Welcome to the Month Without Monsanto page!

Once upon a time I embarked on an experiment based entirely in naive curiosity. I tried to go one  month without consuming any Monsanto products. It was stupidly hard, and I blogged about it on a tiny little site that I set up all by my lonesome.

That month sparked a lot more questions than it answered and eventually inspired my partner Cassie and I to set up the Digging Deep Campaign, with a fancy website overhaul (created by actual web designers), and a six more bloggers from all around the country to help us ask (and try to answer) important questions about our food supply.

This page now acts as an archive of the Month Without Monsant project. You can click here to jump to the beginning of the project and read my posts about trying to live Monsanto-free, or you can browse the right hand column there and read posts that strike your fancy.

When you're finished, we encourage you to visit the Digging Deep home page. Check out what our bloggers are investigating these days. We're not experts, just concerned people who like writing about food almost as we enjoy eating it.

On this last day without Monsanto, the question I’m hearing the most is “what will you eat tomorrow?”

First of all, I’m thinking about staying up until midnight tonight. I have a mini bottle of champagne in the fridge that a neighbor brought over (thanks Elisa!), and a box of girl scout cookies that have been taunting me all month. It seems a little celebration is in order.

As for how I go from there, I’m not sure. I will most likely stick to meat, eggs and dairy that come from the farmers market. I really like being able to talk to the farmers, know where the meat comes from and how it was treated. As it does cost more I will be eating a little less of it, but really I don’t mind. The thought of regular milk products just brings to mind tortured cows with icky puss coming out of their udders - an image I don’t think I’ll get over soon.

I will definitely keep shopping for produce at the farmer’s market, and I will ask the farmers where they get their seeds. Those who can say their wares are Nonsanto will get my business first, but the focus will be on organics.

As for GMOs, they are definitely out. If some day I am convinced that foods made from them are safe then I will reconsider, but after a month of research, it seems the jury is still out. I will not be Monsanto’s guinea pig.

So things like fast food, highly processed snacks and sodas are definitely off the menu for me and my family. That said, I’m sure they will sneak in from time to time. I’m hardly going to insist that my daughter grow up without ever eating an In-N-Out burger, but it will be a special occasion kind of meal.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, the best thing we can do as consumers is be informed and aware. Knowing exactly where our food comes from (not “the supermarket,” but rather what ground is was grown on) is a big step.

While I will be tapering off on my blog posts, I will definitely report back on the next few days and my transition back into the “regular” world of “regular” eating, so stay tuned.

Editor's note: In honor of the 2-year anniversary of the Month Without Monsanto Project, we're highlighting posts from guest experts who contributed to the project. Kim Roberts* wrote and edited the film Food, Inc., nominated for Best Documentary Feature in 2010 and changed the way many of us think about food. Enough people, in fact, that Monsanto has a page on their website providing answers to all the people who contacted them after watching the movie - giving proof to Kim's comment below that "Just being aware of where your food comes from, and paying attention to corporations like Monsanto, puts pressure on them."

By Kim Roberts, March 28, 2010

Question: How can we change agribusiness?

Answer: Be aware of where your food comes from.

When I was editing Food, Inc. I was not only vegetarian, I was pregnant. The sight of most foods made me sick, let alone the hours of slaughterhouse footage I had to wade through. And yet it wasn’t really shocking. Horrific footage of the treatment of our food animals has been around for decades.

More shocking to me was the role of corporate power in our food industry, and the consolidation of that power in the last few decades. Monsanto’s near control over the basic building blocks of food - the seeds - is a perfect example. As Month Without Monsanto so wonderfully illustrates, because Monsanto is in pretty much every soy bean (and much of the corn), it’s therefore in almost all processed food and almost all industrial meat - even fish.

But I wonder if the rise of a Monsanto wasn’t inevitable. Corporations aren’t good or bad, they’re amoral; they become as big and as powerful as we allow them to be. In agribusiness, we opened the doors to corporate monopolies by doing two things: First, we decided to give the corporations patents for living things like seeds. Second, through the Supreme Court, we decided that corporate patent rights superseded the long-standing right of farmers to save their own seeds. Once these two decisions were in place, it was only a matter of time before a company came up with a patented seed that farmers preferred (and many do prefer the GM seeds) and the monopoly game began.

But the other thing I learned while working on Food, Inc. was that even the most massive, hated, and Machiavellian corporations can do real good when under pressure. Wal-Mart’s decision to ban bovine growth hormone (a Monsanto product) from its milk had a HUGE effect on industrial milk production. Some think it will lead to the end of RBST in milk.

Just being aware of where your food comes from, and paying attention to corporations like Monsanto, puts pressure on them.

I’m constantly hearing from people who wanted to watch Food, Inc. but were too scared - scared that it would force them to change their eating habits. These are often the same people who love to complain about corporate power.

Until more people are willing to research where their food comes from, I doubt agribusiness will change.

KIM HAS WORKED AS A WRITER AND EDITOR ON MANY FILMS INCLUDING “WAITING FOR SUPERMAN,” “AUTISM: THE MUSICAL,” AND “THE FALL OF FUJIMORI.” HER MOST RECENT PROJECT, “SPLINTERS,” FOLLOWS THE EVOLUTION OF INDIGENOUS SURFING IN THE DEVELOPING NATION OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA.

*The opinions expressed her by Kim are her own, and not necessarily the opinions of the Food, Inc. team

With just three more days to go I’m thinking about the future - and not just the girl-scout cookie bender I’m planning for Thursday.

No, I’m actually thinking more about how to keep the momentum of what I’ve learned going forward. I’m talking with my neighbors about putting together a garden produce swap, maybe going in on a CSA delivery. I’m also thinking about all the friends I’ve made through this blog.

If you haven’t already, please consider signing up for the Facebook page I’ve created for this project. Come next month I won’t be posting on this blog every day, but I will still post when I discover new Nonsanto products, or learn something shocking about GMOs, and when I do I’ll be sure to put the word out through Facebook.

For that matter, if you’re into the Tweeting, feel free to follow me there too: @WithoutMonsanto. I’ve actually been pretty active on Twitter, because the format so easily lends itself to forwarding articles and such (and check out my hashtag #Nonsanto - it’s all ours, Monsanto can’t modify that baby, it has no genetics).

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go stare longingly at my box of Samoas.

This morning my hubby and I had our neighbors over for brunch. We actually tried to do it last month, but everyone’s schedules got crazy. Then the question was raised - should we wait and do it when I’m done with this project?, but we all decided that was kind of like cheating, so we went for it. And it was lovely.

I made scrambled eggs (of Lily’s Eggs) with cheddar (from the Spring Hill Cheese Company). On the side I sauteed up some Givens Farm chard with organic soy sauce. I also sliced up an avocado from the DerVaes farm, and had a big bowl of strawberries, also from the Givens Farm folks. I mixed up a big pitcher of lemonade with DerVaes lemons, maple syrup and some mint from my garden. We also served organic tea. My husband made up some coffee and pancakes (which I didn’t partake of, but everyone else enjoyed). Oh, and I mixed up some rice pudding with organic raisins and organic hazelnuts in it. Yum.

It was a fabulous spread, so much fun, and I didn’t feel deprived at all. I just love knowing the people that raised my food, and how they raised it. Something about it makes the whole eating experience so much more satisfying.

I’m working on Chapter 3 of What I’ve Learned - should be able to have it up by the end of the day. Also - it’s looking like I might have a very cool guest blogger lined up for Monday. I won’t say who just yet, but here’s a hint - her film was nominated for an Oscar this year.

Stay tuned...

Right around the middle of the month I began to grow tired of this experiment.

I couldn’t eat out, and in fact everything I ate required quite at least a bit of preparation (no convenience foods). I had to do laundry constantly because I only had a few items of clothing that are assuredly Nonsanto. Even though my diet was slowly expanding to include things like 15 year old whiskey, it still lacked in variety.

I started to get some discouraging emails from companies saying that they don’t even try to avoid Monsanto products - that it’s impossible.

Refusing to believe that, I hit the farmer’s market with my iPhone and asked the farmers where they get their seeds. The lovely couple at the Givens Farm stand told me they get their seeds from Johnny’s Seeds. A quick google search told me that while Johnny’s still sources some seeds (about 2% of their line) from Semenis (which is owned by Monsanto), but they were quite willing to share the list of those seeds with me and none of the produce I bought was on it. Check out my March 21st post for the list.

So apparently it IS possible to avoid Monsanto, it’s just very difficult. In fact, what it really seems to come down to is eating simple foods, and talking to the people who grow it.

Where it gets tricky is with foods grown in large monocrops. Corn, soy, and wheat for instance are all grown across the country and then pooled into silos and sold from there. So even if one farmer makes the effort to grow a non-Monsanto variety, his end product would just get mixed in with the crops from all the other farmers. Thereby making impossible to sort out the Monsanto from the Nonsanto.

This seems to be the main reason I can’t track down any wheat products that are Monsanto free. By about week three I was desperate for a cookie (I do my best writing when cookies are involved). Luckily a tweeter by the name of @waylandcook saved me with a wheat-free peanut butter cookie recipe. (Check out my post from the 22nd for more on that.)

The combination of face time with the farmers and tweet support from the blogosphere kept me going for another week.

The month of March began with me (all decked out in my new organic cotton clothing), thinking I just had to stick to USDA certified organic foods.

I was cruising along just fine for all of a day before a tweeter pointed out that Monsanto has a lot of subsidiary companies (including Seminis, De Ruiter, Peotec, Western, DEKLAB, and Asgrow), and through them Monsanto owns a large percentage of the seeds out in the world. I was even more shocked to realize that when Monsanto bought up Western Seeds it officially moved into organics. Their organic line now includes wheat, barley, oats, triticale, beans and peas.

Even if these seeds are purchased by organic farmers and grown organically, they still owe their existence to Monsanto. I could no longer trust the USDA organic label to mean something was Monsanto-free.

Stunned, I cut my diet back drastically until I could trace some of the seed sources for the foods I wanted to eat. For a day or so I ate only seaweed, eggs from grass and bug eating chickens (luckily I got a dozen from the farmer’s market on the Sunday before), wild-caught fish, organic dried fruits and nuts (except papaya, mango and melons), maple syrup and coconut meat/juice.

It was right around this time that I seriously considered quitting, but with the help of my friend Cassie I was able to track down a few non Monsanto (what I’m now calling Nonsanto) food sources. These highly conscientious farmers could tell me exactly where they got their seeds, and prove that they were in no way associated with the big M. The first two were the folks at theDerVaes urban homestead, and Greg Massa of Massa Organic farms. Shortly after that I added Lundberg Family Farms to my list.

I also exchanged a few emails with the CEO of Annie’s Inc, who helped me track down all the ingredients in his Organic Macaroni and Cheese to confirm that it was Monsanto free.

So by day eight I was able to add some veggies, fruit, rice and (my personal favorite) Mac-n-Cheese to my diet. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

A week or so ago I wrote about having some computer problems. Turns out that was kind of like wining about a mosquito bite a week before getting the chicken pox, but I am happy to report that both I and my computer have survived.

If you don’t have a backup drive, I would like to take this moment to remind you of what you already know - you need one. Yes, I spent over three hours at the mac store in the last two days, but if I hadn’t had a super-reliable back up system in place, all the geniuses in the world could not have saved this blog (let alone my novel). As it is, I lost my last post about monopolies. (Sorry folks.)

So if you don’t have one, go get one. Seriously, it’s totally worth the investment. You will thank me.

That’s the PSA for the night. I’ll catch up with Chapter Two of my summary tomorrow.

I just got an email from Johnny’s Seed rep Ben Sturtevant in which he lists every seed variety that they still source from Semenis (owned by Monsanto). It’s actually only 21 items long, and (here’s the best part) none of the produce I bought from the Givens Farm folks on Sunday is on the list! Yay!

It’s amazing what you can learn just by asking. I have to give Johnny’s serious props for 1. transparency, 2. customer service and 3. making a continued effort to source their seeds from non-Monsanto (Nonsanto) owned companies. The letter they posted on their website (check out my post from Sunday if this doesn’t ring a bell), was dated February ’09 and it said they still had 40 varieties (just 4% of their inventory) coming from Semenis. So in just over a year they managed to cut that almost in half (down to just 2%).

High five, Johnny!

This is my fifty-eighth blog post. Dang.

I’ve learned a lot, but the information I’ve collected is scattered in with my thoughts (both stunningly profound (right?) and hopelessly vain). I imagine that as a reader it’s hard to sort through it all for the parts that really effect our lives. So as I enter into the home stretch of this project I want to sum up what I’ve learned for you, my faithful readers.

As there’s a lot to cover, I’m going to do it in chapters, summing up what I’ve learned, in the order that I learned it.

Chapter 1

The first thing I learned was that you can find studies to back up which ever side of the argument you support. Some studies say that GM crops are literally making us ill, other reports say GMOs will save the world. What is certain is that at least in America, the foods made from GM crops are not labeled.

Generally the USDA organic label means no GM crops were included in a product, (though this crazy article has me questioning even that assumption), but to avoid Monsanto’s products specifically you have to dig a lot deeper (I wouldn’t learn this until later, so more on this in a future chapter).

The second thing I learned is that Monsanto owns the patent on most of the cotton out there in the world. Recently Monsanto admitted that their Bt Cotton was not performing as well as they thought it would, and suggested that the farmers (particularly the ones in India who find themselves destitute and desperate) buy the new version of their GM cotton seeds. Social and political concerns aside for a moment (google “Monsanto India” if you want more - there’s plenty) the fact is that in order to avoid buying Monsanto products you must buy either organic cotton or a cotton alternative like hemp.

This was the basic information in my head when I started. “Stick to organic foods, wear organic cotton clothing,” I thought. “How hard could it be?”

Oh man, was I in for a shock.