A Month Without Monsanto

April Dávila bit off a little more than she could chew. When the thirty-something aspiring novelist and new mother came across a story on The Huffington Post about how Monsanto’s genetically modified corn had been linked to organ failure in rats, her first thought was, “I’m never eating Monsanto again.” A friend of hers warned that it wouldn’t be so simple since Monsanto “is in everything,” as he put it. She decided to take him up on the challenge, and in the spirit of Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man pledged to go a month without touching anything with connections to the biotech and seed conglomerate.

She ran into trouble on Day Two. Here’s an excerpt from her March 2 diary on her blog, A Month Without Monsanto:

So I’m feeling disheartened. I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode where Lisa goes to Bart’s military school, and she’s getting picked on while trying to cross some rope strung over a mass of thorns and Bart says “I thought you wanted a challenge?” Lisa responds something to the effect of “Duh, I meant a challenge I could do!"

As April was quickly (and painfully) coming to learn, avoiding Monsanto-linked products in contemporary America is like trying to, well, avoid breathing. The Missouri-based biotechnology company is an overwhelming force in the food industry. Ninety-three percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. come from seeds that have been genetically altered by Monsanto; ditto 80 percent of corn seeds. The company controls about 60 percent of the GM cotton seed market.

For farmers, Monsanto’s market dominance has meant a recent sharp rise in seed prices. For April, it meant that there was very little she could eat — or wear. Just about any processed foods — which almost universally contain soy and corn — were out. Same with conventionally raised meats, since the farm animals very likely fed on Monsanto-bred corn. Any clothing that contained conventionally grown cotton (which is the vast majority of apparel) was also a no-no.

Until recently, fruits and vegetables might have provided an escape hatch for April. But in 2005 Monsanto spent $1.4 billion to buy up Seminis, the largest producer of fruit and vegetable seeds.

Less than a week into her Lenten experiment, April was finding her menu options shrinking. “I consider myself a pretty healthy eater,” April told me on Thursday, a day after she celebrated the close of her Monsanto-less month with champagne toasts and a box of Girl Scout cookies. “We eat a lot of vegetables. We don’t eat a lot of meat, probably only two or three times a month. Not to say that we are saints. We eat fast food occasionally.”

Still, despite her habitual low-impact diet, she didn’t expect how difficult the effort would be. “I had no idea how much harder it was going to be. … On the second day, I totally freaked out and was like, How am I going to eat? How am I going to exist?”

In the end, farmer’s markets ended up saving her. When she went to the Hollywood Farmers Market near her home in the Silverlake district of LA, she took her iPhone with her and asked the farmers where they got their seeds from. Then she typed the seed company’s name into Google to make sure they weren’t a subsidiary of Monsanto. When buying meat at the market, she asked the ranchers how the animals were raised and what they were fed. Eventually, April says she got into “a real groove.” Discovering that 15-year aged Glenfiddich scotch is made without GMOs was a nice bonus.

April started her stunt motivated by a desire to avoid GMO foods. I share April’s skepticism of GM technology and worry, as do many others, that GM strains have not been fully tested for their health effects and that they could jump into wild plant varieties, which could compromise biodiversity. But I think April’s experiment reveals a much larger problem — one that has less to do with science and public health than it does business and economics.

Monsanto’s near-monopoly control over many essential seed stocks shows the frightening degree of corporate concentration in the agriculture industry. Having a single company exercise such control over our seeds is, I think, a bad idea. It violates the ecological principle of biodiversity, that ecosystems are most healthy when they boast a wide range of different species. It also violates the ecological principle of resilience, that redundancy equals strength. Monsanto is the epitome of a company that is “too big to fail.” When it comes to the financial sector, too big to fail can lead to a stalled capital market and economic recession. When it comes to our food system, too big to fail threatens nothing short of food shortages. It’s a recipe for famine.

The challenges April experienced during her month of living without Monsanto proves that this company has too firm of a grip over our food system.

I asked April how the experience will change her future behaviors. She admitted that she’s not sure if she can give up all Monsanto cotton (“can I afford to pay three times more for a t-shirt every time I go shopping”? she wondered). But she says she is committed to making sure that she keeps GMOs out of her family’s diet. She says that she really loved the experience of getting to know the people who grow her food.

“I like looking down on my plate and knowing exactly who grew all of the food there,” she told me. “It feels right. It feels very communal. It didn’t come magically to my plate. I know who raised my food and I feel good about that.”

Photo credit: -eko-