The first time you bite into a perfectly ripe, fresh-picked heirloom tomato, you’ll wonder how you ever settled for anything less. A conventional tomato’s flavor just pales in comparison. That’s because heirloom crops come from special seeds whose lineage has been protected and cultivated for more than fifty years. They’re pollinated through natural sources like wind and insects, which preclude them from being subjected to large-scale farming efforts that require less variable results. (Open pollination, being less controlled than other methods, yields new generations of plants with different gene pools, and therefore different types of crops.) And that’s exactly why heirloom seed cultivation has experienced such a resurgence as of late—it’s the antithesis of the modern agricultural movement and of Monsanto, its leading proponent.
Documentaries like Food, Inc. and The Future of Food give audiences a staggering glimpse into how Monsanto, a biotech corporation responsible for the majority of food production in the United States, turned the simple, age-old act of farming into a highly industrialized, genetically engineered endeavor. In its quest to acquire more seed companies, claim more seed patents, and bully more competing farmers out of business, Monsanto has made sure that the vast majority of crops grown in the United States will be from their lab-made seeds.
As Monsanto gains power and agricultural influence, heirloom seeds—those that can be traced back to a time when seeds weren’t created to mesh well with pesticides—become increasingly harder to find and grow. How has Monsanto put naturally delicious and nutritious heirloom crops in danger?
Paving the Way with Chemicals and Coercion
To understand Monsanto’s looming role in today’s heirloom seed industry, it helps to know the company’s role in farming overall—specifically, the fact that it didn’t even have one up until a decade or two ago. Monsanto started out as a chemical producer back at the turn of the twentieth century, generating sweeteners like saccharin and industrial products like sulfuric acid before moving into insecticides like DDT in the 1940s. The current leading food manufacturer in the United States, Monsanto used to make one of the worst chemicals, both environmentally and health-wise, ever created. They helped make Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, too.
