"Our work in wheat is focused on helping improve wheat productivity, including breeding, biotechnology and improved agronomic practices," said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles in a statement.
This sentence says it all, but no, not in the way Monsanto would like. Notice the curious expression, “helping improve wheat productivity.”
First question—helping whom? The wheat? The farmer? The greater good?
Second question—at what is wheat being productive? I sort of know what I do, which is get up, write some stuff, teach a few classes, and hope vainly (and formerly secretly) one day to go viral. But what does wheat do?
The questions go on and on. I knew, though I prefer not to think too much about the matter, that cattle breed—but wheat? And if wheat does breed, do cattle then pollinate? And what’s the deal with the “biotechnology and improved agronomic practices?”
Spokesmen are supposed to speak, which implies communication, but this is a classic example of a sentence that says absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s utter gibberish—which would be OK, if it were spoken. We had a president recently who spent eight years falling into one sentence and then scrambling to get out the other end. It was agonizing to watch, although it also could be amusing. Once, during one of the debates, I was present in a large room of University of Wisconsin students as Bush tried to come to the end of a sentence. He paused, trying to find some light in the dimness of his brain, and the group collectively held its breath. Then a whispered question from somewhere in the room: “is he stoned?”
But the “in a statement” up there at the end of the first paragraph makes me believe that this is not spoken, but a press release. And that’s standard—would you want to be Lee Quarles and have to explain face to face what a genetically modified wheat plant was doing in an Oregon field a decade after your company had stopped testing it?
So the question is, is it intentional gibberish or unintentional? My first instinct was unintentional—the corporate mindset had so settled in Quarles’s psyche that he was first, incapable of logical thought, and second, completely convinced that wheat could breed, use technology, or improve agronomic practices.
Now, I think it was intentional. And I think he must be chortling, up there in Missouri. It’s fun, you know, to practice this bit of mercurial foolishness with the language. I do it frequently, and for the same reasons as Quarles.
Raf (peering inside the refrigerator): Who drank the beer?
Marc (practicing for his mayoral bid): First of all, I’d like to thank you for that question, and to say that it’s citizens like you: ordinary men and women, people who get up in the morning and put on their clothes and feed the kids and go to work, you ordinary, good, decent men and women who form the background of our community—it’s people like you, unafraid to ask the hard questions….
Raf (flatly): You drank the beer.
Marc (unstoppable): I’m calling today for an independent, bipartisan commission…
Raf (walks away in disgust)
Repeat that twice a week for thirty years and you have a fair sampling of my marital life. And I am sure that Quarles can do it better than I, since I focus most of my time on writing short and lucid, as opposed to long and opaque. Quarles, on the other hand, spends fifty or sixty hours a week doing just the opposite.
And I hope they pay him well, because he’s gonna be a busy little bee, as things heat up. A Kansas wheat farmer, wonderfully by the name of Barnes, has filed suit against Monsanto, and so we get the following statement.
"Tractor-chasing lawyers have prematurely filed suit without any evidence of fault and in advance of the crop's harvest," said David Snively, Monsanto executive vice president and general counsel.
Right, it might be Snively—and is Dickens making up these names?—who “said” it, but it has Quarles all over it. Notice the nice shift: it’s not the good farmer, standing in his field. No, no—Monsanto is smarter than that! Can you imagine a photo of Barnes standing alone in his field, mopping his brow, squinting into the camera, standing against the wheat field that rolls endlessly and perhaps genetically modifiedly into the distance? And then a picture of the home office of Monsanto? Nope, let’s not go after the farmers, who are anyway Monsanto’s customers / pawns. So Quarles gets Snively to say it’s the lawyers—who rank a bit lower than farmers on the lovability quotient—and then he gets a spark of genius!
I see Quarles in his office—a large windowless affair—sitting before his computer, wondering how to give this sentence a spin. “Tractor-chasing,” whispers the muse, who then goes off to smoke a cigarette. Quarles grins—she’s never let him down yet.
And Quarles may also have to deal with this, one day:
An amendment inserted into the 2013 Farm Bill passed by the House of Representatives' Agriculture Committee Wednesday would revoke the ability of individual states' lawmakers to pass GMO-labeling laws, food advocates warn.
What does this mean? Well, suppose a liberal, agricultural state like Vermont decides to pass a law requiring that all food sold in the state have a label, saying This product contains genetically modified food products. Would you buy it? Of course not, why should you?
And Monsanto knows that. So we’re going to have a federal law that says that states have no right to require that food is labeled as GMO, or (presumably) even GMO-free.
Now then, did Monsanto actually come out and say, “hey look, we don’t want you to know what’s in the potato salad?” Nope, they got an Iowa representative, Steve King and shame on you, to tweak it as the PICA—Protect Interstate Commerce Act. This isn’t about labeling, this is about interstate commerce, see?
One wonders—was it Quarles who dreamed up the name? Perhaps so, because one critic of the act, Heather White, noted a stylistic similarity:
"This impenetrable language simply means that states would be prevented from regulating just about any agricultural product in commerce," White wrote, adding that, "This sweeping provision would severely undermine all states’ authority to set standards for environmental protection, food safety or animal welfare. It would apply to genetically engineered food labeling, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) regulation, antibiotics use in meat and other local and state food and farm regulations."
It’s one thing to drink all the beer—that’s inadvisable but forgivable. But to modify all the food, threaten a billion dollar wheat market (Japan and Korea have just announced they’re not buying American wheat), and then turn around and sneak a bill into a farm act that would prevent anyone from knowing what they’re putting in their mouths, or —God forbid—their children’s mouths?
Unforgivable.
