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showing Monsanto has already spent $1.4 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2012 alone.
How was the food? That was a major point of curiosity for me when I accepted the gig. What does the agrichemical industry eat at its feasts? Not surprisingly, fancy—and generally passable—hotel fare. The night's menu included a reasonably fresh salad, some competently cooked mixed vegetables, and a filet mignon cooked medium. Normally I don't eat meat whose origin is mysterious to me, but that night I was famished from travel and work. As I laid into the filet mignon, I thought of the specter of meat glue and how it's commonly used to fabricate filet-mignon-like beef cuts in institutional settings. I remembered the vow, in my recent piece on meat glue, to "eat around" filet mignon if I'm ever—"God forbid"—served it "at some cursed banquet." Shaking off my vow, I ate about half of it. As with all filet mignon dishes, it was tender but didn't taste like much.
How was the food? That was a major point of curiosity for me when I accepted the gig. What does the agrichemical industry eat at its feasts? Not surprisingly, fancy—and generally passable—hotel fare. The night's menu included a reasonably fresh salad, some competently cooked mixed vegetables, and a filet mignon cooked medium. Normally I don't eat meat whose origin is mysterious to me, but that night I was famished from travel and work. As I laid into the filet mignon, I thought of the specter of meat glue and how it's commonly used to fabricate filet-mignon-like beef cuts in institutional settings. I remembered the vow, in my recent piece on meat glue, to "eat around" filet mignon if I'm ever—"God forbid"—served it "at some cursed banquet." Shaking off my vow, I ate about half of it. As with all filet mignon dishes, it was tender but didn't taste like much.
At the next day's conference, I appeared on a panel of food bloggers, along with Danielle Gould of Food + Tech Connect and Hemi Weingarten of Fooducate. The moderator, Gunther, asked us each to describe how we got into blogging. I told of how, when I launched a food-politics blog back in 2005, my very first post was a meditation on Monsanto's market power. I explained that in the first months of my blog, I had become so fixated on the GMO seed/agrichemical giant that I had taken to running a regular feature called Roundup Ready, "named in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds genetically engineered to withstand its herbicide Roundup," which gave a brief overview of recent news, trends, and topics in the food-politics world.
After months of diligent daily blogging, I had built up a regular national readership numbering in the low two digits. My break came when someone from Monsanto's legal department—surely an intern, I speculated, because surely no actual company lawyer was trolling Google search to root out obscure blogs criticizing Monsanto—sent me a cease-and-desist email demanding that I stop using the phrase "Roundup Ready."
"I knew that email was pure gold," I told the crowd. "I knew I was a made guy after that." I published Monsanto's letter along with a cheeky response, generating a small internet sensation, and before long was invited to move my blog to Grist.
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