MonsaaaaaaaaantoooooooooOOOOOooooo

45 minutes ago we returned from Food Inc.

I realized the desire to eat a hamburger is a mistake. Someone in a company planted that desire inside my head with a machine that was originally modeled to fill Twinkies and, in the future, will build T-1000s.

I realized that my dreams are going to be more frightening tonight than when I watched Alien at age 10 or when I was visited by a man with a cane and a top hat.

I realized that, according to Michael Pollan, my whole lifestyle is funding the dark side and it tears me up inside like a Tyson chicken breast.

However, perhaps the most shocking thing I saw on screen was this monstrous company stalking soybean farmers called Monsanto. Little is known of the mysterious company, but it is all around us. It owns us... it is us!

Monsanto has the craziest wikipedia history, so crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if it was made up by a crazy vegan computer-science student.

I'll offer a quick Monsanto recap:

founded in St. Louis in 1901 dabbling in artificial sweeteners, caffeine and something called vanillan.
The company starts making all kinds of crazy shit: in the 40s was plastics then came herbicides including DDT and Agent Orange. Monsanto became a top 10 chemical company all the while making things such as NutraSweet and food flavoring. Then, in the 80s, Monsanto goes from being a huge chemical company to a huge bio-tech company when it realizes it can patent a soybean seed that is immune to Round Up (a Monsanto product). Monsanto then sells these beans to farmers and disallows them to reseed the beans they buy and sues farmers for patent infringement.

That is the main story Food Inc. runs with. The film shows a few farmers being bankrupt by the shrewd Monsanto, while others (forced to mask their identities) are blacklisted from purchasing any Monsanto products.

The company seemed so villainous I thought maybe the films tactics were over-dramatizing the situation. Then I read a bit more of the wikipedia... Perhaps the most baffling fact is one more frightening than getting caught in a mutant spiderweb. Monsanto owns the patent for a product called The Terminator Seed. It is a seed that, when planted, the plant will produce sterile seeds, so the farmer is forced to re-buy seeds the following year. The main fear is that these sterile genes will spread to wild plants through pollination terminating all plantlife.

If storytelling has taught me anything, these guys are bad, and will eventually destroy us all when they discover a way to patent air molecules and sue marathon runners for using more of their product than they paid for. Then, once there are no more marathon runners to sue, they'll sue airplane companies for abusing their product, then bakers because they own the bread if it is baked using Monsanto patented air molecules. Then, when they stop supplying air, and people can only live in renegade underwater bubble cities supplied by soot spurring volcanic faults on the ocean floor, and everyone is constantly covered in volcanic ash and chronically coughing from the stubborn volcano air, a grandfather will tell his granddaughter about lost days of sunshine and free fresh air and soybeans that you could pick and plant without a lawyer handing you a paper and taking away your farm... But his granddaughter will be asleep dreaming of being allowed to marry a dolphin and raise a dolphin family.