I hope not, but I am not too sure that it isn’t.

What is food? To most of us, food is something we buy in a store or restaurant when we get hungry. We get our fill, feel its energy, and then at some point we shit it out. In a store we look for the roundest tomato, the largest cucumber, and the yellowest corn for the cheapest price. Food is a utility to some, a nuisance to others, and a profession to a declining few. But what about this — what if I was a massive corporation that wanted to make a lot of money? I could make TVs, but some people do not have electricity or do not watch television. I could be a real estate mogul, but I would only have a select audience. Or I could patent seeds, more or less monopolizing the food industry, which is the lifeline is every single person in the world.

I would be a company like Monsanto, who supplies 80% of the corn seeds and 90% of the soybean seeds in the United States. I’d be sure that these seeds produce the yellowest corn, the largest cucumber, and the roundest tomato. And to make things more fun and to give myself more control and profit, I would make these seeds transgenic. This means that by bioengineering the seed, the plants that these seeds produce will not yield seeds to plant in the next sowing season, cutting off what has been human habit since the agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago. Also, we will manipulate the genes of the seed with Science so that the same seed will be able to become accustomed to a wide variety of climates, although it will require increased pesticide and insecticide use. These seeds, with its layers of chemicals and pesticides that will accompany them, will harm the native heirloom seeds nearby so that the organic farmers will eventually see reduced outputs, the inability to call their farm organic, and be faced with having to buy these transgenic seeds too. Who cares that these pesticides and insecticides will kill bees, harm our waterways, and be potentially harmful to us? Who cares that millions of people will lose their jobs and, almost as important, their cultural habits? Who cares that farmers will go broke buying seeds every year? We would have control of the world.

And that is the scariest part, but there are a growing amount of people who do really care. They are a largely caucasian population, middle to upper class, living somewhere in the first world. They might have crystals around their necks to heal themselves and the world or are romantic nostalgists in the Wendell Berry school of what-the-world-should-be-ism. They might be young entrepreneurs starting an organic farm with plans to sell to the community or they might be conscientious mothers with an airtight smile, shopping in their nearest Whole Foods or farmers market. They have enough money to buy organic products, which are inevitably more expensive with a higher cost (due to increased labor) and lower output. They are sure that they are doing something good, and undoubtedly they are, but it must be acknowledged that an infinitesimal percentage of the world population could afford to buy these more expensive products. They might be proud that they are excluding corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont from their lives, but their exclusion has almost no effect. Most people, as much as they might like to, lack the luxury of making decisions based on secondary concerns.

A Whole Foods wouldn’t fit into Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. It would look out of place, its business model would not impress many people, and with its high prices the store would be shut down in its opening week. An organic community farmers market would certainly get attention, but the prices once again would keep most people from doing anything but browsing. Those round tomatoes, super-yellow ears of corn, and the largest cucumber could be bought for a lower price in the same market that the people and their parents have been going to for generations. It is what they know and it is all that they could afford. A diminishing amount of people know or care where the food that they are buying comes from. They are unaware that these improved varieties require more chemicals. And with extremely limited resources, it’s a depressing fact that most people outside of the first world cannot abstain from buying certain products based on principle. They buy the cheapest products because it is all that they could afford. They have no knowledge or lack the resources to be able to care that these products are from one of these food giants that are causing bees to die, Lake Atitlán to become covered with cyanobacteria, and to have more control over the human population than any single entity in the history of our world.

These ideas are abstract. They require education, contemplation and conversation, and that takes time. Many people in the third world do not have time for research or lack computers to access the wide variety of information that is accessible. Let’s pretend, though, that every person in my town of 40,000 people was completely aware of the harmful environmental, cultural, and economic effects of massive corporations like Monsanto and their transgenic seeds. They loathed the existence of these corporations and wished to never see a perfectly round tomato ever again. Even in that world, only a couple thousand people at the very most would be able to to spend the extra money on a local organic alternative. Only another thousand people would have the space to grow enough food to feed themselves and their family. The percentages are incredibly low. Frankly, it looks like Monsanto has found the perfect business model and will laugh as the world and its environment go to shit.

We need to take the organic movement out of the comfortable academic first world context. It might work there, but the world is a lot bigger and a lot poorer than the perfect tiny little circle where that movement currently fits. People do care and unaware people would care, but whether they could pay the extra costs is a far more difficult challenge. We have a beautiful market with far too little accessibility. I am not sure what the solution is, but I hope that it exists and I really hope that people tucked away in farmers markets in the United States start thinking about how to accommodate the entire world.