From Galileo to Servetus to Mendel to Einstein. Revolutionary science has always incited visceral hatred on a mass scale. Galileo told us that the Bible was wrong and he was chastised for denying the word of God. Mendel was engaged in the devil’s work. And Einstein “invented a weapon that killed millions” because of his original theories of physics.
It’s a lot easier for a reaction to something new to turn into repeated statements of evil, supported by anecdote and innuendo, and eventually turn into a meme, ultimately becoming the commonplace perception. Melissa McEwen is a blogger who writes about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. She recently penned an article titled “Just Kale Me: How your Kale habit is slowly destroying your health and the world”. She chastised Kale (a very healthy vegetable) as being deadly (http://huntgatherlove.com/content/just-kale-me-how-your-kale-habit-slowly-destroying-your-health-and-world). She used innuendo, extrapolation, unscientific references, out-of-context facts and statements to make her point. Her “fake” article spread like wildfire and for about a day was considered “truth” by many “healthy living” bloggers and readers alike. The very next day, she edited the article and admitted to the truth—she was trying to make a point that it is so easy to demonize something without clear logic and fact, and still get everyone to believe you and repeat the bottom line. Her declaration was that when you read “an article that demonizes a food, think about whether or not there are citations and follow those citations”. Her article struck me as very poignant, in light of all the GMO research I had been doing in the prior weeks. There are so many articles (some are repeatedly published) that are wholly inaccurate, based in half-science, extrapolation, innuendo, and out-of-context rhetoric. When I did my own research—to the source and in the science—I was amazed at how far these inaccurate statements had gone and how wrong so many people were, thinking they were right because they repeated the same things others did.
Perhaps Monsanto should have adopted the mantra that Paul Bucheit so cleverly and timely introduced at Google in 2000—“don’t be evil”. Just saying that was their mantra has helped Google countless times avoid the evil designation that so many people have tried to hurl their way over the years. It has worked.
Did you know: Google sues more of its customers each year than Monsanto does? Google spends 3 times as much as Monsanto on Federal lobbying? There are more ex-Googlers in the Obama administration than there are ex-Monsanto employees?
I could go on. But a lot of the “bad things” being said about Monsanto are simple truths about the nature of doing business at scale. On the list of top lobbyists on payroll in DC, Monsanto is not even in the top 50. The “Monsanto Protection Act” is actually called the “Farmer Assurance Provision” and was drafted and written by a number of farm groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers, and others, to help ensure farmers aren’t denied the right to grow crops that are approved and regulated by the Federal agencies, protecting them from emerging state propositions that aren’t based on science or research.