A Farmer Weighs In

Well, he got after me, as he sometimes does. Had I been fair? Had I slammed Monsanto without giving the company a chance to defend itself? What if it were true that this technology not only was improving yields but also was capable of doing a host of other things? If, for example, Monsanto could breed a drought-resistant strain of wheat, how beneficial to humanity would that be?

It was in vain to tell him—my long dead father—that Monsanto was hardly likely to take my call. No, he was as persistent in death as he was in life, and so I did what I had always done: sighed and caved.

Right—so who would take my call? Cousin Marshall, I decided. He’s family and a farmer, so it was the work of a moment to call him.

Well, he confirmed what I suspected: yes, he uses Roundup-Ready seeds from Monsanto, which in this case come from a local seed dealer, Dairyland Seed. And yes, he’s seen an increase in his yields; in addition, he’s using much less pesticide / herbicide. Even better, what he’s using is far less toxic—before, he had been using pesticides / herbicides with a low LD 50 (a measure of toxicity, and the lower the LD 50 the more toxic); with Roundup, he doesn’t have to worry about applying near streams and killing fish.

Well, LD 50 was new to me, so I googled it, and discovered that it stood for the lethal dose (LD) of 50 percent of a given population. Right—so I looked that up and discovered that Roundup has an LD 50 of 5,600mg / kg for rats. In short, if you give 5,600 mg / kg to 100 rats, you will kill 50 of them.

Wow—the stuff you learn as a blogger!

All that led to the question: was Roundup really less toxic? The answer—par for the course—is that I don’t know. I can tell you that I went to Table 6 of the Pesticide Safety Fact Sheet; Roundup’s LD 50 seemed to be in the mid-range—there were others with an LD 50 of over 10,000 mg / kg. But what do I know about farming? There may be other factors to consider….

Marshall’s one problem with Roundup? Well, at one point he was farming with both Roundup-ready and with non-Roundup-ready seeds (in other words—regular seeds), and somehow he forgot which was which. So he applied Roundup to one of his fields, with the result…

You could tell it still hurt, so I didn’t tell him, though I was tempted, “typical Newhouse!”

In short, for Marshall, Monsanto has made his life easier. And guess what? Anything that makes a farmer’s life easier is—usually—something I’m all in favor of. Because a farmer’s life is seriously hard, and never more so than today. And so I assured him that I bore him no grudge for using genetically-modified seeds. After all, I well remember the howls I got from people who learned that I worked for Wal-Mart—who am I to talk?

Marshall was then good enough to write an email, in which he pointed out…wait, let him tell it:

Over 90% of the acreage in the Corn Belt is under cultivation using GMO’s (as I stated earlier).  The problem with that scenario is that it represents millions of square miles of a man-made monoculture.  That is not anything you will find in nature anywhere on this planet and not at any time in the past.  Earth’s systems will fight that and will eventually win the battle.  That is already occurring with weeds developing resistance at various places around the country.  As numbers of species of resistant weeds increase and areas infected with these resistant weeds expand, the efficiency of GMO’s (Roundup in this case) always yields to the environment.

Marshall went on to state, “Each GMO breakthrough is a short term solution designed to last a decade or two if the industry is lucky.”

Well—that’s definitely a cause for concern. In short, we’re skirting with disaster, hoping to outwit Mother Nature. Can we sustain that?

If I were a farmer, I might very well do as Marshall has done: join the crowd and grow GMO seeds. The problem? I’m not a farmer, but an eater. And which foods and products have GMO’s? At the moment, I have to assume that they all do—at least until I go onto a site that has a list of GMO-free foods.

As I said yesterday, we have taken part in an experiment without being told that we were guinea pigs. And what have been the consequences? Since I had written about the possibility of GMO foods being linked to autism, I decided to check it out. Here, from the Washington Times, is a comparison of US’ versus Britain’s—which has banned GMO foods—rates of autism:

As of 2010, their article said, autism prevalence rates for 8-year-old British boys was about four cases per 1,000, and 0.8 per 1,000 for British girls. This was essentially the same as in 2004.

By contrast, autism rates for 8-year-old U.S. boys rose from a range of 8.9. to 15.8 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to an average of 18.4 cases per 1,000 in 2008. For U.S. girls, rates went from 1.5 to 3.7 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to four cases per 1,000 in 2008.

Maybe it’s true what Mom always said: you are what you eat!

Monday Morning Bastards

Well, well—Monday morning, and time to find out what all my favorite bastards are doing.

They don’t stop, you see—which is curious, because...aren’t they reading? Aren’t they paying attention? Surely this blog should put the fear of God into at least a few people….

There’s Monsanto, for example, and what, by the way, ever became of that genetically modified wheat that somehow sprang up in a farmer’s field in May of last year? Remember that? An Oregon farmer sprayed the herbicide Roundup on his field, and some wheat plants refused to die. So he sent them off to Oregon State University—which unsurprisingly is quite interested in wheat, since the state sells 700 million bucks of it mostly to Asia—and yup, it was Monsanto’s experimental wheat. And the experiment? It had ended more than a decade before.

Japan suspended purchases of wheat; the USDA guys were scrambling to try to determine how the wheat got there. Then, in a conference call, some Monsanto spokesman came up with an ingenious idea: sabotage. One of those nutty foodies, you see, had snuck into Monsanto—presumably any soul can drift in and out of their facilities, rather like a mall—and copped the wheat. Then, he had gone into a field, planted the seed, and pointed the finger at Monsanto, to tarnish the company’s reputation! Hah! Foiled that dude!

The complete inanity of the explanation was of no importance. What’s important, as anybody in corporate America knows, is that somebody says something. Anything. Whatever….

Because they know—the public forgets. We go on. We worry about North Korea until it’s time to worry about the Crimea, and then, guess what? The North Koreans detonate a nuclear missile and then we all start worrying again.

And so I googled “GMO wheat Oregon,” and was unsurprised to learn: we still don’t know, the story went cold. I did, however, discover the name of the professor who identified the wheat—Carol Mallory-Smith, professor, Weed Science.

Weed Science?

This, I have to say, greatly improves the Monday morning experience. Who knew, for example, that there is the Weed Science Society of America, or the WSSA, which takes its weeds very seriously? And I regret to inform the readers of this blog that I completely screwed up by not informing you guys about National Invasive Species Awareness Week, which was February 23-28. (Though it does seem curious—don’t most weeks have seven days? Or do invasive species move so fast….)

Right—so I have emailed Professor Mallory-Smith, to see if there’s any more information on the Oregon wheat situation; the professor, curiously, has not immediately responded. She may be out in the field; stay tuned.

What else did I find? Well, take a look at this….

And the caption for this photo?

Michael Doane, Monsanto's wheat industry affairs director, looks at growth in a wheat field in an undisclosed location in North Dakota in this undated file photo. (Reuters / Carey Gillam)

And the date of this article? January 15, 2014.

Guys? Who the hell decided to allow Monsanto to test their new GMO wheat in—of all places—a North Dakota field? And why, by the way, did The New York Times publish an opinion piece entitled “We Need G. M. O. Wheat?”

Well, I read it, which turns out to be an op-ed written by guys seriously in bed with the “biotech industry.” One of the authors, in fact, has written a book, The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution—does that tell you the story?

According to the authors, the soybean and corn farmers made the switch to GMO seeds in the 1990’s, and they’ve been happy as Chesapeake Bay clams ever since—enjoying increased yields, using less herbicide, making more money. But those fussy foodies won’t let the biotech industry approve GMO wheat, since 15 percent of it is exported to countries that don’t want the stuff. Oh, and the authors go on to say:

The scientific consensus is that existing genetically engineered crops are as safe as the non-genetically engineered hybrid plants that are a mainstay of our diet.

Whew—what a relief!

Or is it? Because I had been watching a documentary about Monsanto, and something stuck in my mind. So I googled “GMO food autism” and sure enough, there’s a body of research out there—done in admittedly iffy institutions like Harvard and Massachusetts General—that suggest that there may be a link between autism and GMO foods.

Why? It appears that GMO foods cause the intestines to weaken and become inflamed. Here’s what one article had to say:

One of the earliest indications that GMOs might cause GI tract distress was a 1999 study published in the Lancet. After rats were fed experimental GMO potatoes for just 10 days, the cells of the stomach lining and intestines were significantly altered.[¹²]

When California pediatrician Michelle Perro reviewed the study in 2011 and saw the photos of the increased cellular growth and abnormal architecture, she thought to herself, “Uh oh -- we’ve got some problems.” Based on her experience treating children for 30 years, she said, “You can extrapolate that the same thing may be occurring in babies clinically. They are not digesting their food. They are malabsorbing. . . . And I’m seeing that commonly now.” Digestive issues are skyrocketing among her patients. 

Does this gastric distress lead to or cause autism? Nobody knows. What’s more interesting, though, is the research on rats fed GMO. Consider this:

Dr. Irina Ermakova, PhD, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported to the European Congress of Psychiatry in March 2006 that male rats fed GM soy exhibited anxiety and aggression, while those fed non-GMO soy did not [³]. Ermakova reported the same behavior in GM soy-fed female rats and their offspring in her study published in Ecosinform. The animals “attacked and bit each other and the worker."[⁴]

(Far more shocking, however, was that more than 50% of the offspring from the GMO-fed group died within three weeks when compared with a 10% death rate among the group fed natural soy. The GM group also had high rates of infertility and had smaller members.)

In one of his books, Michael Pollan writes of being given GMO potatoes, which he kept for a while. Then the question came up—could he make a potato salad and take it to a pot luck supper? And if so, was he morally obliged to let people know? Pollan eventually tossed the potatoes, and came to the conclusion any sane person would: even if the potatoes were safe, why take a risk?

In fact, we have all taken the risk—everyone who has eaten “normal” food for the last 20 years. And now, one in 68 kids in the US may have autism; in New Jersey, one in 28 boys has autism.

Oh, and the guys who are regulating the “biotech industry?” Unsurprisingly, they’re not even in bed with the industry, they’re in flagrante with them.

It’s a cynical as it is evil.

PS—The good professor came through!

Personhood for Chimpanzees!

Whew—that’s a relief. In the course of sifting and winnowing (all right, a good of scrounging, too) an email dropped into my lap and luck with the news: the bastards are still up to their bastardry.

No surprise, right? What’s surprising is the astonishing breadth and depth of the affair. For it seems that twelve countries—United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei—are getting together to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), a little venture which, according to Julian Assange “would trample over individual rights and free expression.”

Well, he should know, because he released the 30,000-word draft of the document on November 13 of this year, and that was pretty much the first time anybody had any idea what it was all about. Here’s The Guardian—surprise, surprise!—on the issue:

In case you were wondering why we had to get this information from WikiLeaks, it's because the draft negotiating texts are kept secret from the public. Even members of the US Congress and their staff have extremely limited access. Thus the much-maligned WikiLeaks has once again proven how valuable and justified are their efforts to bring transparency to important policy-making that is done in the darkness – whether it is "collateral murder", or other forms of life-threatening unaccountability.

Is it just me, or does anybody else have a knee-jerk reaction to anything done at this level of secrecy? And what, exactly, does the TTP intend to do? The Guardian quotes Public Citizen’s Global TradeWatch:

…set US policy on non-tariff, and indeed not-trade, issues in the context of 'trade' negotiations.

Ummmh?

At least that was my reaction, so I read and then reread and then figured it out—there are some concepts simple guys like me can’t get. So would the answer come later in the article? Quite possibly, and it did. Check this out:

Laws to protect the environment, food safety, consumers (from monopoly pricing), and other public interest concerns can now be traded away in "trade" negotiations. And US law must be made to conform to the treaty.

Well, the email that I got from Alice Jay at Avaaz.org put it a bit more graphically:

Monsanto’s about to celebrate their biggest coup ever, but we’ve got until the weekend to stop them.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a huge, ultra-secret deal among twelve major countries that would give corporations unprecedented power -- allowing them to use new global tribunals to sue our governments for passing laws that protect us, but reduce their profits! This could apply to everything from labeling GMO foods to protecting internet freedom. Wikileaks has broken the story and opposition is building fast, but the countries are rushing to seal the deal in 48 hours.

OK—let me imagine it. The US decides, at long last, to ban genetically altered wheat, since our foreign market doesn’t want the stuff. But Monsanto decides to raise the middle finger, and argues that the ban infringes on their right to make a profit. So they take us to a new global court, and sue us on the basis of this treaty.

All of this, asserts Assange, is an attempt to impose the United States’ strict interpretation of intellectual property rights, under which a seed becomes an idea, as long as you’ve altered its DNA.

Wonderful, isn’t it, what corporations are doing, and what they’ve become. They’re no longer things, or legal concepts—but people. So under Citizens United, corporations, like people, can donate money to political campaigns. Oh, and they can have religions, too, which is why Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supplies will argue this year before the US. Supreme Court that they have the right to not offer certain types of contraception through their employee health plans. Nor, by the way, are these particularly small companies: Hobby Lobby employs over 13, 000 people, Conestoga over 1000.

The following information, by the way, comes from the liberal website Slate.com. But it seems that the sword cuts both ways, because I’ve just read that animal rights activists, citing Citizen’s United, are now looking for jurisdictions that would take the adventurous step of declaring chimpanzees legal persons. (The article was entitled “Seeking Citizen’s United Victory for Chimpanzees”—of course I had to read it….)

Back paddling hard back to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there’s one thing to bear in mind: the process in the US may be fast-tracked. And that is, you ask? The Guardian comes through again:

…fast track, which first began under Nixon in 1974, was not only a usurpation of the US Congress' constitutional authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations".

It also gave the executive branch – which is generally much less accountable to public pressure than the Congress – a means of negating and pre-empting important legislation by our elected representatives.

So what’s our time frame? According to the email which alerted me to the issue, it’s 48 hours.

Here’s the link, dear Reader. You know what you have to do….

    http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_champagne_for_monsanto_loc/?bpRuwbb&v=32155  

A Corporation No Mother Could Love

"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.

Monsanto Marches On

Is there anything this company does that doesn’t piss me off?

Look, I worked for Wal-Mart for seven years, and I still shop at Wal-Mart, even after they laid me off. And yes, they get it wrong sometimes; yes, they do colossally stupid things like tell Joe Biden they’re too “busy” to run up to Washington to talk about gun violence. Then everybody jumps on them and they get a guy out there to do the PR stuff—in short to mop up.

And they could be paranoid. The people from DACO, our local consumer protection department, were in the stores at 4AM every Black Friday, watching us—note that pronoun—like a cat hovering over a fishbowl. So why didn’t they check the local toy stores, my students would complain. “Get over it,” I would say, “it’s the price we pay for being number one.”

I’m trying to tell you—I’m not intrinsically against big business. But I’m finding it hard not to be completely annoyed by Monsanto.

This perhaps won’t make anybody in the corporate office in Creve Coeur, Missouri, wince. But they are, I’m sure, wincing at the news that nine years after testing genetically altered wheat, that same wheat turned up unexpectedly in a farmer’s field in Oregon.

Back up for people just coming in on the story. Monsanto was set up in 1901 by a guy named John Francis Queeny—stop that sniggering out there—and named after his wife’s maiden name. Queeny’s father-in-law, in fact, was Puerto Rican, a wealthy sugar producer in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Queeny’s expertise was in pharmaceuticals, and the company’s first product was saccharine.

Over the years, the company produced mainly chemicals. Then it got into herbicides, and struck it rich with a product called Roundup. Introduced in the ‘70s, it was touted as being completely safe and wonderfully effective at killing anything green.

Monsanto then churned its way into the world of genetically modified seeds. And came up with a brilliant idea—they could make a seed that was resistant to Roundup—their very own product—and sell it to farmers. Then, the farmers would plant the crop, spray the hell out of the field with Roundup, which would kill everything but the Roundup-resistant crop. Think napalm, or maybe Agent Orange.

There were predictable glitches, of course, and those damn fussy Europeans got it into their heads that they didn’t want genetically modified food. And what’s wrong with Canada, normally a quiet, well-behaved country? They don’t want the stuff either. Fine, you say, let ‘em. They can eat whatever they want.

Well, there is a problem—we sell half of our wheat, the world’s largest crop, overseas. And if our trading partners don’t want genetically modified wheat, and especially if they don’t trust us not to be mixing genetically modified wheat into the regular wheat—well, we’re screwed.

And yes, Monsanto was doing testing on genetically modified wheat between 1998 and 2005.

You know what’s coming. A farmer in Oregon was preparing a field that had been lying fallow for the upcoming planting. There were a few stray wheat plants, so he nuked them with Roundup. No luck, try again. And again. So sometime in early May of this year he yanked the plants, which looked identical to regular wheat, and sent them to Oregon State. And yes, they were the genetically modified wheat plants that Monsanto had been testing…

…in 2005.

That’s eight years ago. More, here is the list of states in which the testing took place:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming. 

Seventeen states, over 100 field tests, and all this approved by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Nor is this the first time. Monsanto, according to one report, in the past 13 years has sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, almost always settling out of court (the few farmers that can afford to go to trial are always defeated).

Oh, and what’s the size of the problem? According to the same source, thinkprogress.org:

Organic and conventional seeds are fast becoming extinct — 93 percent of soybeans, 88 percent of cotton, and 86 percent of corn in the US are grown from Monsanto’s patented seeds. A recent study discovered that at least half of the organic seeds in the US are contaminated with some genetically modified material.

So that tofu you’ve been eating virtuously—no Big Mac for you—is likely made with genetically modified soy seed. Is it a problem? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know, but the Europeans, the Canadians have logically decided—why find out? Why be the guinea pigs in Monsanto’s experiment?

All right, let’s turn onto a different, though parallel, street. Remember that stuff, Roundup, that farmers have been dumping on crops since the 70’s? It turns out—it may be making us fat.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) journal Entropy, even small amounts of Roundup can build up over time—one of the researchers compares it to arsenic. There are no effects at first, but then you get sick.

How? Apparently, Roundup contains antibiotic properties, which attack the gastrointestinal microbes that—thanks, guys—digest our food. So that leads to an overgrowth of the pathological bacteria, which in turn leads to absorption problems. So we eat and eat—we don’t feel full.

As well, Roundup interferes with the production of the amino acid tryptophan, which is needed to make the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood and also—get ready—appetite. So I just ate a tuna fish sandwich—am I OK? Have I just gotten a little zap of Roundup? Here’s the author of the study on the subject:

 “If you are eating the typical Western non-organic diet that includes anything made from corn, soy, canola, wheat, sugar (both cane and sugar beet), cottonseed oil, sunflower, carrots, okra, potatoes, lentils, beans, and peas, or meat, then you’re almost certainly consuming glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup),” notes Samsel.

Still want to defend Monsanto? Consider the list of products made by this wonderful company:

1.     Saccharine

2.     PCBs

3.     Polystyrene

4.     Plutonium for the A bomb

5.     DDT

6.     Dioxin

7.     Agent Orange

8.     Petroleum based fertilizer

9.     Roundup

10.  Aspartame

11.  Bovine Growth Hormone

12.  Genetically modified organisms

Sure is quiet around here….