It was February 17, 2004, 11 Tz’i’, or 12.19.11.0.10, a day in the Maya calendar symbolizing justice, law, spiritual authority, and the balance between individual and collective good. Don Pablo B’otz was one of the most joyful and gentle souls I had the privilege to meet during my years living in Q’eqchi’ Maya territory. Born in Guatemala, he fled the civil war for refuge across the border to Jaguarwood village in southern Belize.¹ We met because an Indigenous nonprofit had enlisted me to film and document the elders’ traditional ecological knowledge in the Sarstoon-Temash watershed in order to support a Maya constitutional claim for territorial autonomy and community comanagement of a national park. In a meeting during which the Q’eqchi’ elders defined the terms of my research, Don Pablo had volunteered to demonstrate traditional candlemaking using forest-harvested wax from wild, endemic Melipona bees. On the scheduled day (11 Tz’i’), I arrived at his house by dawn, but he was running late following a 3:00 a.m. community pig slaughter. His wife wanted to harvest some slow-growing tapikal beans, so when Don Pablo arrived back home at 6:20 a.m., we changed plans to visit his milpa (the traditional term for a polycropped maize field). Like a proverbial trip to grandmother’s house, we went over the river in a borrowed dugout canoe and through the woods, then walked another four kilometers to reach a mosaic of connected plots that he and seven close friends and compadres had slashed, burned, and helped one another plant.

To adapt a line from the musical Oklahoma!, the maize in Don Pablo’s field was as high as a jaguar’s eye. When I queried how much he had planted, Don Pablo responded not in acres or workdays, but with the traditional metric of the number of sown maize cobs: one hundred for the wet season and three hundred for the dry season. His agrodiverse milpa involved far more than the proverbial “three sisters” companion planting of maize, nitrogen-fixing beans that trellis up the stalk and fertilize the maize naturally, and squash as a ground cover that naturally suppresses weeds. Don Pablo began by pulling some onions to use in cooking the pork soup planned for lunch, remarking that he would leave the rest to go to seed when the field was fallowed. He checked his rice sprouts and dug up a few sweet potatoes (ix) and macal roots (ox) that had been planted while offering special prayers he had learned from an elder, who had learned them from an elder before him, and so on, rearward for millennia. His chili peppers were ripening, and I spotted pineapples in another corner near a patch of ub’el (or Santa María, in Spanish). To an outsider these greens might look like weeds. However, Don Pablo explained that some folks like to eat them boiled or sautéed, but his family mostly used them to wrap fish from the river or snails from the creek before roasting. Because I was running a fever, we chatted about some other medicinal plants growing in his milpa. At the forest’s edge we collected vines for making a wheel to dip the natural beeswax candles that would provide light during his all-night vigil before planting to accompany the soul (xmuhel) of his maize seeds.

A north wind rustled through the maize, as if whispering the secrets of the ancestors. That season Don Pablo had only planted white maize, but in the past he had planted other maize colors. Gesturing to his forearms, head, and belly, Don Pablo explained that his people were made from maize. In fact, the five colors of maize “are like our bodies—red for blood, yellow for skin, white for bones, blue-black for hair, and green for the sky-earth.”² His somatic description of being made from the flesh of maize echoes a classic Maya tale recorded in the sixteenth-century sacred text, the Popol Vuh. Central to pan-Maya identity, this creation story was kept alive in many different languages through oral histories passed down over generations of people living in even the most remote rainforest villages, like Jaguarwood. Over the next two months that I lived in Jaguarwood, other elders shared stories of how maize colors came from Paxil, a sacred mountain. They also explained the tradition of planting three kernels in every hole: one for the mountain gods, one for the animals or bugs, and one for themselves. This triad is a gesture to abundance and plenty for all, and of farming with nature rather than against it.

Weighed down with full sacks of bounty, we merrily headed home. After leaving the lushness of Don Pablo’s complex multicropped and organic milpa, we passed through an adjacent monocropped field that had been blitzed with paraquat, a highly toxic herbicide now banned in almost sixty countries.³ A strange, slippery fungus was growing on the barren earth between the maize stalks. “How foolish [my son] is,” Don Pablo lamented. “He could have planted so many good foods.” Encouraged by foreign missionaries to use Western inputs, Don Pablo’s son had begun to reject the old ways after he married a Baptist girl and converted to Protestantism. Don Pablo explained that his son was also “a little lazy” and wanted to save time by spraying herbicides instead of weeding by machete. I correctly surmised that his son’s field was planted with store-bought hybrid seeds because it was already pollinating. This set the stage for the first conversation I had in Q’eqchi’ about GMOs, or iyaj jalb’il xyuam rik’in b’an (roughly, seeds whose life is changed with chemicals).

A few months before, I had taken a weeklong break from fieldwork to attend a forum hosted by La Vía Campesina (henceforth Via Campesina), an alliance of international small farmer organizations, in opposition to the Fifth World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Cancún, Mexico. Before departing, I attended an improvised teach-in at Guatemala’s public university, which had been quickly organized after many nonprofit representatives and academics were denied travel visas to Mexico. For my Guatemalan comrades not able to travel, I promised to report back what I learned and witnessed. After a long overland bus journey, I arrived in Cancún and wandered into an old school building where Via Campesina was using its logistical prowess to feed and house hundreds of peasant leaders from around the world. Throughout the city, numerous foundations and nonprofits, including Via Campesina and the International Forum on Globalization, were hosting parallel teach-ins to discuss emerging trade threats. Honestly, I learned more about corporate power in that one week in Cancún than I did during my four years attending Yale University.

Among the most discussed cases was that of Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, whose crops had been involuntarily contaminated by GM pollen. Monsanto investigators had trespassed on his land to collect samples, and when they found trace amounts of transgenes with Roundup resistance, they threatened to sue him for patent infringement unless he paid a fifteen-dollar-an-acre licensing fee for the 1,030 acres he had planted using his own saved seed inherited from his father. Having been a small-town mayor and regional legislator, Schmeiser appealed his case all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court. In a shocking verdict, the court ruled that Schmeiser, not Monsanto, was in the wrong. After losing his constitutional case, an indignant Schmeiser traveled the world to tell his story, becoming a symbol and inspiration for farmer resistance to GM crops and eventually winning the Right Livelihood award in 2007.

Another farming folk hero emerged that week in Cancún. On September 10, 2004, I joined a march of peasants and Indigenous peoples. From a few meters away I witnessed college-educated South Korean farm leader Lee Kyung Hae climb a police barricade, shout “The WTO kills farmers!,” then plunge a knife into his own chest. Although Lee’s cattle farm had been a model training site recognized by the United Nations, he lost the farm when South Korea opened its borders to subsidized Australian beef after signing the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which preceded the WTO.⁴ Shortly before his dramatic political suicide, Lee penned an indignant letter about how commodity dumping had destroyed his livelihood: “Since [massive importing,] we small farmers have never been paid over our production costs. What would be your emotional reaction if your salary dropped to half without understanding the reasons?”⁵

Sobered by Lee’s spectacular martyrdom, members of more than two hundred farm groups from thirty-four countries gathered for a solidarity protest three days later. The crowd parted in silence when the South Korean delegation arrived (fig. 2). They walked to the front of the barricades, sat, sang a song, and then pulled out a heavy rope borrowed from some local fisherfolk. Like a tug-of-war against the global corporatocracy, the delegation used this humble gift of solidarity to pull down many layers of concrete barricades. It was one of the most moving gestures of allyship I have ever personally witnessed. And, hypothetically, the night before, a pair of gringas may have “drunkenly” distracted Cancún police officers long enough for climbers to scale a construction crane and hang a banner illustrated with a balled fist and an ear of maize next to an anti-WTO message.

As a Swaziland delegate commented to one activist, these and many other direct actions outside the WTO meeting in Cancún emboldened her and other African delegates to stand against the hypocrisy of the Global North. If poor countries were expected to open their borders to “free trade,” then rich countries should have to cut their farm subsidies. When agribusiness interests blocked this needed international dialogue over subsidies, a Kenyan delegate announced, “This meeting is over. This is another Seattle.”⁶ A bloc of twenty countries walked out and this WTO tribunal (and most that followed) ended in disarray.

For months after Cancún, Lee Kyung Hae’s sacrifice and Percy Schmeiser’s court case had weighed on my mind. With the best toxicology I could muster in Q’eqchi’, I shared with Don Pablo what I then knew about the health hazards of herbicides. I explained how the “rich men” (aj b’iomeb’) that patented GM seeds also required the purchase of a special herbicide, Roundup. I spoke about Schmeiser’s battle with Monsanto—how pollen from a nearby field had contaminated his canola fields and Monsanto had sued Schmeiser for the “crime” of planting seeds passed down through his family. Without hesitation, Don Pablo responded with an uncharacteristic flash of anger. “That is evil” (Ink’a us).

Many elements of that memorable visit to Don Pablo’s milpa—the Melipona bees, the sacrilege of crop contamination, the erosion of agrodiversity, and the nutritional and medicinal value of “weeds”—became universal themes of resistance to GM corn throughout Mesoamerica. Although Belize quickly decided to prohibit GM crops in 2011, they had been legal for a brief time. Like its neighboring countries, Belize imports a significant quantity of GM corn from the United States. It is possible that Don Pablo’s native maize had already been contaminated with transgenic splices. With corn pollen able to travel up to half a mile, just one flowering GM stalk in a gust of wind could contaminate dozens of adjacent milpas.

That is the essence of the “milperos’ dilemma”: how to defend their sacred maize against an invisible technological threat in a world of interconnected trade and corporate aggression. For Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (singular possessive), the challenge is how to eat more ethically and healthfully through individualized dietary responsibility. For the human “omnivore” of the Global North, food is merely a mode of consumption that begs for “food rules” about what to eat in the context of mass-produced industrial food that has replaced so many food heritage traditions. For milperos, however, maize is a means of production that expresses history, cultural heritage, culinary tradition, landscape, kinship, community, and sense of home. Overwhelmed by too many consumer choices, the omnivore begs for labels to simplify shopping decisions, while Mesoamerican milperos lament the loss of the choice to plant the seeds of their ancestors. The omnivore signals virtue by what she, he, or they buy or do not buy, while the milperos’ ethics are relationally formed in community. The omnivore belongs to a silent majority opposed to GMOs, but milperos have become a repressed majority. The omnivore wonders if GM food is safe to eat. The milperos ask if it is safe to grow. The omnivore hopes that self-control and ethical choices can save the planet from catastrophe; the milperos know they must join broader agrarian and regulatory struggles for food sovereignty, climate justice, and environmental health to counteract supranational corporate interests.⁷

In these and other ways, the kernels of Mesoamerican resistance to GM corn provide counterpoints to the individualistic, consumer-driven, and parochial food politics that Michael Pollan’s work inspired. Consumer politics end at the cash register, but collective Mesoamerican resistance to GMOs has germinated broader—even state-sponsored—support for reviving agroecological practices that can repair the damages of industrial agriculture. The methods and processes by which Mexican and Guatemalan social movements won their struggles against GM corn also teach deeper lessons of diversity and plurality. In Mexico, members of a motley movement to defend maize are now in high positions of state leadership, designing strategies to reinvigorate milpa systems and support a national glyphosate detox. In Guatemala, renewed civic confidence after the defeat of the first Monsanto Law germinated a generalized defiance against corruption and seeded a new political movement, the Movimiento Semilla, literally the “Seed” party, which won the presidency in 2023 in a surprise landslide. To defend those election results and prevent a second Monsanto Law from slipping through the outgoing Congress, Indigenous ancestral authorities used roadblocks to paralyze the country for more than a month and maintained a peaceful encampment in the capital for 105 days straight (a number with deep calendrical meaning), from October 2, 2023, to the delayed presidential inauguration held on January 14, 2024.

A fortnight after this democratic transition, a Poqomam congresswoman introduced legislative bill no. 6086 to protect both biodiversity and collective ancestral knowledge from privatization. Five hundred years after Pedro Alvarado brutally invaded the region that became Guatemala, Maya peoples are redefining their nation according to principals of dignity and plurality, or, as the Maya Zapatistas in Mexico would say, “a world where many worlds fit” (un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos).

The aim of this book, therefore, is simple: by sharing how the People of Maize defeated one of the world’s largest and most reviled corporations and planted renewed seeds of democracy, I hope to reinvigorate the political hopes and aspirations of we, the People of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, to demand greater collective regulatory protections, stand up to the corporate interests bullying our Mesoamerican neighbors, and codevelop agroecological pathways to more climate-wise forms of agriculture.

POLLAN-ATED FOOD POLITICS

Back in the United States on the same day in 2004 when I visited Don Pablo’s milpa, Michael Pollan was likely receiving fan mail about his first magazine article about the anxieties of being an “omnivore” during the mad cow scare.⁸ His prior bestselling book, The Botany of Desire (2001), popularized the food commodity genre. Through subsequent columns in the New York Times, Pollan reported on the lunacy of the farm subsidies whose biggest payout goes to corn—some $90 billion between 1995 and 2010.⁹ This became the central theme of his 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which Pollan followed the production of a bushel of corn as both the symbol and substance of all that is wrong with industrial agriculture. With vivid prose he made the wonky issue of farm bill policies a hot topic.

Pollan dates the problem of US overproduction of corn (“cornification”) to the year I was born. Between the New Deal and 1973, to prevent another Dust Bowl and to stabilize grain prices, the US government sometimes paid farmers to leave fields fallow or purchased grains during bumper years to save those harvests for leaner times. However, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, considered this conservation strategy foolish.¹⁰ To exert US “agripower” abroad, he wanted to maximize corn production no matter the ecological cost. Butz abolished the national granary, encouraged farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow, and built a new system of subsidies that forced corn farmers to “get big or get out.”¹¹ Although diplomats cringed from his boorish behavior, Butz brokered big deals, even selling grain to the Soviets in 1972. He continued to travel the world to off-load surplus grain production as either a trade or an “aid” weapon in the Cold War.

US farmers subsequently enjoyed several years of prosperity; many took out loans to expand their acreage. But when interest rates rose in the 1980s, this confluence of factors bankrupted many small farms.¹² When the smaller farms were bought out by investors, the average farm size doubled from 200 to 400 acres. Today, corporate (nonfamily-owned) farms control three-quarters of US agricultural production and gobble up most government subsidies.¹³

Corn production skyrocketed from 20 bushels an acre in 1920 to as many as 200 today.¹⁴ This mirage of plenty, however, was conjured by petroleum fumes. When factoring in the use of agrochemicals and fuel, each US corn acre burns through fifty gallons of oil every year. Today it takes ten calories of oil to grow one calorie of corn.¹⁵ More subsidies embedded into the 1996 and 2002 farm bills skewed a system already obsessed with yield into outlandish production goals. With the US spending $315 billion annually on crop subsidies, that congressional pork pie costs each taxpayer approximately $2,000. The wealthiest 10 percent of farms commandeer 71 percent of corn subsidies and the richest 2 percent take a third. So many farming businesses began growing corn in a chase for subsidies that the total US corn crop now covers an area the size of California.¹⁶

Where do these mountains of corn go? Around 40 percent gets processed into ethanol—meaning we are spending oil to produce corn to make ethanol to replace oil, all at an energetic loss. The Biden administration, nevertheless, is working on a plan to require airlines to blend more corn ethanol into jet fuel. Feedlots consume another third of the corn crop and 10 to 20 percent is dumped on export markets.¹⁷ The rest goes toward industrial food and beverages. A fourth of the estimated 45,000 products in a typical supermarket (including inedible products like diapers) now contain corn derivatives.¹⁸ With corn concentrated into meat, soft drinks, other processed foods, and ethanol, the average person in the United States indirectly consumes far more corn than subsistence farmers like Don Pablo eat directly through a tortilla-based diet. One of Pollan’s most memorable tidbits is that US meat eaters have a higher corn biomarker in their bones (a carbon-13 isotope) than do Mesoamericans for whom maize is a staple.¹⁹

Perhaps counterintuitively, omnivores who want to consume less corn should just start eating more tortillas and less meat.²⁰ If US corn were eaten directly, one Iowa acre could, in theory, sustain fourteen people. Yet, when subtracting for caloric loss in its transformation into meat and dairy, one industrial corn-acre feeds only three people (which actually is lower than the productivity of small farmers in countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Guatemala).²¹ MacArthur “genius” Lester Brown calculated in 2007 that the corn it takes to fill a twenty-five-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed a family for a year on a maize-based diet.²²

Although meat production consumes far more grain, Pollan saved his most strident critiques for the 3 percent of corn that turned US consumers into the People of High-Fructose Corn Syrup. Per capita US consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) grew from 45 pounds in 1985 to 60 pounds in 2006. That equaled almost 10 percent of average daily food intake.²³ In selling two million copies of his book, Pollan almost single-handedly inspired wealthy consumers to reject HFCS. Responding to Pollan’s famous New York Times “voting with your fork” column, the first commenter exclaimed, “It sometimes seems daunting to try and change things through the political system—you could get shot or even assassinated—but I dare them to force me to eat high fructose corn syrup!”²⁴ Many such foodies returned to the colonial sweetener of yore: cane sugar.²⁵ Where did the excess HFCS go? To export. By 2015, three-quarters of US HFCS exports were dumped on Mexico.²⁶

Yet, other than a couple of breezy and anachronistic sentences about how “Mexicans” domesticated corn, Pollan paid scant attention to maize’s deep millennial symbolism for millions of Indigenous Mesoamericans past and present. Despite his professed passion for the natural history of cooking, he devoted nary a sentence to the culinary brilliance of how Mesoamerican women transform maize into hundreds of savory and sweet dishes. For an investigative journalist with an ample travel budget, Pollan seems embarrassingly ethnocentric. He parrots the typical white settler-colonial narrative of the foolishness of “Squanto,” who “handed the white man precisely the tool he needed to dispossess the Indian.”²⁷ Expressing an odd reversal of fortune, Pollan remarked in a 2003 NPR Thanksgiving interview, “Our entire diet has been colonized by this one plant. We’re probably doing more for corn than corn is doing for us. It has gotten the upper hand in this relationship, and we need to bring it back under control.”²⁸ In his mind, gringos are the victims of this “welfare queen” who is so “greedy” for nutrients that she leaves “cornsick” land.²⁹

Besides his apparent disdain for corn, Pollan espouses throughout his corpus a Jeffersonian nostalgia for self-made yeoman homestead farms, where settler farmers mix their labor with the land in a Lockean logic of private ownership.³⁰ Pollan’s other ideal citizen (actually, he prefers the word “eater”) is a self-reliant epicure who “votes” with a fork through farmers market foraging, backyard gardening, home cooking, and label reading.³¹ The “Pollan-ated” foodie mythology goes something like this: through friendly face-to-face conversations at the farmers market, the enlightened “eater” exerts a culinary noblesse oblige, strategically spending money (“buycotting”) to coax even the most curmudgeonly conventional farmer to learn more sustainable values and adapt the family farm to local market demands.³² Reflecting this romanticization of rural life, one dating app (FarmersD) can even match “city beauties” with food producers.³³ I have seen UC Davis professors who auction their research to agribusiness corporations assuage their consciences by shopping local at the well-known Davis Farmers Market (est. 1976). But, as Laura DeLind counters, buying local “ultimately … does more to comfort and accommodate the individual eater (i.e., the locavore) than it does to challenge inequity and existing power structures.”³⁴

The inference is that if consumers make an effort to “know where your food comes from,” it will lead them toward more ethical and sustainable choices. This supposition reflects an ableist assumption that eaters have both the energy and the mobility to procure fresh local foods, as well as an Antoinette-ish attitude that people can afford to do so.³⁵ In a Pollan-ated food politics, the implicit adversary is the consumer’s own will—or the fatness of the same consumer’s wallet. Justifying his own admitted sense that “elites can be ahead of the curve on some things,” Pollan hopes that the soft politics of enlightened epicureanism might inspire eaters to later engage in the hard politics of legislative change.³⁶ Other scholars beg to differ, noting that political struggle is rarely pleasurable;³⁷ that voluntary actions in the marketplace seldom build the collective social momentum needed to resist state regulatory power;³⁸ and that corporations so deeply manipulate consumer desire, via many of the same PR firms hired by the tobacco industry, that consumer choices can hardly be considered autonomous.³⁹

While on tour promoting The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan published an editorial, trying to convince the nation that “you can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.” In response to critics, Pollan backpedaled in a 2007 editorial, stating that “voting with our forks can advance reform only so far” and that concerned citizens must “vote with their votes as well.”⁴⁰ However, the damage was done. Although Pollan would likely disdain drinking Kool-Aid, middle-class consumers drank his enchantment for the local and forgot his more important message about farm subsidies.⁴¹ In 2007 the Oxford English Dictionary proclaimed “locavore” as its word of the year.⁴² Time magazine ran a March 17, 2007, cover with the heading “Forget Organic. Eat Local.”⁴³ Borrowing from weight anxiety and dieting, more authors and food movement leaders have followed Pollan’s calorie critiques of industrial agriculture and pledged to eat local to reduce their “food miles.”⁴⁴

WHEN THE CENTRAL VALLEY IS “LOCAL”

In celebrating the local, Pollan’s corpus has an odd libertarian streak that rejects formally regulated organic certification for other voluntary labels like “biodynamic.”⁴⁵ Less than a decade after his book was published, sustainable agriculture students at UC Davis had clearly absorbed his skepticism for large-scale organic production. Even though we are surrounded by “Big Agriculture” and get regularly doused by aerial pesticides, my students fervently believe in voting local with their forks.

I noticed this via one Socratic dialogue with the undergrads enrolled in my 2014 Native Foods and Farming of the Americas course, after I had spontaneously posed this dilemma: If you walked into the Davis Food Co-op and the same vegetable was being sold at identical prices in both the conventional “local” section and in the organic section (the latter with unknown provenance), which would you choose? I was startled that nine-tenths instinctively opted for the local vegetable, even though crop dusters fill the skies where we live and the conventional local produce would almost certainly be laced with pesticides. They told me they wanted to know where their food came from. As Pollan later argued, “Shake the hand that feeds you.… Regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.”⁴⁶ Following this communitarian but almost libertarian sentiment, local food advocates argue that personal relationships are superior to regulations.⁴⁷

Indeed, many of my students earnestly assert that farmers market booths with handwritten “pesticide-free” or “noncertified organic” are better than the produce coming from “big organic.”⁴⁸ Having had market vendors and pick-your-own farm owners baldly lie to me about their pesticide use, I frankly prefer third-party certification. When ill from chemotherapy but determined to ingest extra antioxidants, I once called a local blueberry farm to verify if it was organic. The farmer assured me his crop was pesticide free but his farm was too small to get certified. So I picked sixty pounds of his blueberries to store in my freezer, only to fall violently ill from eating the first bowl. A telephone call revealed he had sprayed an exceptional herbicide to kill the poison ivy invading his bushes on the day before I showed up to pick fruit to fill my cancer-fighting pantry.

After I reoriented that course in order to challenge the next student cohort to think beyond their own youthful sense of immortality—and consider the farmworkers whose bodies would be exposed to pesticides to produce that “local” food—the students’ answers began to change.⁴⁹ Former students courageously stepped forward to share their own experiences being sickened by pesticides through their campus laboratory jobs or summer field jobs. I also began emphasizing the extraordinary accomplishments of transnational agrarian movements to help young people see that corporate power is not infallible and can be defeated in solidarity with collective, global struggles.⁵⁰

I, of course, understand why my sustainable agriculture students aspire to build livelihoods with “their hands in the dirt.” The serotonin-producing bacteria in organic soil makes me happy too. However, a revolutionary transformation of the food system will also require the “dull work” of putting hands on computer keyboards to lobby for policies to restrict subsidies, reduce food waste, help young farmers buy land, break up factory animal farms with environmental laws, and prevent trade agreements that wreck the lives of small farmers elsewhere.

When white and wealthier communities mobilize against ugly or environmentally damaging projects near them, their actions often push those harmful developments onto communities of color. The environmental justice movement rightly denounces this as NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”). Yet, the food corollary—what I might call CHOMPism (“choosing health on my plate”)—remains a troublingly acceptable marker of food politics. I recall one student who indignantly scribbled on my local vs. organic poll that he would never be caught buying local food and would only chomp his own homegrown food. I could not help but chuckle that part of his “wokeness” included the cup of imported coffee he brought to every lecture. Caffeinated stimulants, tropical fruits (pineapples, bananas), and chocolate—all of which drove colonial expansion—remained somehow exempt from this young man’s local food rules. Apparently, some foodies give themselves a “Marco Polo exception”: if the explorer could have carried it home, unrefrigerated, for months on a slow boat, then it can be an ethical “splurge.” According to this logic, immigrant farm laborers should forgo imports of their own cherished heritage foods, while their transnational migration to produce “local food” remains invisibilized.⁵¹

Besides these hypocrisies, the neoliberal logic of local eating falls short of the systemic changes needed to solve our food problems.⁵² Like so many other militarized aspects of industrial agriculture, the US Army published a study in 1969 to first promote “local” food as a survival technique during nuclear war.⁵³ Questioning his previous pretension for local food, historian James McWilliams realized that going local is like “turning ourselves into a gated community.”⁵⁴ Digging into the entire food cycle, it turns out that transportation is just a sliver of the environmental impact of our diets (only 11 percent). Farming and food processing represent 46 percent, home cooking 25 percent, and restaurants serve up 16 percent.⁵⁵ Yet, as McWilliams quips, “‘Cook efficiently’ just doesn’t have the same rousing ring as ‘eat local.’”⁵⁶

Because 80 percent of US grains go into animal feed, the single most impactful act any “eater” can do for climate change or global hunger is to consume less meat.⁵⁷ The average steer requires 130 gallons (3 barrels) of oil over its lifetime.⁵⁸ A US family can offset its average annual car travel (2,938 miles) simply by cutting its meat consumption in half.⁵⁹ Even more astounding, the energy used to produce only the meat a typical US omnivore consumes is equivalent to the total average annual energy consumption for someone living in the Global South.⁶⁰ Happily, one can eat less meat without resorting to gruel or the generic Esperanto cuisine of “hippie food.”⁶¹ Mesoamerica boasts a plant-based cuisine that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) honored in 2010 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.⁶² The complexity of the region’s sauces, beverages, and versatile staples are mirrored in the beauty of its polycropped milpa system.

Although local food opens a path for people to withdraw a piece of their lives from corporate markets, it does not spontaneously produce democracy nor does it challenge global inequities of food distribution.⁶³ Like the “Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” (popularized in an eponymous book published for Earth Day 1990), there is a profound disconnect between simplistic individual actions—like driving an SUV to a store, then buying local food, and bagging it with a reusable tote—and the pace and scale of planetary destruction we collectively face.⁶⁴ Former vice president Al Gore, for example, could have used his bully pulpit to confront the one hundred corporations responsible for 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but instead he encouraged individuals in his documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, to simply change a lightbulb.⁶⁵ We now know that one oil company (British Petroleum) birthed the concept of “carbon footprint” to deflect responsibility for the climate crisis onto consumers rather than on the oil industry.⁶⁶ Agribusiness is essentially doing the same through the notion of food miles.

Proof in the (HFCS-free) pudding is how easily globetrotting corporations have co-opted the concept to “localwash” themselves. Walmart—arguably one of the least local businesses ever created—is a corporation that does not even bank locally and instead wires its profits every night to Arkansas. Yet it successfully made much ado about starting to procure “local” food, while at the same time lowballing local farmers.⁶⁷ The southern supermarket chain Winn Dixie launched an ad campaign in 2009 called “Local Flavor since 1956,” but also paved over a local field where my family once picked blackberries and wild plums. Barnes and Noble, which decimated local independent bookstores during my youth, later launched a website saying “All bookselling is local.”⁶⁸ Need I continue?

The most insidious effect of locavorism is how it reinforces a parochial sense of US exceptionalism. Switching from beef to ostrich meat might reduce carbon emissions, but simply ostrich-izing our food politics will not. Opting out of industrial food at home does nothing to repair the damage of US corporate aggression abroad. Like it or not, all localities are enmeshed in global trade, and “no group can delink from a world in which we are all already implicated in concrete historically produced planetary effects.”⁶⁹ Instead of filling our Facebook feeds with vanity photos of our dinner plates, we could use that space to discuss how corporate bullies are ravaging the food sovereignty of neighboring nations.

By its presence or absence, mass sentiment profoundly shapes government and multilateral policy. For instance, in the delusional belief that a nuclear attack could somehow be survived, the construction of expensive fallout shelters became a craze among well-to-do families … and they became less concerned about peace.⁷⁰ When the wealthy think they can opt out of planetary problems through consumption alone, this has profound consequences for a democratic society.⁷¹

Don’t get me wrong: I love my home garden as much as anyone else. And sure, before Long COVID disabled me, I enjoyed biking to the nearby farmers market, where I regularly had pleasant conversations with a local farmer about growing nopales, blackberries, and tomatoes, and the reason he farms organically (so as not to expose his grandchildren to pesticides when they visit). But these local gestures are not a substitute for political action. Nor will they help the millions of people in distant places whose livelihoods have been “Butzed” by corporate commodity dumping. As any kind of direct rebuttal to Pollan, this book comes far too late, and I have likely already spilled too much ink on how much The Omnivore’s Dilemma got under my pericarp.⁷² The deeper questions are how and why Pollan’s ideas fell on fertile ground.

Although we ought to be united against a food system that coddles corporations, the People of High-Fructose Corn Syrup and the People of Maize express significantly different assumptions about social change. According to the dominant “educational” model of social transformation in the United States, if “eaters” can be armed with better information (read: labels), they will become more socially responsible consumers of local, organic, GMO-free, seasonal, or even homegrown food, and the sum of these acts will somehow ripple up the food chain to transform corporate practices. At the very moment the food movement could have demanded regulation, solidarity, and transnational solutions, locavore fantasies and the quest for consumer labels diverted the movement’s revolutionary potential. Individual behavioral acts of resistance may sometimes add up, but they rarely multiply unless people step forward to contribute toward something larger than themselves.⁷³ By contrast, through more direct repertoires of protest, many countries in the Global South—even those with a long history of state oppression, weak environmental agencies, and little consumer information—have won more aggressive action to reinvigorate democracy in order to regulate genetically modified crops (as in Guatemala) and to defend, celebrate, and renew small farming techniques for climate resilience at a scale only possible with state support (as in Mexico).

CLIMATE-WISE NOT CLIMATE-SMART AGRICULTURE

Despite surplus calories being consumed by the People of High-Fructose Corn Syrup and their industrial feedlots, agribusiness has frightened policymakers, research professors, and the public into believing that the People of Maize must be forced into a “gene revolution” to be able to sustain the masses in a climate-altered world. After two decades of the repeated claim that they would “feed the hungry,” genetically modified crops clearly have not. Hunger is a problem of inequitable land tenure and food distribution, full stop. The world already produces more than enough food to fill every person’s caloric needs, yet 800 million people go hungry every night.⁷⁴ Today, only 23 percent of cultivated land goes toward plant crops (providing 82 and 63 percent of humanity’s calories and protein, respectively). The remaining 77 percent is tied up in producing feed crops (many of them GMOs) for meat and dairy, which then supply a mere 18 percent of global calories and 37 percent of global protein consumption.⁷⁵

After the blazing summer of 2023, it seems clear that we are moving from global warming to global heating faster than scientists ever predicted. Historic heat records last year led scientists to warn that the homogeneity of grain monocultures, especially corn, leaves the world at risk of “synchronized crop failures.”⁷⁶ This has happened once before.

In the past, hybrid breeders detasseled male corn inflorescence by hand, but this was time-consuming and time-sensitive, requiring hefty labor costs. My father, in fact, earned money as an Iowa teenager to pay for college this way. After breeders discovered a gene for corn male sterility in Peru and Chile in 1965, they introduced it through conventional breeding into hybrid seed production, and soon this gene (cms-T) appeared across 75–90 percent of commercial corn.⁷⁷ The 1970 season was unusually wet and hot. A corn blight that originated in the Philippines in 1964 spread throughout the US Southeast by June 1970; a month later, it engulfed Iowa and Wisconsin; by August it was attacking fields all over the place, including Canada. Only hybrid crops based on the cms-T sterility gene were affected. In some areas of the US South, losses were as high as 50 percent. All told, the blight wiped out 15 percent of the US crop, amounting to a billion-dollar loss (roughly $15 billion today).⁷⁸

To restore genetic vigor against the disease, in 1971 corn breeders returned to Mexican landraces.⁷⁹ Still, aside from the occasional lecture in a plant pathology course, the seed sector appears to have forgotten this cautionary tale. They stack homogenous GM traits onto a similarly narrow set of homogenous hybrids. A 2017 study found that 45 percent of GM corn seeds share the same hybrid base.⁸⁰ The four countries that produce more than half of global corn are still 84–88 percent reliant on Corn Belt Dent (CBD) germplasm.⁸¹ A researcher for the USDA (hardly a radical institution) warned: “With the development of biotechnology, specifically genetic engineering, one wonders if we are setting ourselves up for another fall by increasing genetic uniformity of our crops.”⁸²

As the climate crisis grows more urgent every year, it can be tempting to look for silver bullet technologies—but, as Vandana Shiva quips, Monsanto gets the silver and farmers get the bullet.⁸³ In a strange way, the “buy local” mantra also functions as a rhetorical silver bullet, promising miraculous results from a single solution. Yet climate solutions inherently must be plural; it would be foolish to gamble on fragile corporate monocultures or expect that some elusive future tech will save us.⁸⁴ As wisely stated in a popular quote attributed to Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Biotechnologists claimed that by helping farmers lower their agrochemical use, they could fix the problems of industrial agriculture.⁸⁵ Yet herbicide use instead went up dramatically. Following the introduction of Roundup Ready crops, herbicide use increased by 527 million pounds in the United States from 1996 to 2011.⁸⁶ That includes the half pound of glyphosate applied on average to every cultivated acre.⁸⁷ By 2016 global herbicide use had multiplied fifteenfold. Around the world, 523 weeds are known to be resistant to herbicides, including 357 that are impervious to glyphosate.⁸⁸ Scholars from the Global South foresaw this based on their own Green Revolution experiences.⁸⁹ Monocultures of any kind invite pests. Agrochemicals kill friendly species and disrupt the ecological balance. Fertilizers cause the soil to release carbon and dry out. Weeds and insects reproduce quickly and will inevitably become resistant to pesticides and insecticides.⁹⁰

Just when the bad news was piling up, the World Bank inadvertently (and then purposefully) gave the biotech industry new rhetoric to smother its weed problems. The World Bank first invoked “climate-smart agriculture” in 2009 as part of a gender empowerment program in Africa.⁹¹ Biotech firms quickly co-opted this phrase to turn the climate crisis into profit.⁹² By 2014 the World Bank and other “stakeholders” launched the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture to help promote GM crops, especially in Africa.⁹³ One member of this climate-smart alliance is Yara, the world’s largest fertilizer manufacturer, which is especially ironic given that the nitrous oxide emitted from fertilizers is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂.

Biotech PR talking points go something like this: with “smart” herbicide- resistant crops, farmers can avoid plowing before they plant and thus save a little gasoline. Industry front groups serve up factoids like: “Each additional hectare/2.47 acres of land converted to no-till has a CO₂ impact equivalent of erasing the carbon emissions from a drive from Boston to Philadelphia.”⁹⁴ What about the rest of greenhouse gas emissions? All the gasoline consumed in the mechanized farming cycle should be counted, as well as the aforementioned release of nitrous oxide, the soil carbon lost from fertilizers, the petrochemicals used to make pesticides and herbicides, and the deforestation underway to make room for GM crops, especially in the Amazon. Biotechnologists bragging about helping a few corporate farms shift to no-till agriculture are like lazy husbands who boast and beg to be congratulated for occasionally “helping” to wash the dishes while ignoring everything else their wives do to sustain the household—from emotional labor to scheduling, budgeting, childcare, cooking, cleaning, and endless laundry.⁹⁵ Touting boutique humanitarian projects like the benefits of golden rice or virus-resistant papayas is equally unimpressive.⁹⁶

Yet 99 percent of GM seeds sown today are either engineered to be resistant to herbicides or are Bt insecticidal crops. They are mostly destined to be feed for animals, to factories, and to agrofuel plants—not for people.⁹⁷ Although the biotech industry promotes “drought-tolerant” seeds as the future’s miracle solution, plant adaptation to abiotic stressors requires interaction among multiple genes, so adaptation to unpredictable rainfall can never be solved by singular genetic modifications.⁹⁸

Cor[n]porations complain it costs them $130 million and thirteen years, on average, to develop each new GM seed that will “save” the world from climate change.⁹⁹ That single sum would be enough to finance Guatemala’s entire public seed research program for eighty-five years. If more funding were available to work in partnership with Indigenous peoples, imagine how many open-pollinated varieties might be bred to adapt to climate change and then be exchanged for free, farmer to farmer. Yet currently less than 15 percent of the US agricultural research budget supports alternative techniques and far less goes to holistic agroecological transitions.¹⁰⁰ Even fewer US resources are directed to support agroecological projects for the Global South.

Biotechnology is inherently a myopic and vertically integrated laboratory science run by a tiny group of scientists who operate as though separated from social realities, whereas agroecology (a blend of agronomy and ecology) seeks to cocreate holistic solutions through respectful relations with the lived experience of peasants and Indigenous peoples as knowledge-holders of agrodiversity.¹⁰¹ Gaining global recognition through Via Campesina, agroecology is also now a collective political movement based on principles of cultural diversity; it seeks to defend “seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, water, knowledge, culture, and other common goods.”¹⁰² With the goal of recycling resources on the farm, agroecology looks to the knowledge passed down over generations, rather than external modern inputs. Genuine agroecological systems are already close to net-zero energy use; they rebuild soil carbon; they have greater elasticity for intensification via polycropping; and they are more resilient in the face of disaster.¹⁰³ For example, after 1988’s Hurricane Mitch, the second deadliest Atlantic Ocean storm that killed at least twenty-two thousand people, a large Central American survey showed that hillside plots farmed with agroecological methods retained 20 to 40 percent more of their topsoil, whereas conventional farms suffered tremendous erosion.¹⁰⁴

To question GMOs is not to be antiscience. Rather, it is to value the wisdom of agroecological science tested on a longer timescale. For instance, a 150-year experiment at Rothamsted Station in England clearly shows that organic-based systems (in the form of recycling manure from farm animals) yield more over time than chemically fertilized crops. Since 1981, other long-term experiments by the Rodale Institute have shown that organic corn cropping earns 25 percent more profit and it sequesters tremendously more carbon.¹⁰⁵ In turn, this organic matter in the soil holds more water, serving as a natural solution to drought. With relatively modest investments, Rodale estimates that if farmers shifted to agroecological production tomorrow, this “down-to-earth” sequestration of carbon could offset 100 percent of annual CO₂ emissions. Even if an immediate shift to organic is unlikely, the US-based Project Drawdown estimates that stepwise agroecological conversion could contribute as much as 45 percent of necessary carbon reduction by 2050.¹⁰⁶ We need not wait for some future technological wizardry to save the planet: regenerative organic agriculture can substantially mitigate climate change now.¹⁰⁷

To be sure, scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering since 2012 have allowed plant breeders and other scientists to modify specific genes at significantly lowered research and development (R&D) costs than what it took to develop the first generation of GMOs (by inserting transpecies genes through a cauliflower mosaic virus).¹⁰⁸ Using enzymes to more accurately modify genes, the new CRISPR-Cas9 technology has led to an explosion of genetic engineering for medications, vaccine development, and environmental remediation that could be beneficial for humanity. Soon a GM crop could perhaps be made in someone’s garage.¹⁰⁹ Even without physical seeds, anyone can now experiment on plant genetic sequences using big data analysis.¹¹⁰ In theory, breeders could use CRISPR technology to create more resilient crops that require fewer chemical inputs. But who will do this needed research? Land-grant universities now seem functionally beholden to agribusiness.¹¹¹ The corporate behemoths that controlled the first- generation herbicide-resistant GM crops will easily acquire and squelch any innovative CRISPR technology invented by research professors that might compete with their profit models.¹¹²

Although they have cornered the market in the United States, Bayer- Monsanto and other biotech firms have had less success in penetrating the enormous but opaque agricultural markets of developing countries. Were GM crops truly healthy, hearty, high-yielding, and drought-resistant, biotech corporations would not need to resort to legal bullying to transform autonomous small farmers from the Global South into clients. At present no corporate giant is researching varieties that succeed in the marginal, mountainous, degraded soils of impoverished countries.¹¹³ Instead, they “stack” more genetic traits onto hybrids that were originally bred to maximize yield in northern latitudes on flat irrigated land nursed by synthetic fertilizers. However, maize is very sensitive to day length, altitude, wind, soil, water, and heat, so seeds designed for US midwestern corn monocropping will not produce the same yield elsewhere.

Happily, farmers in the Global South have conserved maize diversity and possess the techniques, skills, and social networks to learn from one another. They have been doing so with little to no money. Upward of half the world’s farming population remains engaged in agricultural production on small farms. Eighty percent of farmers in the Global South still save their own seeds because their local varieties are better adapted to the marginal lands left to them after colonial land grabs. Native seeds offer more resilience to climate change, exhibiting more phenotypic plasticity against abiotic stressors than hybrids or GMOs.¹¹⁴ Many maize landraces already exist that can thrive under conditions of climate change; others may be adaptively developing under the watchful eye of wise milperos.¹¹⁵ Through emails and texts, Guatemalan colleagues have reported maize landraces that resist floods, produce low oleic levels for long-term storage, and display other assisted evolutionary marvels.¹¹⁶ Gene flow between maize and its hardier wild ancestor, teosinte, offers “unexploited genetic diversity for novel traits” and stress tolerance.¹¹⁷ As journalist Peter Canby has mused, “Would it be fair to think of landrace [“native”] corn as having already achieved, on some level, the very properties that genetic-engineering firms were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to breed into commercial corn?”¹¹⁸

Because most small farmers in the Global South source their seeds locally and often within their own families, a very simple climate solution would be to fund structures (seed fairs and the like) for them to share promising seeds and seek contextual advice from other farmers outside their ordinary networks.¹¹⁹ Sometimes all that is needed is a gentle suggestion to awaken the scientific curiosity of small producers. One agroecology research team reported that after a simple transect walk accompanied by some Nicaraguan farmers who were asked, Why do you think x bean variety does well in this space?, many of those farmers spontaneously began experimenting with multiple beans within their fields. Within just a couple of seasons, they had figured out which seeds yielded best according to different soil moistures.¹²⁰

Thinking that time is running out, policymakers may be tempted to support a single stopgap solution coming from a lab. It would be reckless to bet on these single high-tech “fixes.” In a global game of roulette, sure, the risk of “smart” solutions to climate change might produce a bigger payout. But corporations will be the ones cashing in their chips. A much safer bet would be distributed over a larger set of numbers—such as on the thirteen million Mesoamerican farmers working today, including the one million Q’eqchi’ Maya among whom I had the honor of learning.

METHODS IN MILPAMERICA

Whether in Q’eqchi’ or Spanish, the words for milpa and maize are colloquially synonymous. Milpa entered Spanish from the Aztec term for “cultivated place,” or “milli pan.” In Q’eqchi’, “to farm” means “to plant milpa” (k’alek), that is, to plant maize. The Q’eqchi’ word for maizefield (k’al) has the same double meaning as “milpa,” referring to both the land parcel and the maize crop itself. The word for “village” (k’aleb’aal) means “the place of maize fields.”

In 1998, 82 percent of the lowland Q’eqchi’ population self-identified as farmers; 99 percent of those reported maize as their principal crop. As Guatemala’s most prodigious maize producers, Q’eqchi’ families have transformed the northern lowland departments of Alta Verapaz, Petén, and Izabal into the country’s “tortilla basket.” In these lowland regions, Q’eqchi’ Maya farmers can coax up to three annual maize crops from thin karstic tropical soils through swidden cropping fed only by ashes, rain, and sun. An older generation of other Maya (Itza’ and Mopan), Petenero, and ladino farmers also once extensively cultivated maize across this region, but their children and grandchildren have tended to seek nonagricultural employment. So although they constitute only 7 percent of Guatemala’s population, Q’eqchi’ farmers are now disproportionately responsible for producing approximately 20 percent of commodity corn sold nationally. Even while engaging with markets, Q’eqchi’ farming families enmesh their own subsistence maize production with ceremony and Maya cosmology.¹²¹

From seven years living in six different Q’eqchi’ villages, two Itza’-“Mayero” towns, and traveling to many more peasant communities, I eventually amassed some three thousand pages of fieldnotes with marginalia on lowland maize farming techniques, rural household budgets, pesticide use, and more.¹²² Complementing my participant observations, I was codesigner of two major stratified surveys (in 1999 and 2009). With a sample size of a thousand households each, they provided quantitative insights into the economics and agricultural logics of maize/corn production.¹²³ In conversation with countless women, I also spent thousands of hours making tortillas, tamales, and other ritual foods. Later commissioned by an Indigenous Belizean nonprofit to write a monograph series about cultural aspects of farming, forest knowledge, recipes, and traditional stories, I gained other insights into the deeper spiritual dimensions of the milpa (swidden) system.¹²⁴

For the past decade I have collaborated with the largest Q’eqchi’ peasant federation in Guatemala. Unlike my prior community-based fieldwork, as a primarily long-distance ally to this organization, I became more of an observant correspondent than a participant-observer.¹²⁵ Through regular texts, emails, and social media posts with Q’eqchi’ leaders and farmers, I acquired a feeling for how they not only read the news, but also how they “read” institutions to find conjunctural cracks, apertures, trim tabs, or other openings for change. Grassroots movements operating on a perpetual shoestring need to plan carefully when to bide their time and when to strike.

As described in the preface, an uncanny series of cyclical coincidences drew me into their struggles to defend maize from gringo GM corn. This involved no new rural fieldwork per se, though, like Sidney Mintz, “I stumbled across issues that might be better understood” from my previous village sojourns.¹²⁶ Although I was not in Guatemala when the 2014 Monsanto Law protests erupted, prior ethnographic understanding allowed me to read between the lines of what a broad cross section of the Guatemalan public were saying in their blog comments and other forms of social media, which I cataloged and coded. Despite a long history of political repression, Guatemalans of diverse backgrounds have embraced Feis (the local name for Facebook), community journalism, and comment pages on mainstream news sites to express themselves with surprising candor and crystalline articulations of “moral economy.”¹²⁷ This virtual topography of protest has likewise rendered visible a multicultural discourse that is otherwise typically missing from mainstream news and official texts.

Of course, social media also has a bias toward rupture, fissure, scandal, uprising, novelty, and breaks with the past. It tells little about the slow-moving underground or the long-term organizing of civil society.¹²⁸ Through readers’ likes and reposts, however, one can glean a sense of the connective threads among and between actors—the mycelium, as it were, to these grassroots networks. To verify whether I had accurately captured the meaning of social media ephemera, I consulted regularly with key leaders, academics, and organizers. Believing more in “people review” than academic peer review, I then circulated a quick “artisanal” translation of a first book draft with a core group of organizers.¹²⁹ I also shared the research behind this current book, gaining new insights from strategic dialogues in a private WhatsApp group chat and public postings to a larger Facebook group. Making lemonade from life’s cancer lemons, I realized one of the contributions I could make from afar to movements on the ground was to summarize, distill, and translate toxicological and other environmental health research on the hazards of pesticides. I have spent time every day for the last decade reading PubMed and other technical literature on toxic threats; eventually this “hobby” turned into a new field of expertise in service to Indigenous movements.

As Karl Marx once noted, the point is not simply to interpret the world, but to change it. As a lifelong ally of agrarian movements, Peter Rosset shares this perspective:

You have to find a way to participate in the movement in order to deserve the access that you’re given to it. Some people have said that in the best case, research with social movements is the collective construction of knowledge—collectively by both researchers and movement activists … And in practical terms, if you want to be able to work with social movements, you can’t just do what you want to do with them. You have to put yourself at the service of the movement … Whatever it is, you have to be always available to do whatever has to be done to the best of your ability, and in exchange, maybe at some point you get to do a little bit of research with the movement.¹³⁰

Following these same ethics, this book took more years to germinate than I might have wished. I began writing it simply to share the story of the Guatemalan Maya movement’s inspiring victory over Monsanto in 2014. While the humanities and social science literature on corn is bountiful, most is focused on the United States or Mexico. On an academic panel in 2016, filled with luminaries of GMO struggles in Latin America whose work I deeply respect and admire, I was stunned that no one knew what had happened in Guatemala. While Mexico’s rumbles with Monsanto became a cause célèbre for hundreds of international allies, scholars, journalists, and watchdog groups (boasting 55,700 results in Google Scholar), Guatemala’s resistance to GM corn remained relatively unknown outside the country, except for a small number of dissertation projects and papers.

When Guatemala was forced into legalizing GM corn in 2019 through a backdoor customs deal with Honduras, I realized that I had to widen my analysis to understand the GMO policies of the rest of Mexico and Central America.¹³¹ As a cultural region centered around maize but also threatened by trade agreements and development projects, Mesoamerica should really be known as “Milpamerica.”¹³² In the additional years that Long COVID slowed my expanded research, Mexico dramatically reversed course after a quarter century of US corn dumping, state permits for GM corn field trials, and the consequent contamination of native maize. The moral of Mexico’s turnabout became suddenly (and inductively) clear: the diversity of social opposition led to this dramatic policy shift, just as the plurality of Guatemala’s underdog uprising to the Monsanto Law initially defeated it, then crescendoed into a greater democratic uprising in 2023.

How will this end? In the years of working on this book, my thoughts have teetered between hope and anguish. Then I realized that like maize and beans, these sentiments can coexist. I was reminded by fellow southerner Janisse Ray that “there’s no despair in a seed … only life, waiting for the right conditions—sun and water, warmth and soil—to be set free.”¹³³ As a bridge between past and future, seeds are themselves nuggets of hope. To make change, one must necessarily enter a dark space of fallowed grief on which new ideas can sprout. As Rebecca Solnit puts it,

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, and alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists … It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.¹³⁴

Or, as F. Scott Fitzgerald quipped (or perhaps plagiarized from his wife, Zelda), “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”¹³⁵

Of course, like all environmental struggles, resistance to agricultural technology and corporatization will be a perpetual struggle. When an uprising fails, pundits often poke fun at the instigators. We also tend to distrust our victories—or ignore them—to dwell upon failures and heckle ourselves. Yet, as Ralph Nader often says, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win. Failed uprisings become the compost that creates fertile ground for future harvests or “wins.” As Martin Luther King Jr. said so beautifully, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—if only we can persist in the struggle and learn valuable lessons along the way. While this story will, of course, continue to unfurl past this publication, I set it free with the following structure.

CHAPTER OVERVIEWS

As a book for the general public, here are a few notes about implicit academic conventions. Nonacademic readers are welcome to graze the theoretical appetizers in chapter 1, but should not miss the main and dessert courses (subsections) about how the call for food sovereignty arose in response to corporate concentration and profiteering. Due the density of the cites in this book, daily newspaper articles are cited only in endnotes. I heed the orthography of the Guatemalan Academy of Mayan Languages. Except when referring to languages, I use the preferred form “Maya” as both noun and adjective. Although “genetically modified” and “genetically engineered” are used interchangeably, I use the term GMOs, in English, even though the Spanish term transgénico more rightly emphasizes the taking of genes from one species and inserting them into another. Generally, material from ethnographic fieldnotes and correspondence is not cited, except where reviewers asked for more detail about the source. Following ethnographic ethics, village names are pseudonyms.

Chapter 1 presents the food regime scholarship that inspired my dialectical comparison of milperos and omnivores. From these canonical works, food studies and peasant studies morphed into an electrifying new field of critical agrarian studies co-constructed with the input of the peasant organizing juggernaut, Via Campesina. Against predictions that Indigenous people and peasants would disappear, small farmers continue to persist and organize by thinking locally and acting globally against transnational corporations, and especially Monsanto. Even though Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018, I use Monsanto’s maiden name throughout this book because most of the events described herein occurred under the auspices of Monsanto alone.¹³⁶ After a slurry of mergers in the late 2010s, just three large seed and chemical corporations—whom I call the “three wicked stepsisters”—dominate the global seed/agrochemical trade: Bayer- Monsanto, Dow-DuPont, and Syngenta-ChemChina. However, they all face growing legal liability for the toxicity of their herbicides. Waiting for a laboratory miracle from this trio or hoping for salvation from seeds being stored in ex situ seed banks are poor planetary bets for a climate-altered world. Rather than gambling on fragile corporate corn futures, I argue that going “back to the future” to support (free) farmer-to-farmer exchanges of evolving Mesoamerican maize varieties would be a better societal investment for climate resilience.

To appreciate the deep tenacity of maize and its people, chapter 2 bends backward through history to trace the ancient transformation of teosinte grass into tiny domesticated cobs. These proto-maize plants then traveled the hemisphere—transforming the cultures, languages, rituals, cuisines, and social life of almost all Indigenous farmers of the Americas, but especially at its center of origin. This chapter also pays tribute to the unsung genius of Mesoamerican women, whose cooking technologies made maize an even more nourishing staple. Although the Spanish aggressively imposed European germs, weeds, and cattle onto the ecology of the Americas, they could not persuade Mesoamericans to abandon maize for their “more civilized” wheat. Foodways, therefore, became an important idiom of Indigenous resistance from the Spanish invasion to the present. A final case study of biopiracy orchestrated by Mars Inc. and UC Davis serves as a reminder that colonial-style thefts of Indigenous knowledge continue today.

Chapter 3 surveys the history of industrial corn in the context of Cold War military and development politics and describes how Monsanto and Dow, as manufacturers of chemical weapons, reinvented themselves as agrochemical providers and then GM seed sellers. Through nonprofit industrial hybrid research centers like CIMMYT in Mexico (funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) and supplemented by US “aid,” the Green[go] Revolution clearly served gringo geopolitical interests. By deepening dependency on agrochemical inputs, I argue that the present day “gene revolution” represents a difference in degree, not kind, from the Green Revolution.

Chapter 4 describes how Mesoamerica has been stalked by corporate trade. Immediately following NAFTA’s implementation, some 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their lands and livelihoods. This chapter explores how and why this occurred as well as the ways that corporations have used contamination, convoluted trade agreements, and diplomatic pressure to force Mesoamerican countries to open their borders to biotech seeds. Beyond the legal mazes of US trade policy, this chapter discusses alternative legal agreements, like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), which could support collective rights to save seeds.

Chapters 5 and 6 chronicle how pan-Indigenous movements in both Mexico and Guatemala have formed strategic alliances with strange bedfellows to resist the foreign imposition of GM seeds … and won. These chapters also show the potential for radical change when social movements can compel states to take proactive steps to support food sovereignty (in the case of Mexico’s Fourth Transformation), or, at the very least, to stop corruption and reinvest in the eroded public sector (in the case of Guatemala’s 2023 plurinational strike, which ushered in a new democratic age after seventy years of political violence and repression). Reflecting a Maya sense of cyclical time, these chapters are presented in roughly, but not perfectly, chronological order—with many uncanny repetitions, some setbacks, then incredible advancements. The remarkable arc of Mesoamerican resistance to GM corn does seem to be bending toward food and environmental justice.

The conclusion circles back to the US Midwest and one of the great forgotten victories of the anti-GMO movement: how Canadian and US farmers defeated GM wheat by uniting their pitchforks with forktivist-inspired consumer movements. This case addresses the broader potential for food movements to form diverse alliances across borders, as well as other recipes for radicals. My final reflections on weeds and other ancient wisdom gleaned from our plant relatives in a milpa system aim to help you, gentle reader, think anew (or, an-old) about agrarian and climate struggles.