Well, shit. The bee arrival is delayed a week. It’s also been too windy to finish the greenhouse; although it is now positioned in the garden, the door and the window are on, and I’ve staked it down. But maybe with the bee delay and a smile from the wind gods I can get that done this weekend. Other than that, the only thing that’s going on right now is that I seem to be coming down with my annual cold.

Those of you who have been around awhile may remember last year’s bout with the viral inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. I was new to town and, epidemiologically speaking, fresh meat. I thought I was going to die. No, really. I came this close to calling 911. The only thing that stopped me was weighing the choice between dying and ending up in the U.S. Health Care System. Unfortunately there was no door number three. The good thing that came out of it was that I had a dream which became the seed for my short story Apotheosis; a story that I am quite fond of.

Something similar happened this morning, but because my fever had not yet (and at this point still hasn’t) reached the temperature required for creative deliria, the result is somewhat more mundane: I was thinking, in my pre-dawn discomfort, if you all ever did get serious and elect me king: What is the first thing I would do?

I was surprised how easy the answer was.

The very first thing I would do is take Monsanto (“Spray it until it dies.”); Dupont (“Better living through chemistry.”); and Bayer (“Oh, you liked aspirin? Wait until you try heroin.”); and remove them from the face of the Earth.

Maybe not the whole company, but the agricultural divisions.

Now, lest you feel that I’m going all granola-head-Birkenstock on you in preparation for the annual Green Festival, I want to state unequivocally that this has absolutely nothing to do with the health of the planet, or “organic” being better than “synthetic” (an idea I have already debunked), or even that Monsanto might be the Devil’s own corporation. This, as usual, is all about me.

Okay, it can be about you too. But just this once.

Here’s why. Right now we (if you live in the U.S. or our subservient proxy to the north) are all unwittingly taking part in the largest uncontrolled medical experiment in history. Daily you are being tested to ascertain the effects of long term exposure to agricultural chemicals and synthetic life forms. This experiment is so far reaching that it makes the post-World War Two Army radiation and chemical warfare test scandals look like a summer-camp prank. The experiment is proceeding on two fronts.

First, Monsanto, in its rush to sell even more of its flagship herbicide Roundup, has gone down the genetic engineering pathway to make crops that are resistant to Roundup’s main ingredient (glyphosate if you’re interested). They do this by changing the genetic structure of the crop plant by inserting a gene from a resistant organism which passes that resistance to the crop plant.

At this point it doesn’t seem too bad. I mean, humans have been mucking around with plant genetics creating hybrids and interspecies crosses for millennia. The difference in the case of Monsanto is that the organism being crossed isn’t a plant at all, it’s a bacterium. Just by chance they found a colony of bacteria living in the waste tank at the factory where they make Roundup. Monsanto’s scientists were able to identify and clone the gene that allowed these bugs to survive and that gene was inserted into another type of bacteria which had the ability to infect corn plants at the cellular level. After multi-thousands of these infections, one took, and Roundup Ready corn was born.

This first success was itself cloned and that one plant is the source of all of the Roundup Ready corn. Everywhere. Not willing to rest on its laurels, Monsanto has gone on and made Roundup Ready soybeans, canola, cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, soybeans, and they’re working on wheat. This technology has been so successful, and Monsanto has been so aggressive at enforcing its patent that currently over 85% of the corn – and a higher percentage of soybeans – grown in the U.S. is Roundup Ready.

This means, in a nutshell, that an estimated 70% of the food you eat – from soda to Doritos – contain genetically engineered ingredients. Or, if you are having an “all whole foods” meal, possibly even more.

It seems Monsanto is also using genetic techniques to introduce all manner of pest and disease resistance to the seeds its various vegetable seed companies produce. Pretty soon even your Caesar salad will be dressed with a hearty GMO.

But you’ll never see the “Monsanto” brand on you broccoli. Monsanto buys seed companies and sells the seed it develops through those companies. So now you can chow down on all manner of bacteria, viruses, and animals in your veggies; all without your knowledge because, in the U.S. at least, none of this is required to be labeled on the product.

It may surprise you that this doesn’t bother me so much; one way or another, humans have been messing with plant genomes for millennia without too many ill effects. If we could get GMO crops and products to be labeled then nobody would buy them which would take care of the consumer end. Remember, GMO potatoes were used in McDonald’s fries until somebody figured that out. Now Monsanto doesn’t even make potatoes anymore. The real problem with GMO is a hubris thing. We don’t really know how genetics works and weed plants, being the promiscuous little monsters that they are, have already figured out how to incorporate these marvelous new genes into their own cells and, at the current time, about eleven Roundup resistant weed species are known in the U.S. From that perspective it’s a self-limiting technology which, if you will pardon the pun, has already sown the seeds of its own demise.

But this is getting people thinking about what the farmers will now have to spray on the new franken-weeds to keep them under control in the future.

The top candidates: 2,4-D; AKA Agent Orange.

Oops.

No, what really worries me is the switch from topical pesticides to systemic pesticides.

Yawn!

Exactly. That’s what DuPont and Bayer Cropsciences want your reaction to be.

In the history of synthetic pesticides, which only dates to about 1947, the chemists formerly responsible for developing nerve gas during the Second World War were out of work and needed something to do. So they got jobs and started putting out all manner of nerve-agent based insecticides that took out the bugs but didn’t kill a lot of people. I mean, you could drink DDT. There were some collateral effects which ended up getting the stuff banned but basically all of these chemicals worked by getting on the bug, and making its nerves stop working. Just like the Raid you keep on your shelf.

So, the Environmentalists get involved. They convince the nerve gas chemists to stop spraying poison all over everything. The ever-vigilant chemists looked to the trusty tobacco plant for help. Tobacco contains nicotine which messes with insects’ (and humans’) neural pathways too. The chemists started with nicotine and created neonicotinoids – neonics for short. These chemicals, at very low doses, cause nerve damage in bugs (they have been implicated in the honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder) which keeps them from eating the plants. Plus there is no spraying, plants just suck it up through their roots.

This is corn seed. But it’s pink! Very good. Corn for the most part is kind of yellowish but this corn has been coated with the pink neonic Gaucho. The seed germinates, the roots suck up the Gaucho, and every cell in the plant contains a tiny little bit of nicotine based nerve agent.

Let that settle in for a second.

That’s right, pretty much every bite of food you eat contains some poison; a poison that doesn’t wash off. The plants are poisonous so the bugs will stop bothering them. Those plants, in turn become food for us, and maybe even more importantly, food for other things we eat. And, as you no doubt remember from Silent Spring, poisons are concentrated as they move up the food chain to the top.

Which is us.

Back to the experiment. All of these major changes in agriculture have taken place under the radar and protected by massive lobbying efforts by the companies involved. There are no long-term tests on the effects of either GMO food or on systemic pesticide exposure. The pesticide tests so far have all been lethal-dose experiments but nobody really knows what the long-term effects are of us or beneficial insects, like the bees, ingesting these poisons at sub-lethal levels. We’ll find out sooner or later but recent studies have found some major behavioral changes in bees, those little bugs which are responsible for one out of three bites of food you eat. Some of you are thinking: Well, nicotine affects the human nervous system. It’s one of the most addictive substances on the planet. So why don’t these chemicals affect us?

They might. The answer is we just don’t know.

Now we have Roundup Ready crops; and Roundup Ready weeds. We have systemic pesticides; and, already, resistant pests. Next up: Genetically modified animals. You laugh, but the approval of genetically modified salmon has been in process for a couple of years. They supposedly taste great, grow fast, and are unable to reproduce in the wild. And what do you think they feed these predators of the sea?

Corn.

This is a slippery slope we’re sliding down. For the most part the damage has already been done but there’s a place to start, at least on the GMO side, to address the issue: require labeling of foods. Follow this link and let the FDA know that you want to know what you’re eating.

It worked for the potatoes in McDonald’s fries so it might just work for corn too.