Monsanto’s latest farmwashing ad campaign debuts

This guy looks an awful lot like Henry Fonda play­ing Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, which seems only fit­ting since Agribiz may be help­ing to cre­ate a 21st cen­tury Dust Bowl.

After decades of boast­ing about how fossil-fuel-intensive indus­trial agri­cul­ture has made it pos­si­ble for far fewer farm­ers to pro­duce way more food, Monsanto is now cham­pi­oning the power of farm­ing to cre­ate jobs and pre­serve land. Does this attempt by a biotech­nol­ogy behe­moth to wrap itself in a pop­ulist plaid flan­nel shirt give you the warm and fuzzies, or just burn you up?

I checked in with Marion Nestle, NYU pro­fes­sor of nutri­tion and author of the good-food hand­books What to Eat and Food Politics, and most recently Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (University of California Press, 2010), for her take on the campaign.

Nestle: This is not a new strat­egy for Monsanto. Half of my book Safe Food is devoted to the pol­i­tics of food biotech­nol­ogy. I illus­trated it with a Monsanto adver­tise­ment (Figure 17, page 182). The cap­tion may amuse you:

In 2001, the biotech­nol­ogy industry’s pub­lic rela­tions cam­paign fea­tured the equiv­a­lent of the Marlboro Man. Rather than cig­a­rettes, how­ever, this adver­tise­ment pro­motes the industry’s view of the eco­log­i­cal advan­tages of trans­genic crops (reduced pes­ti­cide use, soil con­ser­va­tion), and con­se­quent ben­e­fits to soci­ety (farm preser­va­tion). In 2002, a series of ele­gant pho­tographs pro­moted the ben­e­fits of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied corn, soy­beans, cot­ton, and papaya.

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