November 2006
Our final Rant/Rhapsody reading of 2006 was played (is that the right word?) to a nearly full house, and the readings were typically ecclectic, spanning the emotional gamut from Eulogy to Reverie. And there seemed to be an emergent theme of food and gardening that was appropriate given that this was, after all, the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend. On this night we heard from Ted Hamm, Keith Miller, An Xiao, Naeem Mohaiemen, Matt Power, Anna Lappé, and yours truly, Mark W. Read. We read the following, OUT LOUD
MARK W. READ
"Rutabagas on Asphalt"
As some of you may know I not-so-long ago ventured on an extended/distended/slow-creeping foray into middle America- a month long crawling bike circus caravan through the cultural wilderness of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia. I am now returned to this Citadel of the intellect, this capital of commerce and culture, this lingering stronghold of lefty politics, and I am here to report that things are not nearly so fucked up as they might seem. Contrary to what you might conclude if you are one of the daily throng that reads the meticulous cataloguing of disaster, murder, corruption, cultural divide, and governmental duplicity that comprises the NY Times, there is an uninvestigated yet incontrovertible abundance of creativity, compassion and plain old common sense that resides out there in the foothills and the flatlands; the hamlets and the town halls of what too many of us have come to secretly, disparagingly refer to as “middlebrow America.” Don’t get me wrong, I am not blind to the signs that Babylon is falling, and am not asserting here that all is well in the republic. I know that Karl Rove is methodically laying the groundwork for long-term corporate fascist rule, and am now, more than ever, intimately aware of the legions of Christers who have been enlisted in his cynical and unholy cause of forging an eternal, indestructible Evangelical-Capitalist Alliance. I know too, in my heart of hearts, that these political problems may only be symptoms of a much more insidious and intractable disease, a sickness that can be summed up most efficiently as, simply, Car Culture. It is, after all, the atomizing, eco-cidal logic of the automobile that has given rise to this cookie-cutter, degraded, degrading, vacuous, consumptive sprawl of Taco Bells, TGIFridays, Cineplexes, Starbucks, stoplights, smog, asphalt, McDonald’s and Walmarts, all of which conspire to deprive us of ANY sense of connection to ANYTHING save the characters on our favorite tele-dramas, and sitcoms and sportscasters and, more to the point, our favorite televangelist preachers, who tell us that we’re not alone, and that there’s an enemy, and that he goes to fancy schools and thinks he’s better than you and you make sure that you don’t forget where you’re from and that you’re one of us and not one of them.
Yeah, I know all that, but I know something else, too. “The system” doesn’t operate at anything near peak efficiency. Try as it might to terrify us all into isolation, or entertain us into impenetrable apathy, innate curiosity, desire, and generosity are as virulent and widespread as ever. The world still opens up to the willing, and should you hurl yourself heedless, plan-less into the maw, you are still far more likely to find yourself suckled than devoured. People are, by and large, ever-curious and ever-thirsting for genuine connection
I had been riding with the Flying Rutabaga Cycle Circus for only a couple of days, after having met up with them in Louisville Kentucky, when we first crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. For the next three weeks we would travel slowly up that wide brown river, bouncing between Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, stopping in small towns and big cities alike as we toured this once booming cradle of industry now known sarcastically as “The Rust Belt.” The Rutabagas had already been going for more than a week before I joined them. They had begun their tour- what they were calling their “caravan across the cornbelt,” in St. Louis Missouri, the home of the Monsanto Corporation and the site of the Monsanto-sponsored World Agricultural Forum. It was also the site of the aptly named counter-convergence, BioDevestation, which is the event that had drawn the Rutabagas to St. Louis in the first place, and, for that matter, the event that had inspired the idea for the tour itself. The plan was simple: Travel by bike from “Biodev” in St. Louis to the WTO agricultural meeting in Washington DC, stopping along the way in cities and towns to perform an educational and entertaining circus show about Genetic Engineering. They had made connections with organizers and set up performance dates across the entire route. They had gotten a grant to help with food purchasing. They had constructed a handful of bike trailers from recycled bike parts. They had developed shows and written songs and practiced acrobatics in preparation. What they were unprepared for was the all-out assault on them that came from the St. Louis Police Department. Perhaps they could have seen it coming. The Police had been conducting a fear-monger campaign for weeks leading up to the demonstrations, as has become the standard tactic for handling any kind of national mobilization since Seattle in 1999. The citizens of St. Louis were being braced for hordes of bomb-throwing, window-smashing anarchists. Video clips of the Seattle protests had been played as B-roll over any mention of the Bio-devastation convergence on the local news over and over and over again. The Mayor promised “zero tolerance.” Still, the Rutabagas were undeterred and gathered in St. Louis a few days before the convergence, to get the show ready and, in many cases, simply to get introduced to one another. They had come from all over the U.S. and Canada, from Austin, Toronto, Montreal, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York and Wisconsin, 23 in all, willing and ready to travel almost 1,000 miles to raise the alarm against the Biotech industry.
On the morning of the first day of the demonstration, about half the troupe rode out from the Bolozone, the collective house that was housing them in St. Louis while they were there. The other half had remained to help clean up the house and had planned to meet the first group in a park at noon for a rehearsal. Around 10:00am, the Bolozone was surrounded by police in riot gear, while, simultaneously, the riding contingent of the Rutabagas was pulled over and arrested for “bicycling without a permit,” a law which, as it turns out, hadn’t been on the books for over 50 years. After a brief standoff over the issue of a warrant, which the police did not have, the Bolozone was raided and subsequently boarded up. The police confiscated everything the Rutabagas had- clothes, bags, bikes, food, books, diaries, cameras, phones- and much of the Bolozone residents’ things as well. All of them- Rutabagas and Bolozoners alike- were held for over 48 hours. It took them a week to get their belongings returned, and when they were returned, the tires on their bikes were slashed, their bags and clothes had been urinated on, and their address books, cameras and cell phones were “missing.” They had missed virtually the entire convergence. Their departure had been delayed. They were rattled and dispirited. The prospect of canceling the entire tour was a real possibility, discussed over many hours in difficult, emotional meetings. In the end, I think, it was their spirit of defiance that won out. Bagging the entire tour would have been an unacceptable capitulation to the forces that had harassed and persecuted them in St. Louis. And so, a modified tour schedule was concocted, an altered show was rehearsed, and off they rode, into the heartland.
Like I said, I didn’t meet up with them until Louisville, where they performed a couple of spirited shows, in a park and on a college campus, and where they caught up on sleep, fixed up their bikes and purchased enough bulk food to make it to Cincinnati, the next major metropole on the route. They were still a bit rattled, and more than a little pissed off, but after a couple of days they were more than ready to get rolling, and I was more than happy to be moving with them.
Traveling upstream along the Ohio River, the gradient rises at such a gentle pitch that the road seems flat, and the riding feels effortless. It is late June, and the honeysuckle is in full bloom, cascading down any slope or thick foliage it can find, infusing the cool morning air with a sweet, perfume-like scent so thick it makes you woozy, like you’re taking in some kind of opiate. Along the river we pass the husks of dormant factories, the remnants of industries that were once the bedrock of the economy here. With little effort one can imagine the hustle and bustle of these places, the men coming to work by boat or by trolley; the barges destined for ports afar, carrying their goods to market; the smoke and the stench and the sounds of unbridled industry. It is a strange feeling, like walking through a graveyard that has gone untended and become beautifully, sumptuously overgrown.
On my third day we took a turn away from the river, and embarked upon a section of “rails-to-trials” trail. I had never heard of this phenomenon, but was struck at the simple genius and almost poetically symbolic beauty of the concept. Thousands upon thousands of miles- 13,600 to be exact- of old, unused rail lines have been turned into well maintained nature trails for pedestrian and cyclist use. This was made possible through the work of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, which got started in 1987. In 1998 they successfully lobbied for legislation that put 1.8 BILLION dollars towards expanding this network of trails, and maintaining the ones that they, or we, already have. It is a locally driven, nationally expanding phenomenon. Folks hear about the one in the neighboring community and they contact the national organization, which helps them figure out how to go about creating a similar model in their own community, and also turns them onto potential funding sources to get it all done. And then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on. 100,000 members. Twenty years in the making. These rail lines were once the vital infrastructure, the circulatory system, of the expanding American Industrial Economy during the gilded age. That age has passed, leaving behind relics and refuse that have no use in today’s post-industrial world. Reclaiming them for bikes is a stroke of genius I would have thought impossible to accomplish in our culture. It’s like something out of a dumpster-diver’s wet dream. And yet, there they are, these beautiful paths that wind through forests, along rivers and creeks, for miles upon miles, and days upon days. I find myself giddily riding no-handed for what must be a full thirty minutes, at sunset, somewhere in southern Indiana. That night we cook donated Broccoli and Quinoa over an open fire, with dumpstered ring dings for desert. I dream of steamboats and catching fish
Indiana is arguably the most Republican-Dominated state in the country, and one of the most culturally conservative. It was the headquarters of the KKK in the 1920’s and is now home to over 100 militia groups. When we crossed into Indiana, a chill of fear went through me, and I felt, honestly, like we were entering into “enemy territory.” But you can’t always trust the Newspapers or the history books, and Indiana’s history is no more one-dimensional than the rest of the country’s, and kids rebel there just like they do anywhere else, and people are curious and generous the world over. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, at the end of a long and arduous day, after two bike breakdowns and numerous missed meet-ups, I would find my Rutabaga friends sprawled out in a Gazebo in Madison Indiana overlooking the Ohio River, surrounded by a small group of curious skate punks who were begging us to stay the night in their town, in their houses, on their floors, in their backyards, offering to feed us and asking us to perform our show. The troupe trickled in slowly as the sun set yet again. We ate snacks and, after concensing as a group to remain in Madison, discussed whether or not there was enough energy and enough of an audience to do a show. The group was split, and couldn’t decide immediately, so some of us took a walk along the riverside park, where we found a plaque that described how this town of Madison had once been a stop on the Circuit Chautauqua, and that Williams Jennings Bryan himself had stopped here. We were excited but curious. I knew a few things, as did one or two others, but details were scant amongst us- What WAS a Chautauqua, after all? Before we could finish wishing for more answers we saw, next to the plaque, under a plastic rain-guard, a loose-leaf notebook binder, which contained the whole story:
“Founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister, later Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, Chautauqua's initial incarnation was in western New York State on Lake Chautauqua. The programming first focused on training Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its range and was the first to offer correspondence degrees in the United States. This summer camp for families that promised "education and uplift" was too popular not to be copied and in less than a decade independent Chautauquas, often called assemblies, sprang up across the country beside lakes and in groves of trees. The goal of the Circuit Chautauquas was to offer challenging, informational, and inspirational stimulation to rural and small-town America.
Circuit Chautauqua begun in 1904 and by the 1910s could be found almost everywhere. At its peak in the mid-1920s, circuit Chautauqua performers and lecturers appeared in more than 10,000 communities in 45 states to audiences totaling 45 million people.
Lecturers were the backbone of Chautauqua. Every topic from current events to travel to human interest to comic storytelling could be heard on the Circuits. Chautauqua would swell by the thousands to see William Jennings Bryan, the most popular of all Chautauqua attractions. Until his death in 1925 his populist, temperance, evangelical, and crusading message could be heard on Circuits across the country. Another popular reformer, Maud Ballington Booth, the "Little Mother of the Prisons," could bring her audiences to tears with her description of prison life and her call to reform. In a more humorous vein, author Opie Read’s homespun philosophy and stories made him an enduring presence on the platform.
Music was also a staple on the Circuits and bands were particularly popular. Opera stars Alice Nielsen and Ernestine Schumann-Heink were familiar faces. Numerous Jubilee Singers companies, based on the original from Fisk University, could be seen on the Circuits every summer. For the largely white audiences these spirituals demonstrated a very different way of seeing African Americans in performance than minstrelsy offered. There were also numerous singing and instrumental groups performing everything from contemporary favorites to sentimental ballads to nostalgic music from "the old country."
Once the Circuits were established there was nothing during their heyday that evoked the excitement and promise of summer more than the coming of the brown tent. One manager remembered them as "the essence of an Americanism in days gone by." The Great Depression brought an end to most Circuits, although a few continued until World War II. Their arrival brought people together to improve their minds and renew their ties to one another. As a sort of diverting, wholesome, and morally respectable vaudeville the Circuit Chautauqua was an early form of mass culture. As one spectator concluded, "[our] town was never the same after Chautauqua started coming.... It broadened our lives in many ways."
We took a breath after reading this, looked up at one another, smiled and decided then and there that we had to perform here, in this town, on this slow summer night in June, as heirs to the Circuit Chautauqua. We went back to the Gazebo and rallied the other Rutabagas, who were as awed as we were by the evident synchronicity at work, and rushed themselves down to the plaque to read the tale for themselves. We turned to our new best friend, the dreadlocked skateboard punk rock kid Johnny, who within the hour had rallied an audience of 30 or more for an impromptu show there in the park where he had found us, on the Ohio River, where Chataquas had once-upon a time stopped while on their tours of the country’s river byways, just as they had stopped in so many towns, towns like Martin’s Ferry, George’s Run, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and yes, Madison, yes right there where we stood, and sang, and stomped and shouted, right there where we let it all shine for those 30 kids who couldn’t get enough of it and who all came over to Johnny’s afterwards and sang songs and drank cheap beer until far too late into the night.
In the morning I woke to the sounds of Anton playing softly on his flute, still wearing a dress from the show the night before, makeup still caked to his young angelic face. I sat up and wrote these three lines:
There ARE cracks in the petrol-soaked asphalt.
There ARE weeds that no pesticide can kill.
There is a power in our hope and our history that abides.
MATT POWER
"Arbor Day for Rudy"
I really did try all the conventional methods. Really. I wrote imploring letters to the Office of the Mayor, I called my City Council members' secretary at all hours, I testified at public hearings before assorted half-awake bureaucrats. Nothing and again nothing. It would have been less frustrating to tell it all to the guy at the token booth. I had gone through all the channels and still over 100 community gardens from around New York were on the auction block for May. In a city with a 2.1 billion dollar budget surplus. Beautiful little patches of green, slivers of Eden that bring communities together and reclaim neighborhoods from blight. My garden, where I had been working for a year, was wedged on a tiny triangle of land between the Bruckner Expressway and a housing project in the South Bronx. And it was on the auction block as well. There were hundreds of us trying to save the gardens, but there was no response to our requests except to be accused of being "stuck in the era of communism" by Mayor Giuliani.
It’s difficult to conjure up those long ago days, six years ago, when Giuliani was a perfect stock villain out of a silent melodrama, instead of the Mayor of the World, the Churchill of 9/11, the highly paid security consultant and presumptive Dick Cheney replacement he has become today. For the community gardeners, we were just the latest in a series of the authoritarian Mayor’s targets: squeegee men, the homeless, squatters, cab drivers, jay walkers, fare beaters, sidewalk artists, elephant-dung representers of the Madonna. Giuliani had started a fight with the gardeners and now we were going to take the fight to his backyard.
You had only to take a walk around City Hall Park to sense the enormity of our Mayor's paranoia, during that spring of 1998 (that his paranoia would someday be born out, none of us suspected). Under renovation, it looked like a medium-security prison, surrounded by eight-foot chain link and concrete barricades.
It was on such a walk that April that the idea came to me, and I couldn't get it out of my head. The perfect, crystalline vision of moving into one of the mayor's trees and not coming down. If he's going to sell my garden and cut down my trees, I thought, I'll just have to use his. And from that seed the idea grew.
I scouted the park with a friend of mine from Earth First! and found the perfect tree, a fifty foot ginkgo outside the fence on the park's edge, with low bottom branches, good visibility from the street, and an easy climbing route. I felt like Raskolnikov going through the paces of his crime, sizing up possible trees around the park's periphery. The police surrounding City Hall suspected nothing.
By the arranged day (Arbor Day, of course), everything was ready. I had my supplies: trail mix, water, extra clothes, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and the huge sunflower headdress I had built last Halloween out of coat hangers (generously donated by the dry cleaner on my block) and yellow satin curtains ($9.95). And a great many rolls of Duct tape (this was also an era when Duct tape had more innocent associations). My friends were all there with me, just outside the City Hall stop of the 4,5,6 on a beautiful morning on the last day of the last cruelest month in an over-eventful millennium. The sunlight had an almost liquid quality. Each strand of the Brooklyn Bridge was as precise as a line drawing in the clear air. The trees shook their heads, with new leaves bursting out everywhere in a regeneration that seemed unlikely at best only weeks before. I was pretty nervous, but seeing as how it had been my idea, there I was, the voluntary sacrificial lamb, who had only to climb a tree and wait.
I crossed the street and stood, casually as I could, at the corner of the park. A policeman stood only thirty feet away, directing traffic at the intersection. I half expected him to run and tackle me the moment I touched the tree. Some forest spirit left over from before the Dutch arrived on this island must have cast a spell over him, because he suddenly left the intersection and walked around the corner, out of sight. So cued, up I went.
The first branch was about seven feet high, and after a brief scramble where I thought I was too shaky to climb, I made it. Looking back at the street corner, I realized nobody had even noticed. So I went higher and higher, my pack getting caught on branches, my face brushing against the new ginkgo leaves. I grew up on an apple orchard in Vermont, and have been climbing trees my entire life, but never anything quite like the mayor's ginkgo.
There is a feeling one only has up in a tree, with people scurrying unnoticing below, seeming pointlessly rushed, disconnected from themselves and their surroundings. And so it seemed when I reached the top, looking down on the unquiet desperation of morning rush hour at the corner of Centre and Chambers, everyone running to their cubicles and not a one looking up. I took the sunflower out of my pack and "donned" it, to use the term the newspapers would later use. And still no one looked up. My friends had all congregated at the bottom of the tree, and began holding up their signs and chanting, calling on the Giuliani to stop the auction.
He didn't come out. As it turns out, he wasn’t there, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.
And nobody seemed to be paying much attention to our brilliantly orchestrated plan. Finally, a lone cop on a scooter pulled up, looked up at me, and shook his head.
"You wanna come down?" he called up, barely audible over the traffic.
"No thank you."
"They're gonna lock you up."
"They'll have to come up and get me first."
I had been arrested before, but never quite so theatrically. I called down to my friend Brad Will, an old hand at these sorts of endeavors, and asked him what I should do.
"Well, whenever you come down, they're gonna put you through the system. So you might as well stay up there and be free for a while."
I know I kept shouting down to the people on the ground from time to time. I know there were, at some point, reporters and cops shouting questions at me, and that a crowd started to form on the corner. The entire line for the bagel cart across the street was turned and looking at me. The realization that the proximity to the city courts meant that, in all likelihood, an equal number of prosecutors and public defenders were witnessing my actions, brought little comfort. But somehow, despite all the noise and commotion below, I was in an envelope of stillness. Somehow I slipped out of the awareness that what I was doing, to the vast majority of people in this city, was completely insane. Bellevue, Ward’s Island, men-in-white-uniforms certifiable nuts.
I could see an inchworm crawling on a branch a few inches away. A light breeze off the water shook the new leaves on all the trees, and I could feel myself swaying as though I were out at sea. Birds flitted from the stoplight to the branches, and then dropped to the ground to peck for crumbs. Sunlight dappled the branches. It seemed, up there, that this feeling was really the whole point of trying to save community gardens, that in a city with so little open space for so many, gardens allowed some of the feeling of tranquility I felt up in that tree. What were those poor people on the ground scurrying so much for? Come up in the trees! Live! The world seemed so far away. Brad was right: up in the tree I was free, and down on the ground I would not be.
Particularly considering the number of disgruntled public servants that were gathering at the base of the tree. I was awoken from my reverie when I realized that coming up in the trees was exactly what they intended to do. Four Emergency Services vehicles screeched up, one a truck with a boat on the roof. In case I tried to catapult myself into the East River, apparently. The driver jumped out and must have forgotten his emergency brake, because the huge truck began to roll backward very nearly hitting an NBC reporter and a squad car. There were about thirty police under the tree by this point, and a dozen reporters. A huge air bag was inflated beneath me.
And then a ladder was placed against one of the lower branches. I climbed a little higher. There wasn't much tree left. An Emergency Services officer in jumpsuit, heavy gloves, and climbing gear ascended the ladder. I was still another twenty feet above its top. He began to climb, nervously.
"You don't climb trees much, do you?" I asked.
"No. Bridges." he replied, struggling to get his arm over a branch, and then clipping his safety harness to it.
"Are you gonna come down?"
"Come up a little higher," I replied.
He made it up, after some struggle, to the branch beneath me. I perched above him. He looked scared. He had his arm around the trunk like it was a ship's mast in a storm.
"Look," I said, "I don't want anyone to get hurt. If you shake my hand and tell me that community gardens are a good thing, I'll come down."
Holding the trunk still, he reached up with a gloved hand and we shook.
"Say it." I said "Community gardens are a big thing." he mumbled.
"Good thing."
"Community gardens are a good thing." He wouldn't look me in the eye.
"Okay, I'll come down."
"You gotta put on the harness or I'll get in trouble."
No wonder he couldn't climb. His safety harness felt like one of those lead aprons they have at the dentist's. So he descended and I followed. Down the tree, slowly, retreating from that peace of which I had felt a glimmer, like pulling down a shade against the morning light. I stopped at the top of the ladder and straightened my petals before climbing to the ground.
I had, vaguely, the sense of handcuffs snapping around my wrists, of flashes bursting in my face and the eye of a television camera peering at me as I was ushered off by many, many cops. Questions were yelled and I shouted back answers. I should have yelled "I'm just a pansy," like some arboreal Lee Harvey Oswald. Hundreds of people were staring at me from across the street. At some point, the sunflower costume was pulled off at the behest of an angry captain.
And then there was the fingerprinting (now digital), and giving them your shoelaces, and the kind cop whose father had a farm upstate gave me girl scout cookies through the bars, and let me read Calvino till they took me to The Tombs, where the identical twin junkies and the guy who got arrested for bringing a python on the subway called me "tree climber" with some sort of respect, and the night court judge twelve hours later burst out laughing before sending me out onto the streets of Chinatown on my own recognizance.
And through it all, even in the fluorescent lit, institutional-green dungeon of Manhattan Central Booking, I felt the branches swaying beneath my feet and the spring sunlight on my face, a feeling not even the mayor of New York could put up for auction.
But it wasn’t until the papers came out the next day that it really sunk in.
PROTESTER GOES OUT ON A LIMB TO SAVE GARDENS
COPS PLUCK PETULANT CITY HALL PROTESTER
PLANT LOVER UP A TREE IS PRUNED BY POLICE
Even the New York Times editorial page got in on the act: "Despite months of discussion and last week’s highly public arrest of a man dressed as a sunflower…"
And somewhere in all of it, amid the protests and the shouting and the dozens more arrests, the Mayor sensed the tide of public opinion was against him on this, sensed (it seemed to us, at that moment) his political mortality for the first time, and called off the auction at the eleventh hour. Which back then was all the victory we could imagine. If you walk around on a May afternoon, on the Lower East side, past all the little gardens on 9th street and 6th street and Avenue B, or all the way up to 136th and Cypress in the South Bronx, you’ll see why.
ANNA LAPPE
"Food Quiz"
FOOD QUIZ
1. What’s the new job of Rob Horsch, former Monsanto VP?
a) Deputy Administrator, EPA
b) Senior Program Officer, Gates Foundation
c) Deputy Administrator, USDA
d) Member, National Organic Standards Board
2. Who said: “There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians”?
a) President Richard Nixon
b) Dwayne Andreas, Archer Daniel Midlands Chairman
c) Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa
d) Richard Crowder, US Trade Rep and Chief Agricultural Negotiator, former Monsanto VP
3. Philip Morris spent millions rebranding itself in the wake of Big Tobacco lawsuits with which brilliant new corporate name?
a) Humana
b) Virtua
c) Respira
d) Altria
e) Beneficia
4. What’s Hawaii’s most popular food?
a) Spam sushi
b) “Spamburger”
c) Chicken-fried Spam
d) Spam poo poo platter
5. Match the Tagline: “Nature Talks, We Listen”
a) Dow
b) Syngenta
c) Dupont
d) Monsanto
e) Biotechnology Industry Organization
6. Match the Tagline: “Biotechnology—A Big Word That Means Hope”
a) Dow
b) Novartis
c) Dupont
d) Monsanto
e) Biotechnology Industry Organization
7. What percentage of non-GMO cucumbers seed does Monsanto now control?
a) 18%
b) 28%
c) 38%
d) 58%
8. From this list, name the countries that don’t require GMO labeling?
1) United States
2) China
3) Canada
4) Australia
5) France
6) All of the above
9. What’s the likelihood that an African-American or Latino child born in the U.S. will develop Type II diabetes?
a) 1 in 3
b) 1 in 5
c) 1 in 8
d) 1 in 10
10. How many toys does McDonalds sell or give away every year?
a) 250 million
b) 500 million
c) 1 billion
d) 1.5 billion
Bonus Question: Which do we have more of… prisoners or farmers?
MARK W. READ
"Rutabagas on Asphalt"
As some of you may know I not-so-long ago ventured on an extended/distended/slow-creeping foray into middle America- a month long crawling bike circus caravan through the cultural wilderness of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia. I am now returned to this Citadel of the intellect, this capital of commerce and culture, this lingering stronghold of lefty politics, and I am here to report that things are not nearly so fucked up as they might seem. Contrary to what you might conclude if you are one of the daily throng that reads the meticulous cataloguing of disaster, murder, corruption, cultural divide, and governmental duplicity that comprises the NY Times, there is an uninvestigated yet incontrovertible abundance of creativity, compassion and plain old common sense that resides out there in the foothills and the flatlands; the hamlets and the town halls of what too many of us have come to secretly, disparagingly refer to as “middlebrow America.” Don’t get me wrong, I am not blind to the signs that Babylon is falling, and am not asserting here that all is well in the republic. I know that Karl Rove is methodically laying the groundwork for long-term corporate fascist rule, and am now, more than ever, intimately aware of the legions of Christers who have been enlisted in his cynical and unholy cause of forging an eternal, indestructible Evangelical-Capitalist Alliance. I know too, in my heart of hearts, that these political problems may only be symptoms of a much more insidious and intractable disease, a sickness that can be summed up most efficiently as, simply, Car Culture. It is, after all, the atomizing, eco-cidal logic of the automobile that has given rise to this cookie-cutter, degraded, degrading, vacuous, consumptive sprawl of Taco Bells, TGIFridays, Cineplexes, Starbucks, stoplights, smog, asphalt, McDonald’s and Walmarts, all of which conspire to deprive us of ANY sense of connection to ANYTHING save the characters on our favorite tele-dramas, and sitcoms and sportscasters and, more to the point, our favorite televangelist preachers, who tell us that we’re not alone, and that there’s an enemy, and that he goes to fancy schools and thinks he’s better than you and you make sure that you don’t forget where you’re from and that you’re one of us and not one of them.
Yeah, I know all that, but I know something else, too. “The system” doesn’t operate at anything near peak efficiency. Try as it might to terrify us all into isolation, or entertain us into impenetrable apathy, innate curiosity, desire, and generosity are as virulent and widespread as ever. The world still opens up to the willing, and should you hurl yourself heedless, plan-less into the maw, you are still far more likely to find yourself suckled than devoured. People are, by and large, ever-curious and ever-thirsting for genuine connection
I had been riding with the Flying Rutabaga Cycle Circus for only a couple of days, after having met up with them in Louisville Kentucky, when we first crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. For the next three weeks we would travel slowly up that wide brown river, bouncing between Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, stopping in small towns and big cities alike as we toured this once booming cradle of industry now known sarcastically as “The Rust Belt.” The Rutabagas had already been going for more than a week before I joined them. They had begun their tour- what they were calling their “caravan across the cornbelt,” in St. Louis Missouri, the home of the Monsanto Corporation and the site of the Monsanto-sponsored World Agricultural Forum. It was also the site of the aptly named counter-convergence, BioDevestation, which is the event that had drawn the Rutabagas to St. Louis in the first place, and, for that matter, the event that had inspired the idea for the tour itself. The plan was simple: Travel by bike from “Biodev” in St. Louis to the WTO agricultural meeting in Washington DC, stopping along the way in cities and towns to perform an educational and entertaining circus show about Genetic Engineering. They had made connections with organizers and set up performance dates across the entire route. They had gotten a grant to help with food purchasing. They had constructed a handful of bike trailers from recycled bike parts. They had developed shows and written songs and practiced acrobatics in preparation. What they were unprepared for was the all-out assault on them that came from the St. Louis Police Department. Perhaps they could have seen it coming. The Police had been conducting a fear-monger campaign for weeks leading up to the demonstrations, as has become the standard tactic for handling any kind of national mobilization since Seattle in 1999. The citizens of St. Louis were being braced for hordes of bomb-throwing, window-smashing anarchists. Video clips of the Seattle protests had been played as B-roll over any mention of the Bio-devastation convergence on the local news over and over and over again. The Mayor promised “zero tolerance.” Still, the Rutabagas were undeterred and gathered in St. Louis a few days before the convergence, to get the show ready and, in many cases, simply to get introduced to one another. They had come from all over the U.S. and Canada, from Austin, Toronto, Montreal, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York and Wisconsin, 23 in all, willing and ready to travel almost 1,000 miles to raise the alarm against the Biotech industry.
On the morning of the first day of the demonstration, about half the troupe rode out from the Bolozone, the collective house that was housing them in St. Louis while they were there. The other half had remained to help clean up the house and had planned to meet the first group in a park at noon for a rehearsal. Around 10:00am, the Bolozone was surrounded by police in riot gear, while, simultaneously, the riding contingent of the Rutabagas was pulled over and arrested for “bicycling without a permit,” a law which, as it turns out, hadn’t been on the books for over 50 years. After a brief standoff over the issue of a warrant, which the police did not have, the Bolozone was raided and subsequently boarded up. The police confiscated everything the Rutabagas had- clothes, bags, bikes, food, books, diaries, cameras, phones- and much of the Bolozone residents’ things as well. All of them- Rutabagas and Bolozoners alike- were held for over 48 hours. It took them a week to get their belongings returned, and when they were returned, the tires on their bikes were slashed, their bags and clothes had been urinated on, and their address books, cameras and cell phones were “missing.” They had missed virtually the entire convergence. Their departure had been delayed. They were rattled and dispirited. The prospect of canceling the entire tour was a real possibility, discussed over many hours in difficult, emotional meetings. In the end, I think, it was their spirit of defiance that won out. Bagging the entire tour would have been an unacceptable capitulation to the forces that had harassed and persecuted them in St. Louis. And so, a modified tour schedule was concocted, an altered show was rehearsed, and off they rode, into the heartland.
Like I said, I didn’t meet up with them until Louisville, where they performed a couple of spirited shows, in a park and on a college campus, and where they caught up on sleep, fixed up their bikes and purchased enough bulk food to make it to Cincinnati, the next major metropole on the route. They were still a bit rattled, and more than a little pissed off, but after a couple of days they were more than ready to get rolling, and I was more than happy to be moving with them.
Traveling upstream along the Ohio River, the gradient rises at such a gentle pitch that the road seems flat, and the riding feels effortless. It is late June, and the honeysuckle is in full bloom, cascading down any slope or thick foliage it can find, infusing the cool morning air with a sweet, perfume-like scent so thick it makes you woozy, like you’re taking in some kind of opiate. Along the river we pass the husks of dormant factories, the remnants of industries that were once the bedrock of the economy here. With little effort one can imagine the hustle and bustle of these places, the men coming to work by boat or by trolley; the barges destined for ports afar, carrying their goods to market; the smoke and the stench and the sounds of unbridled industry. It is a strange feeling, like walking through a graveyard that has gone untended and become beautifully, sumptuously overgrown.
On my third day we took a turn away from the river, and embarked upon a section of “rails-to-trials” trail. I had never heard of this phenomenon, but was struck at the simple genius and almost poetically symbolic beauty of the concept. Thousands upon thousands of miles- 13,600 to be exact- of old, unused rail lines have been turned into well maintained nature trails for pedestrian and cyclist use. This was made possible through the work of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, which got started in 1987. In 1998 they successfully lobbied for legislation that put 1.8 BILLION dollars towards expanding this network of trails, and maintaining the ones that they, or we, already have. It is a locally driven, nationally expanding phenomenon. Folks hear about the one in the neighboring community and they contact the national organization, which helps them figure out how to go about creating a similar model in their own community, and also turns them onto potential funding sources to get it all done. And then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on. 100,000 members. Twenty years in the making. These rail lines were once the vital infrastructure, the circulatory system, of the expanding American Industrial Economy during the gilded age. That age has passed, leaving behind relics and refuse that have no use in today’s post-industrial world. Reclaiming them for bikes is a stroke of genius I would have thought impossible to accomplish in our culture. It’s like something out of a dumpster-diver’s wet dream. And yet, there they are, these beautiful paths that wind through forests, along rivers and creeks, for miles upon miles, and days upon days. I find myself giddily riding no-handed for what must be a full thirty minutes, at sunset, somewhere in southern Indiana. That night we cook donated Broccoli and Quinoa over an open fire, with dumpstered ring dings for desert. I dream of steamboats and catching fish
Indiana is arguably the most Republican-Dominated state in the country, and one of the most culturally conservative. It was the headquarters of the KKK in the 1920’s and is now home to over 100 militia groups. When we crossed into Indiana, a chill of fear went through me, and I felt, honestly, like we were entering into “enemy territory.” But you can’t always trust the Newspapers or the history books, and Indiana’s history is no more one-dimensional than the rest of the country’s, and kids rebel there just like they do anywhere else, and people are curious and generous the world over. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, at the end of a long and arduous day, after two bike breakdowns and numerous missed meet-ups, I would find my Rutabaga friends sprawled out in a Gazebo in Madison Indiana overlooking the Ohio River, surrounded by a small group of curious skate punks who were begging us to stay the night in their town, in their houses, on their floors, in their backyards, offering to feed us and asking us to perform our show. The troupe trickled in slowly as the sun set yet again. We ate snacks and, after concensing as a group to remain in Madison, discussed whether or not there was enough energy and enough of an audience to do a show. The group was split, and couldn’t decide immediately, so some of us took a walk along the riverside park, where we found a plaque that described how this town of Madison had once been a stop on the Circuit Chautauqua, and that Williams Jennings Bryan himself had stopped here. We were excited but curious. I knew a few things, as did one or two others, but details were scant amongst us- What WAS a Chautauqua, after all? Before we could finish wishing for more answers we saw, next to the plaque, under a plastic rain-guard, a loose-leaf notebook binder, which contained the whole story:
“Founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister, later Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, Chautauqua's initial incarnation was in western New York State on Lake Chautauqua. The programming first focused on training Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its range and was the first to offer correspondence degrees in the United States. This summer camp for families that promised "education and uplift" was too popular not to be copied and in less than a decade independent Chautauquas, often called assemblies, sprang up across the country beside lakes and in groves of trees. The goal of the Circuit Chautauquas was to offer challenging, informational, and inspirational stimulation to rural and small-town America.
Circuit Chautauqua begun in 1904 and by the 1910s could be found almost everywhere. At its peak in the mid-1920s, circuit Chautauqua performers and lecturers appeared in more than 10,000 communities in 45 states to audiences totaling 45 million people.
Lecturers were the backbone of Chautauqua. Every topic from current events to travel to human interest to comic storytelling could be heard on the Circuits. Chautauqua would swell by the thousands to see William Jennings Bryan, the most popular of all Chautauqua attractions. Until his death in 1925 his populist, temperance, evangelical, and crusading message could be heard on Circuits across the country. Another popular reformer, Maud Ballington Booth, the "Little Mother of the Prisons," could bring her audiences to tears with her description of prison life and her call to reform. In a more humorous vein, author Opie Read’s homespun philosophy and stories made him an enduring presence on the platform.
Music was also a staple on the Circuits and bands were particularly popular. Opera stars Alice Nielsen and Ernestine Schumann-Heink were familiar faces. Numerous Jubilee Singers companies, based on the original from Fisk University, could be seen on the Circuits every summer. For the largely white audiences these spirituals demonstrated a very different way of seeing African Americans in performance than minstrelsy offered. There were also numerous singing and instrumental groups performing everything from contemporary favorites to sentimental ballads to nostalgic music from "the old country."
Once the Circuits were established there was nothing during their heyday that evoked the excitement and promise of summer more than the coming of the brown tent. One manager remembered them as "the essence of an Americanism in days gone by." The Great Depression brought an end to most Circuits, although a few continued until World War II. Their arrival brought people together to improve their minds and renew their ties to one another. As a sort of diverting, wholesome, and morally respectable vaudeville the Circuit Chautauqua was an early form of mass culture. As one spectator concluded, "[our] town was never the same after Chautauqua started coming.... It broadened our lives in many ways."
We took a breath after reading this, looked up at one another, smiled and decided then and there that we had to perform here, in this town, on this slow summer night in June, as heirs to the Circuit Chautauqua. We went back to the Gazebo and rallied the other Rutabagas, who were as awed as we were by the evident synchronicity at work, and rushed themselves down to the plaque to read the tale for themselves. We turned to our new best friend, the dreadlocked skateboard punk rock kid Johnny, who within the hour had rallied an audience of 30 or more for an impromptu show there in the park where he had found us, on the Ohio River, where Chataquas had once-upon a time stopped while on their tours of the country’s river byways, just as they had stopped in so many towns, towns like Martin’s Ferry, George’s Run, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and yes, Madison, yes right there where we stood, and sang, and stomped and shouted, right there where we let it all shine for those 30 kids who couldn’t get enough of it and who all came over to Johnny’s afterwards and sang songs and drank cheap beer until far too late into the night.
In the morning I woke to the sounds of Anton playing softly on his flute, still wearing a dress from the show the night before, makeup still caked to his young angelic face. I sat up and wrote these three lines:
There ARE cracks in the petrol-soaked asphalt.
There ARE weeds that no pesticide can kill.
There is a power in our hope and our history that abides.
MATT POWER
"Arbor Day for Rudy"
I really did try all the conventional methods. Really. I wrote imploring letters to the Office of the Mayor, I called my City Council members' secretary at all hours, I testified at public hearings before assorted half-awake bureaucrats. Nothing and again nothing. It would have been less frustrating to tell it all to the guy at the token booth. I had gone through all the channels and still over 100 community gardens from around New York were on the auction block for May. In a city with a 2.1 billion dollar budget surplus. Beautiful little patches of green, slivers of Eden that bring communities together and reclaim neighborhoods from blight. My garden, where I had been working for a year, was wedged on a tiny triangle of land between the Bruckner Expressway and a housing project in the South Bronx. And it was on the auction block as well. There were hundreds of us trying to save the gardens, but there was no response to our requests except to be accused of being "stuck in the era of communism" by Mayor Giuliani.
It’s difficult to conjure up those long ago days, six years ago, when Giuliani was a perfect stock villain out of a silent melodrama, instead of the Mayor of the World, the Churchill of 9/11, the highly paid security consultant and presumptive Dick Cheney replacement he has become today. For the community gardeners, we were just the latest in a series of the authoritarian Mayor’s targets: squeegee men, the homeless, squatters, cab drivers, jay walkers, fare beaters, sidewalk artists, elephant-dung representers of the Madonna. Giuliani had started a fight with the gardeners and now we were going to take the fight to his backyard.
You had only to take a walk around City Hall Park to sense the enormity of our Mayor's paranoia, during that spring of 1998 (that his paranoia would someday be born out, none of us suspected). Under renovation, it looked like a medium-security prison, surrounded by eight-foot chain link and concrete barricades.
It was on such a walk that April that the idea came to me, and I couldn't get it out of my head. The perfect, crystalline vision of moving into one of the mayor's trees and not coming down. If he's going to sell my garden and cut down my trees, I thought, I'll just have to use his. And from that seed the idea grew.
I scouted the park with a friend of mine from Earth First! and found the perfect tree, a fifty foot ginkgo outside the fence on the park's edge, with low bottom branches, good visibility from the street, and an easy climbing route. I felt like Raskolnikov going through the paces of his crime, sizing up possible trees around the park's periphery. The police surrounding City Hall suspected nothing.
By the arranged day (Arbor Day, of course), everything was ready. I had my supplies: trail mix, water, extra clothes, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and the huge sunflower headdress I had built last Halloween out of coat hangers (generously donated by the dry cleaner on my block) and yellow satin curtains ($9.95). And a great many rolls of Duct tape (this was also an era when Duct tape had more innocent associations). My friends were all there with me, just outside the City Hall stop of the 4,5,6 on a beautiful morning on the last day of the last cruelest month in an over-eventful millennium. The sunlight had an almost liquid quality. Each strand of the Brooklyn Bridge was as precise as a line drawing in the clear air. The trees shook their heads, with new leaves bursting out everywhere in a regeneration that seemed unlikely at best only weeks before. I was pretty nervous, but seeing as how it had been my idea, there I was, the voluntary sacrificial lamb, who had only to climb a tree and wait.
I crossed the street and stood, casually as I could, at the corner of the park. A policeman stood only thirty feet away, directing traffic at the intersection. I half expected him to run and tackle me the moment I touched the tree. Some forest spirit left over from before the Dutch arrived on this island must have cast a spell over him, because he suddenly left the intersection and walked around the corner, out of sight. So cued, up I went.
The first branch was about seven feet high, and after a brief scramble where I thought I was too shaky to climb, I made it. Looking back at the street corner, I realized nobody had even noticed. So I went higher and higher, my pack getting caught on branches, my face brushing against the new ginkgo leaves. I grew up on an apple orchard in Vermont, and have been climbing trees my entire life, but never anything quite like the mayor's ginkgo.
There is a feeling one only has up in a tree, with people scurrying unnoticing below, seeming pointlessly rushed, disconnected from themselves and their surroundings. And so it seemed when I reached the top, looking down on the unquiet desperation of morning rush hour at the corner of Centre and Chambers, everyone running to their cubicles and not a one looking up. I took the sunflower out of my pack and "donned" it, to use the term the newspapers would later use. And still no one looked up. My friends had all congregated at the bottom of the tree, and began holding up their signs and chanting, calling on the Giuliani to stop the auction.
He didn't come out. As it turns out, he wasn’t there, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.
And nobody seemed to be paying much attention to our brilliantly orchestrated plan. Finally, a lone cop on a scooter pulled up, looked up at me, and shook his head.
"You wanna come down?" he called up, barely audible over the traffic.
"No thank you."
"They're gonna lock you up."
"They'll have to come up and get me first."
I had been arrested before, but never quite so theatrically. I called down to my friend Brad Will, an old hand at these sorts of endeavors, and asked him what I should do.
"Well, whenever you come down, they're gonna put you through the system. So you might as well stay up there and be free for a while."
I know I kept shouting down to the people on the ground from time to time. I know there were, at some point, reporters and cops shouting questions at me, and that a crowd started to form on the corner. The entire line for the bagel cart across the street was turned and looking at me. The realization that the proximity to the city courts meant that, in all likelihood, an equal number of prosecutors and public defenders were witnessing my actions, brought little comfort. But somehow, despite all the noise and commotion below, I was in an envelope of stillness. Somehow I slipped out of the awareness that what I was doing, to the vast majority of people in this city, was completely insane. Bellevue, Ward’s Island, men-in-white-uniforms certifiable nuts.
I could see an inchworm crawling on a branch a few inches away. A light breeze off the water shook the new leaves on all the trees, and I could feel myself swaying as though I were out at sea. Birds flitted from the stoplight to the branches, and then dropped to the ground to peck for crumbs. Sunlight dappled the branches. It seemed, up there, that this feeling was really the whole point of trying to save community gardens, that in a city with so little open space for so many, gardens allowed some of the feeling of tranquility I felt up in that tree. What were those poor people on the ground scurrying so much for? Come up in the trees! Live! The world seemed so far away. Brad was right: up in the tree I was free, and down on the ground I would not be.
Particularly considering the number of disgruntled public servants that were gathering at the base of the tree. I was awoken from my reverie when I realized that coming up in the trees was exactly what they intended to do. Four Emergency Services vehicles screeched up, one a truck with a boat on the roof. In case I tried to catapult myself into the East River, apparently. The driver jumped out and must have forgotten his emergency brake, because the huge truck began to roll backward very nearly hitting an NBC reporter and a squad car. There were about thirty police under the tree by this point, and a dozen reporters. A huge air bag was inflated beneath me.
And then a ladder was placed against one of the lower branches. I climbed a little higher. There wasn't much tree left. An Emergency Services officer in jumpsuit, heavy gloves, and climbing gear ascended the ladder. I was still another twenty feet above its top. He began to climb, nervously.
"You don't climb trees much, do you?" I asked.
"No. Bridges." he replied, struggling to get his arm over a branch, and then clipping his safety harness to it.
"Are you gonna come down?"
"Come up a little higher," I replied.
He made it up, after some struggle, to the branch beneath me. I perched above him. He looked scared. He had his arm around the trunk like it was a ship's mast in a storm.
"Look," I said, "I don't want anyone to get hurt. If you shake my hand and tell me that community gardens are a good thing, I'll come down."
Holding the trunk still, he reached up with a gloved hand and we shook.
"Say it." I said "Community gardens are a big thing." he mumbled.
"Good thing."
"Community gardens are a good thing." He wouldn't look me in the eye.
"Okay, I'll come down."
"You gotta put on the harness or I'll get in trouble."
No wonder he couldn't climb. His safety harness felt like one of those lead aprons they have at the dentist's. So he descended and I followed. Down the tree, slowly, retreating from that peace of which I had felt a glimmer, like pulling down a shade against the morning light. I stopped at the top of the ladder and straightened my petals before climbing to the ground.
I had, vaguely, the sense of handcuffs snapping around my wrists, of flashes bursting in my face and the eye of a television camera peering at me as I was ushered off by many, many cops. Questions were yelled and I shouted back answers. I should have yelled "I'm just a pansy," like some arboreal Lee Harvey Oswald. Hundreds of people were staring at me from across the street. At some point, the sunflower costume was pulled off at the behest of an angry captain.
And then there was the fingerprinting (now digital), and giving them your shoelaces, and the kind cop whose father had a farm upstate gave me girl scout cookies through the bars, and let me read Calvino till they took me to The Tombs, where the identical twin junkies and the guy who got arrested for bringing a python on the subway called me "tree climber" with some sort of respect, and the night court judge twelve hours later burst out laughing before sending me out onto the streets of Chinatown on my own recognizance.
And through it all, even in the fluorescent lit, institutional-green dungeon of Manhattan Central Booking, I felt the branches swaying beneath my feet and the spring sunlight on my face, a feeling not even the mayor of New York could put up for auction.
But it wasn’t until the papers came out the next day that it really sunk in.
PROTESTER GOES OUT ON A LIMB TO SAVE GARDENS
COPS PLUCK PETULANT CITY HALL PROTESTER
PLANT LOVER UP A TREE IS PRUNED BY POLICE
Even the New York Times editorial page got in on the act: "Despite months of discussion and last week’s highly public arrest of a man dressed as a sunflower…"
And somewhere in all of it, amid the protests and the shouting and the dozens more arrests, the Mayor sensed the tide of public opinion was against him on this, sensed (it seemed to us, at that moment) his political mortality for the first time, and called off the auction at the eleventh hour. Which back then was all the victory we could imagine. If you walk around on a May afternoon, on the Lower East side, past all the little gardens on 9th street and 6th street and Avenue B, or all the way up to 136th and Cypress in the South Bronx, you’ll see why.
ANNA LAPPE
"Food Quiz"
FOOD QUIZ
1. What’s the new job of Rob Horsch, former Monsanto VP?
a) Deputy Administrator, EPA
b) Senior Program Officer, Gates Foundation
c) Deputy Administrator, USDA
d) Member, National Organic Standards Board
2. Who said: “There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians”?
a) President Richard Nixon
b) Dwayne Andreas, Archer Daniel Midlands Chairman
c) Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa
d) Richard Crowder, US Trade Rep and Chief Agricultural Negotiator, former Monsanto VP
3. Philip Morris spent millions rebranding itself in the wake of Big Tobacco lawsuits with which brilliant new corporate name?
a) Humana
b) Virtua
c) Respira
d) Altria
e) Beneficia
4. What’s Hawaii’s most popular food?
a) Spam sushi
b) “Spamburger”
c) Chicken-fried Spam
d) Spam poo poo platter
5. Match the Tagline: “Nature Talks, We Listen”
a) Dow
b) Syngenta
c) Dupont
d) Monsanto
e) Biotechnology Industry Organization
6. Match the Tagline: “Biotechnology—A Big Word That Means Hope”
a) Dow
b) Novartis
c) Dupont
d) Monsanto
e) Biotechnology Industry Organization
7. What percentage of non-GMO cucumbers seed does Monsanto now control?
a) 18%
b) 28%
c) 38%
d) 58%
8. From this list, name the countries that don’t require GMO labeling?
1) United States
2) China
3) Canada
4) Australia
5) France
6) All of the above
9. What’s the likelihood that an African-American or Latino child born in the U.S. will develop Type II diabetes?
a) 1 in 3
b) 1 in 5
c) 1 in 8
d) 1 in 10
10. How many toys does McDonalds sell or give away every year?
a) 250 million
b) 500 million
c) 1 billion
d) 1.5 billion
Bonus Question: Which do we have more of… prisoners or farmers?
posted by Mark W. Read at 10:56 AM
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