Amy Goodman and Vanity Fair's James Steel on Democracy Now!

A month ago, I'd written about Vanity Fair's recent weighty exposé on the monstrously huge biotech bully Monsanto. Tuesday's episode of Democracy Now! featured Amy Goodman's interview with James Steele, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who co-authored the Vanity Fair piece. You can listen to (or watch) the interview here, or read the transcript here.

Democracy Now! also provides a link to the five page letter written by a Monsanto PR rep to Steele in response to his original article. In the letter, Monsanto attempts to disassociate itself from its previous incarnations, referring to the companies it was as if it's completely unrelated to them, instead of having evolved from them. The rep absolves the ''new'' Monsanto of any sort of ethical accountability and beats it all down to so much legal mumbo-jumbo, as if changing a company's name cleans the slate.

The rep refuses to discuss anything having to do with their bullying and harassment of farmers in what the rep refers to as ''patent infringement cases'', except to describe the manner they go about investigating claims as this almost genteel process. Then, as if to make the whole thing smell even more benevolent, he adds that funds gained by blackmailing and intimidating farmers go towards agricultural education and scholarships. Nice.

The letter response is well worth reading, just to get a sense of the time and energy that this company puts into manipulating its image. And the interview is a must-see.

The Ethicurean and rBGH

I love The Ethicurean. It's not a vegetarian blog, but it's one of my favourite blogs out there now dealing with the ethics of consumption, both in terms of the actual information that's presented, as well as how it's presented . There are different contributors and they discuss topics such as organic farming, food labelling, animal welfare, changes in legislation, the biotech industry, etc. It's definitely worth bookmarking if any of these areas are of concern to you.

Someone posted an open letter to Monsanto there yesterday, listing off the small roadblocks they've been hitting during the lobbying they've been doing in the US to prevent dairy farmers or producers from labelling their milk rBGH-free (rBGH or recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone is manufactured by Monsanto and marketed under the name POSILAC). I was grinning from ear to ear reading it. Monsanto's take on it is that having some dairy products labelled rBGH-free would invariably lead consumers to believe that there's something wrong with it, which would in turn lead to consumers avoiding dairy products coming from cows who've been injected with it.

The Organic Consumers' Association website has a section dealing with the rBGH issue, featuring everything from news stories about it to lists of rBGH-free producers and companies. They also spell out all of the reasons its usage ranges from problematic to outright dangerous, both to cows, as well as to the humans who consume the dairy products coming from cows injected with it.