You Are What You Eat

It's one of those days where I question the value of human existence. No, really.

I'd like to say that my disillusionment comes from having very high hopes, but I think my expectations of human rationality and goodness are fairly reasonable. I might err on the side of demanding too much, but how do you achieve anything without that? It's not like my standards are such that we are all doomed to failure.

We're doomed, but at least it's not on my account.

Maybe I'm the last kid on the block, but do you know about bioengineering in agriculture (also called Genetically Engineered, or GE, or Genetically Modified, GM foods)? It's almost like the illegal diamond trade, or multinational corporations outsourcing labor to third world sweatshops, or a US government 911 conspiracy, but it's worse. It's more like all three put together.

For starters, check out this documentary. It got me back into the goddamn liberal-fascist organic food co-op - something I swore to myself I would never do because those people...!

Let's just put it this way:
Farmers lose money on every bushel they produce. The US government subsidizes only specific crops. These happen to be the most marketable crops (corn, wheat, soy, canola) and they also happen to be the crops that a company called Monsanto engineers to be pesticide resistant.
Interestingly enough, Monsanto also manufactures the pesticides. They also own the patent for the GE seeds, so even if a crop is accidentally planted, or even cross-polinated with the progeny of Monsanto GE seeds, the corporation technically owns those plants. They even enforce this by trespassing on farmers' property and taking samples of their crops. Farmers suspect that they do this based on the size of their output.
Unlike other food additives, agribusiness has lobbied successfully to prevent the labeling of foods with GE ingredients. This means that, even if health problems are caused by the introduction of GE food products into human consumption, there is no way that any fault can be attributed to the engineered foods, and thus the corporations responsible for them.
The latest in GE technology is the Growth Termination Gene. This is a self-destruct genetic modification that causes sterility in the seeds/grain produced after the first generation of plants. So, unlike in the old days when farmers would hold a certain percentage of their grain to plant the next year's crops, this "suicide gene" will force farmers to buy new seeds for planting every year. This is happening worldwide, despite widespread popular rejection of GE foods.

Just wait, there's more...