wouldn't be able to spit out the seeds from the tomato they were eating and try to grow a tomato plant with them. We tried that as kids because Mom explained that the seeds were where plants came from. It's absurd and freaky that in the future, or even the present, that it is not actually true that new plants can grow from the seeds that the plant produces. In fact, seedless grapes are really quite wrong. What I hadn't really thought about was the sheer impossibility of keeping natural plants from breeding or absorbing parts of genetically modified plants.

As for the patenting of seeds and genes, and the cases upholding the patents, I'm going to have to see some of the cases. When presented in the movie, it seems like the most idiotic, suicidal thing to do, but not all those judges and lawyers can be stupid. They must have some logic or reason. I need to read their reasoning to see if it's entirely dumb. Maybe all parties involved in these rulings have never planted anything, but that seems really unlikely. But hey, "separate but equal" was eventually overturned; hopefully, someone will build a successful case to overrule the patent permissions. Or the corporations can try to patent the tortilla and get ripped to shreds by millions of people who eat tortillas everyday. Ask Marie Antoinette what happens when you're too callus about starving people--oh wait you can't, they killed her for it.

Really, this movie just highlights the fact the world would be a better place if people weren't so determined to screw other people over, or at least weren't so worried about what was in it for themselves. Forget nuclear doomsday movies, we need ones with massive starvation due to pharming. Models could serve as extras for the dying masses.

Yes, I have qualms about eating genetically modified plants. I don't need ecol i in my food on purpose. Fish do not belong in my tomatoes. No, I can't think of a reason why genetically modified products are NOT on food labels. See the above paragraph about screwing people over for reasons why they are not already on food labels.

And an article from ProQuest:

• Spurgeon, David. “Monsanto Wins Seven-Year Court Battle for Seed Patent.” Nature. 429.6990 (2004): 330. Research Library. ProQuest. Western Libraries, Bellingham. 4 May 2008 .

Here is a brief article that has a helpful, though partial, solution to the lawsuits against farmers by large seed corporations:

• Catechi, David. “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Patent Right.” Hastings Law Journal 56.4 (2005): 769-770.

EDITED 5/29/08 for citation correction