Nope. You’re a capitalist, and capitalism runs on supply and demand. Your industry not adapting to our needs or not providing anything we need or want is part of that supply and demand equation. Previous generations didn’t “kill the chariot” industry because cars became a more viable and faster way of travel.
The “killing industries” articles are a way for these corporations to play victim and pretend that their complete uselessness in the modern age – like diamonds in jewelry – is a problem caused by consumers rather than taking responsibility for their products failing to sell for numerous reasons.
anyone interested in almost 1k about gmos, monoculture and capitalism cause i just got very angry at a google doc
tldr gmos arent the problem, capitalism is
long version:
so yeah my issues arent directly abt gmos, they’re about capitalism. gmos are just a link in intensive agriculture and capitalism’s firm grip on the neck of food production professionals.
gmos are just accelerated natural selection made in a lab by a human. its good bc it makes crops more resistant and more productive, or makes for examples bananas or watermelon have actual edible flesh and not be just a bunch of seeds.
so! wild bananas? just seeds. some evolved to have more flesh, and some (cough the cavendish cough) were modified to *only* have flesh. the cavendish is completely seedless and thus sterile. to grow a new cavendish plant, you have to use the rhizomes of a first plant (parts of its roots) that you separate from the “mother plant" and plant on their own. you get a whole plantation from one “mother plant”
so what does that mean! that means all cavendish are genetically identical. and that means that since all plants and all fruits are *completely identical,* if one plant or one fruit catches a disease, all others *can* catch it, bc if one is sensible to the disease, it means ALL OF THEM ARE.
with seeds, the plants are all different and thus some can have resistances that others don’t. it’s kind of like vaccination and herd immunity. here though?…
the funniest (/sarcasm) part is that the precedent most widespread banana species, the Gros Michel, was raised the exact same way, and was wiped out by the panama disease or whatchamacallit… which the cavendish is also sensible too.
yeah.
but let’s talk about crops more common where im from like wheat, corn and canola. tomato. most vegetables. these kinds of crops, when they’re gmos, are either intentionally made infertile (as in, you do get seeds but these seeds either won’t grow crops or will grow crops that won’t bear fruits) or are under a certain number of contractual obligations.
one of these obligations is that you can’t keep seeds to plant them again the next year. if you grow wheat, it’s very easy to keep a part of your grain and plant it again the next year you want wheat. forbidden. buy seeds every year.
another can be that you have to use a certain kind of herbicide, that is sold by their own company. im not screaming monsanto rn but thats exactly what im doing. monstanto sells gmos, contractually makes you buy roundup, they get double the money and double the fun.
another thing is monoculture. this isnt directly linked to gmos but gmos and monoculture are both the degenerate children of capitalism.
im from the south of france, we’re the third biggest corn exporters of the world. all the fucking fields are corn. everywhere. all the time. if you havent worked in a corn field you’re either rich or not from here. monoculture, monoculture, monoculture.
when you plant something, this plant will take elements from the soil and reject other elements. if you only plant 1 kind of crop over and over, you create a buildup of the crop’s “wastes" and an exhaustion of the soil’s ressources in what the crop needs.
monocultures basically creates giant deserts. the soil, the ground is drained over and over by the same cultures, or yearly changes, but like i said, here its corn, wheat, canola, corn. it sort of varies but its still always the same stuff pulled from the ground. so if you wanna keep growing your shit, you gotta use fertilizers. triple the money for monsanto.
in my garden, i wanted green beans. green beans reject nitrogen in the soil. if i only plant green beans, my ground is going to get a nitrogen build up. i don’t want that. soil with too much nitrogen stunts root growth, makes the plants over produce foliage and tire themselves, and then salt burns the foliage my plant tired itself for. it also pollutes groundwater.
however! corn and cucurbits love nitrogen. love the shit. corn allows the beans to go up and around. cucurbits have large leaves that protects the ground from drying up and thorns that deter most pests.
(this isnt something i invented lol. Natives Americans from north and central america have been doing this since forever. Maya people used the technique. in the south of france it’s been used for a while with local beans and corn first imported from Mexico i dont know when but a while ago. Mexico has semi recently started using this technique again bc its good! it’s good for your ground!)
the problem, lmao, the problem is that you can’t use the three sisters garden layout is absolutely in intensive agriculture. and thats whats up isnt it? you gotta produce more.
not better, not smarter, not renewable
more
hence gmos. they grow more. they grow better. they grow faster.
but my problem isnt with them, it’s what they represent. they start as a good idea, being able to make more food for people. but the result is that: france produces 17.1 million metric tons of corn per year, and barely eats any of it.
so basically: to grow corn over and over you need to buy the seeds and transport them, buy fertilizer (bc monoculture) and transport it, buy insecticide and transport it. then you use gigantic tractors to fertilize your fields, plant your corn, spray roundup all over it. pay a bunch of teenagers to spend hours in the sun during summer to cut the male flowers of 70% of your crops so the right male flowers fertilize the right female flowers. more giant tractors to gather your corn. nobody buys it here so you transport it to an exporter, who transports it elsewhere, and it moves around until it’s transformed, and then it’s moved around again to a seller.
so much fucking diesel and ruining the soil for what?! and do we talk about food waste????!!!!!
im too angry to write a conclusion 🙃 either you get what i mean or you dont. maybe i’ll say more about alternatives later. idfk
obligatory im not a pro just someone with a brain and an access to both google & common sense
so here’s a thought: who cares if food stamp recipients test positive for drugs. we still deserve food.
this has been the single most controversial post I’ve ever made and it’s literally just saying drug users deserve food lmao
and an extension of this is that even if you honest to God think drug users don’t deserve food (which is just as fucked up as the OP is pointing out), denying people food stamps also frequently means you think their families don’t deserve food either. That is doubly fucked up.
So you know those news stories about how Millennials don’t buy enough breakfast cereal or paperback books or homes or whatever the hell that Boomers are complaining that “kids these days” don’t spend money on? And y’all are like “LOL, no cash my pal”?
I think there’s something more insidious going on. You see, they thought they had you. Forget the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, they had Disney Channel and Nickelodeon feeding you ads all day long. Your generation got advertising in your schools. Your parents took you to prosperity doctrine spewing MegaChurches (it’s Mega so it’s gotta impress the kids, right?).
They thought you were going to be their generation of super-consumers.
You are generations distant from the great depression, and the 1979 energy crisis. Boomers want to pretend that the 2008 housing bubble wouldn’t affect the little kids. And plus, we had grown past the era of Yankee thrift and hippie DIY frugality. Right? And there was no mopey Kurt Cobain glamorizing thrift-store flannel shirts. You guys were going to out-consume the Boomer generation. They were sure of it.
Those think pieces? They’re Boomer disappointment that you have found value in something other than your place as a mindless consumer.
And yeah, I’m not going to pretend that y’all have more cash than you do. It was fucking idiotic to think they were going to raise a consumer generation without having to pay them the money they would need to buy even life’s necessities. And I could write a book about how my generation was complicit in destroying the old values around work and loyalty that left your generation screwed. Really, I’m genuinely sorry for the mistakes we made.
But you guys have given a big middle finger to the generation who thought that they could manipulate you from birth into manipulable-money-spending-machines. And I’m way fucking proud of you for that.
always reblog the post about how millenials fucking killed capitalism
The tail end of Gen X like me were pretty screwed as the economy tanked practically just after we got out of college we were kind of a precursor to the Millennial Experience, called a Slacker Generation when we weren’t rampant consumers.
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