CONCLUSION An Ode to the Pitchfork

Roll a ball, twirl, slap, pat, then palm onto the clay griddle, and flip twice.… Wanting to learn to be a good guest and genuinely be helpful to the village women with their chores while we talked about my 1995 undergrad thesis research, I knew I should learn to make a proper tortilla. For months my village hosts had discreetly fed my misshapen tortillas to the dogs. Then one morning I formed a perfectly even and thin rounded circle. Having more-calloused fingers, the heat of the firewood hearth no longer bothered me, and I turned over the tortilla for its third toast. It puffed into a perfectly ballooned tortilla. My host and dearest friend, María Ramírez from Atelesdale, exclaimed with delight that my tortillas were finally inflating.

No one else in the house used tableware; they deftly scooped beans and other condiments with a tortilla itself. María kept one random fork and spoon in the house for my poor foreign table manners. One day, though, and without realizing it, I ate my bowl of beans with only tortillas as utensils. María noticed my new social grace and expressed her pride that I no longer ate like a gringa, with a fork.

It strikes me as a bit ironic that a decade later, the fork became the discursive centerpiece of the US food movement: Farm-to-fork. Vote with your fork. Fork festivals. Rather than funneling our frustrations with the food system into street protests, we began eating funnel cakes in farmers’ markets on permitted streets. Amid this metaphoric craze for tableware, the food movement surrendered its more powerful tool and symbol of agrarian revolt: the pitchfork.

Believing that “forktivism” alone will bring sustainability and justice, the North American food movement seems to have forgotten one of its greatest regulatory victories: the international preemptive defeat of GM wheat. Monsanto is not a corporation that typically bows to the pressure of its critics. Yet, despite having invested millions in R&D and four years seeking regulatory approval for Roundup Ready wheat, in May 2004 Monsanto unexpectedly withdrew it from the market after facing an unusual union of pitchforks and forks. As a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union of Canada noted, “I think it got sort of neck-snapping attention from government and Monsanto and everybody else because they were really surprised by the diversity of the resistance to this stuff.”¹

In the process, northern farmers realized how fragile their international marketing contracts were and that even small disruptions between production costs and sales could endanger their survival. Although the US food movement has romanticized local markets and demonized trade, in this instance, the global marketplace was the catalyst for food justice regarding GM wheat. Because this pre-emptive removal of a GM crop was such a remarkable lesson in thinking locally but acting globally, a brief review of that case will help in understanding the broader lessons from Mexico’s and Guatemala’s respective and collective resistance to Monsanto, including trickster ways of reimagining weeds in polycropped systems.

THE REMARKABLE GM WHEAT DEFEAT

My interest in how biotech crops affect farmer livelihoods sprouted from that windy day trip to Don Pablo’s milpa and my first conversation in Q’eqchi’ about the threat of GM corn to Mesoamerican milperos.² Half a continent away, on that same day in February 2004, producer resistance was brewing against Monsanto in the unlikeliest of places: the Canadian and US Great Plains. Although biotech advocates like to paint GM crops as unstoppable and almost inevitable for North American agriculture, even the most industrialized farmers were once able to summon collective “growing resistance” to GMOs and harness consumer interests in support of their own.³

A series of bad news stories about GMOs created a fertile context for this farmer rebellion. The StarLink scandal had raised alarm bells about how fast and far that dangerous GM varieties could infiltrate the global food supply. Percy Schmeiser’s much publicized trial in Saskatchewan—after GM canola seeds had blown into a ditch on his property line—raised awareness among regional farmers that “Monsanto was nothing short of a bully, willing to force its agenda to the detriment of even its own customers.”⁴ As Todd Leake, a North Dakota wheat farmer, recounted, “All they need to do is accuse you and take you to court. They have an endless supply of money. The plan is to intimidate you and break you.”⁵ To be exact: Monsanto at that time employed seventy-five lawyers with a budget of $10 million for the sole purpose of prosecuting farmers for patent infringement.⁶ Collecting millions in secret arbitration, the lawyers’ efforts became a self-financing swindle.⁷

Even though GM canola and GM corn had already swept through the Great Plains, wheat was another matter. GMO proponents tend to paint their opponents as “anti-science,” but these plains wheat farmers happily embraced hybrids and other GM crops. Nevertheless, they saw Roundup Ready wheat for what it was: an excuse to sell more herbicides, not to help farmers.⁸ As a Saskatchewan farmer noted, “There are enough chemicals out there for wheat now to keep a nice clean field; I don’t know why you’d want a field of Roundup Ready wheat.”⁹ They were not ideologically opposed to GM crops; rather, Monsanto’s GM wheat failed on agronomic grounds:

• Wheat is less vulnerable to weeds than other GM crops (canola, soy, corn).

• Farmers were aware that blanket spraying of Roundup can create superweeds.

• Combines always scatter wheat seeds—creating a possible scenario in which any herbicide-resistant wheat could become a weed to a higher-value crop, such as canola, in a no-till field rotation.¹⁰

• Farmers had their own wheat seed-saving networks and knew these exchanges enhanced vigor.¹¹

• Wheat is a staple food for some two billion people.

• Wheat is also used to make a consecrated food; the concept of breaking bread has cultural and religious significance to more than one major world religion.¹²

In January 2001 wheat farmers converged in their pickup trucks in Bismarck, North Dakota, for a state assembly committee meeting. Monsanto’s lobbyist had prepared talking points to counter the expected consumer “Frankenfood” critiques, but he was utterly unprepared for farmer opposition. A bipartisan committee unanimously recommended a moratorium on GM wheat, and the North Dakota House of Representatives quickly passed it.¹³ Before the North Dakota Senate could approve the ban, however, Monsanto loyalists within the George W. Bush administration intervened. Farmers nonetheless kept up the pressure. With savvy political theater, during the 2003 state legislative session they distributed bags of wheat containing a smattering of painted seeds to emphasize demonstrate how easily grain elevators could be contaminated. Fears over mad cow disease had already raised EU hackles concerning the safety of North American food imports in general. The North Dakota farmers therefore applied for passports and began connecting with their foreign buyers.¹⁴

Across the border, the Canadian Wheat Board became an unexpected ally for the prairie farmers. After surveying their constituents, the board realized farmers were most worried about fungal blight and pests, not about weeds. Said one marketing consultant, “So then it got us thinking a bit more about the farmer voice and then led into the coalition work we were doing.”¹⁵ This new alliance of calloused hands and carpal tunnel wrists shifted the discussion to corporate control over agriculture. Albeit generally wary of “city folk,” prairie settlers forged an unprecedented alliance with Greenpeace, the Council of Canadians, and the Canadian Health Coalition—organizations that typically engaged with the health and environment concerns of urban constituencies. Without having to sow general doubt about GMO technology, it was the sowers themselves who secured the political victory.¹⁶

The same year Monsanto acquired Semillas Cristiani Burkhard in Guatemala, it also purchased WestBred, an Idaho-based wheat company.¹⁷ Retesting the waters, Monsanto announced renewed research into GM wheat in 2009. Economic analysts for one trade group warned that if North American wheat farms lost foreign markets, US wheat prices could plummet by 40 percent.¹⁸ Were Canada to permit GM wheat, Japan made clear that it would source wheat elsewhere, a double blow to Canadian farmers who had just lost the EU flax market due to contamination from an illegal GM flax variety not approved for commercialization.¹⁹ The coalition of fifteen groups that had won Monsanto’s 2004 voluntary withdrawal of GM wheat sprung back into action. Eventually 233 consumer, environmental, and farmer groups from twenty-six countries signed onto the pledge called Definitive Global Rejection of GM Wheat.²⁰

Two decades later Monsanto has yet to commercialize an herbicide- resistant GM wheat strain, although some smaller biotech firms are now testing a reduced-gluten wheat in Spain, and Argentina approved a drought-tolerant GM wheat in 2000. Monsanto ostensibly corked the GM wheat genie bottle in 2004. But contamination remained a problem since the company had field-tested GM wheat on farms across sixteen states—sometimes on leased land, leaving neighboring farms unaware of the experiments.²¹ The USDA discovered unapproved Roundup-resistant wheat in Oregon in 2013, in Montana in 2014, and in Washington in 2016, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found it in Alberta in 2018.²² Forbes, hardly a radical magazine, noted that from an export perspective, “this could be bad. Very bad.”²³ After the Oregon scandal, Japan and Korea immediately suspended purchases from other US wheat farmers.

Given this history, one might hope that North American farmers and farm associations would be equally outraged when Mesoamericans discovered contamination of their own sacred grain, but the US National Corn Growers Association urged the US Trade Representative to leverage the “new NAFTA” in order to continue dumping the most subsidized crop in history at below-market prices on the very country where maize was originally domesticated. Despite having proactively protected its own wheat farmers from Monsanto, Canada joined onto the US trade complaint against Mexico in 2023. While US foodies CHOMP (choosing health on my plate) on idealized “local” foods, they have passively allowed corporate interests to bully farmers in the Global South to adopt GM seeds.

FERTILE RESISTANCE

Given that Roundup now trespasses in almost everyone’s blood on the planet, these are life-and-death matters for both rich nations and poor nations.²⁴ Whether in the Global North or South, genetic pollution cannot be easily contained because transgenes leak across borders. The uneven and contested rollout of GM corn in Mesoamerica followed the classic colonial pattern of divide and conquer. Though they speak of “harmonization,” contemporary trade agreements almost always result in a regulatory race to the bottom. Corporations tend to market their products in whatever country holds the weakest regulatory structures and demand that neighboring countries follow suit. Shadowy biotech proponents deliberately pitted Honduras’s more easily co-opted regulatory structures against Guatemala’s.

Or, with a genie-out-of the-bottle strategy, they “accidentally” allow seeds to travel across unpermitted places in the hope that once contamination is widespread, states will give up trying to impose any sort of regulation. Even though Guatemala has never formally approved GMOs, in 2023 I heard multiple reports of “Pantek corn” coming from Honduras and being planted illegally in Petén. (Pantek is a glyphosate formula.) In the years that a neoliberal Mexican state was awarding experimental GM crop permits, I also heard reports of GM-contaminated corn being traded from Mexico to Guatemala across a similarly porous national border.²⁵ According to unfolding research in Chiapas, that situation may now be reversed, with GM corn now entering Mexico from Guatemala via Tabasco.²⁶

Despite these interdependencies, Guatemala’s 2014 uprising was rarely if ever discussed in Mexico, and Mexico’s recent policy reversal on GM corn was largely unknown in Guatemala. I hope one small contribution of this book will be to catalyze more conversations, camaraderie, and common knowledge across those borders. Just as the best agroecology programs connect farmers to farmers (campesino-a-campesino) for peer learning, so too should transnational scholarship foster horizontal connections to combat vertical, supranational corporate threats. Comparative public-interest scholars have a special responsibility to proactively move and translate across borders information about mutual threats. It was, therefore, a fulfilling moment when REDSAG published a tribute to its new Mexican acquaintances from the No Maize, No Country movement on their 2023 National Maize Day (September 29), by saying:

We salute the resistance and forceful action you have carried out in defense of food sovereignty, native seeds and maize in all its diversity. For more than 15 years you have mobilized consciences and efforts to prevent the global agri-food system driven by transnational seed and agrochemical companies from appropriating and destroying the ways of feeding the peasant communities that inhabit Mexican territory. Your important achievement in defense of food sovereignty [include]: … a national public policy that prohibits the planting of transgenic corn, that prohibits the use of transgenic corn for human consumption, and that prohibits the use of other harmful pesticides … Mexico and Central America share countless cultural elements associated with food, health, worldview, economy and spirituality. Therefore, the defense of life in Mexico also represents the defense of life for the rest of the Mesoamerican region. For this reason, [from Iximuleuw], we celebrate with you on Mexico’s Maize Day [in the] continued struggle and protest in defense of life, Mother Earth, sacred maize and of the ancient legacy of its people. (Personal communication)

Multi-scalar movements that are able to go beyond predictable allies and borders are often the most disruptive. Futurist Pat Mooney estimates that if either a quarter of the population embraces a new idea or 3–4 percent show up to street protests, it is enough to create “a sufficient tipping point for profound change.”²⁷ Surely if tens of thousands of Guatemalans were willing to risk brutal police or military crackdowns to win repeal of Monsanto Law 1.0 and prevent passage of Monsanto Law 2.0, those of us living in the Global North might venture more often to take over streets where we can more easily exercise democratic freedoms.

Although propelled by Indigenous leaders, Mesoamerican movements against GM corn have blossomed to become cross-class, cross-professional, cross-cultural, and more recently cross-national alliances. In the face of defeat, national movements are playing the long game, including devising electoral strategies to secure the weight, mass, and power of the state to regulate the corporations threatening ancestral agriculture. What is remarkable about Mexican opposition to Monsanto et al. is that the state itself is now supporting food sovereignty and has appointed dissidents to lead that process. In Guatemala, Indigenous leaders tend to locate the “sovereign” part of food sovereignty within their own autonomous territorial governance, not at the level of the state.²⁸ Now that the victorious Seed Movement candidate, Dr. Bernardo Arévalo, rightfully assumed the presidency in January 2024, Guatemala may be able to replace its de facto ban on GMOs to a de jure one as well. Mexico’s newest (and first woman) president, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, elected June 2, 2024, is expected to carry forward her predecessor’s platform of food sovereignty.

Although alliances among the strange bedfellows who constitute the diverse food movements in both countries may be imperfect, “these spaces for dialogue may at least hold the door ajar for stronger alliances to be built and ideas to spread and grow.”²⁹ Their collective resistance to GMOs is clearly fertile. In both countries it has inspired the revitalization of smallholder agriculture, seed saving, and revival of traditional practices, but also hard-hitting agronomic research into the wicked problem of how to step off the agrochemical treadmill while simultaneously adapting to climate change. Although social movements tend to more easily articulate what they are against than to frame what they are for, in both Mexico and Guatemala the maize defense movements have deftly pivoted from protest to proposal (“de protesta a propuesta”). Semillas de Vida in Mexico and REDSAG in Guatemala, among many, many other organizations, are bringing back time-tested polycropping systems, home gardens, and other alternatives to both the Green and gene revolutions. They are also showing how the food movement can socially reflect the polycultures it espouses: ecologically superior and more resilient on the margins.³⁰

However, a harsh reality is that chemical cropping, especially using fertilizers, is addictive. For small farmers the risk of going off them “cold turkey” is tremendous.³¹ The task of weaning off agrochemicals should not be left on the shoulders of small producers (often women) to train themselves and work harder. Agroecology discourse often celebrates Indigenous women as “bearers of culture, defenders of nature, managers of home economies and gardens, and invisible subsistence providers.”³² Mesoamerican women have also worked tirelessly to conserve maize-based gastronomies through colonial and corporate horrors. But romantically saddling Mesoamerican women with responsibility, alone, to save the system is somewhat akin to saddling women in the Global North with label reading and defensive consumerism. Thankfully, the Mexican state is using its influence to investigate gender-neutral pathways out of chemical-intensive agriculture and toward agroecological intensification.

We know from the experience of the Victory gardens of World War II—which were providing around 40 percent of the US vegetable supply by 1944—how productive small and even micro agriculture can be. We also know that pre-Columbian agriculture was once far more intensive than milpa systems alone. Ancient farmers practiced terracing, arboriculture, floodwater fertilization, irrigation, and even wetlands cultivation, all of which can be revitalized.³³ Mesoamerican farmers likely shifted to the more land-extensive milpa system because doing so required less daily labor, a necessary survival technique after the genocidal Spanish invasion led to population collapse. The density of ruins of vast ancient Mesoamerican cities are more than enough evidence that this region can support more intensive agriculture and higher yields.

Any reintensification, however, will require seed diversity to make the most of all agroecological niches. Thus Native American movements for “land back” are also astutely calling for “seeds back”—which Mohawk farmer-activist Rowen White describes as a process of “rematriation.”³⁴ With one heartening story after another, North American tribes are recovering seeds lost during forced relocations and gifting them through Native networks, just as maize originally spread through the Americas. For example, the Cherokee Nation became the first Native American government to contribute seeds to the Global Seed Vault located in Norway, but they also sponsor a seed garden to distribute seeds free to all enrolled tribal members across the United States.³⁵

Maize’s extraordinary dispersal through the Americas is a testament to archaic gift economies that carried and traded seeds across long distances.³⁶ A troubled seed in one context might grow prodigiously in another. To give one illustration, at a Native American tending garden founded at Marin Community College in California by Melissa Nelson and her nonprofit, The Cultural Conservancy, her team improvisationally planted some tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius) stewarded by the Tohono O’odham Nation. These beans are higher in protein and fiber than other beans. With just coastal fog and a little irrigation, those desert seeds plumped up two times their normal size (fig. 21), tantalizing the imagination about how more structural support for Native seed exchanges could offer many other solutions for climate change.

RECIPES FOR RADICALS

As the anthropologist Paul Richards once famously argued, small-farmer agriculture has always been inherently improvisational.³⁷ Although Saul Alinsky’s eleven “rules for radicals” remain golden (especially: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have), I tend to imagine social resistance as a set of improvisational recipes rather than a firm set of rules.³⁸ Skilled cooks can throw together something delicious with odds and ends. Likewise, dissidents can improvise with the time, weather, people, and seeds of ideas available, employing what Gramscian scholars might call “conjunctural analysis.” As food scholar Raj Patel emphasizes, “We all make our politics with the tools we have at hand.”³⁹ Activists must constantly scan trends and news for spaces into which they can gain a foothold (“room for maneuver”). Carpe contextus! We must seize the context to cook up alternatives in the here and now.

Yet, within “progressive” thinking lies a teleological tendency to envision social change in a distant or utopian future, using new language and social relations.⁴⁰ This ignores resilient alternatives that have already weathered the centuries. Even the most vanguard of revolutionaries, Karl Marx, appeared to have been unraveling his own telos shortly before his death. Apparently Marx was avidly reading Lewis Henry Morgan’s ethnographies about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and their maize systems. In what are called his “ethnological notebooks,” Marx realized that a living alternative to capitalism already existed within Indigenous economies. As poet-historian Franklin Rosemont wryly noted, “Anyone capable of making Karl Marx, at the age of 63, abandon his previous opinions, is worthy of more than passing interest.”⁴¹ Had Marx lived to publish this work, world history surely would have unfolded quite differently. Leftists might have sooner learned to value the more formidable resistance that anthropologist Marc Edelman argues “draws from a deep, historical reservoir of moral economic sensibilities as well as on old protest repertoires and agrarian discourses [against the state].”⁴²

Although of course we need to unravel the deeper injustices enmeshed with modern capitalism, there is a lot we can do in the here and now to prevent corporate power from running further amuck. During what Philip McMichael characterizes as a “third” food regime, a small cabal of agribusiness corporations have taken advantage of trade perks and loopholes. But all of these legal shenanigans can be reversed.⁴³ In that same time period, the Zapatistas have rebuilt their traditional maize economy while defending their territory from paramilitaries. Now that the Mexican state itself has pledged to reinvigorate small farming systems, corporations finally face an adversary their same size.

Decolonization and decorporatization are related, but not synonymous. I, therefore, advise my students if they want to make a difference, they should master a (neigh)boring topic about corporate power. Trade agreements, patent laws, customs procedures, farm bills, foreign aid, and toxicology are among the “boring” topics I have discussed in this book, since the devil is always in the details. Through lawsuits, shareholder activism, letter writing, public records requests, and other civic tools, ordinary people can shift mountains.⁴⁴ If a few more people tenaciously learned some of the dry codes that corporate criminals manipulate for profit, the world could be transformed, because as environmental historian Richard White notes, “in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom … [which] works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk. It keeps danger away.… Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.”⁴⁵

Although capitalism writ large may be difficult to overthrow, citizens are connecting across borders—under new political imaginaries, and with unusual bedfellows of north-south, east-west, and right-left alliances—to figure out the details of how to decorporatize. These range from tribal trade networks; worker-owned cooperatives; small businesses in the informal economy; planned communities; homesteading; slow food; local currencies; other feminist modes of production that value precapitalist ethics of household economy and reproductive labor; and, above all, food sovereignty.

In the case of the anti-GMO movement, many Christian homemakers who want to be more “natural” are among the most outspoken voices. Although they might not ever agree on prayer in schools, Bible-devoted capitalists are often as troubled as urban foodies about how scientists “play God” with seeds. In fact, poll after poll shows that Republicans want GMO labels as much as Democrats.⁴⁶ As Ralph Nader argues, when people and politicians move past abstractions into concrete details, both the right and left can find many points of convergence and form temporary alliances of convenience to counter corporate excess.⁴⁷ Some of these may be procedural—for example, abandoning Fast Track ratification time lines to reassert Congressional authority over trade; or holding the Pentagon to the same auditing standards as any other part of so-called Big Government. Other common denominators may be focused on principles of democracy and fairness. Preppers might also appreciate the pride and security that a Maya woman feels living “off grid” with a bin full of maize, protected from the fickleness of financial markets.

When organizing for justice, insiders (including academics) can and should do more to connect with social movements on the streets. As anthropologist Nicholas Copeland once tweeted, “It’s like, if we’ve given up on movements for political power and social transformation, let’s turn our private spaces into nonstop ritual enactments of radicality. And while we’re at it let’s just eat each other alive inside the Academy over minute squabbles. And call it radical politics. And never look outside the tower.” The left tends to criticize each other about insider-outsider tactics. However, history shows that people committing civil disobedience on the outside can make progressive ideas on the inside seem reasonable. For instance, the most radical suffragettes who chained themselves to the White House fence made their comrades lobbying inside state legislatures seem more sensible and ladylike.

On the other hand, insider sympathizers can help outsiders understand the legal mazes and other boring tools their institutions use to keep activists at bay. Although social movements often disdain “sell-outs,” time and again, many “insiders” are often personally more progressive than their employers. When insiders summon the courage and connections to become whistleblowers, these mutineers invariably move mountains. Take the 2014 case of Guatemala and Goliath: the allyship of Green Revolution agronomists and other insider elites helped protect Maya mobilizations from the usual government crackdowns. Therefore, rather than seeking ideological purity on all social issues in vogue, we could just accept the contributions that strange bedfellows are willing to make about one issue at a time. If every person “Did his/her bit,” as the British World War II slogan went, together we could chip away at corporate perks and privileges.

History shows that Davids regularly beat Goliaths. Reflecting on the essential elements of Davidian victories, Malcolm Gladwell surmises that underdogs often win by being unpredictable—using speed and surprise to compensate for their opponents’ outsized strength.⁴⁸ Davids must play a different and unexpected game. This often happens naturally. The experience of being an underdog transforms people. By necessity they develop new tools. And when underdogs have nothing else to lose, they become formidable sources of change. As Ralph Nader observes, “People, families, and communities can only take so much abuse before they rise up to resist.”⁴⁹ The same qualities that appear to give Goliaths the better odds are often those Goliaths’ greatest weaknesses. As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

The name “Monsanto” has come to serve as a symbolic foil for global food movements, but in doing so Monsanto’s critics may have inadvertently endowed it with more power (and omnipotence) than it actually has. Granted, even before it was purchased by Bayer, Monsanto had net sales of roughly $14 billion, making its budget larger than that of every Central American country. It has acted as a legal bully, yes, but the chemically addicted seeds it hawks do not actually perform better than diverse local varieties.⁵⁰ More efficacious than a thousand food labels, Dewayne Lee Johnson’s first successful lawsuit against Roundup inspired many more institutions—even nation-states—to ban it. The house of cards began to crumble. Despite attempts to spin off liabilities from chemical divisions, the courts are beginning to hold Bayer-Monsanto and other corporate Goliaths accountable for their crimes.⁵¹ Through so many mergers, Bayer- Monsanto has become more of a lumbering multifooted Goliath with multiple Achilles heels. When measured only by caloric output, and not subtracting chemical inputs, GM monocrops beat a Mesoamerican milpa. But when factoring in nutrition, climate resilience, medicine, and cultural value, there is no comparison.

GREENS, GREENS, NOTHING BUT GREENS

Despite its claims to “feeding the world,” the biotech industry has done excruciatingly little to improve cultivars essential for food security, much less climate resilience in the Global South. One supposed exception was “golden rice,” which biotech proponents ballyhooed as evidence of their altruism. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, some thirty biotech companies set aside patents to help engineer a rice that produces beta carotene, which they claimed would save half a million children from blindness induced by a vitamin A deficiency. Here I agree with Michael Pollan that the intent behind golden rice was to “win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.”⁵² Years before it would ever be ready for market, proponents hyped their golden rice experiments to the media as evidence of their benevolence, while accusing their critics of “mass murder on a high scale”—even suggesting that Greenpeace be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity.⁵³

However, GMO opponents rightly note that a child would have to eat two pounds of GM golden rice every day to meet the daily recommendations for vitamin A. Moreover, to actually make the vitamin A bioavailable, the golden rice must be cooked with oil, something that malnourished families may not have.⁵⁴ The foundation’s initiative was “blind” to other solutions, like fortifying any other staple, such as sugar, with vitamin A.⁵⁵ Besides, a half ounce of weeds or greens harvested for free from the side of a golden rice field would provide more nutrients than the golden rice crop itself.⁵⁶ So, “Why pick an expensive, high-tech approach—costing millions of dollars and decades of work, with no guarantee that people will accept and eat orange-colored rice—rather than low-tech, simple solutions that could work right now? Again, there seems to be an obsession with technical, silver-bullet solutions, where a simple approach might be more effective.”⁵⁷ Researchers at my university are similarly trying to create a GM corn with more lysine—an amino acid naturally low in maize⁵⁸—but why? Amaranth can grow free in any milpa, and when it is ground into maize dough, contributes more lysine to tortillas than even eggs, a lysine champ.

MONTEZUMA’S REVENGE

Amaranth is perhaps Montezuma’s ultimate revenge and Monsanto’s interspecies nemesis.⁵⁹ The “superweed” resistant to Roundup is Palmer amaranth, Amaranthus palmeri, nicknamed “pigweed,” which agribusiness characterizes as diabolical, money-robbing, and monstrous—thereby justifying chemical warfare to eradicate it.⁶⁰ Prior to colonization in North America, amaranth never was a pest, since deep-rooted grasses covered the prairies. When white colonists broke sod, however, amaranth seized these open spaces.⁶¹ Like the invasive kudzu that plagues the Deep South, Palmer amaranth grows two to three inches a day in the Midwest.⁶² It has also spread to Argentina (one theory is that it hitchhiked on used farm equipment). On social media, posts can be seen for making “amaranth grenades” (seed balls) to sabotage GM crops.⁶³

Native to Mexico and Central America, other species of amaranth were a major tribute crop for the Aztecs, since the dried seeds could be stored for up to twenty years.⁶⁴ The Aztecs called it huauhtli and reportedly produced fifteen to twenty thousand tons of amaranth seed a year. The Spanish derogatorily called it bledo—a term still used colloquially today to mean “not giving a damn.” Modern taxonomists borrowed the English genus name from the Greek amarantos, meaning “never fading” in reference to its reddish leaves.⁶⁵ It appeared in gourmet Aztec tamales ground along with maize flour, plus sauces from its leaves. For strength, breastfeeding mothers and travelers drank a gruel from popped and ground seeds.⁶⁶ Spanish conquerors, however, declared amaranth a heathen plant because the Aztecs made ceremonial idols of amaranth (mixing it with blood and honey), which they consumed at festivals for the sun god Huitzilopochtli. Spanish priests perceived this as sacrilege to the Christian Eucharist.⁶⁷

Despite Spanish prohibitions, farmers quietly conserved amaranth in their milpas and chinampas (gardens on lake sediments). In 1950 geographer Carl Sauer wrote, “The crop is practically unknown to everyone except to Indians who grow it.”⁶⁸ In the “Columbian exchange,” amaranth also accidentally traveled the world and adapted, along with maize, into Asian and African cropping systems.⁶⁹ In the Caribbean it is called callaloo, and in India rajgira (“king seed”) or ramdana (“seed sent by God”). Even in New York City it adorns sidewalk tree beds.⁷⁰ Tribes of the US Southwest also integrated amaranth into their cuisine; the Zuni people have a famous recipe for steaming it into balls with blue maize dough.

A couple from the Rodale Institute who came across amaranth in the Mexican Tehuacán valley were so enamored by its nutritional potential that they created a nonprofit for its revitalization. Amaranth supplementation can bring malnutritioned children back to health within six months.⁷¹ The National Academy of Sciences published a 1984 report singing its praises.⁷² And Mexico’s contemporary harvest has rebounded to five thousand tons.⁷³ Amaranth’s revival is a splendid example of latent resistance or biocultural memory from what anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla calls the “deep Mexico.”⁷⁴ Beyond the “happy treats” (alegría) that Mexican street vendors make from popped amaranth with honey or molasses, many nonprofit programs and chefs are reintroducing amaranth as a savory staple.

Like maize, amaranth is a C₄ plant, so it can sequester atmospheric carbon at higher rates than other crops. Like maize it thrives from sea level to alpine environments. All parts are edible. Its large leaves can be sautéed as greens or eaten fresh, and the stalk serves as fodder for pigs, ergo, the pigweed nickname. Being high in folic acid, it can serve as a natural prenatal vitamin.⁷⁵ Also high in an immune-boosting blend of lysine, zinc, copper, selenium, and magnesium, it can be anti-viral. Amaranth may help heal heart disease by lowering cholesterol, ironically helping to cure a medical condition caused by eating too much corn-fed beef.⁷⁶ With 16 percent protein, the grain itself contains twice as much protein and seven times more fiber than rice; and it provides ten times more calcium and 30 percent more protein than wheat.⁷⁷ It can produce a high-quality oil that is high in a special vitamin E (squalene) touted in many beauty moisturizers (and that would otherwise be harvested from sharks).⁷⁸ Last, but not least, it is drought-hardy and thrives during the canícula, a dry month within the Mesoamerican rainy season.⁷⁹

In the current craze for revitalizing native foods like amaranth, an incredible number of other Indigenous cultivars have earned new fame, not only as climate-friendly crops but also as gluten-free grains or “superfoods.” To heal the diseases of capitalism’s cancer stage, many people are returning to acaí, chía, chocolate, wild rice, quinoa, maca root, and more.⁸⁰ GMO corporations, by contrast, have tried to healthwash their reputations by claiming they will invent new extra-nutritious plants and grains. Even if they could do this, it would be yet another technical fix to a problem created by the technology itself. “Instead of addressing a world of toxins and pollutants that lead to cancer … [they] engineer an indigo tomato to fight cancer.”⁸¹ Why not just conserve and share blue maize varieties that have just as many healing phytonutrients for diabetes, obesity, and inflammation?⁸² Or just consume the weeds that herbicides aim to eradicate from GM crop monocultures?

WEEDS

What’s in a name? That which some people call a weed may be considered by other cultures as an edible green that is medicinal, nutritious, and delicious. Pointing out that the concept of “weed” exists in the eye of the beholder, Q’eqchi’ peasant leader Sebastián Cux recently texted me, “Maleza es lo que genera Monsanto,” meaning “weeds are a concept generated by Monsanto.” To him and his people, greens/weeds are food and pharmacy because they have developed unique phytonutrients to survive in harsh environments. Derived from teosinte, maize once was itself technically a weed, but it was domesticated with cultural wisdom through the ages by Sebastián’s ancestors to become a human companion.

Weeds are the antithesis of a corporate crop, as they produce prodigious free seeds. Weeds are also a quintessential underdog. By definition, weeds sprout where they are not supposed to be—much like Mary Douglas’s classic anthropological definition of pollution as “matter out of place.”⁸³ Any plant can be made into a “weed.”⁸⁴ At least forty-eight weeds are now resistant to Roundup.⁸⁵ Some “superweeds” have even developed a systemic tolerance to most herbicides. No matter how many herbicide-resistant genes the mad scientists might stack into seeds, new weeds will grow. Rather than blitzing them with more and more herbicides, however, perhaps we might look at weeds differently.⁸⁶ As we know from milkweed and monarchs, many of these so-called weeds are crucial to pollinators.

The ultimate “weed” is industrial hemp, which is a nonpsychotropic variety of Cannabis sativa. If cultivated on a greater scale, hemp could solve a number of fiber and fuel problems. Hemp is bee-friendly, water-efficient, soil-enhancing, and habitat-producing, and can even remediate toxic soils. It has three times the tensile strength of cotton and is naturally antimicrobial. Hemp can be manufactured into fabric, concrete, paper, biofuel, CBD medicine, fiberboard, bioplastic, and more. An acre of hemp can produce 640 gallons of ethanol, compared to only 340 for corn.⁸⁷ So, why in the world are we growing corn that requires 10 calories of petrochemicals to “produce” 1 calorie of ethanol? The sole beneficiaries of ethanol policy are corporations and the politicians in their thrall.⁸⁸

When campaigning for president, Ralph Nader spoke often about hemp. Once the 2018 Farm Bill finally (re)legalized hemp, his vice presidential running mate, Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), began cultivating it, alongside other projects to build a post-petroleum Indigenous economy through the White Earth Recovery Project. As LaDuke puts it, “The hemp economy needs to be led by people who look like you and me. The mess we’re in was created by a bunch of rich white dudes, either in corporations or in the government.”⁸⁹ Rather than seeing hemp just as a new bonanza cash crop, she and tribal leaders are envisioning how to use it to build a genuine circular economy. Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm runs entirely on animal and human power. The Oneida Tribe (in occupied Wisconsin) has invested in hempcrete, the Sisseton Tribe in hemp fiber, Diné weavers are integrating hemp into their artistry, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and others are investing in medical cannabis on sovereign tribal lands. All these developments are being chronicled by a Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) family in a new magazine called Tribal Hemp and Cannabis.⁹⁰

Although hemp does not have enough tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to be psychotropic, it does produce cannabidiol (CBD), which boasts healing properties for treating insomnia, pain, chemotherapy nausea, anxiety, depression, diabetes, epilepsy and other neurogenerative diseases, and arthritis. Besides helping to balance neurotransmitters, it has been shown to reduce inflammation in the body, so it inherently helps to fight cancer and many other ailments, since tumors require inflammation to grow.⁹¹

Hemp is not the only healing weed. Having spent years curing myself of more than one cancer or chronic illness, I have learned a lot about herbal medicine.⁹² At some point I began to notice an ironic pattern: weeds can cure the very ailments caused by the herbicide meant to blitz the weeds. As the great Native American botanist Robin Kimmerer has remarked, if we hold kinship with plants and ask them patiently as friends what medicines they hold, they will reveal their secrets to us.⁹³ In Mesoamerica, healers speak of a “law of signs.”⁹⁴ Plants that harm often have within them the medicine to heal the injury—for example, the Guatemalan broom palm (Cryosophila stauracantha) has a gauze-like material inside that can staunch wounds caused by the tree’s spiny trunk. Other weeds heal health problems caused or worsened by toxicity.⁹⁵

As healers, fighters, and survivors, weeds make a great metaphor for mobilization. As food scholar Harriet Friedmann once wrote, “Appear everywhere like plants breaking through the cracks in the asphalt!”⁹⁶ Weeds take advantage of ruptures and thrive in marginal areas with extreme temperatures or low precipitation. For these reasons they often have much higher rates of phytochemicals. Every backyard is truly a pharmacy. I say, if you can’t beat them, eat them.

Take the case of another weed that became resistant to Roundup in just eight years, mare’s tail (Hippuris tetraphylla). It produces two hundred thousand seeds per plant and has edible shoots and leaves.⁹⁷ Within this rebellious weed are chemicals that specifically decrease inflammation in the intestines and thereby heal the disruption of the microbiome possibly caused by chemicals like Roundup. Likewise, stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) can sooth allergic responses caused by microbiome disruption. From the idiomatic expression “to grasp the nettle” (meaning to act boldly), nettles could be a bold alternative to fertilizers. In addition to being a good source of vitamin K, nettles are high in nitrogen, so they can be composted into liquid fertilizer for maize itself.

Fallowed milpas are also filled with medicinal mushrooms. Consider a favorite delicacy in Maya cuisine tziquinché (Schizophyllum commune), a gilled mushroom which has strong antibacterial and antifungal properties that can address bad gut bacteria. These mushrooms can also decompose biofuel waste, so, like LaDuke’s hemp, tziquinché could be part of a post-petroleum economy.

Or take the case of clover. For decades it was included in lawn seed mixes, but then Dow Chemical convinced the middle class they needed to eradicate clover patches to get pristine lawns by spraying 2,4-D, a potent endocrine disruptor. One of the clovers (Trifolium pratense) that 2,4-D kills ironically has many healing estrogenic properties and can be used to treat a range of gynecological conditions, from infertility to side effects of menopause.

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) are another wonderful example of a good lawn weed wrongly demonized by chemical companies, since dandelion roots loosen compacted soil to make way for earthworms.⁹⁸ Ancient Chinese medicine classified dandelion as a blood tonic. By the eleventh century, Arabic cultures were using it for liver troubles. Once called “fairy clocks” in premodern Europe, the English name for the plant came from the French dents de lion (lion’s teeth). In Europe it was prized as a diuretic for kidney problems as well as digestive issues. The Pilgrims apparently brought dandelion seeds on the Mayflower as a desired cultivar. Native American tribes were already using dandelion as both food and medicine, and one Ojibwe legend tells of how the wind fell in love with the dandelion maiden.⁹⁹ Europeans blow dandelions for wishes upon a star because they resemble all three celestial bodies: a yellow flower (sun) and a white puff (moon) that can be dispersed through the air to create the night sky (stars).

I first learned of dandelion as a cure for lymphoma, as the root induces apoptosis (cell death) in tumor cells. Like chicory, the roasted roots make a “dandy” coffee alternative, which is also a source of a prebiotic called inulin that enhances gut health. Dandelion has other surprising industrial uses. Oklahoma extension scientists have found that dandelion flowers release ethylene, helping fruit to ripen. The Soviet Union farmed dandelion as a natural source of rubber, which is heavier than the version derived from tropical rubber trees.¹⁰⁰ Tire companies are reportedly looking into using dandelion to replace the seven gallons of oil needed to make one synthetic tire. Another farm weed, morning glory, also produces a rubber that ancient Mesoamerican cultures used for sports balls. The final kicker? Dandelion has great potential for producing ethanol.¹⁰¹ This I mention, once again, to point out the absurdity that farmers are caught in a cycle of blitzing a weed to produce corn ethanol at an overall energy loss that could just be manufactured from the weed itself.

A skeptic might note that these are fun anecdotes to learn, but how should we contend with weeds that can overtake crops? In small farming systems, mulches, polycrops, or cover crops perform that function. My favorite example from Guatemala is a “magic” velvet bean, Mucuna pruriens, that helps maize grow like Jack’s beanstalk and could defeat the agritech giants. Originally from India, where is it known as cowitch, it was introduced to Guatemala by the United Fruit Company in the 1920s as forage for plantation animals. Banana workers began integrating it into their own subsistence plots as a green mulch to chop and compost in place before planting the second dry season milpa, called saqiwaj in Q’eqchi’ Mayan.¹⁰² The velvet bean spontaneously spread to nearby Q’eqchi’ communities, who called it “horse bean” (kenq’ kawaay) or in Spanish simply “fertilizer bean” (frijol de abono). Although it is not edible like the black bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), Q’eqchi’ women sometimes toast these beans for a cheery coffee substitute, hence its nickname, “Nescafé.”¹⁰³ Because growing it can cut fallow time in a swidden system by more than half, the velvet bean spread by word of mouth into Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Veracruz in Mexico by the 1950s.¹⁰⁴ When German aid agencies launched a major project to promote velvet bean mulching in Petén, Guatemala, they were surprised to discover the targeted communities had already been using it for decades.¹⁰⁵

In addition to adding nitrogen to the soil, the velvet bean smothers weeds before they can sprout, so farmers can avoid spraying paraquat, a cheap but extremely dangerous herbicide commercialized by Syngenta that is banned in most countries of the European Union but continues to be exported to impoverished countries elsewhere.¹⁰⁶ Paraquat often damages the eyes of its applicators and can also cause severe digestive reactions (vomiting, pain, diarrhea).¹⁰⁷ Because it is so toxic, paraquat became the preferred poison for the estimated three hundred thousand indebted Indian farmers who have committed suicide after Monsanto’s GM cotton failed to live up to its marketing hype.¹⁰⁸ Paraquat also turned cannabis weed into “killer weed” in the 1980s, when the DEA used the chemical to eradicate marijuana fields in the United States and Mexico. With mounting evidence that paraquat may cause Parkinson’s disease, California lawyers are now also mounting class action lawsuits.¹⁰⁹

The irony? This velvet bean has high concentrations (7 percent) of L-dopa. Nutraceutical companies sell it for dopamine-mediated depression and other nervous conditions, including Parkinson’s. When my mentor was diagnosed with leukemia, I pored over PubMed literature for complementary herbal treatments and discovered that Mucuna is proving effective for leukemia.¹¹⁰ Some say it is an aphrodisiac and can improve male fertility. Beyond increasing testosterone, it helps build muscle strength. Taken prophylactically in Asian and African countries as an anti-venom, it also is effective against infamously deadly cobra bites.

Almost all the aforementioned herbs are anti-inflammatory, so inherently they help prevent cancer.¹¹¹ DNA mutations may spark cancer, but inflammation fuels cancer’s fire. As tumors grow they create their own inflammatory environments.¹¹² The art of oncology is dosing enough poisons to get ahead of the tumors without killing the patient. However, this kind of brutal chemotherapy also causes whole-body inflammation. When oncologists fail to help patients detox during and after treatment, cancers often come roaring back.

Bombarding cancer patients with chemicals is really the same militarized logic of bombarding all bugs in agriculture or blitzing all weeds from a field.¹¹³ The Green Revolution talked farmers into buying ammonia from old weapons munition plants, herbicides from war defoliants, pesticides from nerve gases, and irradiated seeds. While funding much of this research, the Rockefeller Foundation also heavily donated to medical research for developing chemotherapy drugs from petrochemicals.¹¹⁴ In addition to the many pesticides and herbicides that came from chemical weapons developed during the world wars, the first chemotherapy drug used to treat lymphomas and leukemias was derived from mustard gas. Oncology “pioneer” Cornelius Rhoads helped the US Army develop chemical weapons during World War II.¹¹⁵ These were not coincidences, but business plans to make other use of industrial waste.¹¹⁶ Almost all the major agrochemical corporations also produce chemotherapy drugs in their pharmaceutical wings. It seems double profit can be made both by giving you cancer and then by healing you.

Although I am grateful to be alive, chemotherapy broke my health and left me vulnerable to other infections. Herbal “weed” friends like Mucuna, nettles, and dandelion have figured in both my recovery from cancer treatment and Long COVID inflammation. Having struggled to write this book through too many years of illness, I have pondered how neoliberalism never lets us rest. Even when terribly sick, I internalized demands to remain “productive.” Yet, all beings must rest to heal, including the land, and thus I have only one more Davidian story to tell before I rest my case.

ANTS, ABUNDANCE, AUTONOMY

In the Popol Vuh the Maya gods created humans out of maize. However, the detail of how the gods themselves discovered maize must be gleaned from oral history, since zealous colonial priests burned the original hieroglyphic Popol Vuh, along with all other Maya codices, in their Inquisitorial bonfires. Mesoamerican peoples nevertheless kept the story alive in many languages, and not just K’iche’. Like the circular structure of the Popol Vuh, they show how the way forward is the way back through the time-honored wisdom of elders.

In the Q’eqchi’ version of the creation story that friends shared with me in village after village, maize came from Paxil, one of the thirteen sacred mountains in the Q’eqchi’ highlands. (Paxil is also known as Qawa’ Ixim, or Don/Mister Maize.)¹¹⁷ Sebastián Cux texted me last year: “Pilgrims [still] travel to [Qawa’ Ixim in] Tactic, Verapaz, to perform ceremonies of thanksgiving for the sacred maize that we eat day by day and, at the same time, to petition the mountain so that our [heirloom] maize never disappears and gives life to the people and animals who consume it.” Mount Paxil not only gave the Q’eqchi’ people maize, but also cacao. In Q’eqchi’ planting practices cacao is mixed into bags of maize seed to “cool” their heat before entering the earth. On the day of the planting, four elder women froth a black cacao drink to be served to the men when they arrive for lunch. Then everyone shares a feast of turkey soup spiced with milpa greens and annatto. Planting days are a celebration of the milpa’s abundance.

Different Maya groups tell variants of this story, in which the animal is an opossum, rabbit, armadillo, or a fox.¹¹⁸ I paraphrased a version related to me by Mrs. Margarita Pop and translated by Juan Pop of Jaguarville, Belize. It stars an agouti (Dasyprocta punctata):

They say it was the leaf cutter ants who found the maize through a crack (paxil) in the mountain and began to carry it back to their nests. The agouti (aaqam) discovered the ants’ path and began to take the maize from them to eat it all day long. That night back in the cave, the agouti farted in his sleep. The other animals asked themselves, “Whose fart stinks so much?” The agouti stayed quiet.

The next day, the agouti followed the ants again. That evening he returned to the cave to sleep and once again began farting. The other animals figured out who was so stinky and demanded to know, “What are you finding to eat?” “Oh nothing,” he replied. So, they surreptitiously followed him to the mountain the next day and discovered his secret.

Wanting more maize than the ants could carry, the animals recruited the thunder gods to help them open the mountain to reveal the stash. The juvenile thunder gods disrespectfully pushed the elder thunder away and boasted they could better blast the mountain with their youthful strength. The young men threw bolt after bolt until they were exhausted. Completely spent, they went back to the old thunder god and asked, “Could you please do us a favor to help us blast the mountain?” The old thunder god hedged. “Well, I don’t know … I won’t be able to because, as you pointed out, I’m old and frail.”

But he eventually agreed and enlisted a woodpecker to go up the mountain and start pecking. He told the bird, “When you find the thinnest part, you should begin pecking very fast. It will make a sound like a bell. When you find it, you should jump out of the way and then I’ll blast the mountain with my lightning.”

Then with one blow, the elder god broke open the mountain, but, alas, the woodpecker did not escape in time. So, the heat of the blast painted the woodpecker’s crown red. The lightning also burnt the maize into its different colors (white, yellow, red, and black).¹¹⁹

Corporations such as Monsanto are like the farting agouti in this story, who selfishly appropriates the long collective labor of maize domestication and tries to hoard it from the other animals, until they trick him and take back the maize as collective heritage. Besides being a delightful tale explaining how the hues of maize came about, it reminds us to take seriously the weight and strength of “old-fashioned” resistance.

What I also love and what Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias appreciated about this story is the image of maize being carried by the ants. In an epilogue incorporated into a reprint of his literary masterpiece Men of Maize, Asturias wrote: “Wealth of men, wealth of women, to have many children. Old folk, young folk, men and women, they all become ants after the harvest, to carry home the maize: ants, ants, ants, ants.”¹²⁰ On the backs of ants, sacred maize crosses between the natural and human cosmos—reflecting the nearly ten thousand years of coevolution between maize and the peoples of Mesoamerica.

Corporate agribusiness has threatened the People of Maize with a trade avalanche of mountains of machine-cultivated corn. However, in classic Maya fashion, perhaps there will be another trickster ending to this story … and the peoples who gifted maize to the world shall keep their seeds safe from the corporate cartels by becoming like ants, ants, ants, ants, carrying seeds back into the hills of autonomy.