Angry Goose

In 1901 a chemist in St Louis founded a small company to manufacture saccharin. He called it after his wife's family name. Monsanto. Over the next 120 years, the company that bore his wife's name would produce, in chronological order: PCBs, DDT, Agent Orange, Roundup, Roundup Ready genetically modified seeds, recombinant bovine growth hormone, and dicamba. Each product was, at the time of launch, marketed as safe. PCBs, manufactured at the Anniston, Alabama plant from 1929 to 1971, were dumped into local waterways at industrial volumes. The town's waters and soils are now among the most contaminated in the United States. Internal Monsanto documents, later released in litigation, show the company knew the chemicals were toxic by the 1930s and continued production for thirty more years. DDT, the insecticide they helped commercialise, was eventually banned in 1972 after Rachel Carson documented the collapse of bird populations across North America. Agent Orange, the dioxin-laced defoliant Monsanto manufactured for the US military, was sprayed across 4.5 million acres of Vietnam. It caused, by conservative estimates, 400,000 deaths and 500,000 birth defects. Monsanto eventually paid a $180 million settlement to American veterans. The Vietnamese received nothing. Roundup, launched in 1976 with glyphosate as the active ingredient, became the most widely used herbicide on earth. Marketed as harmless. Marketed as biodegrading on contact with soil. Marketed as safe enough that a Monsanto executive famously offered to drink a glass of it on French television to prove the point. In 2015 the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans. By 2020, Bayer (the German chemical conglomerate that had acquired Monsanto in 2018, and which had previously been a constituent of IG Farben) had paid out over $10 billion to settle approximately 100,000 lawsuits from people who had developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after Roundup exposure. By 2026 the figure had climbed past $11 billion. Another 65,000 cases are pending. A further $7.25 billion settlement is awaiting court approval. Roundup Ready seeds, the genetically modified crops engineered to survive being doused in glyphosate, transformed global agriculture. Monsanto's seed patents now control roughly 80% of the corn and soy planted in the United States. Farmers who attempt to save seeds for replanting, as humans have done for ten thousand years, are sued. The company is no longer called Monsanto. The brand was so toxic that Bayer retired it within a year of the acquisition. The products, however, remain. The glyphosate is in the wheat, the oats, the corn, the soy, the cotton, the sugar beet. It is in the breakfast cereal. It is in the bread. It is in the beer. It is in the urine of approximately 80% of Americans tested. The 75% reduction in global crop genetic diversity since 1900 is, in significant part, a Monsanto legacy. The bee population collapse, driven in significant part by glyphosate's effect on pollinator gut microbiomes, is a Monsanto legacy. The cancer epidemic in agricultural communities across the American Midwest is a Monsanto legacy. The 192,000 plaintiffs who have, to date, sued the company are a Monsanto legacy. You will not see the name on the supermarket shelf. The name has been removed. The company is in your food anyway. It is in approximately 90% of the processed food sold in any Western supermarket. It is in the wheat that was sprayed with glyphosate as a desiccant before harvest. It is in the soy that was engineered to be sprayed with it. It is in the meat from the animals that were fed the soy. It is in your blood now. It is in your children's blood. The company that put it there has changed its name twice and continues to operate, in 2026, as the world's largest agrochemical concern. The cathedral remains, in Lavenham, as the receipt for what wool built. The cancer registries remain, across the American Midwest, as the receipt for what Monsanto built. Both are public records. Read them.