CHAPTER 2
Seed Saving as a Political Act
One January morning I sat at the kitchen table—the heart of our community and most others—with two of the people I live with, Daz’l and Laurel, figuring out which seeds we wanted to order for the coming growing season. This annual session of pouring over the catalogs together is something I have often dreaded, because it is the most consumeristic moment of the gardening experience. Glossy photos and seductive descriptions can whip folks into a buying frenzy, ordering more seeds than they’ll ever get around to planting. In the past we’ve attempted to be systematic, comparisonshopping from a dozen different catalogs.
Somehow this year was lower-key. Daz’l had sorted through our seed stash, cleaned it up, and inventoried what we had. We put aside the stack of glossy catalogs and mostly ordered from a single supplier, Fedco, a worker-cooperative seed company in Waterville, Maine, whose catalog is black and white on simple newsprint. We decided which varieties to order largely based on the catalog’s notations of which were raised by small-scale seed growers versus those supplied by large corporations.
When our seeds arrived a few weeks later, the package contained a letter from Fedco staff member CR Lawn, dated January 25, 2005:
Dear Seed Lover,
The day of reckoning was bound to come. We watched the increasing consolidation of the seed industry for years, wondering when it would next adversely affect us. This morning we heard that Monsanto, the bête noire of multinational genetic engineers, is buying out Seminis, the world’s largest vegetable seed company with annual sales of over a half billion dollars. This creates a real ethical dilemma for us. We, and you who buy from us, are heavily dependent upon Seminis, particularly for top-notch hybrids. We carry sixty Seminis varieties, most available from no one else, including top sellers. . . . We have long opposed Monsanto because of their aggressive advocacy of genetic engineering. . . . Now we have to decide whether to drop the Seminis varieties. . . . If we drop them, our selection, particularly of hybrid melons, summer squash, peppers, and tomatoes, will be devastated. If we keep them, some of us may have trouble living with ourselves. . . .
Dependence upon ever-growing corporate entities for something as basic as seed is not pretty. Alfonso Romo Garza, the billionaire who masterminded the consolidation of Seminis prior to its sale to Monsanto, bragged to the Wall Street Journal: “Seeds are software. And we have the seeds.”1 That would now make Monsanto the Microsoft of food. Do we really want to be that dependent on a single corporation for our “operating system”?
Monsanto and the nine next largest seed corporations control more than half of the world’s commercial seed supply.2 “What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies,” explains Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, “it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”3 Fedco decided to drop Monsanto’s seeds and announced in its 2006 catalog that the company was “getting off the seed grid. . . .We do so because Monsanto epitomizes the road down which we no longer choose to go . . . the road that leads to our complete surrender of control of our seed and therefore of control of our food system.”
Intellectual Property Laws, Genetic Pollution, and Biodiversity
Expansion of the legal concept of intellectual property underlies corporate control of seeds. Intellectual property law deals with proprietary interests in innovations such as inventions, as well as abstractions such as words, ideas, sounds, and images. Over the past few decades, laws around the world have been rewritten to protect the intellectual property rights of plant breeders, allowing breeds to be patented and constraining ways in which farmers may sell, trade, give away, and even plant saved seeds. “Quite clearly a monopolistic patent regime cannot be established as long as farmers have the alternative of their own zero cost, reliable, time-tested, high-value seeds of their traditional varieties of indigenous agro-biodiversity,” points out Vandana Shiva.4 What has traditionally been viewed as a natural right—saving seed as an integral element of local agricultural practice—is being transformed by globalizing corporate interests into a legally granted (or denied) privilege.
In order to prevent farmers from “cheating” the patent holders by saving and replanting seed, the seed industry, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), has developed what is known as “terminator” technology, seeds that generate self-sterilizing plants. The disclosure of this technology in 1998 created an international furor. For now, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has imposed an international moratorium on terminator technology, but it has been repeatedly challenged.5 The technology exists, and those who stand to profit from it are likely to persist.
“Biotechnology essentially aims to eliminate sexuality as a means of passing on genetic material,” contends Peter Lamborn Wilson. “Capital has now reached the theoretical stage of commodifying the life process itself. The principle of intellectual ownership of nature—the final enclosure—seems to have become the basis for the global world order and its economy.”6
Increasingly, national governments and other, even less accountable, international regulatory institutions have been imposing plant-breed protection laws that deny the traditional right to perpetuate seed. “Farmers can’t believe this is happening,” says Terry Pugh, executive secretary of Canada’s National Farmer’s Union. “There are no benefits for farmers.”7 Profit-driven laws written to favor monopoly control, globalized markets, and economies of scale are attempting to supplant the ancient practice of saving seed, one of the foundations of agriculture and a tradition more central to culture and survival than even the rule of law. What choice does a life- and freedom-loving person have but to assert this natural right, even at the risk of violating the law?
The earliest legal expression of plant-breed ownership came into existence in the 1960s with the formation of the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties. The rationale was to offer greater financial incentives for creative plant breeding. This international agreement created a registry of certified plant varieties, with registration criteria being qualities of distinctness, uniformity, stability, and novelty. In the United States, the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act established specific ownership rights over seeds. In the original law, farmers were permitted to save enough of patent-protected seeds to plant their own land or to sell that amount of seed to a neighbor. A 1994 amendment prohibited the sale of any farmer-saved seed unless the variety owner granted permission. In addition, many jurisdictions around the world now prohibit any sale of seeds lacking government certification.
Increasingly in recent decades, farmers have been prosecuted for illegally exchanging seed they have saved. German organic farmer Josef Albrecht bred his own adapted variety of wheat, which he grew and sold to neighbors, until he was fined by the German government for the crime of selling seed that had not been certified for sale. Similarly, the exchange of seed potatoes among farmers was outlawed in the United Kingdom in 1995 by a court decision in which a Scottish farmer was fined £30,000 to cover royalties lost to the seed industry by direct farmer-to-farmer exchange.8 In Canada, the Supreme Court affirmed the guilt of canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, prosecuted not for illegally exchanging seed but rather for saving and using his own seed, just as he had for the previous fifty years and as his father had before him. (We’ll talk more about Percy’s story later in this chapter.)
Understandings of what can be patented have grown rapidly with recent advances in genome sequencing. Genes and cell lines have been patented, as have even theoretical genetic crosses. Many biological creations, commonly held and freely shared up until now, are being claimed as private property. Activists have coined a descriptive term to describe this practice: biopiracy. The Coalition Against Biopiracy defines biopiracy as “the monopolization (usually through intellectual property) of genetic resources and traditional knowledge or culture taken from peoples or farming communities who have developed and nurtured those resources. Biopiracy includes bioprospecting, patents on nature (genes and molecules) and the trademarking of cultural knowledge.”9
The Enola bean provides a clear example of biopiracy. In 1999 a U.S. patent was issued for this bean, which was later proven to be genetically identical to a preexisting Mexican yellow bean variety, one that had been previously known and grown in the United States. But meanwhile, yellow beans were stopped at the border, and the patent owner filed lawsuits against seed companies providing this seed and farmers growing this bean in the United States, charging patent infringement.
Following intervention from international agricultural institutions, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reviewed the patent, and after years of study, in 2005 the patent was rejected. “The real crime is that, despite the legal challenge, the U.S. patent system has allowed the patent owner to use bureaucratic delays and diversion to legally extend his exclusive monopoly on a bean variety of Mexican origin for over six years (and potentially more)—that’s nearly one-third of the twenty-year patent term,” says ETC Group. “In essence, the system enables holders of unjust patents to monopolize markets and destroy competition.”10 And despite its rejection, the Enola patent remains in force pending further appeal.
Plant and seed patents are no longer an issue of sovereign prerogative. The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (1986–1994), in which the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created, “set a milestone on the road towards the privatization of living matter,” observed the Biotechnology and Development Monitor. “It puts developing countries under the obligation to protect plant varieties by patents or by an alternative . . . system.”11 “The State is under siege,” says Vandana Shiva.12 Seed patent laws are being forced on people everywhere by the WTO. The WTO’s 1994 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) treaty requires new intellectual property rights in the area of plant genetic resources. “Free trade” demands it.
Vandana Shiva has written about recent legislative efforts to bring India’s laws into compliance with TRIPS by allowing for the first time there the patenting of seeds, plants, and other life forms. “Patents on seeds transform seed saving into an ‘intellectual property crime,’” she observes. “This shift is associated with a transformation of farmers as breeders and reproducers of their own seed supply to farmers as consumers of proprietary seed from the seed industry. It is also a shift from a food economy based on millions of farmers as autonomous producers to a food system controlled by a handful of transnational corporations which control both inputs and outputs.”13
All the nations of the world, like India, face pressure to conform to the new intellectual property regime, but Iraq’s patent laws hold the distinction of having been revised by edict early in the U.S. occupation, evidently as an important step toward “democratic self-rule.” In the spring of 2004, Paul Bremer, at the time the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, issued Order 81, “Patent, Industrial Design, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law.” The law extends patent protections to seeds and plants, legalizes genetically modified (GM) crops in Iraq, and prohibits farmers from saving seed from protected varieties. The order’s introduction explains that it is necessary for Iraq’s “transition from a non-transparent centrally planned economy to a free market economy.”14 Isn’t the free market so free!
Investigative journalist Greg Palast obtained an internal State Department document from February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion, that included seed and plant patents as part of the U.S. economic agenda in Iraq. “This is likely history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws,” wrote Palast.15 The plot gets thicker. The war devastated most Iraqi agricultural research centers and seed stocks, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).16 The now notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners, was previously home to Iraq’s national seed bank and research facilities.17 War-related damage and looting “has resulted in the loss of almost all generations of seeds of all crops,” reports the FAO. “Moreover, much seed expertise was lost during the conflict.” In Afghanistan, too, seed storage facilities were destroyed during the U.S. invasion. It appears from these facts that an element of the U.S. military agenda is to disrupt agricultural self-sufficiency and create dependency on the high-tech global seed market, while imposing the legal framework to permanently disempower local farmers.
As a practical matter, for plant patents to be meaningful, patented varieties must be consistent and uniform. Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney observe that “this kind of uniformity and the ongoing quest for greater and greater uniformity pleases both lawyers and pests, and is yet another factor contributing to the narrowing of the genetic base of our crops.”18 Crop uniformity leads to vulnerability to pests and diseases and now, when it involves genetically engineered traits, to genetic pollution.
Genetic pollution is fundamentally different from our more familiar notion of chemical pollution in that it is not a fixed quantity that is unleashed; instead, GM seeds self-replicate, and their genetic material spreads and proliferates. “A single molecule of DDT remains a single molecule or degrades,” explains plant geneticist Norman C. Ellstrand. “But a single crop [gene] has the opportunity to multiply itself repeatedly through reproduction, which can frustrate attempts at containment.”19 The insidious engineered genes are spread easily, by pollinating bees and by the wind, and by commingling in huge processing and storage facilities, as well as by human error and manipulations.
Herbicide resistance is the most widespread GM trait so far. The biggest GM crops to date are those, like canola, that Monsanto has manufactured as “Roundup Ready,” augmented with a gene enabling it to tolerate the herbicide Roundup, also marketed by Monsanto. But genetic drift is a pervasive reality. Whatever diversity existed among regional heirloom canola varieties in Canada is being rapidly homogenized by the Roundup Ready gene. Rene Van Acker of the University of Manitoba has found canola with Roundup Ready genes in ditches, schoolyards, and city lots; she found that even the purest, certified nongenetically engineered canola now contains up to 4.9 percent Roundup Ready material.20 And researchers have identified weeds that have acquired the engineered genes for herbicide resistance, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the herbicide used to treat the herbicideresistant crops.21
The very recombinant nature of genetic modification makes some scientists worry that the engineered genes are very likely to spread. “If you design genetically modified DNA to jump into genomes and to overcome species barriers,” says geneticist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, “then there is a chance that this DNA can . . . get into other unrelated species . . . to make new combinations.”22
This process of widespread genetic contamination is happening to the wild teosinte of Mexico, the progenitor of corn in the place where corn was first domesticated. In Iraq, it’s likely to happen to the wild precursors of wheat and barley indigenous to the Fertile Crescent, another of several places where civilizations built upon grain agriculture emerged. The contamination of wild progenitor plant populations leaves the crops humans have bred from these wild plants with a huge vulnerability to diseases. When diseases have ravaged cultivated varieties—as they have with increasing regularity as monoculture food production has replaced integrated subsistence farming—the solutions have repeatedly been found in the genetic diversity of the wild ancestors of the cultivars. Contamination of the ancestor populations by bioengineered genes contributes to their uniformity and diminishes their genetic diversity, reducing the gene pool from which to draw characteristics such as disease resistance.
Contamination of indigenous corn varieties in Mexico with GM genes was first documented by Ignacio Chapela, a Mexican-born professor of environmental science at the University of California at Berkeley. The Mexican government subsequently identified contaminated corn in many different locations—but not before Chapela’s research had been attacked. The prestigious journal Nature, which published his report, came under enormous pressure and took the unprecedented step of publishing a partial retraction—the first retraction in its history—to distance itself from Chapela’s controversial findings. Chapela was also denied tenure at Berkeley, despite enthusiastic campus support (though as a result of protests and lawsuits, the administration ultimately granted him tenure). His experience suggests that the institutions of science are not hospitable environments these days for a scientist willing to let the facts contradict a corporate funding agenda.
In the growing field of “biopharming,” bioengineers are genetically modifying plants to be vehicles for the production of proteins for pharmaceutical use, hoping to produce antibodies to HIV, SARS, and tuberculosis and many other proteins with potentially promising medical applications. The risk of genetic contamination carries especially high stakes in biopharming, because the genes used to produce these biopharmaceuticals, some active at mere billionths of a gram,23 could be very dangerous if they were to accidentally enter the food supply or the seed supply. This almost happened in 2002 when experimental GM corn plants containing a pig vaccine were accidentally mixed with 30 million pounds of soybeans. All the soybeans had to be destroyed, and the company responsible for the mishap, ProdiGene, required a government bailout to pay $3 million in cleanup costs and fines.
Ventria Biosciences is gearing up for the largest commercial pharmaceutical planting to date: two hundred acres of GM pharmaceuticalproducing rice crops in Missouri, with plans for twenty-eight thousand acres in the future. Widespread opposition from Missouri’s conventional rice farmers (and their largest single customer, beer maker Anheuser-Busch) stopped Ventria from planting in 2005, but it persists in seeking the required permits. “There will be drugs in breakfast cereals sooner or later,” predicts Craig Winters of the Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods. “Those genes can’t be recalled and they would be nearly impossible to clean up.”24 Even though engineering nonfood plants to produce biopharmaceuticals would be much safer, simply because they are further removed from the food supply, the industry prefers corn and rice and other food plants because they are ideal for producing high volumes of proteins.
No one really has any idea of just how pervasive genetic contamination really is. Besides the GM food crops already approved for commercial production (in the United States, that’s soy, corn, cotton, canola, Hawaiian papaya, zucchini, and crookneck squash), there are more than one hundred other GM species, not yet approved for human consumption, that have been in field trials since 1987. “About forty-thousand test sites covering approximately half a million acres are virtually unregulated,” writes Jeffrey M. Smith, the author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette. “Several are reported to have contaminated non-GM crops, but the overall extent of contamination is unknown and potentially widespread.”25
Among the many exotic GM crops in development is rice with human liver genes, which are intended to enable the plants to digest pesticides, so that more pesticides can be “safely” used. This and other experimental GM crops contain genes that are considered confidential and proprietary, so there is little information available about which genes are being tested. “Because of the secrecy behind experiments in the United States, no one—not food companies, not even governments—will be able to test food products or food imports for contamination because they won’t know what to test for,” warned Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe when the United States proposed safety regulations for experimental GM crops—regulations that failed to include testing of neighboring crops for contamination or any threshold limit for contamination.26
Genetic pollution makes it hard for anyone to be sure exactly what they are growing. Percy Schmeiser, a seventy-five-year-old Saskatchewan canola farmer, was saving seed just as he had for more than fifty years and just as his father had done before him. He wasn’t an organic farmer or an ideologue. His farming practice was in every way conventional. All he did was continue doing things the way he always had, saving seed from the crop he produced every year, which cost nothing, rather than buying seed.
The Monsanto corporation manufactures a GM type of canola seed designated Roundup Ready, meaning that it is designed to tolerate the herbicide Roundup, which Monsanto also manufactures. Before it entered into the GM seed business, Monsanto was known primarily as a chemical manufacturer. The company was looking to diversify into something wholesome, such as feeding people, after hugely damaging scandals over two of its products—the defoliant Agent Orange and polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, which are used in electrical equipment; both had been found to be environmental toxins linked to epidemics of cancer and many other health problems.
Some of Percy Schmeiser’s Saskatchewan neighbors planted the Roundup Ready seeds. Wind carried pollen from the Monsanto canola into Schmeiser’s crop. When Monsanto’s private investigators—whom Schmeiser calls “the gene police”—came and took samples of his seeds, their tests verified the predictable drift of genetic material from the GM patent-protected seeds.
Monsanto sued Schmeiser for infringement of its patent, demanding monetary damages. The court ruled for Monsanto. Schmeiser appealed the case all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, which ruled on May 21, 2004, in favor of Monsanto. The court’s decision was nuanced, though, in that it recognized that Schmeiser did not profit from the copyright infringement and did not award Monsanto monetary damages.
Percy Schmeiser is not the only farmer whom Monsanto has attempted to force to pay for the privilege of having his seeds contaminated. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) reported in 2005 that Monsanto, which devotes an annual budget of $10 million and a staff of seventy-five solely to investigating and prosecuting farmers, had filed ninety lawsuits against farmers in twenty-five states. “These lawsuits and settlements are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers,” says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of CFS. “Monsanto is polluting American farms with its genetically engineered crops, not properly informing farmers about these altered seeds, and then profiting from its own irresponsibility and negligence by suing innocent farmers.” The report tallied the total recorded judgments that farmers have been ordered to pay to Monsanto at over $15 million. “It’s hard enough to farm as it is,” says prosecuted North Dakota farmer Rodney Nelson. “You don’t need a big seed supplier trying to trip you up and chase you down with lawyers.”
The contamination of agricultural crops with GM traits that is occurring is an acceleration of a trend that began earlier as seed saving shifted from the realm of community-based generalists to that of seed breeder specialists. “The seeds came with the genetic code of the society that produced them,” write Fowler and Mooney. “They produced not just crops, but replicas of the agricultural systems that produced them. They came as a package deal and part of the package was a major change in traditional cultures, values, and power relationships.”27 Subsistence-scale and community-based agricultural practices are being replaced by “improved” seeds, chemicals, and mechanization, just as global market economics displace traditional local food systems.
People on the ground everywhere are resisting this process—or trying to. “It is not that farmers are against new technologies,” says Moses Shaha, chairman of the Kenya Small-Scale Farmers Forum, “so long as these technologies will not destroy our indigenous seed varieties, will not change our native farming systems knowledge, and will not render us helpless and at the mercy of the transnational companies to monopolize even on what we eat.”28
Amateurism Breeds Diversity
Patent laws may have ceded ownership of seeds, but the mass of humanity cannot afford to abandon the seed-saving cycle so casually. Multinational seed corporations rely on reproduction engineers with PhDs, but historically, plant breeding and seed saving have been the work of generalists, not specialists. Amateurism doesn’t necessarily mean incompetence; it can be general competence, which involves a process of demystification: learning important skills and spreading them.
Corporate control of seeds places us all in an exceedingly vulnerable position, for it means that the source of our food is centralized behind proprietary doors. Seed stocks have traditionally been decentralized, with control widely dispersed. Seed saving has always been a vital part of the agricultural cycle. Without saved seed there is nothing to sow and nothing to harvest. This is a fundamental law of annual plant cultivation.
Since the dawn of agriculture thousands of years ago, people have saved seeds. Over time people saved and replanted the seeds from the fleshiest fruits, from the sweetest- or the strongest- or the mildesttasting plants, from the most storable, biggest, most prolific, most drought-resistant or heat-tolerant or cold-hardy individual plants. These gradually evolved into improved varieties, adapted to local conditions, whose seeds were traded and dispersed.
Seed selection and dispersal over many years and generations has led to tremendous local adaptation of varieties, as the characteristics of the plants most successful in a particular ecological niche were selected over time. “When traits people wanted appeared, they were not allowed to be lost but were encouraged, maintained, and perpetuated by the acts of the first farmers,” write Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney. “This process of selecting certain plants and sowing their seeds, repeated every year for thousands of years, can have effects which are a marvel to contemplate.”29
Seeds “got here in a dance of people and earth that will only go on if both partners are honored,” writes British Columbia seed activist Dan Jason.30 Not only have plant species evolved in this process, but human cultures have coevolved with the plants they have cultivated. For example, wild grass seeds were transformed over time into grains, which require human intervention for effective dispersal. In the process, civilizations were built around the grains and their cultivation, storage, distribution, and consumption. Our domesticated crops depend upon us for their continued existence in their current form just as surely as we depend upon them.
Traditional plant breeding, which has yielded uncountable varieties of cultivated plants around the world—often called heirlooms—is the work of amateurs. Like any other aspect of growing food, seed saving is best learned experientially; there’s a learning curve. Certain crops need to be planted far from other members of their families so their seeds are true to type and they do not cross with genetically similar relatives. Tomato seeds need to be fermented in their pulp before being dried. Seed drying and storage practices influence seed viability. There is much to be learned, but for the most part, the process is simple enough.
In recent years gardeners and farmers have largely abdicated seed selection and saving, traditionally integrated elements of cultivating plants, to professionals. “For most gardeners, seed growing is a mysterious rite performed each year by gifted growers supervised by people with PhDs, the outcome of which is illustrated in bibles of various editions known as seed catalogues,” writes Robert Johnston, Jr., in his informative pamphlet Growing Garden Seeds. “Certainly [it is] not a task to be undertaken by a mere gardener!”31
Government-funded breeding programs introduced farmers to “improved” hybrid varieties and induced them to stop saving their inherited heirloom seeds. The first hybrid seeds were produced in the 1920s. Hybridization involves crossing two inbred genetic lines, which requires greater technical know-how than traditional seed saving. The hybrid seeds produce uniform plants that often show increased vigor by virtue of cross-breeding (a phenomenon plant scientists call heterosis or “hybrid vigor”). However, when the hybrid plants generate seed, the genes that mixed in a predictable pattern in the first-generation (F1) hybrid reshuffle, producing highly variable progeny. Therefore, each year hybridization must be performed from the original two inbred parent lines to generate uniform F1 seeds. As farmers switched to buying hybrid seeds, most of them let go of the seed-saving tradition.
For decades plant breeding was undertaken primarily by scientists at state land-grant universities, whose work was funded by the government, in an effort to promote high yields. However, in recent years, as part of the overall trend toward privatization of resources and services, government research funding has shrunk, leaving corporate sponsorship as the driving force in seed development. For the seeds that are the basis of our sustenance, we have allowed ourselves to become utterly dependent on corporations whose motivations we all know are profit-driven. “Can we stop buying into processes and products that are designed only to make money before it becomes impossible not to?” asks Dan Jason.32
Another aspect of this dependence is that farmers are being reduced from creative generalists—whose concerns include seed saving and selective breeding—to “renters of proprietary germplasm from the Gene Giants or their subsidiaries,” in the words of a 1999 communiqué from the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration (ETC Group).33 The results of this transformation have been disastrous. Achieving the high yields promised by hybrid varieties typically requires greater inputs, such as chemicals and water; these are expensive and degrade the environment, leading to the disintegration of farm communities and dizzying losses of both agricultural and natural biodiversity.
Much of the diversity of traditional, locally adapted crops has been replaced by a small handful of varieties. This increase in genetic uniformity gives rise to huge vulnerabilities to pests and diseases. Biodiversity is a key element of sustainability. “If diversity is to be saved,” said plant geneticist Jack Harlan, “it may have to be saved by amateurs: people who love their seeds.”34
I think I qualify as a seed-saving amateur. Every year that I have gardened I have saved some seeds, generally the ones that seem most straightforward. This year I saved okra seeds for the first time ever and there was nothing to it. I left some okra to dry on the stalks, then broke open the brittle pods and collected the seeds. Beans are also that easy, and it is my impression that they are the most widely saved seeds. Cilantro seeds are easy to harvest as well, whether to replant or to enjoy the distinctive flavor of coriander seeds. I’ve also been growing and replanting garlic bulbs and liver-regenerating milk thistle seeds for a number of years now. Other friends share with me the seeds they save.
One year I grew out corn and pole bean seeds gifted to me by Nance Klehm, a Chicago guerilla gardener and artist. I met Nance after I participated in a project of hers called Cornography, which was a sort of performance art installation featuring a few stalks of this corn growing in a shopping cart and many different people taking turns, over the course of more than a month, walking it across Chicago. “Folks volunteered to be pushers/farmers and traveled the streets and alleyways of Chicago with the corn and their own interpretations and agendas,” says Nance. “The corn cart has visited community gardens, toured supermarkets, politicized a street fair, gone out for coffee, and rested in many backyards.” Nance has also organized a neighborhood orchard of sorts, encouraging and assisting neighbors in planting fruit trees, grapevines, and garlic in their yards. “When you give someone a seed, it’s such a small gift,” observes Nance. “But it entails a responsibility to interact with the land.”
At gardening-related gatherings, and even at political protest events, I’ve encountered other enthusiastic seed activists. These are folks sharing their seed abundances as a public service and a consciousness-raising exercise, asking for small donations or freely giving them away. It is such a generous and hopeful gesture to save the seeds of a few varieties to spread and swap and, more importantly, to inspire other potential amateur seed savers to reclaim this most basic of agricultural skills.
“Seeds, especially of food and other useful plants, should be taken care of by the people,” insist Jude and Michel Fanton, the founders of Australia’s Seed Savers’ Network. “They are too precious for all of them to be placed under the exclusive control of the few. The more hands that hold them, the safer they will be.”35 It turns out that the Fantons enjoy not only saving seed but making good use of the many diverse plants they grow in their subtropical climate, and they are experienced fermentation enthusiasts. When my fermentation fervor tour took me to Australia, they invited me to their Seed Savers Center in Byron Bay, New South Wales. When I was inside their home and educational center, the Fantons kept pulling out jars of fermented vegetables and fruits for me to taste; outside as we toured their compact but richly diverse and productive gardens, Michel kept handing me seedpods, tubers, fibrous stalks, and bulbs. For the Fantons, fermentation and seed saving go together as forms of active engagement with the world of plants. “We can help ourselves to become independent again by saving seeds and passing on knowledge about propagation and plant usage,” they write in their Seed Savers’ Handbook.36
Over the past few decades, as it has become clear how rapidly seed resources are being lost (along with the amateur seed-saving skillbase required to maintain them), a number of organizations have emerged around the world to support and encourage seed saving. Diane and Kent Whealy started the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa in 1975, after Diane’s dying grandfather entrusted to their care the seeds of two garden heirlooms, Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glory and German Pink Tomato, that his parents had brought from Bavaria when they immigrated to Iowa a hundred years earlier. “Seed Savers Exchange is a nonprofit organization that saves and shares the heirloom seeds of our garden heritage, forming a living legacy that can be passed down through generations,” says the group’s Web site. “Our organization is saving the world’s diverse, but endangered, garden heritage for future generations by building a network of people committed to collecting, conserving, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants, while educating people about the value of genetic and cultural diversity.”37 The Seed Savers Exchange publishes an annual yearbook listing seed varieties cultivated by members. In the 2006 yearbook, 756 amateur seed savers offered 12,284 different seed varieties, more than the entire mail-order garden seed industry in the United States and Canada. Most seeds can be ordered directly from the listed members. Some rare varieties are available only on a “must reoffer” basis.
Because the nature of traditional seed varieties is dictated by adaptation to local conditions, the most practical level for seed exchange is local. In India, Navdanya, the seed-savers’ organization started by Vandana Shiva, has helped establish eleven regional seed banks, which she describes as “spreading seeds of hope, helping farmers off the chemical treadmill and out of a vicious cycle of despair.”38 The Australian Seed Savers’ Network, started in the mid-1980s, began devolving a decade later into local networks, of which there were sixty as of 2005. In my father’s town of Gardiner, New York, Ken Greene, a local librarian who is also an aspiring farmer, has been teaching seed-saving workshops and has established a seed library with about fifty plant varieties. People “borrow” seeds from the library, grow them out, and then return fresh seeds at the end of the season.
Seed saving is a skill we can and must reclaim. “It’s time for the rising up of a new generation of plant breeders out of the very soil of our farms and gardens,” exhorts Carol Deppe, author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. “It is time for farmers and gardeners everywhere to take back our seeds, to rediscover seed saving, and to practice our own plant breeding. It is time to breed plants based upon an entirely different set of values.”39 For more information, see the list of excellent seed-saving books and other resources at the end of this chapter.
Biotech Food Safety: Corporate-Government Collusions and Delusions
Contrast the aggressive enforcement against individual farmers, such as Percy Schmeiser, found to have violated intellectual property laws, with the enforcement of the limited safety rules that apply to the biotech industry. Seminis (recently acquired by Monsanto) was fined a nominal $2,500 after it was discovered that the company had shipped unlabeled genetically engineered tomato seeds to the University of California at Davis, whose researchers distributed the seeds to scientists at other universities who had ordered conventionally bred seeds. Scott’s, a grass seed company, was fined only $3,125 when it failed to notify authorities that experimental, genetically engineered, herbicide-tolerant grass seed had escaped from a test field in Madras, Oregon.40 The USDA and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) covered up news that Swiss-based Syngenta had distributed around the world hundreds of tons of mislabeled experimental GM corn—not approved for commercial distribution or consumption—from 2001 to 2004. The experimental corn was in the food supply for years before the story broke in the journal Nature, months after the U.S. government was notified by Syngenta and took no action to recall products containing the corn or to warn consumers.41 The Nature editors later urged European regulators to investigate how the error could have happened, since “their U.S. equivalents show little sign of rising to the challenge.”42 The USDA subsequently fined Syngenta $375,000, an inconsequential sum in light of the scale and length of the error.
These wrist-slapping enforcement actions are illustrative of the control biotech corporations have over the regulatory processes to which they are at least theoretically subject. Throughout the brief history of GM foods, corporations invested in the new technology have driven public policy. According to the New York Times, “It was an outcome that would be repeated, again and again, through three administrations. What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto—and, by extension, the biotechnology industry—got.”43
The officials of federal regulatory agencies charged with evaluating Monsanto’s applications are all too often once and future Monsanto employees, a classic revolving-door scenario that we find repeated in the stories of how control of our food supply has come to be so concentrated. For example, as a Washington-based attorney for the law firm of King and Spaulding, Michael Taylor worked for Monsanto drafting proposed regulations for GM crops for Monsanto’s lobbyists to promote. When he was appointed deputy commissioner for policy at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Taylor was able to implement the regulations he had drafted. Taylor’s good work at the FDA got him promoted to the position of administrator of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, where he continued to be involved in setting policy related to GM foods. He was later hired back by Monsanto as its vice president for public policy.
Attorney Steven Druker, a public-interest crusader whose organization, the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, filed a successful lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act against the FDA, has had the opportunity to study the FDA’s internal files. The lawsuit forced the FDA to release internal documents that are a fascinating study in politicized public policymaking. Certainly the agency had staff scientists who were raising safety questions. The FDA Task Group on Food Biotechnology: Progress Report 2, dated August 15, 1991, states: “Four broad concerns were identified: (1) New substances for which safety basis is not established; (2) Unexpected changes in food/feed composition that result from genetic modification; (3) Labeling; and (4) Environmental issues.”44 A few months later an FDA official wrote, “The process of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different, and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks.”45
Nonetheless, FDA policy repeatedly stated that the GM foods were safe. “During Mr. Taylor’s tenure as Deputy Commissioner,” Druker writes, “references to the potential unintended negative effects of bioengineering were progressively deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency scientists), and a final statement was issued claiming (a) that [GM] foods are no riskier than others and (b) that the agency has no information to the contrary.”46
And so the official line is that these foods, radically altered on the genetic level, are “substantially equivalent” to traditional foods. The biotech food industry, the World Trade Organization, and the U.S. government all claim that there is no significant difference between foods that are genetically modified and those that are not, as if extensive research had definitively determined that truth. It is on the basis of this presumption of equivalence that these foods were released into the food supply—without any labeling to differentiate them.
The introduction of GM food has been devious and deceptive at every step. There is a huge experiment being conducted on the effects of GM food on human health and the environment. The experiment is completely uncontrolled, and its results have yet to be fully revealed or understood. We are all the subjects of this experiment. In the past decade, GM ingredients have saturated our diet in the United States through their widespread presence in processed foods. As of 2004, 85 percent of soy and 45 percent of corn grown in the United States was genetically modified.47 Try finding processed foods without either corn or soy. Meanwhile, new GM foods keep being introduced every year. In 2005, for example, wine fermented with GM yeast entered the U.S. market.
Boosters of genetic modification point to the fact that we haven’t all died or experienced dramatic illness after a decade of widespread consumption of GM foods. However, the causes of disease are not necessarily obvious, dramatic, or immediate. Often epidemiology (the study of disease transmission) takes decades to understand the impact of certain practices on health, such as smoking tobacco or eating trans fats.
Food-related illnesses doubled between 1994 and 2001, the period in which GM crops first entered the food supply.48 “Unknown agents account for approximately 81 percent of foodborne illnesses and hospitalizations,” reported the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1999.49 In addition, obesity has become a national epidemic, the incidence of diabetes is rising sharply, and cancers and many other illnesses are becoming more and more prevalent. “Is there a connection to GM foods?” asks Jeffrey M. Smith. “We have no way of knowing because no one has looked for one.”50
In fact, there has been very limited meaningful study of the effects of GM foods on human health. However, the few studies of the effects of GM foods on animals suggest problems. In 1995 biologist Arpad Pusztai received a grant from the Scottish Agriculture, Environment, and Fisheries Department to develop a model for testing the safety of GM foods. Pusztai studied the effects of a diet of GM potatoes on adolescent laboratory rats. After only ten days on a GM diet, the rats suffered immune system damage, white blood cell suppression, impaired organ development, and other problems. “I had facts that indicated to me there were serious problems with transgenic [GM] food,” says Pusztai.51
After Pusztai went public with his findings, the institute that employed him would not permit him to speak further about his research, but a furor had already been unleashed, and he was invited to testify before Parliament, which superceded his contractually obliged silence. Sensational though Pusztai’s revelations were, they have never been rigorously followed up. In 2005 Russian scientist Irina Ermakova conducted an experiment on the offspring of female rats, comparing three groups fed diets augmented by GM soy, non-GM soy, or no soy at all, beginning two weeks before conception and continuing through nursing. Within three weeks of birth, 56 percent of the rats born in the GM soy group died, compared to 9 percent in the non-GM soy group and 7 percent from the no-soy group. But then Ermakova’s funding ran out, and she has not been able to perform detailed organ analysis or to repeat her experiment to confirm the results.52
“Those familiar with the body of GM safety studies are often astounded by their superficiality,” reports Smith. With universities and research institutes increasingly dependent on corporate dollars, dissenting views are easily silenced by withdrawing funding. Research on GM food safety simply isn’t happening, except under direct corporate sponsorship, which comes with strings attached. “When you have so many scientists . . . doing sponsored research, you start to wonder,” says Mildred Cho, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics. “How are these studies being designed? What kinds of research questions are being raised? What kinds aren’t being raised?”53
One big concern about GM foods is the potential for unexpected allergic reactions. GM foods may contain greater concentrations of known allergens. Soy allergies increased 50 percent in the United Kingdom after GM soy was introduced to the country, and Russian scientists report that allergies in their country tripled in the three years when GM foods became widespread there.54 GM foods can also produce new, unanticipated allergens. “No one knows if humans are allergic to [the GM foods’] proteins—they were never before part of the human food supply,” observes Smith.55
GM StarLink corn, approved only for animal consumption, was discovered to be widespread in the human food supply in 2000. Although StarLink was planted on less than 1 percent of U.S. cornfields, it was widely mixed in silos with other corn and contaminated 22 percent of the corn tested by the USDA, thoroughly insinuated into all of corn’s varied products. More than three hundred different products, totaling ten million individual food items, were eventually recalled from supermarket shelves, at a cost of about $1 billion, but not before hundreds of allergic reactions were reported, presumably triggered by Cry9C, a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin unique to StarLink.56
“We all wish there was a test where you plug in a protein and out pops a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer,” says Sue MacIntosh, a protein chemist with AgrEvo, a GM seed manufacturer. “But there is no such test . . . short of giving it to a lot of people and seeing what happens.”57 In 2006, more than a decade after GM foods entered the U.S. food supply, the EPA is for the first time offering grants, totaling $3 million, “to develop methods to assess the potential allergenicity of genetically engineered foods.”58 I wish that made me feel safer.
Worldwide Resistance to Genetically Modified Food
Most of the world is not accepting GM agriculture or food. More than half the acreage under GM cultivation globally is in the United States, and almost all of the rest is in four other nations: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and China.59 Most other nations have opposed GM (also referred to as GE, for genetically engineered) crops and products, either banning them outright or at least taking a more cautionary approach. In the United States, most people haven’t so much embraced GM foods as remained oblivious to them, thanks to the lack of required labeling and the paucity of information about GM foods in the mainstream media. Despite the fact that GM ingredients are ubiquitous in processed foods in the United States, surveys consistently find that most people do not realize they are there.60
While the corporate forces of technological inevitability try desperately to impose GM crops and foods, people in most places are responding with an emphatic “No!” Zambia refused a donation of GM corn from the United States in 2002, and Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have refused GM corn unless it is first milled to eliminate the risk of contaminating crops.61 In 2006 a “farmers’ jury” in Mali listened to arguments for and against GM crops for five days and then urged its government to reject them. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan tree-planting environmental activist who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, warns that biotechnology “is the new frontier for conquest, and Africa ought to be wary because a history of colonialism and exploitation is repeating itself.”62
In 2005 seventeen nongovernmental organizations from ten rice-growing nations across Asia came together in Bangkok to issue the GE-Free Rice Declaration, which concludes: “The future of our world’s most important staple food crop will be secured through the protection and use of biodiversity rather than genetic engineering, and through ecological agriculture based on the traditional knowledge of farming communities.”63 When agricultural researchers met in Mexico City in 2004, “demonstrators tossed tortillas and ears of corn painted with fluorescent colors and skulls at a line of riot police guarding the hotel.”64
Around the world many regions and localities have declared themselves “GE-free zones.” In the United States, New England activists have brought the issue to town meetings, that venerable institution of direct democracy. In two days, March 4 and 5, 2002, thirty-one Vermont towns declared themselves “GE-free,” and many more have since followed suit. By 2005 nearly one hundred New England localities, most in Vermont, had declared themselves GE-free zones, and the idea continues to spread.65
In California, citizen referendums have been a grassroots means of creating GE-free zones. Mendocino County passed the state’s first ban in 2004, despite the fact that industry opponents of the ban outspent proponents seven to one in the campaign before the vote. Marin County voters passed a similar anti-GM referendum, and Trinity County joined the ban, not by referendum but by a simple vote of the county’s board of supervisors. The group Californians for GE-Free Agriculture is offering trainings for teams of regional organizers in the hope of facilitating further local bans. “Perhaps the most important strategic tactic we have at the moment is passing local bans,” says Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, “and then linking these local areas together so as to create regional GE-free zones, especially here in North America, the belly of the beast.”
Of course, the biotech industry and the elected officials who answer to it are not submitting to grassroots democracy without a fight. As of 2005 Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and West Virginia had passed preemptive laws prohibiting counties and municipalities from restricting crops. These laws are frequently referred to as “Monsanto laws,” and similar measures are under consideration in more states, including California.
In the United States, some activists have focused on trying to get the government to require labeling of GM foods and ingredients. When asked in polls, Americans overwhelmingly (92 percent according to a 2003 ABC News poll) say they think GM foods should be required to be labeled as such. And yet they are not, and there has never been any serious national discussion of such a policy in the United States, though many other nations require GM foods to be labeled. In 2002 Oregon activists succeeded in getting a referendum on the ballot proposing to require labeling of GM foods. Industry opponents financed a $5 million media blitz to convince voters that passage would lead to higher grocery prices, and the referendum was defeated at the polls. A bill has been introduced in Congress to require GM labeling—the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act—but it has gone nowhere. Congress is beholden to the biotech industry, which would be destroyed by mandatory labeling. In 2005 Alaska became the first state to require labeling of GM food, but only in the case of fish, as the FDA considers approving fast-growing GM salmon.66
In response to the few states that have enacted or seriously considered their own food-labeling regulations, there has been a move toward national policy prohibiting state food-labeling requirements beyond existing FDA standards. In 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the National Uniformity for Food Act. If enacted into law, this act will legally enforce ignorance and hide the truth.
The GM food industry has acted aggressively even against food labeled as free of GM ingredients. Monsanto sued Oakhurst Dairy in Maine because its label stated, “Our Farmers’ Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones,” informing consumers that their milk is free of genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which is commonly used in milk production. The dairy settled the suit by agreeing to add to its label the caveat “FDA states: no significant difference in milk from cows treated with artificial growth hormone.”
In Europe, resistance to GM foods has been strong and largely effective. Although GM food imports to the European Union are permitted, most retailers and manufacturers market their food products as GM-free, and the European Union requires that any food containing GM ingredients be explicitly labeled as such. The popular movement against GM foods in Europe was sparked by direct action. In the fall of 1996, as the first ships bearing GM food arrived from the United States in European ports, Greenpeace activists confronted the ships out in the harbors. In Hamburg the first shipment of GM soy arrived in a ship aptly named Ideal Progress, and activists drew attention to it by projecting onto the ship the words “We are not your guinea pigs!”67 Two weeks later activists confronted ships bearing GM soy in Amsterdam, Liverpool, and Barcelona as well. Though these actions failed to prevent the GM soy from entering Europe, they were tremendously effective at alerting people to the issues.
Strong public opposition to GM food has prompted some European governments to adopt bans or moratoria on GM crops. When GM seeds have been imported to Europe or GM crops planted there, they have often been destroyed by activists. In 1998 a group of two hundred French farmers broke into a Novartis warehouse, opened sacks of GM corn, and doused their contents with water. One of the organizers of the Novartis action, René Riesel, delivered an eloquent defense in court, asking, “Is it still possible to make the truth heard when so many political and economic powers are in league to cover it up? . . . My comrades and I felt it was urgent to act before it was too late.”68
In 2005 a French court actually dismissed criminal charges against forty-nine activists who had uprooted a field of GM corn. “The defendants have shown proof that they committed an infraction of voluntary vandalism in a group to respond to a situation of necessity,” said the court, affirming that genetic modification “constitutes a clear and present danger for the well-being of others, in the sense that it could be the source of contamination and unwanted pollution.”69 The same year another French court sentenced sheep farmer and activist José Bové to four months in jail for his role in destroying a field of GM corn. “They hope that by sending me to jail they can stop the movement,” said Bové. “Our fight is more legitimate than ever, and it will go on.”70
When Bové was invited to speak in the United States in 2006 at a conference at a university, he was denied entry into the country. Though direct action against GM crops has been common in Europe, and quite effective, in the United States, in this time of the so-called war on terror, these acts are defined as agroterrorism. “Agroterrorism is the willful, unlawful threatened or actual destruction of property or people through the agricultural and food industry to achieve the perpetrator’s ends, usually political,” writes agricultural economist Luther Tweeten. “It is not possible to dismiss the varied activity of agroterrorists as mere pranks because those who intend only to destroy property and science end up destroying lives both literally and figuratively. . . . Eternal vigilance is in order.”71
In the United States most anti-GM direct action has been symbolic, such as in the 1998 action when members of the Biotic Baking Brigade threw a pie in the face of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro as he spoke at San Francisco’s posh Fairmont Hotel. “Agent Apple” provided an eyewitness account:
I could barely contain myself, the tension was so great. Shapiro waxed grandiloquently about Monsanto’s crucial role in saving the Earth from soil erosion, pollution, overpopulation, famine, and the destructiveness of industrial society. I kid you not. He described the inherent wastefulness of cars and other industrial products, especially agricultural. His solution: more technology. . . .
Finally, he finished his speech and left the podium in a hurry. I perceived Agents Custard and Lemon Meringue approaching him directly, so I prepared for a delicious case of culinary comeuppance. As Caesar said from the banks of the wide river Rubicon, while gazing across at Rome, “The pie is cast.”
A young man at a table near the stage stopped Shapiro cold in his tracks with cries of “Shame, shame!” A dialogue ensued, then from Shapiro’s three o’clock angle two pies originating from suited figures went airborne. The first made delightful contact with his upper left facial quadrant and left eyeglass piece, while the second sailed past harmlessly. Our victim directed some verbal unpleasantries toward the rapidly departing flan-ers, then barely stopped to wipe his glasses and face before returning to the argument, exclaiming loudly: “Roundup is perfectly safe!”72
The End of Sexuality and Other Apocalyptic Scenarios
Can any action avert humanity’s technological downfall? I try to remain hopeful and cast my lot with the possibility of change, but our situation and prospects both appear rather bleak. So many nightmare scenarios have been imagined for us. Science fiction anticipated genetic tinkering generations before the technology existed to actually do it. The dangers I have just briefly described are very real. Yet I find that every new revelation seems strangely familiar, as if we had been expecting it. Each sensational news report seems like it must have come from science fiction.
For instance, on October 6, 2005, the Washington Post reported, “It has recently become clear that a few offspring of cloned pigs and cows are already trickling into the food supply.”73 Though the meat and milk industries have mostly observed a voluntary moratorium on producing food from cloned animals while the FDA formulates rules, some cloned animal products have entered the supply chain. The FDA is expected to rule that milk from cloned animals and meat from their offspring are safe to eat. “The FDA has made clear it won’t require labels on clone products,” wrote the Post, “which may leave meat-eaters who want to avoid them little practical way to do so.”
This is surreal and scary. Our food supply is increasingly divorced from natural processes. Reproducing flocks of animals, like selected, saved, and replanted seeds, generate diversity in decentralized processes. Biotechnology creates uniformity. It seeks to control nature. But as we are seeing in the world around us, efforts to control nature typically have unpredictable repercussions, making us exceedingly vulnerable. The best protection of our food supply against disease and crop failures lies in the diversity of traditional decentralized agricultural practices. Unfortunately, decentralized systems of community food sovereignty are not high on the agendas of the multinational corporations vying for control of our food.
Toward what cataclysmic climax the path of biotechnology may eventually lead us, we can only speculate. The futuristic dystopian image I often think of comes from the 1973 film Soylent Green. Set only a couple of decades beyond our own time, the film envisions massive environmental collapse. The only foods available are processed food bars of undisclosed origin. One day a week people receive special green high-protein bars. “Tuesday is Soylent Green Day.” The character of the cranky old man, Sol Roth (played by Edward G. Robinson), refuses when a young friend offers him a bar of Soylent Green:
Tasteless, odorless crud. . . . You don’t know any better. When I was a kid food was food. Before our scientific magicians polluted the water and soil and decimated plant and animal life. . . . Why in my day you could buy meat anywhere, eggs they had, real butter, fresh lettuce in the stores. . . .
Soylent Green turns out to be made of people, a not unreasonable source of nutrients in the absence of any others. But what generally conjures up this image in my mind is the fact that so much of what we consume already consists of mystery ingredients that the law requires not to be included on labels. These include not only actual GM ingredients but also many ingredients manufactured through processes that utilize enzymes produced by GM microbes.
My personal paranoid fantasy of where biotechnology industries are headed involves human reproduction. Isn’t that the next frontier after plant reproduction and animal reproduction have been fully commercialized? There are already plenty of signs that human reproductive abilities are on the wane: decreasing fertility rates; reduced levels of sperm vitality and viability; the massive use of drugs by women to increase fertility and by men to overcome erectile dysfunction; and diminishing penis size linked to exposure to chemicals called phthalates, which are commonly found in plastics, cosmetics, and perfumes. It’s not just us. “Animals throughout the world are undergoing unnatural sexual changes in response to environmental pollution,” reports National Geographic.74
The biotech industry, composed of many of the same corporations that gave us the endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the first place, are well positioned to take over the complex mechanics of human reproduction. The flaw with life processes, from the point of view of capital, is that by their self-regenerating qualities they resist commodification. “If life is to be commodified,” writes Vandana Shiva, “its renewability must be interrupted and arrested.”75 Biotechnology corporations profit by halting the continuous, endlessly cycling and regenerating spiral of life and requiring corporate products to accomplish various biological reproductive processes—from plant seeds to babies.
Already human reproductive processes have become medicalized, drawn into the realm of experts with an ever-expanding array of specialized technology. Will we come to accept that human reproduction requires technological intervention, as we seem to be accepting for the food we eat? If we do not reclaim natural reproductive processes for the food we eat, we risk our disconnection growing to encompass the remaining natural processes—such as human sexual reproduction—that are still considered the province of generalists. Retaining our biological power to share and exchange our own seeds (and related pleasures) may depend upon the outcome of political struggles happening now, upon farmers and gardeners asserting their inalienable natural rights by continuing the ancient tradition of saving and replanting seeds.
Recipe: Soaking and Sprouting Seeds
Seed germination is a miracle to behold. In its dry form, a seed is life in suspended animation, dormant, a bundle of potential. Once it is wet, a seed drinks in the water of life and begins to transform and become alive. A seed can remain in suspended animation for quite some time without losing its spark of life; in fact, scientists recently germinated a two-thousand-year-old seed they had unearthed in an archeological dig.
Dry seeds are nutritionally dense and protected by a skin and various chemical mechanisms that discourage critters (ourselves included) from eating them. Soaking seeds causes them to swell and sets in motion enyzmatic transformations that neutralize the protective toxins and digest proteins, carbohydrates, and fats into simpler forms. “The nutritional energy of the food is repatterned,” writes Renée Loux Underkoffler. “The seed begins to transform its stored energy into the active, growing energy of the plant.”76 The process of germination produces vitamins and other nutrients.
Soaking seeds begins the process. Seeds include all the foods we know as nuts, grains, and beans, as well as sesame, pumpkin, flax, sunflower, and others that we generally refer to as seeds. Each seed is unique in its particulars, but generally this soaking improves digestibility and neutralizes toxic protective compounds. After just a few hours of soaking most seeds will be visibly swollen. Soaking overnight (six to twelve hours) is ideal for most seeds; for especially oily nuts, such as cashews, macadamias, and pine nuts, an hour or two of soaking is plenty, as they lack skins containing enzyme inhibitors, and longer soaking will leach out their rich oils. Drain off the soaking water and your seeds are ready for eating raw, cooking, sprouting, or making seed cheeses or pâtés (see Recipe: Vegetable-Nut Pâté).
One seed toxin that has received much attention, thanks to the crusading work of Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price Foundation (for more on them, see The Grassroots Raw Milk Movement), is phytic acid. Phytic acid is a phosphorous compound found in the bran (outer layer) of grains that can bind with minerals (calcium, magnesium, copper, iron, and especially zinc) in the digestive tract and prevent their absorption. Regular consumption of untreated whole grains can lead to depletion of these vital nutrients. Sprouting grains neutralizes the phytic acid. If the grains are not to be sprouted but simply soaked, the addition of a small amount of an acidic liquid, such as vinegar, whey, sauerkraut juice, buttermilk, or sourdough starter, activates the enzyme phytase to break down the phytic acid.
Sprouting jar with mesh, draining.
©Robin Wimbiscus. Used by permission.
To sprout, the swollen seed must be kept moist while also having access to air. This requires rinsing the seeds regularly, but not letting them sit in water, because they also need air. Think of a seed germinating in moist soil, wicking in moisture while also being exposed to air. The easiest way to create this condition is in a jar with window-screen mesh over the top, held in place with a rubber band or the circular screw-on band of a Mason jar top. Soak the seeds overnight right in the jar (leave space for them to swell), drain, then rinse the sprouts in the jar at least a few times a day. The more frequently you rinse, the better, especially in hot weather, when unrinsed sprouts can get funky and start to rot quickly. Leave the jar upside down while it is draining, supported up above the surface it is draining onto, so that the none of seeds will be sitting in a puddle of the drained water. Another good sprouting container is a bag made of fine-mesh fabric, which you can hang up to drip after each rinsing.
Radish sprouts are my favorites for a little fresh zing on a sandwich or salad. Mung bean sprouts are big, crunchy, sweet, and very versatile; I love them as elements in spring rolls, stir-fries, and kimchis. They may be rinsed for days to sprout longer tails. If the mung sprouts are protected from light, the tails will be white; exposed to light they will be green and more bitter. Once the sprouts are ready, refrigerate them and use them while fresh. They deteriorate after a few days, though continued rinsing can extend their life.
Only seeds with intact skins can be sprouted. Certain very small seeds, like millet, can be tricky to sprout, and flax is even more so because it is mucilaginous and impossible to rinse. Larger seeds are easier. The length of time required for sprouting will vary with the type of seed and the temperature. Seeds can also be sprouted to a greater or a lesser degree. Typically grains are sprouted just until their tails emerge. That’s when they are sweetest, and as the tail grows the sweetness is consumed. Sprouted whole grains can be enjoyed raw; used in breads, beers, and delicious porridges; or further soaked into a fermented tonic drink called rejuvelac (find the recipe in my book Wild Fermentation).
Recipe: Roasting Squash or Pumpkin Seeds
I hate to see people throwing away the seeds of squashes and pumpkins. The seed is where the plant directs its greatest potency. It contains important nutrients—protein, fats, and minerals—that the plant is investing in its future generations. It seems like an extravagant insult to discard the most nutrient-dense part of the plant.
As we assert our natural right to save seeds and reclaim the seed as a missing link of continuity in the food chain, it behooves us to use rather than discard seeds. Making use of these precious resources honors them, recognizes their tremendous importance, and reintegrates them into our lives. And roasted seeds are so delicious!
Roasting seeds is easy. The slightly tedious part is separating the seeds from the pulp. Generally I collect the scraped-out seeds in a bowl of water and use both hands to pull chunks of pulp and fiber from the seeds. Eventually I decide the seeds are clean enough, and I drain off the excess water. Since these seeds are fresh, they lack the protective toxins that develop in dried seeds and so do not require soaking.
Sometimes I season seeds with salt and perhaps cayenne, and other times I toss them in a little tamari and/or liquid hot sauce. Then I roast them. You can roast seeds either in a pan on a stovetop or in the oven. The challenge is to not burn them, so it is important to stir the roasting seeds often. Stovetop roasting requires constant attention for ten to fifteen minutes. Roasting in the oven is somewhat more forgiving. Roast seeds at a moderate heat (325°F/160°C) for twenty to thirty minutes, until they’re not only dry on the outside but crispy in the middle as well. As an alternative to roasting, if you wish to keep the seeds raw with enzymes intact (see chapter 5), you can also dry the seeds more slowly using a dehydrator.
Action and Information Resources
Books
Ashworth, Suzanne. Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners. 2nd ed. Decorah, IA: Seed Savers Exchange, 2002.
Cooper, David, Renee Vellve, and Henk Hobbelink, eds. Growing Diversity: Genetic Resources and Local Food Security. Warwickshire, UK: Intermediate Technology Development Group, 1992.
Deppe, Carol. Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2000.
Fanton, Michel and Jude. The Seed Savers’ Handbook for Australia and New Zealand. Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia: The Seed Savers’ Network, 1993.
Fowler, Cary, and Pat Mooney. Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.
Fox, Michael W. Beyond Evolution: The Genetically Altered Future of Plants, Animals, the Earth . . . and Humans. New York: Lyons Press, 1999.
Jason, Dan. Save Our Seeds, Save Ourselves: Means and Methods of Embracing Our Seed Heritage. Ganges, Salt Spring Island, BC: self-published, circa 2000.
Johnston, Robert, Jr. Growing Garden Seeds: A Manual for Gardeners and Small Farmers. Winslow, ME: Johnny’s Selected Seeds, 1983.
Lambrecht, Bill. Dinner at the New Gene Cafe: How Genetic Engineering is Changing What We Eat, How We Live, and the Global Politics of Food. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
Lappé, Marc, and Britt Bailey. Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998.
Nestle, Marion. Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000.
———. Tomorrow’s Biodiversity. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Smith, Jeffrey M. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Fairfield, IA: Yes! Books, 2006.
———. Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating. Fairfield, IA: Yes! Books, 2003.
Tokar, Brian, ed. Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger. Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004.
———. Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering. New York: Zed Books, 2001.
Weaver, William Woys. Heirloom Vegetable Gardening: A Master Gardener’s Guide to Planting, Seed Saving, and Cultural History. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Films
Bullshit. Directed by PeÅ Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian. Sweden: HB PeÅ Holmquist Film, 2005; www.peaholmquist.com.
Fed Up! Genetic Engineering, Industrial Agriculture and Sustainable Alternatives. San Francisco: Wholesome Goodness Productions, 2002; www.wholesomegoodness.org.
The Future of Food. Directed by Deborah Coons Garcia. Mill Valley, CA: Lily Films, 2004; www.thefutureoffood.com.
Life Running Out of Control. Directed by Bertram Verhaag. Reading, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2005; www.bullfrogfilms.com.
Organizations and Other Resources
Alliance for Bio-Integrity
2040 Pearl Lane #2
Fairfield, IA 52556
(206) 888-4852
Ban Terminator Campaign
431 Gilmour Street, Second Floor
Ottawa, ON K2P 0R5
Canada
(613) 241-2267
Californians for GE-Free Agriculture
15290 Coleman Valley Road
Occidental, CA 95465
(510) 647-3733
Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods
PO Box 55699
Seattle, WA 98155
(425) 771-4049
Center for Food Safety
660 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, #302
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 547-9359
CorpWatch
1611 Telegraph Avenue, #702
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 271-8080
Council for Responsible Genetics
5 Upland Road, Suite 3
Cambridge, MA 02140
(617) 868-0870
ETC Group: Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration
431 Gilmour Street, 2nd Floor
Ottawa, ON K2P 0R5
Canada
(613) 241-2267
Fedco Seeds
PO Box 520
Waterville, ME 04903-0520
(207) 873-7333
Garden State Heirloom Seed Society
PO Box 15
Delaware, NJ 07833
GE Free Maine
PO Box 7805
Portland, ME 04112
(207) 244-0908
Genetically Engineered Food Alert
1200 18th Street NW, 5th Floor
Washington, DC 20036
(800) 390-3373
Genetic Resources Action International
Girona 25, pral., E-08010
Barcelona
Spain
34 93301 1381
Greenpeace USA
702 H Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20001
(800) 326-0959
Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism
PO Box 72
Nixon, NV 89424
(775) 574-0248
Institute for Responsible Technology
PO Box 469
Fairfield, IA 52556
Institute of Science in Society
PO Box 32097
London NW1 0XR
United Kingdom
44 20 8452 2729
Monsanto Watch
National Farmers Union Seed Saver Campaign
2717 Wentz Avenue
Saskatoon, SK S7K 4B6
Canada
(306) 652-9465
Native Seeds/SEARCH
526 North 4th Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85705-8450
(866) 622-5561
Navdanya
A-60, Hauz Khas
New Delhi 110016
India
Organic Seed Alliance
PO Box 772
Port Townsend, WA 98368
(360) 385-7192
Peoples’ Global Action
Primal Seeds
The Ram’s Horn
S6, C27, RR#1
Sorrento, BC V0E 2W0
Canada
(250) 675-4866
Restoring Our Seed
PO Box 520
Waterville, ME 04903
(207) 872-9093
Rural Advancement Foundation International USA
PO Box 640
Pittsboro, NC 27312
(919) 542-1396
Saving Our Seed
286 Dixie Hollow
Louisa, VA 23093
(706) 788-0017
Scatterseed Project
Khadighar Farm
PO Box 1167
Farmington, ME 04938
Seed Savers Exchange
3094 North Winn Road
Decorah, IA 52101
(563) 382-5990
Seeds of Diversity Canada
PO Box 36, Station Q
Toronto, ON M4T 2L7
Canada
(905) 623-0353
True Food Network
2921 Chapman Street, Suite 2
Oakland, CA 94601
UK Agricultural Biodiversity Coalition
Union of Concerned Scientists
2 Brattle Square
Cambridge, MA 02238
(617) 547-5552
United Plant Savers
PO Box 400
East Barre, VT 05649
(802) 479-9825
World Social Forum
Rua General Jardim, 660, 8th Floor
São Paulo, SP 01223-010
Brazil