JP Morgan fleeces public schools out of $12 billion in PA alone...,
2008-04-04 10:04:18
| Main |
Mayor Daley Welcomes You to the City of Chicago...,
2008-04-05 13:42:54
documenting the watching of documentaries:
I was gonna tell you about what I'm watching this evening, but instead you can just watch it yourself:
Technology truly does make life easier.
This one is about Monsanto, the genetically modified food giant and producer of a militarized herbicide that was lethal to Americans but perfectly safe for Vietnamese: alternatively, when Americans were occasionally exposed over the course of the war in Indochina it could be deadly, but if you live for the next 40 years more or less swimming in the stuff it's like vitamin C.
Of the three concerns: human health, patent monopoly, and threats to biodiversity, it's that last one that bothers me the most. Food with genes from non-food breeding with normal food isn't something that's we can just turn around and contain the impact of. If you want to stop enforcing the patents on African subsistence farmers or just stop eating the stuff altogether, that's easy. But as the small and organic farmers who find themselves forced to pay patent rents to Monsanto know, there's no obvious way to pull the recombinant DNA out of the gene pool once it pollutes it.
