Review: Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, by Bartow J. Elmore
by
Stuart Holland
Somehow, it has taken me a few weeks to write this review, because I finished the book quite a while ago. Sometimes that just happens. I try to make my reviews/posts relatively simple for me to write to avoid this, but sometimes that’s not enough. Anyway, on to Seed Money!
Want to be angry about plants, farming, and seeds? This is the book for you. It’s an interesting crossover between digital ownership and corporate ownership of genetically engineered plants through patents. Like John Deere brings right to repair advocates for tractors together with those for electronics, Monsanto can clearly unite farmers who want to own their own seeds with people who want to own their own video games.
You do have to wonder where companies continue to find the mustache-twirling caricature villains to fill out their decision-making processes. Between the atom bomb, Agent Orange in Vietnam, effectively extorting farmers who grow the food that keep us all alive, gaslighting researchers who have concerns with Monsanto’s products (when Monsanto’s own internal data lines up with the researchers), it really is some cartoon villainy shit. But this book really doesn’t set out to stitch Monsanto up (it even stands up for them in places), the facts do it instead. And it’s interesting to see the seeming reversal from Monsanto’s, ahem, roots with John Queeny to its modern day incarnation. John Queeny’s no saint, but some of his specific moral positions are directly opposed to the modern Monsanto ones.
The book itself is an interesting dive into something I had heard a little about, but now have a better grounding in actual context. I look forward to reading more about it to get a better understanding. But I’ll stand right here and say that disallowing replanting of seeds (or deliberately engineering a crop to make it ineffective) is clearly not an ethical thing to do. If more folks read this book and it leads them to oppose these kinds of businesses, that seems like a good thing to me.
Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future
