We saw Food, Inc. the other night. We left not wanting food of any kind. But that was no surprise. People had warned us that the movie would sap our appetites.
The movie was not widely seen – we lived in Bozeman when it came out, and it never graced the local theater. We saw it here in Boulder on the local campus as part of an International Film Festival.
Anyway, what can we say about slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens? It has to be done, and done on a massive scale to feed 330 million people. It’s not pretty.
What can be said about NAFTA? The union members who once worked the packing plants have been supplanted by low-wage workers? That is including millions of Mexican corn growers driven out of business by cheap subsidized American corn? Thanks, Bill Clinton. We’d be better off had you stuck to cigars and other preoccupations.
What can be said about high fructose corn syrup? It’s subsidized, it’s cheap, and is at the center of our obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic. (Most people in movie, other than Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, were notably overweight).
Food, Inc. is about all of that, for sure. It is about a wide range of subjects, including the inhumane treatment of animals. Growers keep them confined, not even allowing chickens to enjoy a ray of sunshine during their 49 day life. Cattle are fed corn when their evolutionary path made them grass eaters. Harmful bacteria grow in the bellies of corn-fed cows – a diet of grass for a few days before slaughter would kill 80% of this bacteria, according to Pollan.
But that’s not cost-efficient. Instead, meat producers load the corn mash with antibiotics. The bacteria have grown tougher, and disaster in the food supply chain looms. E. coli outbreaks are common in this century, and Pollan thinks that worse, much worse is yet to come.
I left the movie depressed, feeling helpless. It wasn’t about the cows who can’t graze or chickens who never get to move around or even see light or pigs who never get to root or enjoy being pigs. It wasn’t about loss of good-paying union jobs or wild immigration.
It was about oppression – concentrated corporate power that cannot be dislodged. Just a few corporations now control most of our food supply – ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and IBP. They behave as all people behave when given monopoly power – they clamp down, squeeze, push, take everything the can. They have armies of lawyers fighting for them at every turn, and their executives swarm in and out of government, usually ending up regulating themselves.
That is the nature of “public service” in America. It’s all about self interest.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once an attorney who worked for Monsanto. Later he wrote the majority opinion in the Pioneer Hi-Bred International v. J.E.M Ag Supply case, which upheld lower court decisions allowing large agricultural companies to patent seed strains. The film intimates that Thomas was rewarding a former employer, but that’s not likely. It is simply part of the mindset of right wingers that government should not involve itself in the affairs of commerce … that things usually work out for the best.
Here’s how it worked out for Monsanto and soybeans: Monsanto patented a strain of seed that is “Roundup ready” – that is, that it is not affected by Roundup, Monsanto’s pesticide. At the time of the patent, Monsanto seeds comprised about 2% of the U.S. domestic market. It is now over 90%.
Monsanto does not force farmers to buy its seed, and makes it available through many other companies (but profits from every Roundup Ready seed sold). Here’s the catch – because it was allowed to patent the seed, Monsanto requires that anyone who uses that seed buy new supplies from Monsanto every year. This, in effect, outlaws the common practice of “seed cleaning”, whereby farmers set aside a portion of each year’s crop for planting the following year.
This requirement has set in motion onerous enforcement mechanisms, and Monsanto has a team of undercover spies roaming the country to make sure that farmers are not reusing seed. The result is a regime of oppression, farmers spying on each other, costly lawsuits, and in the end, castration and submission to power. Monsanto now owns the soybean crop.
Monsanto, of course, treats this all as normal, and defends its activities as legal, which of course, they are. But when corporations have the power to make their own laws, operating within the law is quite easy. Farmers, on the other hand, have no choice but comply or be put out of business.
Monsanto defends itself here.
The film makes one claim that the company did not address, however. It’s “GMO” (“genetically modified organisms”) seeds spread naturally – it is impossible for farmers who do not use them to keep them out of their fields. Monsanto has sued farmers whose fields have been involuntarily infected with their product, forcing them to stop seed cleaning, and forcing them under the regime.
No surprises here, and I do not have anything against Monsanto. It is merely behaving as power behaves, which is why we used to regulate power. The problem in part is the legal concept that allows patenting of of essential elements of our food supply, like soybeans. It’s an aberration, a departure from normal practice in American history.
Most agricultural research was once done at our land grant colleges, and scientific advances that came about were made freely available to everyone. Research was a public domain, and we all benefited. It was a free society.
Land grant colleges still do publicly funded research, and still leave all their advances in the public domain. But more and more corporations are funding university research and patenting the results for private use. Corporate oppression has invaded the colleges.
The real bottom line is something far afield from the mistreatment of animals, secrecy and oppression. It is the lack of enforcement of our antitrust laws. Monsanto has too much power. Too much of our food supply is in the hands of too few companies. Farmers have become serfs on their own land, and patent law, as it stands, acts against the public interest by allowing monopolistic practices to flourish.
And that’s why I walked away from the movie depressed – there is so much concentrated power now in the corporate sector, so much corporate control of government, that it is unlikely anything will be done until we have some catastrophe to reawaken the public. The beast will not soon be put back in its cage.
In the meantime, eat organic food, avoid high fructose corn syrup. Avoid fast food. Avoid monopolies and oligopolies. (That’s humor – by definition, we cannot avoid them.)
And by all means shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, two organic food outlets. They are in healthy competition with one another, forcing prices down.
Oh, wait. Hold on. Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats. The merger was approved by the FTC. Never mind.
Shop farmers markets – while they are there. Soon they will too be outlawed.
Piece of Mindful 
High Altitude Seed Trust and others have been saving seed and teaching others how to save open-pollinaed seed for decades(“brown-bagging”). Local communities are catching on too. Expaning community greenhouses and summer gardens is happening in big cities and towns across the globe. Cheer up, when it comes to food we still have choices. Not so, apparently, with our health, housing and other necessities.
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Thanks for the lift!
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Farmers have become serfs on their own land, eh? I wonder what history tells us about the outcomes of that? It probably won’t end well.
But, somehow I can’t get out of mind the story of Safeway and Dixon Melons (Missoulian link), the bottom line of which was that many growers were fed up with dealing with Safeway. They grew tired of meeting all the corporate requirements, including that their produce be shipped from Montana to Eastern Washington warehouses before it could come back to Missoula for sale.
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We saw it here in Boulder on the local campus as part of an International Film Festival.
Sounds like the equivalent of Friday night prayers at a Mosque.
…union members… have been supplanted by low-wage workers… including millions of Mexican corn growers…
Gasp! You actually wrote something about immigration.
… driven out of business by cheap subsidized American corn
The cash price of US corn would probably be the same sans subsidies: when you subsidize everyone in a competitive industry the $ gets capitalized into the cost of land, etc.
There are winners and losers when you start to trade. Generally the winners out number the losers.
I suspect most of those “millions” weren’t Mexican corn growers, but there are emotional buttons to be pushed here.
I left the movie depressed, feeling helpless.
Hmmm. You’re the one here wired in, hip to the scene, able to survey all and see the trends. I imagine nothing in the movie surprised you, so of what use is an emotional response? Does it spur you to action, even the action of dropping out of society in some small way?
It was about oppression – concentrated corporate power that cannot be dislodged. Just a few corporations now control most of our food supply – ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and IBP.
To say they control most of our food supply is a bit gratuitous. It looks like they delivered the most product for the least cost at their point in the pipeline. ConAgra, Monsanto, and IBP each don’t swing quite $12 billion, which isn’t much of a blip in today’s economy–the Feds spend that much in 3 hours. Corporations come and go (Montana Power, anyone?). IBP is about to become #2 in their field. On the other hand, zero gov’t agencies ever leave us because of non performance.
Monsanto now owns the soybean crop.
This is a stretch beyond the breaking point.
The problem in part is the legal concept that allows patenting of of essential elements of our food supply, like soybeans.
Monsanto patented certain traits that can be added to soybean seed. They sell these traits to seed companies that add them to their lines. I don’t think Monsanto bags and sells any seed. These traits have proven to be very successful and popular. The old seed technology is still out there, but no one wants it because it sucks.
Our intellectual property rights lets Monsanto benefit from their effort until the patents run out. We generally get better effort with this incentive. What ag idea has your Cuban incentive program produced?
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Aye – where to start … don’t think I will. You just sort of pull things out of your ass as you go, so it is not worth much to have an exchange with you.
See the movie.
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You just sort of pull things out of your ass as you go
A playground argument and your way of not facing the flaws on your side of the scene.
I imagine a movie could be made about the evils of the car industry: corporate overlords in the service of greed convinced people they need to travel in metal containers with GLASS! windows using tanks full of a class 1 explosive and known carcinogen piped around the passengers, burned at 2000 degrees a few inches from their bodies, and such vehicles frequently crash into each other with horrifying deaths resulting, etc etc. You would leave the movie never wanting to drive again.
How these things are framed make a difference.
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Another ass-pull.
Put up an argument that shows you’ve read something beyond what I wrote and allowed your knee to jerk, and we’ll go forward.
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Sheesh. For someone who worries about closed minds and getting the word out your toe isn’t very far into the water.
Put up an argument that shows you’ve read something
Ha ha. This from a guy whose knowledge of the commercial seed business comes from one propaganda film full of dicey facts and conclusions. Keep drinking the kool aid.
My argument is that we are well served by corporations such as Monsanto. Research and getting products to market is expensive and difficult. Monsanto has the institutional framework to attract, motivate, and organize the skill set to get this done. They add value to our economy at a faster rate than any other institution or individual.
You seem willing to throw Monsanto under the bus in search of some vague utopia where everyone is happy and equal and there are no side effects. Good luck with that.
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I interviewed a rancher years ago from up around Lewistown, and he was the one who first set me off on the large food companies making ranchers serfs on their own land. They don’t do this because they are bad people – they do it because they want to maximize profits.
Gilles was the guy’s name, I’ve forgotten his last name, but he had an advanced degree in agriculutre and business, and he noted that when a firm in any industry attains even a 20% market share, that they begin to behave like a monopoly, fixing prices, forcing people below them to absorb their costs.
Yes, we get advances from large enterprises, That’s why we allow them to exist – to build economies of scale and reinvest. But we have laws in place to prevent them from becoming too big, as Monsanto has.
You don’t read so well. Montanto is forcing everyone into the fold – even farmers who don’t use their strain of seed have been sued because the seed emigrated onto their land.
Anyway, you would be well-served to see the movie, see Montanto’s response, read the book The Informant, read up on antitrust history, and stop talking out of your ass.
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Your interest in my ass is creeping me out.
Monsanto faces a lot of competitive pressures. Pioneer is on the verge of releasing its Liberty/Hurculex technology which would compete directly with big M’s stuff. This coming year Monsanto will cut the price of its proprietary Roundup herbicide by half, yes by ONE HALF. How many monopolies would do that? Monsanto lost in court over Roundup ready alfalfa, and last month they lost in court over Roundup ready sugar beets.
Monsanto built a better mousetrap, and the world is beating a path to their door. I don’t see any producers complaining about Monsanto, except for the price they add to the seed. Producers pay the price because it is more than worth it: more production at less price, especially in fewer other chemicals sprayed on the crop. Every bit of the pre-Roundup ready seed is still out there for those who want to forgo the evil Monsanto.
Monsanto took some producers to court because the producers did something ILLEGAL. What law has Monsanto broken? Maybe you don’t like the intellectual property law these prosecutions are based on, but the incentives they provide leave us better off in the long run.
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Now we can get into it a little bit, as you’ve done some Googling. There’s not much understanding on the right about monopolies or the need for antitrust laws. The general attitude appears to me to be a) that market forces undermine monopolies, and 2) that we on the left think that corporations are evil.
Market forces can and do prevent monopolies arising in many sectors, but you must understand that large entities know this as well, and dedicate their market strategies to overcoming this natural tendency. Microsoft was legend in this regard, buying up every competitor it could, making sure that its op sys and browser were in every computer sold. You must understand that no one likes markets. The only people who can defeat markets are powerful people. Hence, antitrust legislation, which is enforced only against those companies that have gained such market control that they are no longer subject to market forces.
This was Monsanto’s goal – not to make scientific advances, but to seize control of market sectors, in soybeans, and as you note, in alfalfa (that case is long from over). And I note with interest that you fail to comment on Monsanto’s lawsuits against farmers on whose land the GMO seed had merely migrated with the breeze. Monopolistic, ya think?
Are corporations evil? I don’t know if this is a strawman,or if you really think that we think that way. Regardless, Lord Acton said that “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That is the essence of “corporations are evil” – how people behave when they have power. JRR Tolkein wrote the trilogy of the ring on this very subject.
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“Power corrupts”. I notice you don’t dwell much on the corruption inherent in big government. I think we would do well to suspect both big business and big gov’t, but with business one can usually shop around and avoid the Wal Marts and Microsofts. Governments have the habit of sending people around to find you.
The monopoly power of Monsanto is overblown. I did not comment directly on the prosecution of “windblown seed savers” because these are mainly people trying to get around the intellectual property provisions.
On a more general level much of our economic life can come under “tournament” strategy, or winner take all. The Microsofts work to get all the market share they can, but in that type of market there is a tendency for everyone to implicitly want to adopt one operating system — the classic Beta/VHS battle. So it is just not that Microsoft is evil, but that when things break their way, it goes all the way.
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The problem with your attitude that government enslaves people is that most governments perform useful services for their constituents, and do not enslave them.
I suppose it all comes out of Russia and AYn Rand coming from there and all, but that was a situation much like 1789 where the existing social order broke down and there was nothing to replace it. The worst elements took over.
Something very similar happened in Cambodia with the rise of Pol Pot. The U.S. had destroyed the country, and there was anarchy. The very worst forces rose to power.
That really has no bearing on governance of advanced democratic countries, over even a faux-democratic country like the U.S. We are not under threat of anything like that – we are just debating whether we want to be subject to corporate control, or democratic control.
If markets break up a monopoly, fine. If not, government should. I don’tcare whether they come about naturally, or via coercion or co-optede government, they are bad.
Your pooh-pooh of Monsanto lawsuits of windblown mseed is interersting. Raw,naked corporate abuse of power,OK by you.
And underlying it all is the very notion that one should be able to patent a seed. Again you don’t read well -when that was done by government, via land grant universities, itsimply entered the public domain. The vast number of advances in food production have come via that route. Note taht once a corporation enters the picture, farmers lose rights as power accedes to the corporation.
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That’s dangerous. When government did seed research, tehre was no danger.
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It is not so much bodily enslavement, but the economic type where agents come and take one’s treasure to support the federal patronage business. That makes it hard to shop at another store.
The “useful services” that government’s provide are often a small part of what they do, and come at a high price. The feedback mechanisms are worse in gov’t than in business.
Public research is a fine and noble thing, and it is problematic to allow some genetic manipulations to go proprietary. But we tend to get more innovative products under a private patent regime. It is a utilitarian calculation. I know you like the purity of the Cuban model, but there are other ways to organize the world.
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Public research is far more prevalent than you seem to know. Private corporations are co-opting much of it by taking advantage of underfunded colleges. What used to be public research becomes “intellectual property”.
The “enslavement” you talk about is a right wing kind of meme, the idea that membership in the larger community is a penalty rather than a privilege, that individuals bear no responsibility for the general health and welfare, that a few wealthy people are propping us up. It’s utter nonsense. It is as if you think leaching off the system is a right, and payment into the system a form of legal crime. It’s not only Randian, it’s antisocial….. me me me.
Public services, including research done by government and made available to the private sector for the advancement of commerce, are alive and well all around you. You would not be communicating here without such services …. you know … the Internet?
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You want to push the glories of public research, which is fine, and much research is intertwined. But most of our advances in products and applications comes from for profit businesses: consumer electronics, industrial processes, chemicals, consumer products, auto and machinery.
I agree that the individual has a duty to the whole, such as military service for the greater good. While it is not appropriate to argue with the 2nd Lieutenant about the efficacy of charging up the hill in the heat of battle, in quieter times I don’t have to agree with funding political hacks like ACORN, or funding bridges to nowhere, or bulking up seldom used border crossings in northern MT that supplies work for connected CA contractors. You can’t just tell me it is for the greater good and then elect Barack Obama with his trillion dollar boost in patronage spending and expect me to like it.
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Most of the important advances – aviation, computers, the Internet, the GPS System – are the product of government research, or private research done on the government tab. Fact is that private industry will not invest in things where there is not some promise of future profit. Further, much research that eventually winds up benefiting all of us is the product of military spending.
Spending is spending, by the way. It doesn’t matter whether it is done by government or the private sector save this one thing: Public spending tends to go into projects with longer lasting benefits – highways and schools, as opposed to casinos.
Military spending is mostly wasted, and certainly has nothing to do with defense. There are very few real threats out there, nothing justifying what we spend even slightly. It’s a way of siphoning off our surplus and redirecting it to private investors.
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food is style of living
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Spending is spending, by the way.
We usually (not always) get more bang for our buck in the private sector. Wal Mart puts up a building for a lot less than any gov’t entity. The former Soviet Union had excellent, excellent basic research but their public sector groupies couldn’t spool up the mojo to put it to work for the economy.
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Now you’re ass-pulling again.
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